What’s New at Bluecore: AI-Driven Orchestration, Stronger Integrations, and Enhanced Platform Speed
The future of retail belongs to the company that truly knows its customers.
As we head into a new year, customer focus continues to be a top priority for retail marketing teams. The retail landscape grows more competitive by the day and customer acquisition costs continue to soar. To grow a sustainable and profitable business, retailers are shifting to customer movement — a marketing philosophy and framework centered on customers rather than channels to drive profitable growth.
Our mission is to equip retail marketers to unlock customer movement, building deeper and more profitable relationships with their customers. To enable this, we’re continuing to develop technology to help you identify behaviors, analyze customers, and deliver real-time, signal-based messaging.
The ultimate goal is to reach new shoppers and existing customers at the exact moment they’re ready to buy. And this customer-first approach is paying dividends. Retailers who adopt a customer movement strategy can grow their three-year retention rates to 59% — while their competitors only retain 22%.
Our product team has been hard at work integrating enhanced ways to make customer retention and retail growth easier. To date in 2024, we’ve added key enhancements to the Bluecore platform, including Transparent Identification, customer analytics, the new Experimentation Hub for testing, and more.
Here are some of the features we’re investing in for the rest of the year and beyond.
Observability and reliability
A reliable, transparent platform is essential for retail marketing success. We’re enhancing performance, monitoring, and compliance to ensure you deliver seamless customer experiences.
Moving at the speed of retail with a reliable platform
Retail moves fast, so your retail marketing platform needs to move faster.
To keep pace, we are actively investing in platform performance and responsiveness so you can move at the speed of retail. This means upgrading load time and latency monitoring, progressive loading, caching, and improving throughput.
These enhancements work to ensure your campaigns and customer experiences are delivered without interruptions or delays.
Enhanced monitoring and alerting
We’re also investing in additional monitoring and alerting to make it easier to spot campaign issues before they impact your marketing programs.
Coming soon, we’ll be introducing comprehensive health checks for both campaigns and infrastructure, expanding pre-send halt alerts to include product blocks, and implementing delayed campaign alerts. Additionally, we’re improving campaign send completion alerts to notify you after deployment and when less than 50% of your audience has been reached.
We will also be updating the MTBM (minimum time between messages) rules to move from one global rule for all campaigns to a flexible and configurable setting.
Bot click filters
Bot clicks are a reality in our world. There’s no avoiding them.
That’s why we are in the process of identifying and removing AI agent and non-human clicks for our entire customer base to provide you with engagement analytics you can trust and leverage for analysis.
This is going to be an ongoing process, as the definitions of bot clicks may change over time, so we will be reviewing and revising filters as needed every 6 months.
GDPR “Right to Be Forgotten”
Lastly, we’ve made GDPR compliance easier by adding a self-service “Right to Be Forgotten” request for all users. This new feature gives individuals more control over their personal information by allowing them to request that their data be deleted if it’s no longer needed or it’s being misused.
Orchestration
Our vision is for Bluecore to become an AI-driven retail orchestration solution that optimizes for repeat purchases. To turn this vision into reality, we’re adding channel-affinity intelligence, more automated workflows, and stronger experimentation features.
- Transactional product recommendations: Capitalize on high engagement in transactional emails to drive shoppers closer to their next purchase. In early testing, this feature has driven a 10% increase in click-through rates and a 5% rise in incremental revenue.
- Date-based triggers: Engage loyal customers and reactivate lapsed buyers with trigger-based campaigns to drive second purchase. Recognize birthdays and anniversaries, or use date-based triggers to run winback, reactivation, and replenishment campaigns.
SMS
- SMS in Audience Builder: Combine email and SMS behavioral activities to create cross-channel audience segments and follow-ups. For example, set up a trigger to send an SMS if an email wasn’t clicked.
- Core platform capabilities: Take advantage of integrated SMS data and enhanced SMS reporting in Customer 360. Enjoy the same depth and capabilities as existing email analytics.
- Contact cards: Make your SMS messages stand out by sending branded contact cards that save your SMS shortcode as a recognizable contact in customers’ phones, reducing the risk of being flagged as spam.
Audience
- Customer movement in Audience Builder: Turn the results of your Customer Movement Assessment into audience filters. With direct integration, you’ll be able to identify high-opportunity customer segments, such as loyal repeat purchasers or at-risk churners, and seamlessly activate these segments within your campaigns.
- Geolocation targeting: Bridge the online and offline shopper experience by surfacing relevant store details in emails. Automatically designate a closest or preferred store, then include preferred store location and maps in email communications.
Workflows
- AI-driven Experience Designer: Use Experience Designer to build seamless customer journeys across email, SMS, and mobile, guided by AI to engage customers at every critical touchpoint.
- Persistent coupon: Ensure a smooth customer experience by carrying valid coupon codes across all touchpoints. Automatically track coupon eligibility and redemption status across channels, and optimize offers based on customer behavior, like presenting alternative discounts if a coupon has already been redeemed.
- Audience AND/OR: Create more robust audiences with new audience segment operators on customer attributes by using the new “OR” functionality in Audience Builder.
Analytics and experimentation
- Audience-level reporting: Break down campaign performance by specific audience segments to understand how each group is engaging with your messaging. Track metrics for predefined segments like new, reactivated, or loyal customers within a single campaign.
- Experimentation Hub: Develop and scale test-and-learn strategies with automated results reporting in one centralized location. Use Experimentation Hub to quickly identify successful strategies and scale winning tests. Experimentation Hub is now available for all Bluecore users.
APIs and integrations
Bluecore is designed to work seamlessly with your marketing tech stack. We’re making it easier than ever to integrate, access, and utilize data across your ecommerce, email, social, and cloud systems.
Shopify one-click integration
Connecting Bluecore with your Shopify store is now easier than ever.
With our new one-click integration, you can skip complex setups and access real-time data quickly, allowing you to launch personalized, timely campaigns. This plug-and-play experience means seamless activation and faster access to valuable purchase data and product insights.
Enhanced SFMC adapter
Streamline your email sends and analytics with our improved Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) adapter.
We’ve increased throughput for large campaigns and added closed-loop reporting to track deliverability, soft bounces, and hard bounces. Native click tracking now enables you to view campaign performance directly in both Bluecore and SFMC. Choose between API-based connections for simplicity or file-based connections for faster delivery.
Social media audience syncs
We are also increasing our integrations with native API connection to popular ad platforms and social media channels. Today, you can use Bluecore Advertise to create meaningful 1:1 connections across paid media channels such as Google, Criteo, Facebook, and TikTok. And soon, we’ll be adding full integration with Pinterest and Snapchat.
API and cloud system connections
Lastly, we’re working to make it easier to access and utilize Bluecore’s data with new API enhancements and direct cloud-to-cloud integrations. Whether you need product, customer, or eligibility data, you can quickly read, write, or export insights.
Bringing it all together
With these exciting enhancements, Bluecore continues to expand the capabilities of retail marketing, making it easier for you to build customer-first experiences, increase engagement, and drive growth. Stay tuned as we roll out these updates and, as always, reach out to your Customer Success Manager with any questions.
If you’d like to watch the whole webinar, you can access the recording here.