In today’s user interface world, we like to view content that pertains to our interest as quickly and easily as possible. Perhaps we are shopping on our phone, searching videos on our tablet, or developing wonderful marketing content to reach customers. There can be A LOT of content in SAS Customer Intelligence 360. And a lot of users, all accessing the same interface. There are features to help you quickly find and view the content you seek.   In addition to point and click filters to view what matters the most, you can also create and use savable filters to reuse and save you some time as well as lower your “noise” in the interface. This post will address how to select filter criteria and also how to set up and create savable, custom filters to reuse as often as you want. The custom filters are specifically for you – they are not visible by other users. So create as many as you want!   Applying Filters   The first step to using filters is to select the filter icon at the top of the screen, and make sure to select the Filters tab. Here is an example within Tasks:   Select any image to see a larger version. Mobile users: To view the images, select the "Full" version at the bottom of the page.   There are many selection criteria to use. Channel and Type filters enable you choose the type of tasks you want to view, such as Email or Mobile. Status is especially helpful if you want to view tasks that for example are “Active” to see tasks that are currently published and running. Or tasks that have a “Designing” status to view the tasks you are currently developing and have not yet published. The Modified By filter is a way to see only tasks that are saved by you (or others) – simply select the user ID(s) you want. The Date Published and Data Modified filters can be used to select tasks that fall within selected start and end dates.   Just these few filters can easily and quickly filter out all the “noise” or content that either does not apply to you or interest you at the moment. There can be dozens if not hundreds of tasks so all these filters can be very helpful.   Also notice that counts of each object are automatically provided. For example, in the picture above you can see there are 35 Email channel tasks and among those are 26 Bulk Email tasks.   Selecting the filter for Bulk Email in the Type section results with this change to the view:     The listed tasks are now only Bulk Email tasks.   Saving Custom Filters   You can select multiple filter criteria and then save that as a custom filter. Not only does that save you time from having to repeat the process, but the filter is easily accessible to use later on.   To configure and save a custom filter, complete your selection criteria and then select the new filter icon to save it. Here is an example of saving a filter to include a view of only Web tasks that also have Active status. Give the filter a name to easily represent its criteria:     Once saved, you can easily select that custom filter at any time to render the same view:     You may be wondering what happened to the filter navigation view on the left side? That is easy to hide in order to make your view a bit cleaner – simply click the filter icon and it closes the filter view:     Custom filters are available only from the page where they are created. For example, if you create a custom filter for tasks, that filter is not available for Segments or Messages.   Re-usable custom filters are supported for these items: activities, tasks, segments, data views, messages, creatives, events, and spots.   To toggle between multiple custom filters, simply select another filter within the saved filters list:     There are a few changes you can make to an existing custom filter. You can add more criteria to further refine your filter. However, you can not remove any criteria (just create a new custom filter if needed). Also, you can rename a filter and at any time you can delete a filter.   As a reminder, any custom filters you save are visible only to you - so create as many as you want!   For more information on applying filters and saving custom filters in SAS Customer Intelligence 360, please visit these sites below:   SAS Customer Intelligence 360 User's Guide SAS Customer Intelligence Learning Subscription   Course: SAS Customer Intelligence 360 Resources and Guides     Find more articles from SAS Global Enablement and Learning here. ... View more

Have you received a promotional email that for some reason did not render properly? Some content was missing? But you were still able to view the content of the email thanks to a “view on web” link that you selected to alternatively view the email content on a web browser? I’ve had to do this myself a few times. There is a feature available in SAS Customer Intelligence 360 that is very easy to set up and use to provide this alternative viewing. Some organizations have a policy to always provide this email feature as a backup for the occasion where their email recipients have an issue with rendering the email using whatever email application or device they are using at the time.   When setting up the content using an Email task, there is an Element Type aptly titled “View-on-Web Text” that can be used to enable this feature. This feature is available using the Layout Manager within the Content tab of the Email task.   View-on-Web Text   Drag a View-on-Web Text element onto the Layout Manager. Typically, these view-on-web links are provided in the very top of the email body itself or on the very bottom near other information such as an unsubscribe link. I’ve seen them both ways. The link may be more noticeable on top of the email for recipients if there is a major issue rendering the email content.   Select any image to see a larger version. Mobile users: To view the images, select the "Full" version at the bottom of the page.   Pictured is the default content of the element. You can use the View-on-Web Text Settings to customize. Here is the very convenient part of this setup: the link to the web-based view of this email is automatically provided! When an email is published, SAS Customer Intelligence 360 automatically creates and houses the web page copy of the email. By default, the system automatically keeps this web page up for 90 days and then it gets deleted (typically if it’s not read within 90 days, they’re probably not going to read it anyways). The link itself gets created by using a default merge tag generated by the system.   If you place a View-on-Web Text at the top of an email, make sure to add pre-header text so that the View-on-Web Text content does not appear next to the subject line in email previews.   You can change the font, font size, font color, background color, the text words, among other things using the View-on-Web text Settings (similar to the Text Element settings).     The default text is “To view this email in your web browser, click here.” You can change this as you wish. Some more common ones I’ve seen in emails lately:   “Having trouble viewing this email? Click here.” “View this email as a web page.” “View in browser”.   If you want to change the wording and apply the link to another word(s), simply click the linked word “here” and then select the Link button in the editor, and you can copy the merge tag as pictured here:     There’s a lot more features to customize and change the defaults. For example, you can use the Target tab to change the target on the link from the default New window (opens a new browser window) to a popup window. You can even change the color of the underline in the linked word(s) using the Advanced tab.   For more information on View-on-Web Text and how to set up and deliver emails using SAS Customer Intelligence 360, please visit these sites below: SAS Customer Intelligence 360 User Guide SAS Customer Intelligence Learning Subscription Course: Email Development and Delivery with SAS Customer Intelligence 360     Find more articles from SAS Global Enablement and Learning here. ... View more

  There is a common marketing test referred to as A/B testing, in which different messages or promotional content are tested and results compared to establish a winner. The winner is used for subsequent communications because it statistically was proven to resonate better with the audience or target segment of customers (based on conversion rates).   SAS Customer Intelligence 360 offers various ways to conduct A/B tests, such as with web and mobile channels. However, a recent new feature has been released to conduct a similar test with email subject lines for bulk email tasks. “Bulk” email tasks deliver an email at one time to a selected target audience.   Email subject lines can be very important. How many emails have captured your attention – or not - based on the subject line content? It’s typically the first item scanned when viewing an email. When I scan my email quarantine list, I only look at the subject lines and the sender email addresses. If a subject line does not resonate with a viewer, there is a chance the email will be ignored and deleted. Marketing organizations are keen on testing email subject lines for effectiveness.   Subject Line Configuration   To use this feature, there is a wonderful toggle button aptly titled “Subject line A/B test” in the email task Header tab. This is where the subject lines are set up. The button can be toggled at any time during the development and configuration of the email task prior to publishing the task (which delivers the emails). Here is an example of an email task Header tab where the button was enabled and 2 subject lines A and B were filled in:   Select any image to see a larger version. Mobile users: To view the images, select the "Full" version at the bottom of the page.   Note subject line B has some hard to comprehend code – those are merge tags, which allow the customers’ age to be inserted into the subject line (another topic for another blog). A conditional merge tag was set up so that anyone age 65 and higher will receive a subject line with their age number included in the text, and those under 65 will receive a different subject line text but without their specific age included.   Note the Distribution is by default set to 50% each – for a fair comparison for the test. Half the emails delivered include subject line A, and the other half include subject line B. The Duration can be selected among various numbers between 2 and 48 hours. This means, for example if 24 is chosen, the system will use the collected email performance data for only the first 24 hours after publishing the task for the test (it will continue to collect performance data, but data collected after 24 hours will not be used for the test). If enough data was captured it will determine a statistically proven winner based upon the selected Primary Metric and applied test parameters.   The Criteria for A/B Test section is where the type of conversion can be selected as the Primary Metric: “Open Rate” for opened emails, or “Click Rate” which means at least one link within the email needs to be clicked at least once.     You set the baseline conversion percentage rate, which should be the expected conversion rate based on the average open or click rate for all emails sent in the past 90 days (excluding bounced emails).   A/B tests use the default settings that are set in General Settings. These settings affect how winners are identified and the size of the recommended sample size. You can override the defaults and specify custom values for the task (these changes won’t impact other tasks).   As just alluded to, the recommended sample size is calculated based on the test settings and the applied Baseline conversion rate. Your target audience ideally should have a population at least equal to the recommended sample size.   As I mentioned, after the system reaches the set duration it will calculate a winning variant based on the applied test settings:     Winning Variant A can be used for any subsequent email campaigns or for a larger email campaign targeted at a much larger population. It also can be used to develop better subject lines for future emails.   More details on how to configure and set up this feature will be forthcoming soon in a revision to the course “Email Development and Delivery with SAS Customer Intelligence 360”, accessed via the SAS Customer Intelligence Learning Subscription.   Also, SAS R&D is planning to develop additional email A/B testing capabilities with regard to the email body content.   For more information on how to set up and deliver emails using SAS Customer Intelligence 360, please visit these sites below: SAS Customer Intelligence 360 User Guide SAS Customer Intelligence Learning Subscription ... View more

SAS Education is pleased to announce a reorganization of the SAS Customer Intelligence Learning Subscription.  The SAS Customer Intelligence 360 courses have been reorganized and in many cases their content has been divided among smaller, more modular and topic driven courses.   Expected benefits: Improved organization and more modular set of courses Easier to find topics you need training on The new course SAS Customer Intelligence 360 Resources and Guides has a new subscription guide video.   The previous learning subscription has been replaced with the new one.  Existing subscribers have been migrated and given access to the new one.   I find the easiest way to access the learning subscription is under “Learn” (on SAS.com) select “Course Catalog” (or browse to learn.sas.com), then side filter select “Learning Types = Learning Path”,  and find “SAS Customer Intelligence​ Learning Subscription” among the choices.   To access the courses, make sure to be logged into your SAS profile (after you are subscribed). ... View more

  Your online “behavior” can dictate what gets displayed to you on a website – in real time. Some call this personalized contextualization. The items you click on in a website can be used to deliver marketing content that is relevant to your interests. The purpose of this post is to describe how SAS Customer Intelligence 360 can deliver this personalized content.   SAS Customer Intelligence 360 is a suite of digital marketing functionalities.  Amongst those is the capability to deliver creative content to a website.  Many websites (especially retail websites) have boxes or windows with images that may include promotions, new information, items on sale, etc.  We refer to those boxes or windows as “spots”.   Spots exist on websites and mobile apps.   When I first developed training for this functionality, I was happy to use as creative content one of my favorite things – golf.  I’ll run us through a scenario where a visitor (that’s what we call customers or prospects who visit a website) will browse a hotel resort’s web home page and see inviting pictures of resort views and activities.  These images - with imbedded links behind them - can be delivered by SAS Customer Intelligence 360.  Then, the visitor (someone like me) immediately notices another main tab titled “Golf”.  The visitor clicks on the Golf tab, scrolls and views the info, and then returns to the home page.  Voila – one of the “spots” changed and now displays a promotion for a golf package – all delivered by SAS Customer Intelligence 360.  Let’s walk through this process to understand how to set this up.   Spots and Web Tasks   The main HOME page – notice the GOLF tab on top and the lower left spot that displays a poolside view:   Select any image to see a larger version. Mobile users: To view the images, select the "Full" version at the bottom of the page.   All these images displayed in the spots are delivered by SAS Customer Intelligence 360.  These spots contain “default” content images which we refer to as “creatives”.  These spots have imbedded links for visitors to view more information. These are set up by using “Spots” on the left side menu within SAS Customer Intelligence 360.   Next, the visitor clicks on the Golf tab which displays this page:     Using SAS Customer Intelligence 360, a Page View event was created to capture this online customer behavior of viewing this page.  That visitor’s “event” is captured instantly and stored by the system, and that event can be used to “trigger” any number of SAS Customer Intelligence 360 functions.  In this example, we want to change the spot on the home page to display a golf promotion. We know this topic is relevant to the visitor because they visited the Golf page.   Next, the visitor returns to the home page and voila – notice the bottom left spot content has changed:     A free golf lesson is included with an offered golf package.  The visitor can click on that spot to view more details and sign up for this golf package.  Or, they could do something like fill out an interest form, and as a result an email could be delivered to provide more information (delivered by SAS Customer Intelligence 360).   By the way, you can also present multiple creatives in a random fashion, so this visitor went back to the home page again and now sees this:     Now the visitor has seen two different golf package offers – with different images.   That new creative content was delivered by a Web Task in SAS Customer Intelligence 360.  The task is published and waiting to display the new golf package content, once the task’s trigger event is fired off by a visitor clicking on the Golf page. If a visitor never selects the Golf page, then these specific creatives will not be displayed on the home page.  Rather, either the default content will remain, or other Web Tasks can display content based on different click behaviors – such as interest in accommodations or dining.   So when you are browsing a website, the information you view is not necessarily static – i.e. everyone does not see the same content – but rather, with the help of solutions like SAS Customer Intelligence 360, the web content is tailored to you and your interests. Welcome to the age of personalized digital marketing.   For more information on how to set up Spots and Web Tasks, please visit these sites below:   SAS Customer Intelligence 360 User's Guide SAS Customer Intelligence Learning Subscription   Courses: SAS Customer Intelligence 360 Fundamentals Using SAS Customer Intelligence 360 Web, Mobile Spot, and Advertising Tasks     Find more articles from SAS Global Enablement and Learning here. ... View more

  The purpose of this post is to describe the Email Client Preview feature and how to run tests before emails are delivered.   SAS Customer Intelligence 360 is a suite of digital marketing functionalities. Amongst those is the capability to develop email content and deliver the email messages.   Most likely you receive emails from numerous senders that could be related to personal accounts and typical retailers that you make purchases from. You are probably receiving an extra amount of emails these days with it being the holiday season for many parts of the world. SAS Customer Intelligence 360 can be used to send emails that are personalized and ideally contain content that is relevant and timely to the viewer.   There are three main features to test emails before they are delivered:   Responsive Previews: test how an email would render on multiple screen widths and send test emails to entered email addresses Email Client Preview: see how an email is displayed on multiple devices, browsers, email clients, and platforms Spam Test: test if the email is flagged as spam   The latter 2 are “paid services” which means there is a cost associated with these tests. This post will discuss the Email Client Preview feature and how to use it.   Email Client Preview   These tests can be run by using the Review tab within an Email task. Note that the task must be in the Designing status and not part of an activity. Select Email Client Preview and then Run Preview and it will begin the process of testing the email against many platforms and email clients. It generates previews for each one – give it some time to complete this process. Not all of the preview windows will finish at the same time.   Once a preview test has completed running, the Tile view provides an easy way to scan how the email renders for different clients and platforms. You can select an item to take a closer look and inspect how the email displays. There are many platforms and clients so it is a best practice to ensure proper display.   Here is an example of the initial Tile view where you can see many test results:   Select any image to see a larger version. Mobile users: To view the images, select the "Full" version at the bottom of the page.   You can select any one to view in more detail, such as for the iPhone 13 Pro Max on the iOS 15 platform:     A new improvement recently added is the ability to toggle to the Bulleted list view to see a list of all the platform and client tests. Green checks for each one indicate the test is completed. Simply select any among the list to see its preview.     You can also apply a search to view the results for a platform, client, or an application such as a browser.   If any of the results do not display as expected, you may need to modify the content and layout of the email.   If you would like to learn more about email tasks please visit these sites below:   SAS Customer Intelligence 360 User Guide SAS Customer Intelligence 360 Learning Subscription     Find more articles from SAS Global Enablement and Learning here. ... View more

  The purpose of this blog is to describe the two main types of mobile app messages, and how they are different.   SAS Customer Intelligence 360 is a suite of digital marketing products. Within that suite, SAS 360 Engage Digital is the product that can deliver mobile app messages to mobile app users.   You may receive mobile app messages from mobile apps related to various topics like weather, home security, airlines, retail store, and so on. For example, each time I set my house alarm on or off, I receive an app message delivered to my phone because I use a mobile app to manage and monitor my home security. But did you know there are two main types of mobile app messages, and they have very different purposes and operate quite differently?   The two main types are referred to as In-App Messages and Push Notifications. Mobile app messages are delivered to a mobile app that has been installed and configured on a mobile device such as a phone or tablet.   In-App Messages   In-App messages are only received when users are actively using the app on their device. Thus, they are called “In-App” messages. If a user is not using the mobile app, they will not receive in-app messages.   To set up and configure delivery of In-App messages, a SAS 360 Engage Digital task type named “In-App Message” must be set up and executed or “published” to start the delivery.   These type of tasks can be set up only as “triggered” tasks, meaning the task has been set up to use a specific app-only event that needs to be done by a user that will trigger the mobile in-app message delivery. For example, it could be a behavior as simple as viewing a specific item on the mobile app or adding an item to a cart on the mobile app.   Select any image to see a larger version. Mobile users: To view the images, select the "Full" version at the bottom of the page.   It is important to note that we cannot use any external events to trigger an In-App message in 360 Engage Digital. Reason being simple – we would not know if the user is actively using the mobile app when the trigger event occurs.   Push Notifications   Push Notifications are quite different. In fact, they are messages that are delivered to mobile app users that specifically are not actively using the app.   They are designed to inform, attract, remind, or lure a user to use the app. They are sent to promote more interaction with the app and therefore more interaction with the organization that is deploying the mobile app and using SAS Customer Intelligence 360.   For example, if you installed and use an app to order food carry-out or delivery, but have not used the app in a while, the food service company could send you a push notification informing you of a special promotion of a new menu item.   This message type is designed to “push” a user back into using the app. To set up and configure this type of delivery, a SAS 360 Engage Digital task type named “Push Notification” must be set up and executed or “published” to start the delivery.   A Push Notification task can be configured either as a “bulk” or a “triggered” delivery task. Bulk refers to a (typically large) amount of messages all sent at the same time to multiple app users.     The event used to trigger a push notification task could be any event external to the mobile app, however not an event that occurs in the app itself. Again, important to note here is that a push notification is not delivered to a device when the app is in focus or being used. The push notification will be delivered only when the mobile app is minimized and running in the background.   To set up and execute these mobile tasks, SAS Customer Intelligence 360 needs to be connected and configured to work with a mobile app.   If you would like to learn more about mobile app tasks please visit the Customer Intelligence 360 User Guide.  ... View more

A new e-learning course for SAS 360 Engage: Email has been released.  It is available as part of the new SAS Customer Intelligence 360 learning subscription. ... View more

There is a new learning subscription available that provides access to all SAS Customer Intelligence 360 e-learning courses for 12 months.   Individual e-learning courses for SAS Customer Intelligence 360 will no longer be offered. The subscription includes e-learning for SAS Intelligent Decisioning for customers that use it for marketing purposes. SAS is currently offering a 30-day free trial period available to start any time before May 31. For details including a list of available courses, see the website: https://www.sas.com/en_us/training/programs/customer-intelligence-360-learning-subscription.html ... View more