Ubiquity have gone and done it again and come up with a bunch of new developments for Engage. The most exciting development is the inclusion of the 'Engage TXT' module within Engage. You now have the choice of communicating by email or TXT with your database. TXT is far more immediate than email and allows for easier opting in to databases.
- Engage TXT
- Attachments
- Dynamic Attachments
- EasyEdit Templates
- Slider Field Type
- Media Field Updates
- Tabs
- Tweaks and bug fixes
1. Overview of 1.65
Some great new features in 1.65.
It's been many months in design and development but we are very happy to announce the release of our new TXT module.
We've improved triggered emails so you can add attachments to these emails. Now you can also attach personalised attachments to Web Form triggered emails. And, as always, lots of small tweaks and bug fixes.
We're always open to ideas so please don't hesitate to contact us if you'd like to contribute to the Engage road map.
2. Engage TXT
Ubiquity has had a TXT gateway for quite a few years but until now we had to custom develop TXT Programmes for each solution.
It meant we needed to get a developer involved each time which was time consuming.
But now TXT is a fully featured module in Engage.
With Engage TXT you can not only send TXTs to your database contacts but you can set up multi-step response processes right from the Engage interface.
Setup TXT surveys, TXT for Info, TXT email address capture, TXT competitions and TXT conversations without any programming. You can have your own shortcodes and there is also an API so you can connect your software to send and receive TXT messages.
The drag and drop interface makes it simple to create sophisticated TXT solutions.
Contact your Ubiquity Account Manager if you'd like a demo. Not sure who to contact? Go here, fill in the form and we'll contact you.
3. Attachments
Until this release you could only add an attachment to an email in a Mailout.
We've extended attachments so now you can add attachments to Web Form, Survey and Event triggered emails.
An attachment to an email allows the recipient to read the document even when they have no internet connection (such as being on a plane) provided they have downloaded the email already.
To add an attachment simply go into the Content of the triggered email and click "Add attachment".
4. Dynamic Attachments
Sometimes you might want to add an attachment that is personalised for the recipient. Such as a quote, receipt or statement.
Personalised attachments allow this. Currently they are only available for Web Form triggered emails but in the next release we'll open this up for all emails in Engage. Then you will be able to send out personalised attachments to your database contacts.
Engage doesn't actually create the personalised attachments. Most clients have their documents in a different system. Instead Engage will call the external URL to get the attachment. Variables are passed in to the URL in order to get the correct document. But if you don't have documents in a different location and want them generated then we can help!
Please contact Ubiquity to have this option enabled for your account.
5. EasyEdit Templates
Following up on the EasyEdit enhancements in our November Release, we've added in a few more additional features.
Slider Field Type
The slider field type makes it easy to choose a size, for example choosing the width of the email or the amount of padding around an image.
Please note that this new field type must be coded in to email templates in order for it to be visible.
Media Field Updates
The media field type is useful for inserting images into your EasyEdit templates, however previously images had to be resized before uploading.
Now there are additional settings in the media field type for setting the:
- Alt text – this is displayed in place of the image in some email clients before images have been downloaded.
- Image size – this allows you to easily change the width and height of images that are inserted. The image ratio is locked by default but can easily be unlocked by clicking on the padlock icon.
Note that we still recommend resizing images prior to uploading to ensure that they are web-optimised and will not take a long time to download when the email is opened.
Tabs
With the complexity of some email templates that have been created lately we have been seeing more articles that have a lot of fields.
Sometimes these can get a little unwieldy and hard to see what's going on.
Tabs make this easier by splitting out fields – you could have content in one tab and styles in another, or if you have multi-column articles, the fields for each column could be in their own tabs.
6. Tweaks and bug fixes
Tweaks and bug fixes for this release include: If you added a filter to a Mailout report, saved it and then removed the filters from the report the Save button would mysteriously disappear. Fixed. Copying a Mailout that was set to not track some links would then not allow you to track those links on the new Mailout. The Mailout Reports show the email software people are using to read the emails. We've added Apple Mail to the list of detected email client software (in addition to iOS). Outlook.com from Microsoft is replacing Hotmail. When launched we discovered that some images in emails would sometimes not display. We hoped Microsoft would fix Oulook.com but they were probably busy so, instead, we made changes in Engage so all images now appear. Instead of manually typing the date into an email you can use the merge field [Email Send Date]. Adding this merge field to a triggered email would show an ambiguity error. Fixed. Added percentages on the labels on email client graphs on Mailout Reports. You can also click to download the graphs in a variety of formats. Mailouts would sometimes say Waiting even when they were sending. Now the status reflects what is actually happening. When you create a Web Form, Survey or Event triggered email you can load content from email templates. We've added a permission check for this feature. You now need the Mailout Management, Automated Mailout Management or Email Template Management permission for this option to appear. Insight reports show activity over time – such as how email read rates and click rates are changing. In this release you can also add triggered emails to Insight reports. Date and Date/Time questions on surveys would save the data in the Engage database as text rather than a date/time. The inconsistent date formats created errors on custom reports. Fixed. You can now specify a minimum and maximum number of checkboxes that can be checked for checkbox questions/fields. This is useful, for example, when you have a list of checkbox options and want the user to select only three. The maximum number of tickets on an event no longer gets cleared when the event gets reactivated. An error on the Engage Event credit card payment page would disable the Submit button and stop the user entering their card details again if they had made a mistake the first time. Fixed. The Mailout authentication audit was sometimes a bit enthusiastic in reporting a problem and would sometimes show an authentication error when sending a Mailout. We've made it a bit less enthusiastic. Adding an Engage link to the inactive page of a web form would break the link and display an error when clicked. Lots of tweaks to the Insight reports. Ability to get the public report link, added chart defaults to make creating charts easier and fixed bugs with moving charts up and down.
