Cordial is committed to addressing these challenges head-on. During our Spring Product Showcase, we unveiled 11 new capabilities that empower marketers to overcome these obstacles. These capabilities align with three investment themes: 

1. Accelerating connectivity and marketing strategies
2. Optimizing user-experience and workflow
3. Unlocking human understanding with AI

Take a closer look at highlights of Cordial’s spring innovations, and get a sneak peek into what’s on the horizon. If you want an overview of all the new releases, which we’ve listed below, be sure to check out the full webinar here:

New Releases 

Accelerating connectivity and supercharging marketing strategies 

Cordial strives to help marketers consistently nail their campaigns with maximum efficiency and productivity, turning success into a regular and repeatable occurrence. We developed the following products to make it easier for marketers to implement interconnected marketing strategies and seamlessly integrate Cordial with their diverse tech stack and vice-versa. 

Universal Connector: Integrations made simple

Recognizing our clients’ reliance on third-party apps for vital marketing elements, we prioritize seamless integrations to accelerate time to market and ensure smooth data flow. That’s why we’ve developed Cordial’s Universal Connector, supporting both inbound and outbound real-time data streams to simplify the integration process between Cordial and other applications.

Programs: Optimize marketing strategies against business KPIs 

Programs provide marketers with comprehensive data on entire marketing strategies and their impact on larger business objectives. Combining all Cordial products and tactics, programs offer a cohesive approach for scalable, repeatable, and measurable marketing success. Interested in tracking the impact of daily and real-time automations and optimizing strategies accordingly? Our Programs product enables precisely that. In the future, we’ll leverage Cordial AI to optimize against any custom business variable, like margin or inventory turnover.

Optimizing User-Experience and Workflow

At Cordial, ensuring user satisfaction is always our top priority, all while streamlining workflow. This batch of spring releases is tailored to provide marketers with intuitive tools that simplify message creation, testing, and audience segmentation. Cordial’s user experience and workflows assist marketers in running error-free campaigns and delivering personalized experiences to their customers.  

SMS/MMS Enhancements: Supercharging Cordial’s SMS Product

Cordial clients are using SMS to interact with their customers in a timely and engaging way, and with our latest SMS enhancements, they’re able to establish fresh connections with their customers compliantly and promptly. Previously, Cordial clients could utilize Promotional and Automated SMS. This spring, we introduced Transactional SMS. Now, you can set up and send transactional messages without requiring a double opt-in. These messages notify customers about everything from order confirmations to delivery updates. At Cordial, compliance is a priority. That’s why we’ve also adjusted our SMS quiet hours to ensure all messages are received when customers aren’t sleeping. 

Unlocking human understanding with AI

Cordial AI empowers marketers with a comprehensive approach for deep customer insights, optimized messaging, and a natural language AI interface to humanize understanding at scale, making it more than just a suite of tools but the key to unlocking a comprehensive understanding of your customers, your messages, and you – the marketer. With the AI hype being everywhere, making simplistic AI tools is table stakes. At Cordial we’re creating something more powerful. We’re using AI to unlock understanding at scale. 

Here’s what we mean by this: Skipping straight to generating without understanding only adds more tests without real learning. To predict accurately, you need to understand first. Then, with prediction comes the ability to prescribe solutions. And when you can prescribe solutions, you can automate them. Our vision for AI is to develop AI tools to lay the groundwork for a deep understanding, paving the way for significant transformation.

Send Time Optimization: Engage customers at the perfect moment 

Understanding the right time to send a customer a message to get them to perform the action that you, the marketer, wants is crucial for driving engagement. Cordial’s Send Time Optimization (STO) stands out by leveraging past interactions to pinpoint the best moment to engage customers. Unlike other STO tools, our STO considers past engagement, order history, and browsing behavior, driving significant increases in engagement and revenue. Tests with a major outdoor retailer showed a remarkable 30% increase in average order value and a 29% increase in revenue per email.

Message Analysis: Make your messages count

We believe the foundation of generation and automation lives with understanding, once you can understand, you can predict, and when you can predict, you can automate. With Message Analysis, marketers can gain deeper understanding into message performance through automated labeling and modeling. And what we mean by labeling, is that we’re labeling image types, discount inclusions and more to further understand. 

Natural Language Audience Builder: Create audience segments with natural language

Cordial’s new Natural Language Audience Builder uses AI to simplify audience creation for marketers. Marketers can ask questions like, “Show me engaged customers who bought shoes and pants in the last 30 days,” and Cordial instantly builds the segment, speeding up campaign launch and optimization.

A look at what’s coming soon 

At Cordial, progress is perpetual. We’re constantly innovating and refining our offerings to provide marketers with products that enable them to connect with their customers more efficiently and effectively. Here’s a sneak peak at the exciting developments Cordial has in store for the coming months!

Predict Frequency and Channel

Predict the ideal cadence and channel for sending individual customers messages to increase engagement and reduce risk of unsubscribes. 

Natural Language Analytics

Ask questions of your data such as, “How much revenue did I generate from SMS shoppers in NYC?”

If you liked what you saw here and are interested in trying out one of these products, speak to your Cordial Rep, or if you’re not a Cordial client, schedule a demo today. Don’t forget to join us for our Summer Product Showcase.

The post Spring 2024 Product Showcase recap: Balancing innovation and efficiency appeared first on Cordial.

A decade ago, most would simply visit a local store and look at a few options at their local retailer. Others may have browsed online and made their purchase.

However, in today’s context, each individual’s shopping method is as unique as their fingerprint. Considering the number of channels and the abundance of digital devices to engage with those channels, it’s no surprise that brands struggle to track buying intent across different channels and devices.

Connecting the dots

The multi-device, multichannel reality we operate in has created infinite possibilities for brands and consumers to interact and engage with one another. 

For marketers, it’s vital to identify and match which online devices and channels are associated with a consumer, as well as who that consumer actually is. Each interaction a consumer has with a brand, irrespective of the channel, gives rise to a unique identifier for that interaction, or ‘tag’, that can be tied to that individual. The marketer’s opportunity is to connect the dots and match these various anonymous user identifiers to bring into focus the identity of the consumer. This is where an identity graph (ID graph) can be a marketer’s competitive edge.

Identity graph, explained

ID graphs tie together various identities and their associated activities across various devices and channels in order to understand a single customer’s behavior.

An ID graph enables identity resolution, which is the process of connecting identifiers from multiple platforms, channels, and devices and matching them to a single known customer profile. Properly identifying a customer enables marketers to deliver highly personalized messages and improved customer experiences.

Without an ID graph, there’s no way to understand a single customer’s behavior across channels and devices. As a result, if a customer interacts with your brand by providing their email in-store, then browsing your website via their laptop, and on their mobile browser,  you won’t be able to connect the dots to identify all of those behaviors as coming from a single person. Instead, all of those interactions will appear to come from separate people.

With Cordial’s Identity+, our fully integrated identity resolution solution, marketers have the ability to identify, match, and convert more customers faster and increase ROI through intelligent personalization. 

Why and how Cordial’s ID graph works

In Cordial’s world, every interaction is an opportunity for connection, whether it’s between brands and customers, messages and data, or strategy and results.

Cordial’s Identity+ offers seamless integration with leading identity partners for real-time identity matching, ensuring that no potential connection is missed. While many other solutions will make use of various ID Graph databases to resolve identity, Cordial’s solution integrates with our existing native JavaScript (JS) tagging features and the Cordial platform. This broadens the likelihood of properly identifying a user by querying an ID Graph database, while retaining the native JS capabilities to log and reconcile behavioral data.

And best of all, we make it easy to view and quantify the incremental lift in identified contacts and measure the attributed revenue with our new Identity Dashboard. The dashboard provides at a quick glance, how many anonymous contacts our Identity solutions have identified and how much revenue it’s attributing.

On average, clients using Cordial’s Identity+ solution have seen a 20-30% lift in identified contacts turning what otherwise would have been site traffic into a customizable sales opportunity. 

Looking ahead

Cordial’s Identity+ is more than an innovative solution; it’s a shift in the paradigm of personalized retail communication. It highlights our commitment to creating lifetime customers for the world’s leading brands. With Identity+, we are enabling retailers to not just communicate, but to connect in more meaningful ways with their customers, shaping the future of digital retail.Looking to the future, our product team is ready to continue pushing boundaries. As the need for improved user identification, increased privacy, and personalized communication grows in the industry, our identity solutions stand ready to adapt and expand.

If you would like to learn more about Identity+ or any of our identity solutions, please contact your Client Success Manager or schedule a demo with a Cordial expert.

The post Identity graphs: A marketer’s competitive edge appeared first on Cordial.

The updated Sculpt Editor allows marketing professionals, creative directors, and designers to streamline the message creation process and operate more efficiently. Say goodbye to time-consuming HTML coding and enjoy the freedom of creating captivating message experiences through our singular editor, across your messaging channels. The easy-to-use, drag-and-drop functionality provides a more approachable and intuitive experience to improve message creativity, while reducing the need for technical resources. 

Discover the exciting new features

Cordial’s Sculpt Editor now offers a visual thumbnail grid view for blocks and templates, allowing for quicker identification and easier navigation. Don’t worry – the existing list views are here to stay, giving you the flexibility to toggle and revert back as needed. Additional new features include pre-built generic blocks and the ability to save as a draft, making it even faster and more user-friendly to create rich, personalized emails using Sculpt.

The best part? These incredible enhancements are available to all clients at no additional cost. With Sculpt’s native, agile, and singular editor, you can enjoy a seamless experience that caters to both marketers and developers alike. The power and flexibility you know and love is now more accessible than ever, regardless of technical abilities.

A new way to build: Visual Sculpt blocks 

The first set of enhancements focuses on the block library, presenting visual blocks as thumbnails or a list view and consolidating the editing controls into familiar categories. These visual blocks improve the identification of content block types within the library and offer a visual preview of blocks within a template. With the ability to toggle between a list and a thumbnail grid, you can quickly identify the content you need for your campaigns.

Find the perfect fit with ease: Visual Sculpt templates

The next set of enhancements pertains to the templates in the Sculpt library. Now displayed as visual thumbnails within the message hub and list view, you can easily identify and search for templates by tags, making it simpler than ever to find the perfect template for your campaign. The UI also includes a toggle that changes the template library view from a list view to a thumbnail grid view by default, so you can revert back if needed.

Save time and effort: Streamlined workflow interactions 

The third set of enhancements focuses on simplifying workflow interactions when creating, managing, and saving blocks and templates. These improvements include the ability to export Sculpt messages to raw HTML, hover over functionality to display title previews, and an improved method for saving templates. Furthermore, messages in the message hub now display as fully rendered versions instead of raw HTML and code blocks, making it easier to visualize your customers’ messaging experience. 

Stand out from the competition

In a world where 94% of consumers have discontinued a brand relationship due to irrelevant messaging, it’s crucial to stand out from the competition. Cordial’s Sculpt Editor offers a unique advantage with its usability enhancements and proprietary cross-channel editing versatility. Developers can customize reusable content blocks to meet brand standards, while marketing teams can quickly build messages using these reusable blocks – all without requiring ongoing technical support.

Don’t just take our word for it. Clients like REVOLVE and Valence have praised Sculpt for its efficiency and ease of use. With the enhanced Sculpt Editor, your team can create campaigns faster and deliver more relevant, personalized content to your audience.

“Sculpt enables our graphic and email design teams to work more efficiently and launch campaigns faster. With Sculpt we’ve reduced campaign creation time by roughly 30% per campaign and with the time saved, we’ve had the ability to add more tracking elements, tests and customization to each individual campaign.” —Former Retention Marketing Specialist, REVOLVE

“Cordial’s drag-and-drop editor makes it fast and simple to create an email template. I don’t have to touch a line of code to deploy a campaign.” —Emily Slade, CoFounder and COO, Valence

Elevate your message creation process

Are you eager to try out the new and improved Sculpt Editor? These enhancements are designed to elevate your message creation process. Experience the freedom of a more intuitive creation experience and watch as your campaigns flourish.

To learn more about Cordial’s Sculpt Editor and these exciting enhancements, visit our Knowledge Base. Take the first step towards streamlining your message creation process, reducing campaign execution time, and optimizing your experience with Cordial’s enhanced Sculpt Editor.

The post Unleash your creativity with Cordial’s enhanced Sculpt Editor appeared first on Cordial.

SAN DIEGO — January 24, 2023 — Cordial, the cross-channel marketing and data management platform for brands to communicate in personal, intelligent ways, announced that it has partnered with Snowflake, the Data Cloud company, to list its data offering on Snowflake Marketplace. The new offering will allow joint customers to unify their data and unlock its potential by making it available across their entire business ecosystem.

Modern marketing requires agility, speed, and real-time data. Cordial and Snowflake are working together to give joint customers seamless access to rich customer data, enabling them to analyze engagement trends, monitor consumer behaviors, gauge performance, and unlock new insights about metrics driving their business forward. Additionally, data access can be extended bi-directionally, allowing customers to easily query and leverage data from Snowflake in the Cordial platform for improved message personalization and campaign outcomes. 

“Now more than ever, marketers and technology teams are looking to move faster together. Cordial and Snowflake are removing the barriers for these teams to move fast, trust their data, and iterate quickly in marketing with a customer-led approach,” said Jeremy Swift, CEO and co-founder of Cordial. “This integration makes traditional sharing methods obsolete, eliminating the need to move or copy data, rebuild schemas or manage data pipelines with traditional extract, transfer and load (ETL) solutions, which are costly and labor intensive. This means marketers can spend more time activating their data rather than managing it.”

Cordial’s robust data architecture collects and uses dynamic data sets, including contact attributes, cart items, product catalogs, purchase activity, and digital behaviors. Joint customers can now leverage Snowflake’s data engineering, storage, sharing, and governance, to have unparalleled access and security to this powerful data across their entire team with turn-key setup and maintenance.

“Our partnership with Cordial will enable our joint customers to benefit from real-time, first-party data that has proved invaluable for marketers today,” said Kieran Kennedy, Head of Snowflake Marketplace. “We look forward to seeing this new offering reach more of our customers, helping them to continue maximizing their use of Snowflake’s Data Cloud.”

Additional benefits that differentiate the Cordial and Snowflake integration include:

• Immediate access to rich customer data refreshed multiple times per day.
• Increased flexibility by offering standard or custom secure views of shared data based on specific needs.
• Improved access to retroactive customer data when a secure share is provisioned.

“Cordial’s Snowflake Marketplace offering has given us a more seamless way of accessing and analyzing our data. Sharing data that used to take hours, now only takes a few minutes to complete,” said Hyrum Ward, Manager of Data Engineering at Purple. “All our valuable first-party data from Cordial is now instantly available and queryable alongside our hundreds of other data sources in Snowflake, so we can easily marry up a variety of data points to gain new insights about our business.”

For more information on Cordial’s integration with Snowflake Collaboration Technology, visit www.cordial.com/partners/snowflake/. 

Snowflake Marketplace is powered by Snowflake’s ground-breaking cross-cloud technology, Snowgrid, allowing companies to find, try, and buy the data and applications needed to innovate for their business. Snowflake Marketplace simplifies discovery, access, and the commercialization of data and applications, enabling companies to unlock entirely new revenue streams and extended insights across the Data Cloud. Learn more about Snowflake Marketplace and how to find, try, and buy the data, data services, and applications needed to innovate for your business.

The post Cordial enhances first-party data capabilities on Snowflake Marketplace appeared first on Cordial.

New SMS/MMS features

Manage multiple short codes to efficiently scale your communications.

There are times when brands want to track distinct types of SMS messages to differentiate engagement from promotional vs. transactional campaigns. Or, they need to send campaigns internationally and factor in different opt-in requirements by country. To support these evolving marketer needs, Cordial now lets you add and manage multiple short codes from your single Cordial account. Each short code contains unique inputs such as program descriptions, keywords, and compliance messages. Now you can keep tabs on your distinct messaging campaigns and have a holistic way to manage them all from a single account. Plus, creating SMS/MMS messaging tied to these short codes just got easier with a character counter now built-in to the Cordial interface.

Remove invalid numbers to increase send-time efficiency and engagement.

SMS list hygiene is just as important as email list hygiene. By removing old or unengaged subscribers from your marketing list, you can improve delivery time, save money, and see better engagement metrics. When messages are sent to numbers that continually fail, it puts an unnecessary strain on the mobile carrier’s system and impacts their ability to deliver those messages in a timely manner.

Similar to email, Cordial will now flag phone numbers that continually fail over seven consecutive sends as “invalid” and automatically suppress those invalid numbers from message sends. This automatic suppression lets mobile carriers process and deliver your message faster and also saves you money by reducing the overall number of messages sent. Cleaner sending lists also lead to an increase in engagement and revenue since you will only be sending to customers who can actually receive your messages.

New reporting features

Attribute revenue to WebView mobile apps.

For marketing teams, WebView mobile apps have a lot of benefits. They’re more cost effective, easier to develop and maintain, and take up less space on a user’s device. Overall, WebView apps are making it more accessible for brands to extend into the mobile app space. Cordial recently expanded our attribution capabilities to support any mobile app instance — native or WebView — so all clients can properly track and attribute revenue to their campaigns.

Identify key message insights needed to optimize customer journeys.

It is important for marketers to understand what messaging is influencing their customer’s journey — knowing what’s performing well and where there’s opportunity for optimization. Cordial is continuing to enhance our message reports to make it easier for clients to quickly identify key insights and areas of opportunity. In our Message Report dashboard, you can now select a specific orchestration journey from a drop-down menu to view the performance of each message within that journey flow. This added flexibility is meant to save you time and resources, eliminating the need to export and query reports in a third-party tool. If needed, you can still easily export these message reports via the UI or an API depending on your preference.

Special callout: As part of Podium, Cordial’s orchestration builder, you can also begin to delay sending messages until a specified time, helping you reach customers at the best possible moment. Then on the back-end via Message Reports see what’s working and adjust accordingly.

Quickly identify and troubleshoot erroneous in-platform activity.

Cordial clients rely on our platform to process significant amounts of data and messaging every day. It’s not uncommon for errors to happen or issues to arise that you need to investigate. We created new UI dashboards to help you get the data you need to make important business decisions faster.

The new Account Monitoring dashboard lets you see errors related to jobs such as data imports, JS listener calls, data transformations, and campaign deployments. Having this added layer of monitoring available in the UI empowers you to start investigating a resolution quickly without needing to rely on our Support team. As you dig into this data, we’ve included a table of common errors in our Knowledge Base to give you insight into what it means as well as suggested solutions.

In addition to troubleshooting errors related to specific jobs, you may need to review activity of specific users on your team and actions they’ve completed within the platform. You may need to investigate why a message didn’t send, audit data exports, enforce security protocols, or review content changes. The new User Activities dashboard lets you filter by a specific user, type of activity, or date.

If you’d like to learn more about these new features or have any questions, contact your Client Success Manager. New to Cordial? Schedule a personalized business assessment today to learn more.

The post 5 new Cordial SMS and reporting features appeared first on Cordial.

Signs to switch your marketing platform

1. You can’t use your own data.

Marketing teams who can fully access and activate various data sources are seeing greater success creating more customized, engaging messages. When faced with issues like the inability to export your own data or connect it to other platforms, your marketing strategy becomes limited — or it can cause extra time-consuming steps for your team to find a workaround.

Maybe you’re executing certain channels, like SMS or mobile app, with other providers and you’d like to inform another system about your contact’s behaviors and order activity, but the platform you’re on locks down your ability to export data. If your strategy is fairly simple, this might not be an issue, but as you grow and need to connect your data with other outlets, it can be limiting. The inability to export and use your own data puts more restrictions on your creative and strategic pursuits. 

We’re seeing an increased number of brands adopt a true cross-channel approach by bringing their previously-siloed data into one place. With Cordial, flexibility is a foundational element of our platform, and our Architect tool was designed to transform and transport large amounts of data in and out of our platform in real-time. To extend that power even further, Cordial offers unlimited retention for most data types compared to most other platforms that charge you extra for data retention and purge your data after a set period of time. This means that brands using Cordial for multiple channels are set up for success, and clients can rely on a foundational layer of data portability that isn’t present in all customer engagement platforms.

“Cordial has given me, as a developer-minded marketer, the comfort of knowing that we no longer have to restrict what other software we use because it doesn’t integrate with our ESP. It opens doors for us to use whatever tech stack we want because Cordial is flexible enough to work with it.”  — Jordan Allen, CIO, Lume

2. You’re experiencing slow speeds.

Email marketers know the pain of trying to build the perfect audience segment only to see the spinning wheel reminding you that it’s going to take minutes—or even hours—to load your list. Say goodbye to the rest of your productivity when this happens. 

With entry-level marketing platforms, simple tasks like segmentation can take forever, wasting time and causing frustration when trying to craft the perfect campaign. As you grow your contact list and send volume, this can make the problem even worse as these platforms try to keep up with the increased requirements. This can make it feel like you’re being punished for achieving what every marketer is trying to achieve — growth!

Mosaic, Cordial’s Audience Builder, was designed to build advanced segmentation and audience lists in seconds — not minutes or hours. In fact, Cordial can query over 100 million contact records in just seconds providing you a real-time snapshot of your addressable audience.  

“Cordial has increased our ability to activate data. With Audience Builder, I can pull up an audience count in seconds… It’s been really helpful for us to do audience sizing on the fly.”  — Scott Cohen, Former Senior Email Marketing Manager, Purple.

3. Your customization options are limited.

Many platforms are built with a one-size-fits-all approach, where feature limitations can often go uncovered until you’ve actually migrated to your new partner. For example, what you think is a simple drag-and-drop email editor might end up being more complicated or not powerful enough for your needs, based on your particular use cases. Some more basic platforms may only allow a set number of experiments (A/B tests) to run in a single campaign flow, meaning you have to duplicate campaigns if you want to run additional tests. Not only does this create more manual work for your marketing team, but it can also make it harder to distinguish what worked and what didn’t when looking into performance.  

Cordial has a truly easy-to-use dynamic message builder called Sculpt that helps clients build better campaigns, faster. In Sculpt, you can run a variety of A/B tests and have them run independently of each other. For example, you can run two different hero images, two different coupon offers, and two different product recommendations, in a single campaign without having to manually copy out the entire campaign to run tests for each of those elements.

Related to using Sculpt, one of Cordial’s clients, REVOLVE, said, “We’ve reduced campaign creation time by roughly 30% per campaign and with the time saved, we’ve had the ability to add more tracking elements, tests and customization to each individual campaign.”

In addition to manual testing issues, other platforms may limit the type of events that can trigger a message. Many systems need a “system event” in order to trigger a message send. In Cordial, you have the opportunity to trigger messages based on additional system or status changes. For example, for retailers with different loyalty tiers, our platform can trigger messages based on a contact changing from one level to another. In this case, Cordial can automatically send a “Congratulations on your new Platinum status! Here’s an exclusive 25% coupon.”, eliminating the extra step of running an “event change” look-up on a recurring basis behind the scenes.

4. You have questions that can’t get answered via chat or email support.

Self-service support is great for simple, straightforward offerings, but when you need help evolving and growing your cross-channel marketing strategy, online support often falls short. Many basic platforms only offer email or chat support, making it hard to develop a relationship with your technology partner and restricts the type of deeper-level, strategic knowledge you receive from a dedicated Client Success Rep. 

Choosing a tech partner that prioritizes service and views you as a partner instead of just another account is invaluable as your marketing efforts grow more complex and go beyond the scope of what online support can offer.

At Cordial, our company name symbolizes how we empower our clients to communicate with their customers as well as how we do business—with transparency, collaboration, and trust. Cordial has client support and solution teams that get accounts set up and running efficiently, someone dedicated to ongoing consultation, and additional services offered throughout the partnership to accelerate what the platform can do for clients. 

“We were ready to level up our marketing automation with smart targeting through data synching and advanced triggering. After researching our options, Cordial was found to be the sweet spot of customization and ease of use with a full team of support people that we meet with regularly. And it offers us a chance to develop and grow over time with the available add-on services like direct mail, data automations and SMS.” — Kristen Hess, Director Customer Retention Marketing, 360training

Certain platforms work great for teams with a straightforward email and mobile strategy, but lose their luster as their marketing efforts grow more elaborate and data-heavy. If you’re in this position, reflect on the points above and think about whether migrating to a new platform will help remove obstacles for your team, so they can spend more time strategizing creative ways to knock your goals out of the park.

Interested in seeing how Cordial is helping top brands generate more revenue and exceed customer engagement goals? Schedule a demo with our team to learn more. View a PDF version of this article.

The post Four signs you’ve outgrown your marketing platform appeared first on Cordial.

Marketers are bound by what their tech partners can support. A data-first platform focused on simplifying data management, like Cordial, is necessary to unlock the potential in your data and create breakthrough customer messaging experiences. Knowing how to use business and customer data to really engage your customers requires thinking in new ways and freeing your mind of limitations based on what used to be possible.

It’s critical for you to be able to access all of your data to make every communication with your customers more powerful. Cordial was built with a powerful data platform as a core part of our solution, believing in the importance of marketers seeing, understanding, and using every piece of data you have to really connect on a 1:1 basis. When we built the Cordial platform, we also built the capability for marketers to customize data collections—Cordial Supplements—and use those directly for advanced personalization.   

Cordial Supplements are custom data collections that store rich datasets with many records and values. Some hold complex details about individual customers, while others contain business data that can be associated with a contact. Unlike other platforms, Cordial provides marketers unlimited use of data to personalize messages at time of send. Supplements let marketers extend their datasets in new ways to create more powerful campaigns that drive higher revenue.  

 “Cordial’s Supplements has let us create meaningful connections with our customers in ways we previously thought impossible,” said Gaelle Ouggourni, CRM & Data Associate, Adore Me. “Supplements allow us to store our product catalog data in a way that’s specific to our business needs, and then easily access that data within Sculpt Blocks which allows our marketing team to create personalized content within messages.”

To show the power of Supplements and bring it to life in a real way, we’ll take you through some sample applications. This will hopefully help you imagine new ways you can use your data to inspire more personal 1:1 engagement with your customers, for instance, did you know you could:

How to apply data supplements

1. Import an array of data tied to a customer.

There are times when marketers have sets of information tied to a contact that is too complex to be stored as part of a contact attribute. Marketers can import an array of data that is tied to a customer to enhance their contact profiles in Cordial. This lets you dynamically trigger and personalize messages based on more detailed information about your customers to ensure even greater relevance.

For example, Eddie Bauer is able to track individual contact data such as orders, purchases, and loyalty data to create better experiences based on their customer’s level of engagement. With Supplements, Eddie Bauer tracks and incentivizes their customers with “Adventure Rewards”, which act as rewards based on previous purchases. For instance, based on Adam’s purchase history, Eddie Bauer can send “Adventure Rewards” certificates unique to Adam, track the balance of his certificate, optimize promotions to that balance—such as Early Redeemer promos—and even report back to other systems on usage and balance.

Angela Gow, Director, Digital Merchandising and Email at Eddie Bauer pointed out, “We’ve reimagined our loyalty customer messaging strategy with Cordial. Using all of our data sources, we’re sending relevant messages to our most valuable customers, on a 1:1 basis, about the things they care about most. With this level of personalization, we’ve seen a major increase in engagement across the board.”

With Supplements, you have the ability to store data that is unique and custom to your brand. While Eddie Bauer uses Enriched-contact Supplements to trigger messages based on customer loyalty scores, other brands may use robust, unique subscription data or something like pet information to activate certain messages to their customers. Below are just a few of the infinite examples of what enriched-contact data can be used to create meaningful engagements with customers:

Subscription data

• A marketer may have an array of subscription data about who is active, what service lines they subscribe to, a start and end date, and more. 
• By storing this subscription data as an Enriched-contact Supplement, the brand can easily keep track and manage the status of multiple products and important dates associated with each customer record.
• For instance, Jane’s status for an acne antibiotic just changed to active with a new subscription start, which triggers an appointment request email to be sent.

Pet records

• You may have a supplemental database with an array of pet data: type, breed, birthday, name, and vaccine record tied to a contact ID.
• By storing this pet data as an Enriched-contact Supplement, the brand can plan reminder messages based on the date of their pet’s last vaccine or when their pet’s birthday is coming up.   
• For example, the brand can trigger a message automatically to Dave two weeks before his dog Sadie has a birthday with a promo code, recommendation for top-rated dog treats, or discounts on sparkly collars. The same trigger can be set up when it’s his other dog Goldie’s birthday but with different product recommendations showing the importance of having data on each pet to personalize the experience.

2. Use business data to enhance the customer’s buying journey.

Marketers can easily upload business data as a Supplement in the Cordial platform. The business details about their stores or inventory will have a quality in the record that can match back to a customer. Relevant business information can be quickly pulled into each customer’s message at send time for a better campaign experience.

For example, Jerome’s Furniture is able to dynamically pull in business data specific to the store where a customer has shopped. When the order is ready for pick-up, Jerome’s can use a store list supplement to dynamically look up the store ID to render the correct store location, sales rep, and phone number in the confirmation email to help create a more seamless experience for both the customer and Jerome’s team.

You aren’t limited to including business data only in confirmation emails with Supplements. You can be creative and include any business data you’d like in messages to drive deeper personalization or a specific action. Here are some top examples of the type of business data marketers can use to create more relevant experiences:

Store personalization—nearest store

• Based on a marketer’s contact data on file, they know where each individual lives. A brand can use that information to relate relevant store data to each customer to ensure a more convenient experience.
• When a brand uploads store lists as a Business Data Supplement, they can find store(s) from nearest to furthest that match the individual’s state or zip and render the “nearest store” address in their message. 
• For example, the brand can alert a customer that he can purchase his favorite flannels at the Beantown Outlet that’s only 2 miles away versus the Riverton Mall which is 23 miles away.

Inventory personalization 

• A marketer can upload supply chain data as a supplement in Cordial as well. They can use the data to send smarter and more relevant messages to their customers by understanding their affinity to certain products and which products they’ve actually purchased, browsed, or saved. 
• When an item is back in-stock or there’s been a recent price drop, you can use the Business Data Supplement to find individuals who’ve had an affinity for the product in the past, have it in their cart, or have it as a wish list item to proactively trigger a message.

3. Easily track and send unique promo codes to your customers.

Many platforms stop short by only distributing static coupon offers to customers or requiring a third party to help in managing and tracking promo codes. In Cordial, marketers can manage, send, and track usage of 1:1 offers from a single platform using our Promo Code Supplement. When you include a promo block as part of your message content, a unique code is automatically assigned to each individual at send time. Marketers can set up specific incentives for each customer based on the action they wish for them to take. Through Cordial, brands can easily monitor the number of coupons distributed, who received the offer for which campaign, date distributed, who clicked, and who redeemed (when it’s supplied to us). Also by issuing one-time use offers, you can incentivize contacts without compromising your bottom line.

For example, when Snipes was with their previous ESP, they used a static coupon code for their Welcome series offer, which got picked up by Honey and other coupon services and ultimately resulted in a smaller profit margin. After moving to Cordial, they created a Promo Code Supplement which allowed them to generate a unique promo code in every user’s welcome email. The unique promo code could persist across each touch point in the series, but could not be used more than one time. They also set up internal coupon logic that prevents this coupon from being used on specific brands or products that are not able to be sold at a discounted price. The ability to use dynamic coupon codes allowed them to have more control over their sales and led to an increase in revenue attributed to their Welcome series.

This is just a sample of some of the ways you might rethink your approach to data to shake off current limitations and intelligently unlock the power of your data. Learn more or speak to an expert today to understand what Supplements could do for you.

The post Unseen data limitations may be holding you back from breaking through with customers appeared first on Cordial.

There’s been an ongoing reduction and restriction of data marketers can collect and use in a compliant way. Third-party data, which marketers have long leaned on, will now be difficult to obtain and/or be inaccurate therefore plummeting its value. 

“Nearly one-third of marketers see data quality and availability as a growing challenge, and data deprecation will accelerate challenges in accessing, using, and executing a data-driven marketing strategy.”

— Rusty Warner, VP Principal Analyst, Forrester

The solution? First-party data. Marketers must depend more on the data they own and have directly collected from their customers. This is one of the reasons Cordial release Identity+ — our fully integrated ID Graph — to help brands enhance their first-party data and better understand customers’ buying behaviors to deliver more personalized experiences. 

Fully activating your first-party data is critical to advancing your marketing strategies. Identity+ helps you connect more data points about your customer base and use that unified view of information to send additional flows and triggered messaging. This empowers our clients to increase their message send pool in a meaningful and privacy-centric way to drive sales. 

Identity+ is an identity resolution tool that recognizes contacts anonymously browsing your site, such as on a new browser or device, and connects all of their buying signals to your contact’s profile. 

How it works

• Contacts opt into receiving messages from your company
• These subscribers might browse your website on a new computer or from an unknown device, making their browsing behavior inaccessible
• Cordial collects and categorizes browsing behavior from your website
• With the addition of integrated ID Graph, Cordial can stitch together anonymous behavioral data to the contact profile within our platform (matching known customer IDs to email addresses within our database)
• Cordial only matches behaviors to known subscribers to uphold email compliance standards and ensure a positive customer experience
• By enhancing your first-party data with relevant buying signals, more subscribers will qualify for personalized, triggered messaging campaigns (like abandoned cart, back-in-stock notifications, and more) and in turn increase revenue per message

Triggered email flows are one of the most valuable pieces in the email marketing toolkit, producing on average 10x the revenue per send of promotional messages for Cordial clients. Lume, a DTC e-commerce deodorant brand and Cordial client, has driven revenue growth with triggered messaging.

 “Cordial quadrupled our revenue generated from Abandon Browse campaigns by identifying web visitors and connecting all of the data points to personalize the customer experience.”

— Jordan Allen, CIO, Lume

Take triggered messaging flows a step further with Identity+, and you’re tapping into a customer base that would otherwise be inaccessible, resulting in a higher volume of sends and higher revenue.

Saatva, a direct-to-consumer e-commerce mattress retailer and Cordial client, recently leveraged Identity+ to reach previously-anonymous site visitors and drive more sales. They saw more than 80% increase in identified abandoned cart customers and 2x increase in triggered messages.

“Cordial’s ID Graph has had a massive impact on the revenue we generate from our abandoned cart emails. The Cordial team projected a 40% improvement in the volume of abandoned cart consumers we could reach out to, and we have more than doubled that projection.”

— Joe Bernard, Marketing Manager, Saatva

Want to see how your company can identify and engage more of your customers by using our identity solutions? Learn more or speak to an expert today.

The post Enhance your first-party data with Cordial’s Identity Graph appeared first on Cordial.

• Adding Contact Cards to your text messaging
• Enabling custom sound notifications for mobile app messages
• Orchestrating complex cross-channel customer journeys 
• Securing your platform with API key restrictions

Make your brand logo instantly recognizable with MMS contact cards

As more and more brands start to unlock the full potential of SMS and MMS, marketers are looking for ways to stand out from the competition and maintain a high level of trust with their text subscribers. That’s why we’ve introduced a way for brands to add Contact Cards in their text messaging.

A Contact Card (sometimes called a vCard) is a great way for text subscribers to instantly recognize a brand’s logo and name when receiving text messages. The subscriber can easily add a brand’s contact information to their address book on a mobile device, keeping your company visible and top-of-mind to drive long-term loyalty.

Enable custom sound notifications for mobile app

For brands with a mobile app, you know how critical it is to keep your app subscribers engaged. Brands can now add a custom sound to their app notifications in the new feature we added to our Mobile App SDK.

Here’s an example use case: an online wine retailer is letting customers know they have an order out for delivery by sending a push notification accompanied by the sound of clinking glasses. This feature can add a fun and unique enhancement to the customer experience.

Orchestrate complex cross-channel customer journeys 

Podium is Cordial’s robust orchestration builder that allows marketers to build complex cross-channel customer journeys using a variety of data points. Marketers love the visual, flexible layout of Podium, and given the rise in remote work, we had an opportunity to make it even more adaptable to distributed teams.

Cordial now features a new notification, letting marketers know if another teammate is currently editing a customer orchestration workflow. This will help notify marketing teams about current changes being made to orchestrations, so two people don’t try to edit the same workflow at the same time. Since many teams can’t just look across the hall at a coworker’s desk anymore, this feature will help distributed teams work better together within our platform.

Secure your platform with API key restrictions

Marketing teams working with a third-party vendor might need to grant people outside their organization access to their Cordial account, but need to make sure sensitive information and areas of the platform are kept secure and only visible to the approved parties. 

Enhanced User Roles and Permissions settings allow you to grant greater security controls for API endpoints. You can restrict a certain type of access (read-only vs. write) or deny access entirely, depending on your unique scenario. This ensures you grant the proper access needed while maintaining your security.

If you have any questions about these new features or want to put them to use, contact your Client Success Manager. New to Cordial? Schedule a personalized business assessment to learn more.

The post February key features: Custom sounds, contact cards, and enhanced user roles appeared first on Cordial.

• Enabling them to craft perfect mobile app messages
• Helping them to seamlessly build and manage complex audiences
• Empowering them to track audience trends

Craft the perfect mobile app messages, no coding required

Cordial has a flexible drag-and-drop message builder called Sculpt that harnesses the power of Cordial’s personalization engine to help marketers send a better, more relevant message. Teams can create branded, personalized content blocks and build 1:1 customer experiences in minutes—taking the strain off development and IT teams.

Cordial recently made Sculpt even more expansive, with the addition of Sculpt for mobile in-app messages. The same great benefits and powerful real-time personalization capabilities Cordial clients already had for email are now available for mobile in-app messages, without the need for HTML.

Sculpt for Mobile in-app can help teams:

• Personalize experiences by adding in a recently purchased item
• Improve customer satisfaction by gathering feedback via a polling or survey component
• Easily test and preview messages by viewing dynamic personalized elements at the contact level
• Grow your subscriber base by capturing SMS or email subscription opt-in
• Connect with your customers by capturing additional notification methods outside of the app (ex: enable push notifications)

Seamlessly build and manage complex audiences

Top marketers know that in order to better engage with customers, it’s important to segment your audience base accordingly. You can spend hours crafting the perfect personalized message, but these efforts are fruitless if you’re sending to the wrong audience. Cordial’s Audience Builder has always been a powerful tool in our clients’ marketing tool belt, and we recently rolled out several key new features.

Enhanced user interface features to help marketers easily build audience segments.

• Easily craft the perfect audiences with a flexible UI: with both drag-and-drop or click-to-add options, adding new attribute fields is as easy as either the click of a button or the drag of a mouse.
• Streamline audience creation for your team members: can’t remember the exact name of the attribute you’re looking for? Now, you can run a search across all attribute fields, helping new team members learn the lay of the land and save time creating audiences.

Linked audiences, or audience nesting, to help your team better manage complex segments.

• Reduce errors and save build time: managing a single linked audience is much easier and less error-prone than managing unique audiences in various locations
• Support more complex audience rules: an additional level of nesting can help you drill down even further, or even mix with other rules and components, when building complex audiences

Easily track audience trends at-a-glance

Once you’ve done all the work of setting up audiences in Audience Builder, you might want to track and monitor certain segments to make sure they’re growing as you’d hoped. For example, if you have the initiative to grow users in a particular product category or across a new channel.

Our Audience Trends dashboard view helps marketers:

• Take action if you see a dip in audience counts
• See how audiences grow over time

Teams can choose from set time frames or set a custom range. Up to nine audiences can be added to the dashboard, so you can pick and choose which audiences you’d like to keep a close eye on. You can also export the data into excel for an even deeper-level dive.

Want to see how Cordial can help you take your cross-channel messaging to the next level? Contact our team to learn more.

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