Helping You Achieve More With Email

2014 is going to be a great year for email marketing. It looks like there is going to be an ever-increasing focus on mobile, better segmentation (as data becomes a company’s secret weapon) and the recipient (particularly with UX changes and innovations from Gmail).

To meet these demands, we’re working on some awesome new ideas and features at Vero.

Here’s a look at what we’ve got coming in 2014.

Segmentation gets smarter

In mid-2013 we released segments, a feature that allows you to group and name a set of conditions so that you can easily see the number of matching customers. Typical segments might include “Used feature X 4 times”, “Never paid”, “Loyal customers”, “Blog subscribers” and so on.

Segments are awesome because they are dynamic: they remain consistently up to date as your customers interact with your website.

However, there is so much more segments can do.

For the most successful Vero customers, speed is everything. Being able to readily target a specific group of customers makes a huge difference.

We’re working toward some improvements that will do a lot of heavy lifting around segmentation for you, by automatically creating relevant segments as your customers do more on your site. We want you to be able to login and see segments such as ‘Fresh’ (for new subscribers, as an example), ‘Gone Quiet’ (for customers that haven’t interacted with an email for a while), ‘iPhone users’ (for customers that open your email predominantly on iOS), ‘US customers’, ‘Customers with a Facebook account’, etc.

A lot of this information can be gleaned readily from customers’ IP addresses, open meta-data and even social networks. Data that we have access to and will save you a lot of importing, exporting, manipulation and other tasks. This means you can test marketing ideas faster, which is what counts. Speed of iteration is everything.

If you can see how this will benefit your tests and targeting and are interested in being one of the first to pilot this functionality then please let us know via email – we would love to share the future.

Better email workflow and recurring emails

One of the things we’ve come to understand from talking to you all is that creating an email in Vero right now is a little disjointed: it can sometimes be difficult to know when you should launch an automated campaign or run a newsletter, or whether there is a gap to fill between the two.

We’re upgrading our UI so that creating any type of email campaign is a unified experience. Right now, you can’t clone between newsletters, transactional or behavioural emails nor can you quickly and change targeting options.

We’re working to breakdown the campaign creation process into 3 or 4 easily digestible steps that are the same regardless of what sort of campaign you are creating. This will make it much easier to know who you’re target and when the email will be sent, allowing you to select whether you want the campaign to go out now, at a certain point in time in the future, weekly or based on an explicit customer action: it should be easy to send to the customers you want to.

We’re wireframing this now and will be sharing it with some customers in the next week or two.

Essential upgrades for customers

No doubt the most important thing for us is to consistently ensure Vero is a powerful and fast product. As many of you know we’ve had scaling challenges these last few months and it’s been as painful for us as it is for you! We hate it when you can’t do everything you want to as quickly as you need to.

Two things coming very soon:

1. Improved event and email logs. Last week we released an updated Email Log that now leverages the phenomenal power of ElasticSearch. It’s been a big task migrating data across but we’re really happy with the results. Likewise we’ll be releasing a fully up-to-date, speedy version of the Event Log in the coming week and a half.
2. Better filtering. We’re about to release a whole range of new filters for our segments and automated campaigns, including filtering on opens and clicks, past delivery actions, better detail for ‘has triggered event’ and others. This should make a lot of people very happy!

We’re also working on these great updates:

• Better event management: being able to hide and alter events you are tracking.
• Easier integration with other platforms and by tracking more ‘default’ customer actions.
• Better reporting: bringing back day-by-day graphs!
• Better splits on conversion metrics: view-through vs. direct tracking.

Things you might have missed

Over the past 3-4 months, here are some of the things we’ve released that are worth re-capping, in case you’ve missed theM:

• External data: Using our ‘Fetch HTML’ functionality you can make a call to your own servers to colelct data before an email goes out. There is more data available on this feature and it can be used on a customer-by-customer basis to personalize every single outgoing email. We have seen some customers do some amazing things with this tool.
• [Transactional emails]: These are in beta. If you want access to the ability to send emails every time a customer takes an action, regardless of their subscribe status, drop us an email!
• Newsletters: Send newsletters to your customers at any time and put all the good data you’ve collected in Vero to good use.

Have your say

Is there anything you wish you could do in Vero but simply can’t?

We WANT to hear what is making your life difficult or what would unlock new power for your email marketing.

Email us!