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January: Introducing the Visual Stream Builder

Natalie Samuels
  • Updated
Hey,
 
Let’s talk Journey Builders.
 
Why are they so popular? Well because they allow you to visually map the path of campaigns you want your customer to go through.
 
But are all customers’ journeys the same? Probably not. But even if you believe so, can you map each of your customers’ journeys, anticipate every change in behavior that might require a different path, and decide when they start and end? We think not and that most attempts will lead to broken journeys.
 
This doesn’t mean that visually mapping multi-step campaign flows doesn’t have value, which is why we built the new Visual Stream Builder.
 
Optimove Streams was first released two years ago allowing you to measure the incremental impact of a set of campaigns as a group and compare it either to a second set of campaigns or a super control group.
 
The Visual Stream Builder allows you to build an interconnected flow of campaigns, where the order of appearance of each individual campaign is important and measures their performance as a group.
The difference from your run-of-the-mill builder is that these campaigns are orchestrated by Optimove’s smart priority and exclusion framework as well as Self-Optimizing Journeys algorithms. In other words, you get the best of both worlds – the ability to visually map connected campaigns, and the power of Optimove to orchestrate and measure hundreds of these campaign flows.
 
As always, if you have feedback, I’m only a reply away.
 
Cheers,
Shai Frank, VP of Product
 

Introducing the Visual Stream Builder

Traditional builders burden you with the task of thinking of all the potential paths a customer could take and catering to them in advance by building complex conditions and splits. Although manageable in small numbers, at scale you usually find yourself in front of impossibly complex and rigid automation that can’t be synchronized and maintained.

Optimove’sVisual Stream Builder solves both issues. A familiar interface, it allows you to create many short flows, each with its own goal, campaigns, and triggers. Optimove’s orchestration takes over from there, moving customers between streams to maximize CLTV. Optimove will also ensure customers are assigned to test and control groups for each step of the way and the whole treatment so that you can measure the incrementality of the complete stream, treatment, and of each campaign within it.
 
If you still can’t see the Visual Stream Builder in your Optimove site, you will soon as we are rolling it out gradually.
 

A/B Testing Stream Treatments

Streams allow you to test different sets of campaigns (treatments) against one another. Similar to A/B testing, using the Visual Stream Builder, you can test two treatments for the same customer target group to evaluate them and identify the one that generates the best result for a specific business KPI.

For example, for cross-sell and up-sell streams, you can evaluate the performance of a single-channel approach using only email, as opposed to a multichannel one, using both SMS and email.
 
For more on A/B testing Stream treatments see our Academy article on the subject.

Test/Control Streams

Dividing your customers to test and control groups in a campaign is the only way to measure the incremental uplift each campaign has on your marketing efforts. With Streams, you can measure the impact that an entire set of communications had on a specific business KPI.

The Visual Stream Builder allows you to split your customers between test and control. The majority of customers will be in the test treatment and will receive the campaigns you choose to deliver along it; while a representative group of customers will be held out from all campaigns.
 
For example, to measure the effectiveness of post-transactional campaigns on customer loyalty, you can test/control a post-transactional flow. To do so, use Streams to select your target group and hold out a representative group of customers from the entire flow.
 
For more on creating Test/Control Streams with the Visual Stream Builder click here.

What’s Next? Realtime Triggers & Event Splits

If you think the current Visual Stream Builder is great, wait until you hear what is coming next.

Soon you will be able to split treatments not only by response or customer attributes but also based on specific events in real-time. For example, whether customers visited a specific product page or initiated a deposit.
 
Then, you will be able to trigger real-time campaigns as part of your Stream. For example, trigger a web pop-up for customers who viewed your product page or send an email to customers that didn’t finish the deposit they initiated.
 
Stay tuned for updates on these new capabilities as they become available for you.
 

> From our blog

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Broken Journeys aren’t the only problem of automation builders. Cross-firing ones might even be worse. Read more about how to stop them here.

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To Lock or Not to Lock Customers (into CRM Journeys)

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