Mailkit has made several additions of its email marketing platform recently. The updates involve usability improvements and new features, including AI engagement scoring, improved drag-and-drop blocks, filtering of templates and new integrations.
A.I. driven Engagement scoring & Geo-location
Mailkit’s templating can do some powerful things, with from IF/ELSE conditions, loops, string manipulations, data encoding/decoding, etc. Having access to external data as well as internal data is a key to recipient level personalization.
Mailkit has updated their engagement scoring. If you haven’t worked with enagement socing before, it is an AI based algorithm that assigns a score to each recipient based on their interactions with emails.
Mailkit allowed targeting based on engagement score before, but now it is possible to do dynamic engagement based personalization.
Senders can use the recipient’s engagement score (and trend) in the templates as variables.
This opens a new way of personalizing content to recipients based on their engagement. Templates can now easily have conditions to use custom content based on engagement score.
Do you want to give your highest engaged recipients a special discount code? That is possible now – a condition will make sure only recipients with a matching score will have that block in their email.
Geo Targetting
The individual recipient’s geo-information is available as a templating variable as well. This allows creating personalization conditions within the content targeting City, Region, State, Country, Operating system or Browser. Mailkit users can create a block that will vary by city, region, state or country for location-based content.
Improved drag & drop blocks
Mailkit’s drag & drop content styles are popular among its customers. Drag & drop functions allow senders to build their campaigns from predefined blocks. The blocks can be filled by editing the content or (automatically) fill them from data sources.
Here is a video of the Drag & Drop dataset connected to a product feed.
So marketers can more easily build their email campaigns without looking at the HTML or losing email responsivity. In the MailKit version there are some important updates to this process.
In product feeds, often used by eshop / online retailers, the products can be looked up by their product id and name. But now also by brand, availability and condition as well.
In addition the blocks can have fully dynamic blocks that are generated on the fly. This is very useful for campaigns that contain a mix of static and fully dynamic content. As an example, 4 product blocks with products that are on sale and an additional block with dynamically generated products based on the recipient’s interest.
This video shows the combination of a static Drag and drop block and a dynamic one.
Another new feature are processed blocks. With processed blocks, the logic is not calculated at the time of send for each recipient, but the evaluation happens at the time the block is dropped to the campaign editor.
Processed blocks allow templates blocks that get prefilled with the required content beforehand (but not dynamically changed on time of send). For example, a bank can have a block with exchange rates prefilled when the block is dropped to the campaign from a data source with exchange rates and these can be manually edited before sending.
New email template filters and dynamic subject lines
The latest updates also brought new template filters to help automate complex processes.
New filters are now available for manipulating the messages subject from inside the email template. Meaning a subject can be manipulated from the campaign based on the content. Simple conditions in a template can change the subject of the message to contain for example the name of the recommended product.
Another new filter can take out a recipient from a campaign. If you have an email marketing campaign that you want to send to everyone except if the available data results in a message with not enough content, you can do it easily with a filter.
For instance, campaigns with recommendations can only work if there are enough recommendations. If there aren’t, a simple template condition can skip sending the campaign to him / her instead of sending a message with an empty block.
The existing support for hashing using MD5 is extended with SHA1 hashing. Do you need to pass recipient credentials securely in a link? You don’t need to encode all information beforehand and have it stored in Mailkit – you can simply hash the information in the template from the existing data.
Data integrations with Google BigQuery and Exponea Experience Cloud.
Mailkit has always focused on building an email marketing platform that takes advantage of data.
From data sources that allow easy integration to templates that allow marketers to automate large amounts of their work. The latest update brought two important integrations – Google BigQuery and Exponea Experience Cloud.
Google BigQuery is a cloud-based data store by Google. One of the big advantages of BigQuery is it’s speed when processing large amounts of data. But also it’s integration with other Google services and 3rd party systems that makes BigQuery attractive for marketers.
BigQuery often serves marketers as central data storage from various marketing platforms, allowing analytics using Google’s tools. Allowing access to data directly from Google Data Studio to create custom interactive reports or use of Google’s AI Platform for machine learning.
With the growing interest in AI and machine learning Mailkit has implemented BigQuery integration for all reporting data. It means that whatever data is collected by Mailkit about campaigns and recipient behavior, it can be pushed to BigQuery.
Exponea Experience Cloud integration
In addition to BigQuery integration, Mailkit now provides integration with Exponea Experience Cloud.
Exponea has found strong footing with eCommerce and retailers with their omnichannel marketing cloud. Their platform allows some very neat stuff when it comes to campaign management across channels. One of the key marketing channels is obviously email.
While Exponea already had an integration to send emails via Mailkit for customers demanding email deliverability, the feedback information was not in place. Now customers using both platforms can take advantage of Mailkit’s integration that passes full reporting data back to Exponea in real-time.
This allows customers to integrate all campaign information to Exponea managed workflows. They can use both platforms without having to compromise on features or email deliverability.
