Today is an exciting day for SAP Emarsys. We have not one, but two category-defining updates to share. First, we’re introducing a suite of cutting-edge AI advancements that add important new functionality to our platform. We’ve also released our latest product update chock-full of powerful new omnichannel features and enterprise-grade enhancements to empower marketers.    

While AI is a marketing sensation as of late, Emarsys is not new to it. We’ve been embedding AI in our solutions for years, like our predictive AI Segments, Send Time Optimization, and Product Recommendations for email, web, and mobile, just to name a few.  

Building on this foundation, we’re expanding our AI capabilities to boost marketer productivity and creativity with generative AI, helping them deliver relevant experiences at scale. The new AI features we’ve introduced include Product Finder (in Pilot), Segment Generator (in Pilot) and Preheader Generator (expected GA in July), as an addition to the existing Subject Line Generator toolset. These enhancements come as a direct result of our research on the evolving needs and expectations for AI among marketers and consumers alike.  

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While AI is stealing the headlines, and rightly so, marketers still need support connecting across the customer experience, making data-driven decisions and adapting to shifts in the market or their business with speed and agility. That’s why, in our June Product Release, we’re also rolling out fresh marketing and advertising channels, enhanced analytics, collaborative marketing tools, and expanded integrations with our partner ecosystem. 

Here’s what you need to know about the updates in Emarsys’ latest update.  

Stay Connected with New Features that Drive Omnichannel Excellence

Conversational Messaging: WhatsApp (Early Adopter)

Conversational apps have become an increasingly popular form of communication for consumers. This channel can also be a boon to brands looking to engage consumers where they spend much of their time and are highly engaged, helping improve retention and conversion.

We’ve partnered with Sinch to offer WhatsApp, the most popular mobile messaging app globally, as a marketing channel directly within Emarsys. (This feature is now in an early adopter stage.) Get started now with common one-way messaging use cases such as welcome messages, order updates, promotional offers, or even password resets. Work with approved message templates in Sinch, then design, personalize, and launch campaigns easily in Emarsys. Plus, schedule campaigns using automation programs and monitor their progress in Campaign Analytics. In future releases we will expand this functionality to include dynamic two-way conversations with individuals through the platform.

Digital Ads: LinkedIn Integration

Announced in the previous release, LinkedIn Ads Integration is now generally available to all Emarsys customers. This allows users to utilize their rich first-party customer data and audiences from Emarsys to deliver more targeted, effective ad campaigns on LinkedIn, as well as seamlessly import leads captured via LinkedIn Lead Generation Forms for further engagement. 

Web & Mobile Updates

With the percentage of customers shopping and engaging via mobile and web showing no signs of stopping, one of Emarsys’s key areas for enhancements continues to be in these channels.  

  • Web Push for iOS: As Apple now supports web push notifications, this feature enables users to receive notifications on iOS devices, allowing for real-time interactions that drive engagement and conversions of both known and anonymous visitors. 
  • Web Push Time to Live Setting: This feature allows marketers to control the lifespan of Web Push notifications, providing timely delivery and ensuring that communications are always relevant and more effective. 
  • Updated ‘Send to Contact List’: This feature is now available as a new audience targeting option in Web & Mobile Push and Mobile Inbox. Found in the recipient source setting, marketers can send notifications directly to contact lists for more comprehensive reach and communication. 

Note: if you are interested in joining one of the active pilots or early adopter programs, please submit your request or reach out to your customer success manager. 

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Insightful: Unlocking Marketer Intelligence

Insights into customer behavior and data unlocks marketing intelligence that is actionable and has a direct impact on ROI.  

That’s why we’re excited to introduce the following innovations for marketers: 

AI Improvements

As mentioned above, we’ve unveiled new generative AI features within our product and on our roadmap which will enhance marketers’ creativity and productivity to help them create personalized experiences at scale. Relevant to the June Product Release, this includes the addition of a Preheader Generator to the Subject Line Generator toolset and continuation of the AI Product Finder pilot.  

AI Preheader Generator

Email preheaders are invaluable tools for marketers, as they often represent one of the few key bits of information customers will see as they decide whether to further engage with messaging. That’s why it’s critical to create preheaders that are attention grabbing and inspire users to read on. AI can streamline this process by creating preview text that reflects your message content and speaks to users’ wants and needs. 

With the AI Preheader Generator, we are extending the value of the AI Subject Line Generator toolset. Marketers can create engaging email preheaders simply based off the context of the email, chosen subject line and prompts or settings the user enters. These tools work in concert to give more creative options to marketers in real time and increase email open rates. Both the Subject Line Generator and the AI Preheader Generator are expected to be generally available in July 2024. 

AI Product Finder (Pilot)

Featuring specific product content in marketing campaigns often results in greater customer engagement. However, inserting products and all related details from the catalog into a message and scaling that across each channel or campaign can be a cumbersome task. With AI Product Finder, users can quickly search their product catalogs and insert the most suitable items into their marketing campaigns, with the click of a button. Usable out-of-the-box for any template-based email, Product Finder uses AI and heuristics, to automatically map data fields from the catalog to the message, reducing manual effort and ensuring accurate display of relevant product information. 

Analytics Enhancements

Campaign Analytics

To provide even more rich and actionable insights, Campaign Analytics now includes Mobile Inbox and Conversational channels (i.e. WhatsApp). This means users can view and compare campaign data across even more channels from a single dashboard, allowing for more data-informed choices and better, more personalized experiences for customers. 

Audience Reporting

Audience Reporting has also received some updates. It can now analyze more audience engagement data from existing channels like Email, Mobile Push, and SMS, such as unsubscribes and purchases. Reporting in the tool for the Mobile Inbox channel has also been added, allowing for a more global view of customer engagement. 

Unified Dashboard (Pilot)

The June Product Release brings with it a preview of the Unified Dashboard. For organizations with multiple brands, regions, or teams operating in separate business units, this new pilot product provides a consolidated view of key metrics such as revenue, number of contacts, and engagement levels. It also allows users to compare metrics, including revenue converted automatically to the selected currency, across accounts. This single view helps marketers gain a comprehensive understanding of overall marketing performance. 

Note: if you are interested in joining one of the active pilots or early adopter programs, please reach out to your customer success manager.

Adapt Flexibly with our Extensible and Composable Platform

A powerful marketing engine needs to support the goal of providing better, more relevant experiences to customers with even less effort. That means giving marketers flexible, scalable ways to work within the platform, but also within their extended ecosystem of technology partners. To that end, we’re excited to introduce a host of features that enable marketing teams to integrate with key data and systems, extend the value of their Emarsys customer data and accelerate time to value.  

APIs (Application Program Interface) and Data Extensibility Improvement

One of the strengths of Emarsys is how well it integrates data with a variety of key Martech tools. We continue to grow our API offerings and improve our data extensibility to allow users to customize the tool to their needs.

Omnichannel Voucher Management API

Careful viewers of Emarsys updates may remember the Omnichannel Voucher Management API we mentioned in our previous release. We are excited to announce it’s now fully operational. This feature allows users to streamline the voucher management process. Among its key features are the ability to export, create a voucher pool, and add vouchers to a pool. 

Cloud-Native Contact Data in Open Data (Pilot)

Our newest addition to the pilot program is Cloud-Native Contact Data in Open Data. It is designed to unlock additional value behind other Emarsys datasets, provide deeper integrations, and significantly simplify data-matching tasks. We are excited to invite our forward-thinking clients to join us in this pilot phase.  

SAP RDS (Emarsys Relational Data Service) connection to SAP CDP (Customer Data Platforms)

We are thrilled to announce a new feature that unlocks additional customer and business data for activation in Emarsys from the profiles, groups, activities, and other elements within SAP CDP through an SAP Hana connection with SAP Emarsys RDS. Marketers can leverage this expanded data set to create segments, enhance personalization, power automations and improve analytics in Emarsys. 

Solution Connectors and Integrations

Real-Time SAP CDP Connector

With this update, we have enabled our Real-Time SAP CDP Connector, now available to all Emarsys customers also using SAP CDP. This direct integration allows the sync of customer data and consent from SAP CDP to SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement. Any updates in the customer profile, such as personal data or orders, are automatically reflected in Emarsys, enabling marketers to run accurate campaigns with up-to-the-minute data. Email activity data can also be synced from Emarsys back to SAP CDP to unlock deeper analysis and insights, plus power new workflows. 

mParticle Connector (Pilot)

A special mention goes to our pilot program for the mParticle Connector. This integration offers a seamless, one-way synchronization of contacts, audiences and external events from the mParticle CDP to Emarsys to power segmentation, personalization and automation. We welcome our innovators to join the pilot.  

Google Analytics Integration

We’ve rolled out the Google Analytics Integration to be generally available to all users. This feature allows website activity data tracked through Google Analytics to be actioned on within SAP Emarsys. The data can then be used to create segments and power Automation Center programs, allowing for further personalization and omnichannel engagement. 

Account Engagement

Account-Based Filtering for Data Replication

We’re unveiling the Account-Based Filtering for Data Replication feature. This feature provides control over what specific data from a connected SAP Sales Cloud v1 solution is relevant for marketing purposes and should be replicated to Emarsys. Performed through the Data Filtering option, users can configure customer-specific filters at the account level, which also influences the related contacts that are available. This provides a practical and efficient way to manage and control the data replication process. 

Multi-Business Unit Support

For enterprise users, the Multi-Business Unit Support allows the user to connect multiple Account Engagement entitled SAP Business Technology Platform instances to an SAP Sales Cloud v1 system. These can then each be synchronized with separate Emarsys accounts enabled for Account Engagement. The upgrade allows for data separation across multiple Emarsys accounts and enables the Account Engagement Data Integration filtering to dictate which data is replicated from SAP Sales Cloud to the respective Emarsys accounts for use. 

Note: if you are interested in joining one of the active pilots or early adopter programs, please submit your request or reach out to your customer success manager. 

Execute Enterprise-Grade Omnichannel Marketing with Cloud Scale

At Emarsys, we serve businesses both small and large, including some of the most notable global brands. Regardless of size, we aim to help marketers deliver unparalleled business outcomes, but we recognize that as our customers grow and succeed, they need a platform that supports increasingly complex requirements. In this release, we’ve made some useful improvements in the areas of campaign collaboration, platform scalability, and ease of administration.  

Cloud-Native Data Processing Enhancement

Batch Sales Data Onboarding

The Batch Sales Data Onboarding feature streamlines the process of uploading large volumes of sales data, improving the quality of user analytics, Smart Insight, and lifecycle AI Segments. Benefit from faster upload of sales files of up to 100GB and improve marketing strategies and decision-making processes through better data quality and more effortless troubleshooting. 

Batch Personalization

Batch Personalization has been upgraded to take advantage of the power and scale of cloud processing. This allows you to effectively personalize and scale delivery of your campaigns, regardless of their size. 

Content Management & Distribution Capabilities

Distribution for Omnichannel Content Blocks

Turning our attention to content management, the Distribution for Omnichannel Content Blocks feature allows users to share existing content blocks across other business units within their organization. These could be different brands, regions or departments that benefit from efficient collaboration and easy adoption of best practices to accelerate time to value.  

Bulk Distribution for Automation Programs

The Bulk Distribution for Automation Programs feature offers a practical tool for mass distribution of automation programs across various accounts saving time, increasing operational efficiency and promoting implementation of best practices across the organization. 

Bulk Deletion for Automation Programs

The Bulk Deletion for Automation Programs gives users the power to remove multiple programs in one go. This promotes a clean and organized platform, which reduces time spent accessing information and creating campaigns. 

Asset Tagging (Pilot)

Our Asset Tagging tool, currently in pilot phase, allows users to create their own taxonomy to categorize and arrange assets based on a variety of criteria, such as geography, brand, or business line. Users can also create saved views with these tags, ensuring that these marked assets are clearly visible and quickly accessible in the overview menus. 

Admin and Configuration Experience Update

At Emarsys, we are acutely aware that a tool is only as useful as it is intuitive and easy to use. In our ongoing commitment to making our platform accessible, we have several administrative enhancements to support both marketers and IT personas. 

Role Assignment

Account Owners can now assign multiple roles at once to streamline role management. With increased transparency, account owners can view which permissions are applied for each role. Users can be assigned roles in bulk during onboarding and can also be easily removed later for low-maintenance upkeep. 

Self-Serve Account Owner Promotion

We have introduced the Self-Serve Account Owner Promotion. This allows for account owner responsibilities to be easily delegated through the permission system by adding the “account-owner” permission to any role. Additionally, account owners can seamlessly remove their role or delegate it to another user. The system ensures the validation of multifactor authentication for security, alerting users about potential risks if their security setup is insufficient. 

Note: if you are interested in joining one of the active pilots or early adopter programs, please submit your request or reach out to your customer success manager. 

More Is on the Way!

As always, here at SAP Emarsys we are continually striving to give marketers the best omnichannel customer engagement solution available. Our June Product Release continues Emarsys’s commitment to integrating user feedback, focusing on innovation, and including the latest in AI functionality to empower marketers to do more with less. But if you think we’re resting on our laurels, think again! Our roadmap is filled with innovative ideas, enhancements, and innovations, and our team is always hard at work growing the platform, unlocking value for our customers. Keep checking our Emarsys Product Release Hub for information about upcoming releases. There you can find release videos and resources. You can also learn about opportunities to be part of our growing user community.