Ubiquity released new Engage functionality on Saturday 8th of June.
Updates include:
- Update Imports
- TXT Statuses
- Pre-header text for Email Templates
- Symbols in Subject Lines
- New Quick Search
- Faster Survey
- Spam Reporting with Gmail
- And a bunch of tweaks and bug fixes
1. Overview of 1.69
1.69 was released on June 8th 2013.
A few small features but mainly a focus on performance improvements and bug fixes/tweaks.
2. Update Imports
Update Imports will update contacts in the Engage database with values from your import file.
However if your import file has blank values then the database fields will be updated to be blank.
We’ve added a new option to the import wizard. You can choose not to update database fields if the import file has blank values for that field
3. TXT Statuses
If you send TXT messages via the Engage API then you can now get Engage to call you back with statuses as they arrive e.g Delivered or Failed.
When you call the API to send a TXT you get a Message ID. This Message ID is returned with the status.
Enter the URL and receipt type under TXT Programme > Edit Programme Settings.
Returned values; MessageID, Status, Timestamp.
You can setup your TXT Programme to have inbound messages delivered to your URL using Web Request widget.
4. Pre-header text for Email Templates
Pre-header text appears as a quick preview in the inbox before an email is opened.
An email client will display the first few sentences of an email but it’s better to set your own pre-header text.
Because pre-header text is prominent it can make a big difference on open and read rates for your emails.
You’ll now find an extra field on email templates so you can enter your own custom pre-header text.
Being able to see pre-header text depends on the email client software and settings.
5. Symbols in Subject Lines
We have added support for symbols in email subject lines.
To use a symbol in an email subject line simply copy the symbol from a website or document into the subject line field.
Here are some symbols to get you started: ❤ ♥ ★ ☮ ✿ ♪ ✈ ✂ ☼ ☂ ✔ ☺ ☹ ☎ ►
You can find more symbols here.
Some email clients such as Outlook.com (Hotmail) and the iPhone/iPad Mail app may convert certain symbols into graphical ’emoji’ symbols.
Note that while most email clients have good support for symbols in subject lines, Outlook 03 and Lotus Notes do not have any support so symbols will appear as a ☐ instead. It is recommended that you test subject lines with symbols across a range of email clients.
6. New Quick Search
If you have a large number of contacts or a large number of fields then the database Quick Search wasn’t…well, quick.
We’re changed it so you can select the field to search. Simply start typing to filter the fields in your database then hit enter to search.
If you don’t see Quick Search then please contact us so we can enable it for your account.
7. Faster Survey
Engage Survey goes faster. A lot faster. It can support more survey respondents filling in more surveys simultaneously.
The actual number varies depending on things such as the number of database contacts and fields, the amount of data in the database and the number of survey pages, questions and logic complexity.
But there are limits to how many concurrent surveys can be completed. So we’ve also introduced rate-limiting. If a Mailout includes a link to a Survey then Engage will limit the send-rate to ensure that Survey remains responsive.
Engage will also rate-limit Mailouts that have links to Event.
We are currently working to allow Engage links to be included in TXT message sends (TXT Outs). We’ll put rate-limit checking there too.
8. Spam Reporting with Gmail
Yahoo/Xtra and Hotmail email recipients have the option of clicking “This is spam” when reading an email.
This sends a message to Engage. Engage automatically sets the database contact as GNA=Yes (Gone No Address) and they will be excluded from future Mailouts.
We’ve extended this to include Gmail.
This ensures Engage maintains its extremely high sender reputation.
9. Monitoring Website
We’ve created an Engage monitoring website.
This is hosted in the US (Engage is hosted securely in New Zealand). It polls all the components of Engage.
If you’re experiencing any performance issues with Engage please check this site at http://monitoring.ubiquity.co.nz.
We encourage you to register on this site for email alerts. If there is a problem you will be the first to know.
The monitoring site is different to the Ubiquity contact database. Unless you register there
you won’t receive status emails.
10. Tweaks and bug fixes
| Tweaks and bug fixes for this release include: |
|---|
| Renamed some survey logic conditions to better suit what they actually do: “Contains none of” is now “Does not contain any of” and the old “Does not contain any of” is now “Does not contain all of”. |
| Completing the same Survey in two browser tabs at the same time and clicking back on one of them would wipe your answers. Fixed. |
| Reordering the options on a Survey question that are piped to another question would mean that the options wouldn’t appear in the piped question. No longer. |
| You can now see which user imported into an Engage database. Click into Imports and click on the import. |
| Importing into the database and matching on Reference ID would fail. |
| Added Outlook 2013 to the list of tracked email clients in Mailout reports. |
| Clicking to view the Mailout Folder reports is faster. |
| The confirm screen of the Send Mailout wizard does a delivery audit (including DNS lookup) to ensure the Mailout is ok to send.If the servers don’t respond in time Engage would show an error making you think there was a problem. This could be quite distressing. So we’ve made this process more robust to better handle non-responsive DNS servers. |
| You could make a Mailout in progress unusable by saving the Mailout that had a De-dupe filter, deleting the de-dupe field from the database and then trying to click back into the Mailout. Fixed. |
| Fixed error when loading an email template from a different Engage account. |
| Made the Mailout filter screen faster. |
| Made the Mailout de-dupe screen faster. |
| Snapshots of the Engage servers are taken twice a day for backups.Automated Mailouts would fail if they ran at the same time as the snapshots. We’ve built in more resilience. Also built this into Event triggered emails and Automated TXT Outs. |
| You can now choose to make Automated Mailouts active at the end of the create/edit wizard instead of having to do this from the dashboard. This means you’re less likely to forget. |
| Having a database field called “Row ID” would break Web Forms. It won’t anymore. |
| Previewing an Event that had credit card payment would sometimes show an error.This was due to a slow response from the payment gateway. We’ve added more resilience here too. |
| A user with only the ‘Layouts Administrator’ permission would get an error when creating or editing layouts saying they didn’t have permission. Fixed. |
| The TXT Out widget would sometimes report incorrectly making it appear that some TXT messages weren’t sent. They were. And this is solved. |
| The API V2 help at https://resources.ubiquity.co.nz didn’t look pretty in IE. Now it looks great. |
| Database.ReferenceID wasn’t available on Subscribe Web Form Triggered Emails. |
| Importing a file into an Engage database via API v2 would sometimes fail. |