What's New in the 18.02 Release of CI360

[CItechwriter]

Here's what's new in the 18.02 release of SAS Customer Intelligence 360:

SAS 360 Engage New Features and Enhancements

Assets

Enable assets for external sharing

You can select assets and make them available for external sharing. These assets can be accessed by external users through a publicly available URL. After assets are available for external sharing, you can disable external sharing at any time and prevent external users from accessing assets.

Enable or disable a single asset for external sharing on the Orchestration tab or by selecting the option in the asset tile view. Enable or disable multiple assets for external sharing by selecting multiple assets, and then selecting the Enable/Disable External Sharing option from the menu in the upper right of the asset tile view page.

Creatives

Personalize creatives with merge tags

Add personalized information to the HTML content that tasks deliver by inserting merge tags and variables into an HTML creative. In the creative HTML editor, you can add merge tags for known attributes such as a customer’s first name, age, or gender. For example, you can use a merge tag to personalize a creative so that it displays a user’s first name in a message on your website. For example: “Hi Mike, get 10% off your next purchase.”

If the personalized information that you want to be displayed depends on user behavior, you can use a personalization variable instead of a merge tag. Personalization variables display information retrieved from event attributes. For example, to target users who have viewed a product on your website, you can use attributes from a product view event to personalize a message that visitors see on your website. The attribute from the product view event could be used to display a customized message for a product category that matches the category of a product that the customer has already viewed. If the customer has been viewing products related to cooking, the message that is displayed might look like this: “Get 10% off all cooking products.”

You can also use merge tags and personalization variables in the same creative. By inserting a merge tag to retrieve customer names and a personalization variable to retrieve product view information (such as a product category), you can display a personalized message on your website. For example, a task can deliver a message like this: “Hi Mike, you can get 10% off all cooking products.”

Data Hub

Ensure consistent processing with import validation

When you import customer data, there is more validation to ensure consistent processing of customer identities. Validation ensures that the source file does not contain rows with duplicate identity data and does not have null values assigned to a key column. Validation messages and errors are displayed on the Job Information page, which you can access from the Data Sources settings page.

Design Center

Pause tasks

You can now pause tasks to temporarily stop the delivery of creative content. The system continues to collect data, such as conversions, which is based on creative content that is delivered before the task was paused. You can resume the task to restart content delivery or you can end the task.

While the task is paused, you can make the same changes as you can for an active task. For example, if an active web task is delivering the wrong creative content, you can pause the task, change the creative, and then republish the task to resume content delivery with the modified creative.

Use spot attributes in targeting

Now you can use spot attributes as part of task targeting criteria, including rule-based targeting. For example, your website can have one landing page that displays different content for different campaigns. The task uses rule-based targeting to decide which creative to display based on where the website visitor originated.

To set up this example, the targeting on each creative would depend on the value of the spot attribute. Using a spot attribute from a query string parameter called ‘CampaignID’, the user could assign which creative the visitor sees based on the campaign that brought the visitor to the landing page.

Spot Attributes

To use spot attributes in targeting, first select a spot for the task, and then find the attributes in the Spot Attributes folder.

Spot Attributes Folder

Specify time zone for task schedules

When you define a schedule for tasks, you can specify a time zone for the start and end times. For example, you might want to schedule a web task to run on May 1, 2018, from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. When you set a schedule, you can select from a list of available time zones. The default time zone is based on the configured default time zone that is set up as part of the onboarding process.

Email

Select and insert static images in your email from Assets

In Assets, you can now select specific images and enable sharing with an external audience, such as your customers. Assets that are enabled for external sharing are made available for inserting into email content. As an email marketer, when you insert static images in your email, you can now browse and select images that are marked for external sharing in the Assets repository in SAS Customer Intelligence 360. The link for the image that is inserted in the email content refers to the location of the published image on the external content delivery server.

Select Image from Assets

Plan

Import financial accounts, cost centers, and vendors

You can import data for financial accounts, cost centers, and vendors. First, download a Microsoft Excel template that specifies what information is needed and the expected format of the data. In the template, enter the information that you want to import. In Planning Settings, click Import Excel to upload your data.

If there are problems, or if you want to see the status of the imported data, click View Job Information.

Import Data

 

Reports

Use Insights link to see reports

From the navigation bar, click Insights to list SAS 360 Discover reports, summarized reports, or reports that do not have a corresponding SAS Customer Intelligence 360 object. For example, to see a report about a specific email campaign, navigate to the specific email task. To compare email tasks, click Insights on the navigation bar, open the Email Summary report, and select the campaigns that you want to compare.

Insights

 

Mobile

Improve In-App Message task with Message Dismiss metric

To improve the process of defining and publishing an In-App Message task, SAS Customer Intelligence 360 includes the Message Dismiss event as a default secondary metric. This metric saves time and ensures that all responses from mobile app users are tracked on the Insights tab.

Message Dismiss Metric