product Updates

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.

This month’s wrap-up of product updates includes changes to the update field and archive contact journey actions, new options for some of our data sources, and a better capture experience for customers with an SPA. 

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

• CDP — when importing a CSV file, you can now choose only to update existing records and not create any new contacts.

• Capture — we have improved how capture widgets work on single-page applications (SPA). Now, when your customers change pages in your SPA, all currently open capture widgets will be closed without triggering a ‘widget dismissed’ event and then re-loaded in the appropriate order. 

• Journeys — you can now use the ‘update field’ action in a journey to perform calculations. This means you can automate processes like adding points to a loyalty card or adding whole integer values to a lead scoring model. Plus, the ‘archive contact’ journey action has now been updated to include the option of archiving and suppressing the contact’s email address. 

• Filters —you can now use large text fields in filters throughout Ortto when doing things like creating entry and exit criteria for a journey. 

• Facebook — you can now manually trigger a Facebook data backfill. Plus, if you change the data retention period, we will automatically backfill the extra data.

• Shopify — if you are connecting Shopify as a data source, you can now choose what to do if a record already exists by selecting a merge key strategy. 

New and noteworthy knowledge base articles: 

• Recurly activities and attributes —  learn about the activities and attributes that are automatically added to your Ortto account when you connect Recurly as a data source. 

• Push notifications in Journeys — how to add a new or existing push notification in a journey. 

• How to trigger a custom activity via Zapier — you can trigger custom activities using a middleware tool like Zapier. This article guides you through the process. 

• Gmail’s promotion tab — this article explains the role of Gmail's promotions tab and how you can make tweaks to your email content to avoid it. 

• System activities overview — a detailed list of all system activities and their definitions. 

• Understanding SMS subscribes — this article explains different scenarios in which people can be unsubscribed from SMS communications and how they can be resubscribed.

• What happens if you exceed your contact limit? — each plan includes a set number of contacts covered by your monthly subscription. This article explains what happens if you exceed that limit.

• Retrieve contact activities via API — the get Ortto endpoint of the activities entity is used to retrieve data from one or more activities for a given contact in Ortto’s CDP. This article explains the request and response. 

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.  

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.