product Updates
New releases, improvements, & fixes
September 25, 2024
September product updates
We've reached the end of another quarter after a big month of updates. In September, we shipped enhanced controls on capture widgets, added a new settings option for notifications, gave you more control over how your Salesforce and HubSpot data is integrated, and more.
Check out the full list below, and visit our changelog for a complete list of updates, improvements, and bug fixes.
Capture — you can now target capture widgets to both known people who meet specific filters and anonymous users. For example, you could target known users who are still on a free trial and anonymous users on your website.
Notifications — we’ve added a new settings page called ‘Notifications’ where you can specify which users or non-user email addresses should receive notifications, and/or provide a Slack channel for notifications. This applies to billing notifications, as well as general account notifications like data sources being disconnected.
Journeys — you can now choose whether to keep trying to display widgets or stop attempting to show them when a contact exits a journey.
Salesforce — reduce unnecessary time and data load by selecting to backfill specific objects rather than the whole list.
SMS — the brand prefix input in the settings page is now optional, making it simpler for multi-brand accounts to run SMS marketing campaigns.
Currencies — we’ve extended the list of supported currencies in settings.
API endpoints — there are two new API endpoints available. One to update a custom field and another to get contact activities.
HubSpot — you can now choose to auto-archive contacts in Ortto when deleted in HubSpot and control how HubSpot finds matches when merging contacts.
Knowledge base article updates:
Understanding email unsubscribes — there are several ways someone can be unsubscribed from your communications. This guide explains them and shows you how to resubscribe contacts who were incorrectly unsubscribed.
Updating custom fields via the API — the update Ortto endpoint of the custom-field entity is used to update single-select and multi-select field options and to start or stop tracking field changes in the CDP. This article explains how it works.
What happens when delay and filter shapes are modified — learn how delay and filter shapes behave when they are modified and there are still contacts waiting at the shape.
Send messages to Slack — discover how to utilize your Ortto data to send messages to private or public Slack channels via the journey builder.
Salesforce merge strategy — this new page consolidates information on the Salesforce merge strategy options available in Ortto.
August 28, 2024
August update
This month, we improved the styling in your Talk inbox, gave you more control over unique identifiers, updated some of our report settings, added a share option to emails, and more.
Check out the highlights below, and visit our changelog for a complete list of updates, improvements, and bug fixes.
Talk— we’ve updated the Talk inbox to give you a clearer view of which channel the conversation is happening in (email or chat). Plus, we updated the compose bar for email conversations and have allowed for HTML content in the Talk compose API.
Unique identifiers — you can now specify a secondary custom field as a unique identifier. When you make this selection, the system will check a single incoming field against two different field options in Ortto. For example, if your contacts have a primary and secondary email address, the system checks against both fields. If either field is a match, we will merge the contact.
Reports — pie charts now have ‘include’ and ‘exclude’ fields for ‘group by’ to give you more control over the fields you report on. We have also added a precision control when grouping a report by a date field or attribute to let you choose how you group. For example, you could choose to group by days instead of minutes.
Email — you can now create and share a public link to view sent and scheduled emails in a browser. This can be helpful if you want to create a limited preview of recent newsletters or give current subscribers another way to share your emails.
Knowledge base — we’ve added an option allowing you to change the color of the header in your knowledge base.
Segment integration— you can now control the date format used on fields for ‘identify’ and ‘track’ activities.
Shopify integration — we added an ‘updated order’ activity for Shopify users.
Knowledge base article updates:
Data discrepancy between Ortto and Google Analytics — learn about the differences between conversion and session data tracking methods in Ortto and Google Analytics.
Best practices for email design — this new guide outlines the best practices for email design, covering things like optimal email width, image-to-text ratio, and image formats.
Attaching files to a capture button for download — we’ve added a section to our configuring a capture widget article that details how to attach a downloadable file to a button.
Creating and understanding funnel reports — learn how to build funnel reports with this in-depth explainer covering activity order, percentage calculation, and conversion windows.
Push non-delivery and complaints — this guide to invalid push statuses will help you understand the most common reasons for non-delivery.
How do I send data from Ortto to Salesforce — this article centralizes information on syncing data from Ortto to Salesforce to help you ensure your Ortto data is accurately reflected in Salesforce.
Shopify activities and attributes — this article has been updated to include all of our Shopify activities including the new ‘updated order’ activity.
How overall reaction sentiment is calculated — the email reactions article now includes a section explaining how sentiment is calculated in campaign reports.
July 25, 2024
July update
We’ve got a major update for you this month — a fresh new sidebar! This change brings a more logical grouping to features and settings, helping you to navigate the app more intuitively. In addition, we’ve shipped an update to our funnel reports, added new ways to filter your audience, and more.
Check out the full list below, and visit our changelog for a complete list of updates, improvements, and bug fixes.
Sidebar — our new sidebar design is now live. Watch the video below to learn more, or click here for an A-Z quick reference guide.
Funnel reports — you can now click any of the metrics on a funnel report to view the matching cohort of subscribers and add a tag to all users or export the list.
Email suppression list — we’ve added a new API field that lets you choose to skip creating a new contact if their email address already exists in the suppression list.
Capture — you can now create capture widgets with direct media downloads. For example, you can upload an eBook PDF which can be downloaded directly by a lead who completes the form on a capture widget.
Salesforce — use a merge tag to select which campaign to update in Salesforce ‘Change campaign status’ action. Plus, you can now search for field names when searching in the Salesforce mapping page.
Filters — we have two new filter options: build a filter with multiple values by typing the values separated by commas (e.g. First name is Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa) and the ability to filter for people who have started, are in, or have left a campaign.
Knowledge base article updates:
SMS non-delivery and complaints — this new article shares common invalid SMS statuses and the reason behind them.
Behavior of delay shapes when journeys are turned off and on — Learn how delay shapes work when you turn a journey off and then back on.
Using capture widgets in journeys — this new collection of articles explains how to use a capture widget in your journey.
SMS custom domains — we've expanded on our article about SMS custom domains with a complete section detailing how to access, manage, modify, and delete SMS custom domains.
June 27, 2024
June update
This month, we shipped an update to help you filter archived contacts, gave you more flexibility with Salesforce objects, and added a new SMS integration. All this is in addition to the major capture and NPS improvements we announced earlier in June.
Check it out below, and visit our changelog for a complete list of updates, improvements, and bug fixes.
CDP — you can now filter the archived contacts list against field data. This means you can search archived contacts by tag, date archived, and more, then perform bulk operations like ‘restore all’ or ‘delete all.'
Salesforce — we’ve given you more flexibility with Salesforce objects, allowing you to associate objects via parent objects and link to organizations.
Data sources — you can now upload a CSV with only org fields and no contact fields for updating only the organizations in your account.
SMS – connect with your Burst SMS account to send SMS messages to your subscribers in journeys and campaigns, and report on results.
Capture — prioritize your widgets in settings and add attribution tracking. Plus, new NPS templates are available in all accounts.
Journeys — new ‘widget’ shape allows you to add capture widgets to a journey.
Reports — report on NPS results using the new aggregate option, 'trend score,' to track trends over time.
Knowledge base articles and updates:
File manager — this new article explains how to use the file manager and details file or image size limits.
Home suggestions — learn about the home suggestions feature and getting started checklist.
SMS numbers — this article has been updated with information about using a third-party account across multiple Ortto accounts, and how to use the new Burst SMS integration.
Email suppression list — we’ve updated this article to explain when contacts do or do not count towards your contact limit.
June 12, 2024
Capture and NPS updates
Big news! We’ve just released updates and improvements, including highly-requested features like a widget shape in journeys, widget prioritization, and new NPS widgets and reports.
See the full list of new releases below.
Widget shape in journey builder — a new ‘Widget’ shape to the journey builder, allowing you to add existing or new widgets to journeys.
Widget prioritization — you can now choose to show only one widget to a customer at a time, and control which widget that is. Widgets in journeys will always be prioritized above your always-on capture widgets. For more information, visit our knowledge base.
Attribution tracking on widgets — attribution tracking is now available on all capture widgets. Head to your attribution settings to choose whether shown or engaged (e.g. button clicks, video views, or form submissions) count as a 'touch' in your attribution model. This will show as ‘Converted’ in your widget report summary.
New NPS widget templates — three new NPS popup templates are now available to all customers. Choose between a pop-up, notification, banner and the existing survey template.
‘Submitted NPS’ activity — this new activity type includes information on the widget name, channel, response, and result, making it easier for you to track the NPS responses from your customers.
NPS reports — we have added new reporting options specifically for NPS activities to help you track results over time.
Related knowledge base updates:
Widget shape — this new section within Journeys details how to use the new widget shape.
Create a capture widget — learn how to create a capture widget in the asset manager.
Prioritizing widgets — discover how to use the new prioritization setting for widgets.
Attribution settings — this article explains how to set attribution up for widgets.
Creating a NPS widget — learn how to create a NPS widget from scratch.
May 29, 2024
May update
This month, we added office hours to Talk to help you set customer expectations and give your team a break when they need it. We’ve also introduced features and updates to streamline work, like a shape counter in journeys, a logs tab on tracked form widgets, and the ability to duplicate audiences.
Check out the list below for more highlights, and visit our changelog for a complete list of updates, improvements, and bug fixes.
Talk — Define office hours for your teams in Talk to easily control online status and better manage customer expectations. Plus, agents will now be alerted when an email to a customer bounces.
Audiences — You can now duplicate an audience, making it easy to recreate audiences that are slightly different from one another.
Journeys — A new shape counter in the journey builder helps you identify when you are approaching the 100-shapes limit.
Tracked forms — A logs tab has been added to tracked form capture widgets to help you track failed submissions.
CDP — We now show an alert on a contact’s profile if their email is on your email suppression list.
Dynamic content — We’ve added an option allowing you to edit an existing dynamic condition row filter directly in the modal builder.
Salesforce — You can now add a merge tag to select which campaign to use in the 'Campaign member status' condition shape and the 'Change campaign status' action shape.
Email — We’ve added two new custom tags that you can add to the end of URLs in your email content: #orttonochange to prevent UTM parameters and a hashed email address being appended to a URL, and #orttonotrack to prevent tracking and appending parameters, and a hashed email address to a specific URL.
Latest knowledge base updates:
Compose a new Talk conversation – Learn how to use the compose Talk endpoint to create a new conversation when requests come from an external form or other integrations not natively supported by Ortto.
What is a custom IP? – Business and Enterprise plan holders can purchase custom IPs with Ortto. This article explains the benefits and how to purchase one.
Prevent tracking clicks or appending parameters to specific URLs – This article explains how our new custom link tags work and how to add them to your email messages.
April 24, 2024
April update
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.
March 28, 2024
March update
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.
February 29, 2024
February update
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.
January 25, 2024
January update
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.