What’s coming in Customer Insights-Journeys in December-March?

At the time of the release of this post, we’re waiting on the December ’23 release for Customer Insights – Journeys, it’s hopefully right around the corner. Because there are so many features there I think will have a huge (positive, just to be clear) impact on users, I thought I would write something about some of them. I don’t think I can remember a period in the release plans where I’ve said finally it’s here as much as I have with a lot of these features!

PP is public preview and GA is general availability. Let’s start with some of the features coming out in the December release

Enhance email engagement by allowing browser viewing

GA December ’23

Yay, “view in browser” is back. I know a lot of customers have been waiting for this feature!

Improve appeal and match brand identity with custom fonts

GA December ’23

Bring your own fonts! Upload your fonts or get the fonts from a URL!

Improve communication timing by setting up quiet times

PP October 2 – GA December ’23

This has supposedly been in public preview since October, but I haven’t found it in any of my or my customers’ environments. This is where you can say that you don’t send emails during certain times, for example at night, on the weekends or during holidays. You can create multiple times to fit your business needs.

Capture responses from external, third-party forms

PP December ’23 – GA March ’24

This is one I’ve waited on since they moved over to RTM. In outbound you could create capture forms where you could use an existing form and get the data from the form into CI-J, this will now also be available in RTM.

Qualify leads and route to sales when buying is likely

GA February ’24

I love all the features coming out with the intention of getting sales and marketing to work closer together, I believe there are so many opportunities that aren’t fully utilised in this gap. This is another feature that can bridge that gap, this time by making sure you qualify the leads in an even better way than just by lead attributes in your criteria for lead scoring.

Engage customers with content and follow-ups based on website interactions

PP January ’24

Finally, we’re getting the opportunity to track our customers’ website interactions again!

Create journeys quickly with inspiring templates

GA February ’24

We’re getting templates for our journeys again! This will save so many customers so much time. The event template with a lot of steps you have to create 50 times, now you can do it with your own template!

Easily manage customer consent from contact and lead forms

PP February ’24

An easier way to have control over your customer consent. Something I’m looking forward to testing in February!

Ensure messages go to the right contact email address

PP February ’24

This feature is for everyone who uses more than one email address in Dataverse, maybe you have personal and work email for your customers, or you have students who have a personal and one school email. With this, you can select other than just the primary email to send the email to.

Optimize engagement, increase conversion rates with email A/B testing

PP February ’24

Proper email A/B testing is coming back. This was an option in outbound but has been missing in RTM, another feature making sure RTM has the same functionality that outbound had.

Improve reliability of insights with advanced bot protection

PP March ’24

Be even safer with your emails and get better statistics with advanced bot protection. This will probably not do much for the average user, but for statistics and staying safe, it’s imperative.

Provide varied experiences in one journey using journey split tiles

PP March ’24

Imagine you have 10,000 customers, and you want to send out information to them. You don’t want to send to all 10k at the same time, that would kill your customer service department, but how do you randomly send out to 5000 per time and maybe wait a week before the next 5000. This is the feature where you can split a journey into two lanes or more, and the system will divide the contacts based on your criteria – percent or maximum participants. This is a feature I’ve had several customers ask me about, so really glad it’s in the plans.

Reach customers at the right moment with send scheduling

PP March ’24

Not only are we getting quiet times, but we’re also getting send scheduling. This is where you can send your emails to your customers when they’re most likely to open the emails. You decide when the preferred send time for each email in your journeys is. They will still respect quiet times and frequency cap, but the messages outside the send times, are held until the next window, so they will be sent later.

As you can see – there are a lot of very important new features being released until March, and I have full confidence that we will continue to see important features being released in the next wave as well.