Let’s talk tech: What’s new at Cordial, August 2020

As we continue releasing new improvements to the Cordial platform, we share a monthly roundup here on the blog, and we post individual updates to our Knowledge Base. If you’d like to receive an email when we post new release notes and platform status updates, head over to the Knowledge Base and click the “Follow” button on each page (note: you must be signed in to access these pages). 

This month, we’re talking about our dashboards for multi-channel visibility and reporting, and custom Smarty utilities that simplify complex personalization coding and unlock some incredible data transformation capabilities.

Multi-channel dashboard

When we activate a new SMS or mobile app channel in your account, you’ll now see channel-specific key performance indicators (KPIs), including multiple SMS and mobile app KPIs. As our innovative clients continue to grow their multi-channel messaging strategies, we wanted to ensure the dashboards, features, and analytics available for email are visible for other channels. 

This multi-channel visibility includes:

• Dashboard: view unique stats based on channel (rather than rolled into one aggregate KPI)
• Kaleidoscope: see subscribe status, subscribe date, behavioral clicks by channel
• Analytics: access event data and message reports by channel

In addition to aggregate metrics like sending volume, number of contacts, automated and batch messages, you’ll also see KPIs by channel. These are viewable across four time frames: today, past 7 days, past 30 days, and current year to date. If your Cordial account has email, SMS, and mobile app channels enabled, the dashboard will display separate performance tabs for each of those channels.

Email performance metrics include sent, delivered, bounced, opened, clicked, opt outs, complaints, and revenue. SMS performance metrics include sent, clicked and revenue. Mobile app (push notifications) performance metrics include sent, opened, revenue, and failures.

Custom Smarty utilities

Smarty is a robust, open source PHP templating language that’s designed for managing dynamic content. We’ve been able to extend what Smarty can offer with a series of custom Smarty utilities that allow you to read and write data, and simplify complex personalization rules. 

At a high level, these custom utilities allow you to:

• Simplify what would otherwise require complex coding for personalization
• Allow read access of data from Cordial collections, including external feeds
• Allow write access of data to Cordial collections (at render time)
• Call system APIs/methods, like sendMessage and stopMessage

You may be familiar with Cordial’s use of Smarty within message rendering, whether you’re working in one channel or using dynamic content across multiple channels. For example, you’d use Smarty when you’re building the body of a message and inserting dynamic content personalized to each recipient.

Outside of messaging, you can manipulate data within Cordial using our Data Transformations UI. This evaluates a data source, reads the data, makes business decisions based on a Smarty script, and writes down the results all within the Cordial platform. If you’re bringing data into Cordial, or sharing Cordial data with other systems, you can import into Cordial collections using data automation, transform the data, and send it to other systems via API calls. 

Cordial gives clients access to read data from contacts, events, supplements, external feeds, orders, and products. Clients can also write back to all of the same environments, plus APIs and files (a .csv export, for example). 

Through a basic Smarty syntax, you can instantiate a utility, call the custom utility by name, and then pass in your parameters. Again, this works within a message and within a Data Transformation. For a complete list of available utilities, visit the Cordial utilities reference page.

Each month, we focus on a few of our newest features and enhancements to the Cordial platform. If you missed the last month, check out our updates from July: Podium Fork with Skip Message and Shopify Transactional Events. To learn more about using a new feature or functionality in your account, contact your Client Success Manager or connect with a Cordial expert today.