product Updates

You ask and we listen.

Every month the Ortto product team reviews customer feedback and feature requests, and every month we make incremental improvements saving our customers hundreds of hours through new features and productivity improvements. You can join the discussion here (login with your Ortto account credentials).

Our most recent feature updates are focussed on delivering more control for your data for syncronising with third party systems, exporting for analysis and streamlining workflows. Check out the highlights below, and visit our changelog for a complete list of updates, improvements, and bug fixes. 

• Zapier activity connector - Supports backfilling CDP activities via Zapier - eliminating the need to build custom API integrations in some circumstances.

• AWS data sync (Beta). A robust way to sync data between Ortto CDP and AWS-S3 enabling batch syncing with third party services. Learn more.

• Campaign Data Export - Export campaign metadata into CSV. Enables campaign data to be exported to CSV for analysis, enrichment or use in third party tools. 

• AI Decision and AI Enrichment templates - Keep checking back as we add more AI templates based on most commonly used scenarios. 

New and noteworthy knowledge base articles:

CDP features

• Send transactional push notifications via API - use the Ortto API to send SMS messages by using a dedicated transactional push notification API.

• Adding WooCommerce content to your emails.

• Syncing salesforce fields or field values.

Email best practices:

• Common deliverability issues and how to resolve them.

• Managing your domain reputation.

• How inconsistent email volume spikes affect domain reputation.

• How restarting email campaigns after a sending gap can impact deliverability.

• Dealing with accidental email sends.

• Ramping up your domain and IP warming guidelines.

• Implementing dark mode - design guidelines.

This month, we launched Ortto AI, our brand new AI-powered features, which included new capabilities for filters and journeys. We’ve also made several platform updates, bug fixes, and additions to our knowledge base.

See the highlights below, and visit our changelog for a complete list of updates, improvements, and bug fixes. 

• AI Filters — Provide a written prompt describing the contacts or organizations you are looking for, and the AI will create your filters for you, e.g. “Contacts in Europe”. Learn how to implement AI Filters

• AI Decision Shapes — Describe the kind of users you’re looking for or the actions they should be taking, and the shape will generate conditions for your desired result, e.g. “Is this new contact likely to convert in the next 30 days?” 

• Learn how to implement AI Decision Shapes

• AI Enrichment — Use your contacts’ data and activities to populate values for any text field via AI Enrichment. Enrich contacts, score leads, draft emails, messages, and more. Learn how to implement AI Enrichment

• Capture — Data from capture submissions like a user’s website or email address can now be validated, preventing fraudulent or malicious submissions

• API — You can now enter a sample JSON payload when building an email and preview how the email will look with dynamic data.

• Other — You can now build merge tags for whether a contact is or is not a member of an audience or email subscriber

New and noteworthy knowledge base articles: 

• AI filters - Learn how to use the new AI filter feature.

• AI enrichment - Learn how to use the new AI enrichment feature.

• AI decision shape - Learn how to use the new AI decision shape.

• Understanding how contacts are created - Learn how contacts are created and what source they’ve originated from.

• Managing the email suppression list via API - In this article, you’ll find the relevant API endpoints to manage your email suppression list via API.

• Benefits of custom tracking subdomain - This article explains the benefits of using a custom tracking subdomain.

• How to add a countdown timer to your email - Learn how to add a countdown timer to your emails.

• Adding Shopify content to your emails - Learn how to add Shopify content to your emails

This month’s wrap-up of product updates includes highly requested features like Email reply tracking and our WhatsApp integration, alongside some new journey shapes, improvements to templates, and API updates.

See the highlights below, and visit our changelog for a complete list of updates, improvements, and bug fixes. 

• Email reply tracking — You can now report on how often customers reply to your email campaigns and can also trigger Journeys to apply tags and follow-up actions based on replies. Learn how to get started with email reply tracking.

• WhatsApp integration [PUBLIC BETA] — You can now send WhatsApp messages via your Ortto instance through the use of the new WhatsApp campaign type and WhatsApp shape within journeys. This feature is available for all, in the final stages of our public Beta. Learn more

• Templates — You can now save journeys, playbooks, or emails that contain A/B tests as well as templates for emails built from HTML uploads

• Journeys — We have new shapes for subscribing & unsubscribing a contact from an audience, added the ability for the ‘add/remove tag’ shape to apply to the contact's organization, and added the ability to search & filter version history for easier navigation

• Talk — We have added a new activity, ‘conversation updated’, which will log new replies in a conversation in the past hour, as well as new keyboard shortcuts for basic text formatting

• API — Merging now supports up to 3 merge keys, and we’ve also added three new methods accessible via the API: Get emails on suppression list; Add emails to suppression list; and, Remove emails from suppression list

• Other — You can now add descriptions to custom fields & activities to share purpose and helpful information with other users in your instance.

New and noteworthy knowledge base articles: 

• How link clicks are tracked — Learn how email link clicks are tracked in Ortto and what factors can influence open tracking accuracy.

• How email opens are tracked — Learn how email opens are tracked in Ortto and what factors can influence open tracking accuracy.

• Email reply tracking using Google Workspaces — This article explains how to complete the confirmation process for setting up email reply tracking in Ortto when receiving replies through a Google Workspaces hosted email.

• WhatsApp Integration — Learn how to access our new WhatsApp Integration. Enhance your customer engagement with seamless messaging through one unified platform.

• Sending WhatsApp messages — This article explains how to send WhatsApp messages from journeys or as one-off campaigns.

• Understanding SMS consent — This article explains how consent must be given and maintained to comply with legal and best practice standards.

Today’s extended update will cover product and knowledge base updates from December, along with a video recap of the year’s biggest and most-loved updates from the year that was. 

Before we put a bow on the year, we wanted to take a moment to say a huge thank you to all of our customers who have shared feedback, beta-tested new features, and chosen Ortto to bring their marketing ideas to life. 

We shipped 138 updates this year and published over 100 new knowledge base articles. Each and every time we put something new into the world, we watched you make it your own with creative campaigns, clever operational flows, more personalized experiences for your customers, and feedback that made the product even better. 

Here’s to another year of growing together. 

December updates

• Email settings — We've added a new setting allowing you to specify days you don't want your journeys or playbooks to send messages to contacts. This means you can avoid sending emails to your on holidays, like Christmas Day. Visit settings > channels > email to set this up.

• Talk — If you have any customers with a preferred language setting saved which is one of your supported languages, they will receive all Talk notification emails in their preferred language. You can also go to the Talk messenger settings and turn on different translations for the Talk widget in the ‘Translations’ tab. 

• Salesforce — You can now clear the value for single-select fields or choose to overwrite or append the value of multi-select fields in update record actions. Plus, we’ve added rate limit options to action shapes and included a fallback reference ID for Salesforce mapping. 

• Shopify — If you have Shopify connected, you will now have a data source activity for ‘Processed Order’. 

• Capture widgets — We will now force a maximum length for mobile phone numbers following the limits for each country. Plus, capture widgets can now be closed by pressing the escape key.

Visit our changelog for a complete list of updates, improvements, and bug fixes. 

New and noteworthy knowledge base articles: 

• Failed Salesforce campaign actions — this article details Salesforce error messages you might encounter when using a campaign action shape. 

• Working with aggregate fields — an aggregate field displays a total based on data from specific activities. This article explains how to create and use them.

• How to send a webhook to Zapier — this article will guide you through the process of sending a webhook to Zapier. 

• How to perform mathematical operations in journeys — learn how to use liquid syntax in the update field shapes in your journeys to perform dynamic math operations.  

• Invalid email activity — this guide will show you how to find the details of an invalid email activity and locate the contacts who received it.

• Report on subscribers — discover the various methods to track subscriber data and important tips to consider along the way.

• Working with recipients — the recipients page lets you choose one audience, subscriber tag, or segment filter. This guide walks you through the different selection types available.

• How to trigger a journey via API — sometimes you may want to trigger a journey in Ortto when a specific action occurs in an external app. This article will guide you through the options available to do so.

• How to test your journey — learn how to test a journey to check emails, actions, and conditions are working as expected.