product Updates

This month, we made email campaigns easier than ever with several key updates; an easy-to-use dynamic content modal, the enablement of editable HTML in the asset manager, a sunset policy settings page, and the option to create a suppression list. 

There’s plenty more to explore — including updates to SMS sender IDs and multi-currency fields. Check out the list below, and head over to our roadmap to see what’s on the horizon.

• Condition builder for email — our new dynamic content builder allows you to build dynamic row conditions in a simple form, rather than writing liquid language. You can also save these dynamic rows for future use, making email personalization easier than ever. 

• HTML emails — we’ve expanded on our January update around editing HTML to include emails in your asset manager. This means you can build an HTML email in the asset manager and specify editable tags to streamline simple edits. 

• SMS sender IDs — you can now choose which sender ID or phone number an SMS is sent with at the campaign or journey shape level. This gives you full control over the ‘from’ address for individual SMS messages. 

• Multi-currency supported in reporting — you can now report on multi-currency fields in the base currency you’ve identified in general settings. 

• Sunset policy settings — a new sunset policy settings page allows you to create filter rules to automatically unsubscribe, resubscribe, or archive contacts. This will help keep your list clean to improve email deliverability.

• Email suppression list — you can now create a suppression list of email addresses. This means that even if you try to send an email to this address, it will not send, regardless of the status of any contacts with that email. This enables you to keep track of emails to not contact, without impacting your contact limit.

• Capture widgets — we now include browser and device information on all capture widget-related activities.

• Stripe integration — customers using Stripe can now use the ‘Charge’ and ‘Invoice’ activities as conversion activities for more accurate attribution reporting. 

Latest knowledge base updates:

• Create, use, and delete saved rows — learn how to use saved rows in any campaign type to reduce the time spent creating email content. 

• Custom domain troubleshooting — we’ve added a section to our custom domains page for troubleshooting. This includes guidance on how to resolve some of the more common roadblocks our customers face. 

• How to adjust settings for templates — how to update template settings including header menus, social icons, email reactions, and email compliance postal address.

• Sunset policy — this page explains our new sunset policy settings in detail to help you better manage your list.

This month we added a new journey setting, made improvements to talk, changed the way duplicate records are previewed, and more. We've also enhanced this monthly product update! Each month, we'll spotlight new or improved content from our knowledge base to help you better navigate our docs and get more out of Ortto. 

Check out the rest in the list below, and don’t forget to bookmark our Changelog to see all the updates as they happen.

• Journeys — We’ve added a setting to allow you to stop contacts from entering a journey after a certain time without turning the journey off. 

• Talk — To increase brand trust and deliverability, all outgoing emails for Talk will collect replies at the same email address. Plus, you can now choose whether Talk conversation summaries are included in email notifications. 

• Customer data — You can now control how primary records are selected on the duplicate records page to improve control when you are bulk merging records. Plus, when mapping phone number fields from a CSV or tracked forms, you can now choose whether or not the country code is automatically generated. 

• Chargebee — Transaction activities now support multi-currency transactions and convert back to the account’s default currency for easy reporting. 

• Pipedrive — We’ve added two new actions — add a lead and update organization field — to help you better manage your customer data. 

• Facebook — You can now add multiple Facebook advertising accounts within a single Facebook data source. 

Latest knowledge base updates:

• How campaign statistics are calculated — learn how the statistics for journeys, playbooks, emails, SMS, and notifications are calculated. 

• Understanding journey and playbook entry criteria — understand the difference in behavior between entry criteria with an “occurs” condition and without an “occurs” condition. We’ve also made some updates to the existing doc on how to re-enter people into a journey or playbook campaign. 

• Clearing and setting a person’s field values — this new developer doc shows you how to clear existing field values and set new values in the same API call.   

• Setting a custom field as a tracking code merge key — learn how to set a custom field as an additional merge key, such as a customer ID. 

• Setting the tracking code merge and find strategies – learn how to set the merge strategy and find strategy when you send a person’s data for user session association using the ap3.track method. 

We shipped several major and highly-requested updates this month, including the ability to use a custom domain for link tracking in SMS to improve deliverability and customer trust. Plus, we’ve updated attribution settings to allow you to choose whether you track campaign attribution against sends, opens, or clicks and have given you greater control over the timing of A/B tests. 

Check out the rest in the list below, and don’t forget to bookmark our Changelog to see all the updates as they happen. 

• SMS — we’ve enabled custom domains for link tracking with SMS to improve deliverability and increase brand trust. 

• Attribution — you can now control whether you want to track campaign attribution against sends, opens, or clicks for a better match of which campaigns contributed to the conversion. 

• Talk — the chat window now shows all recent conversations, instead of just opened conversations, and you can control whether customers replying to an old conversation will re-open that conversation or start a new one. 

• Salesforce integration — you can now select multiple statuses to match against in the Salesforce campaign member condition shape. This means you can check if a user has one of multiple matching statuses for a given campaign they are a member of. 

• A/B testing — we’ve added additional timing controls to A/B tests, including what happens while deciding the winner of a Journey A/B test and how long after meeting the Journey volume limit we decide on a winner.

• Multi-path conditions — you can now duplicate or rename a path in a multi-path condition shape for easier editing and maintenance. Plus, multi-path condition filters can now be linked to the journey entry activity or you can specify that the activity must have happened since the contact entered the journey. 

• Folders — we now support three levels instead of two for folders across the application.

• Knowledge base — you can now choose whether article feedback creates a new conversation or not, and host files directly in your articles. Plus, we’ve added a new ‘move to category’ button on article index and individual article pages to help streamline organization.

• Capture - we now allow you to tag all users who submit the capture widget for easier grouping and reporting.

In the spirit of the new year, we spent January focusing on shipping updates that will help with organization and efficiency. We have added the ability to organize your audiences into folders and allowed for greater customization on your preference center content, style, and translations. If you’re using Salesforce as a data source, you now have more granular control over which data to sync, and we’ve made some processing improvements behind the scenes, helping to speed up the sync connection. 

See more in the list below, and don’t forget to bookmark our Changelog to see all the updates as they happen. 

• Preference center — we’ve added new fields allowing you to edit the copy on your preference center and related permission pages, and the option to add styling and translations. 

• Audiences — you can now sort your audiences into folders. We’ve also improved the UX of the index page, allowing better control over which columns you view, their order, and the sorting of your audiences.

• Tracked forms — your tracked forms submission activity report will now show ‘Submission URL’ so you can see where form completions are happening. Plus, we added a new option to capture Tracked form submissions on pages containing a specified URL snippet.

• Salesforce integration – we’ve added options allowing you to sync Ortto activities as activities or tasks in Salesforce. Plus, all Salesforce objects beside Contacts are now optional to sync. These two new options will limit how much data you need to sync, helping to make the integration faster. 

• HTML emails – you can now use a tag to identify elements of your HTML upload that should be editable. When you go to use your custom HTML upload, the tagged elements will appear as editable fields. Once you edit, you will see a revised preview of the email to check before you schedule send.  

• Slack integration — You can now choose to send a Slack notification when Capture form submissions occur. This option will appear as a checkbox under the form fields when you create or edit a capture widget with a form.

Our team spent the last month of 2023 powering through some of the most requested feature updates on our hitlist. We’ve added a brand new journey shape, added more context to talk conversations, and made a platform-wide update to folders to help you get organzied for the year ahead. There’s plenty more — check out the list below, and see all our updates in the Changelog. 

• Journeys — A new journey shape, multi-path condition, has been added to allow you to create a condition shape with multiple exit paths. For example, if you are evaluating the ‘country’ field for a contact, you can have different paths for each country value. 

• Another Journey update allows you to send email notifications to anyone from your authenticated domain, even if they do not have an Ortto user account.

• Folders — Create subfolders to better organize campaign assets, reports, and capture widgets. 

• Talk — Your customers can now view all their past conversations so they can look back and self-serve answers, helping you to reduce repeat questions. If a customer starts a talk conversation on a knowledge base article, your agent will now see the article title, a brief summary, and a link. 

• Capture widgets — All capture widget submission activities will now include UTM parameters from the URL that was viewed, helping you to better understand where leads are coming from. Plus, you can now configure capture widget buttons to use mailto: links for sending emails. 

• Tracking script — You can now whitelist domains that your tracking code will work on to prevent tracking from fraudulent websites. 

• Email — A new set of attributes has been added to email campaign reports to show when someone subscribed to your list via a forwarded or ‘viewed online’ email. 

This month, we’ve added new options for knowledge base data sources, giving you more flexibility when importing articles and categories. We’ve also made several customer-requested improvements including negative filtering on page URLs for capture widgets, the ability to import and use shortcodes for SMS, and more.

• Knowledge base — There are now more ways for you to import and manage your knowledge base articles. Zendesk users can directly import articles and categories, all Intercom users can now import categories, and large Intercom accounts (10k+ companies) can import articles and categories. Plus, you can now export the HTML of your Knowledge Base articles directly via API. 

• Talk — New search capability! Find customers in talk conversations by matching custom field filters. 

• Capture widgets — We’ve added new ways to filter page URLs on capture widgets, including “does not contain” and “is not”. 

• Email assets — Download the HTML of any email asset via the API. Plus, you can now use the raw liquid code or fallback data when previewing email assets before you send.

• Reports — Graph-based reports can now directly map time/date fields using the value of that field.

• SMS — Twilio and Tall Bob customers can now import and use their short code numbers.

This month, we’ve added two new options for pop-ups to make form completions faster for existing contacts. Plus, we made several key improvements to Talk including a new search feature, revamped user interface, and the ability to report on how many times a saved reply was used.

• Capture widgets — Pre-fill information like a person’s name or email address from values in the URL parameters, or collect a person’s information while keeping the field hidden from them.  

• Talk — Talk conversations now have a unique ID for easier filtering and we’ve added a shortcut for accessing talk actions and saved replies via the menu. Plus, you can now soft close tickets so customers aren’t notified when a ticket is closed, report on how many times a Talk saved reply was used, and filter talk conversations by rating. 

• Salesforce integration — We’ve added a new Journey condition shape, ‘Campaign member status’. This allows you to change how you are communicating with someone or what fields you update based on their progress moving through a campaign.  Plus, you can now control if a person is updated or a new person is created when converting a lead to a contact. 

• Email previews — You can now share a link to a preview of a draft campaign with an external user for approval.

• CDP — To avoid duplications, you will now see a warning when attempting to manually add a contact with an email address that already exists in your contacts. 

• Languages — Portuguese and Ukrainian translations are now supported in the preference center.

This month, we launched our Squarespace integration, so you can increase conversions across every stage of the purchase funnel with your Squarespace data. Plus, we launched Knowledge Base and made improvements to our integrations with Salesforce and BigCommerce.

• Squarespace integration  —  Drive more orders and repeat customers with timely, personalized journeys triggered by your Squarespace data.

• Knowledge Base — Give your customers the support they need with our no-code article builder, which includes AI translations, AI search, custom branding, and more.

• Salesforce integration  —  It’s now easier to split the contact and lead selective sync filter. Plus, we’ve improved the naming format for synced campaign-related activities.

• BigCommerce integration  —  Sync custom fields from BigCommerce into Ortto.

• Journey builder — Now you can set a timeout on filter shapes, and apply throttling to SMS sends to distribute traffic to your website and support.

• Email campaign tracking — Track the performance of your email campaign links using the raw URL.

• Pre-filled form data — Simplify the form process for your customers with pre-filled data or hidden fields.

• Reporting — Apply a two-week filter to reports to match your company reporting cycle.

We’re excited to announce Knowledge Base, a no-code article builder for teams to publish and maintain multilingual support content. This much-requested feature joins our omnichannel engagement solution, Talk, making it easier than ever to self-serve faster answers to customer questions.

Knowledge Base includes:

• AI translations – write an article and have it translated automatically into other supported languages.

• AI search – type a question in natural language and get an answer based on content in your articles.

• Custom branding – use your fonts, logo and domain to make knowledge base your own.

• Multimedia – add gifs, images, and videos.

• Text formatting – add buttons, callouts, code blocks, bullet lists and more.

• Categories – structure content into categories for easier navigation and searching.

• Escalation – route users to an agent if their problems aren’t resolved and record feedback so articles can be improved.

• Version control – see a history of any changes made and revert back to past article versions.

Knowledge base is included with all Ortto plans and customers can import existing documentation via our integrations with popular support solutions.

In August, we introduced a new integration with Tall Bob plus made it possible to connect more Facebook accounts to manage multiple brands. Learn about these updates and more:

• Get more flexibility when sending SMS, particularly with AUS and NZ audiences, with our new Tall Bob integration.

• Connect multiple Facebook accounts in your Ortto instance to bring together multiple brands.

• Preview what our templates will look like with your branding applied.

• Increased control over batching your email campaign delivery across larger time frames to spread the resultant website and support team load.

• Talk updates:

  • A more responsive inbox

  • Expanding a message from within your inbox for easier, contextual reading

  • Edit previously sent messages to remove sensitive information