Over the past few months, we’ve been extremely busy putting the final touches on our new Listrak version 4.0. Today, we are pleased to announce that current Listrak clients can now access our version 4.0 beta by logging in at http://v4.listrak.com/admin.
One of the first things you will notice is the menu drop downs have changed. In order to better organize features and enable future additions to Listrak, this was necessary with the launch of the new version. You can see a comparison of the old menu to the new 4.0 in this “Listrak 4.0 Menu Changes” PDF.
To help make it easier to get assistance with Listrak, the manual has been completely rewritten and converted into a help system. You can navigate through the help using the table of contents in the left frame as well as view the index or search all of the documentation.
We believe that continuing education and publication of best practices is important to Listrak users. To meet this need, many white papers have been written over the past year. Previously, the only way to get to this information and download the PDFs was to fill out a form on the front end of Listrak. Now, Listrak users have direct access to the whitepapers as well as training videos, articles, webinars, and newsletters within the Listrak application. These links can be found under the new Support & Information menu as Listrak Resources.
Also new under the Support & Information menu are Feature Requests and direct access to our three Listrak Blogs. The Feature Request form allows our Listrak users to provide feedback on features that they would like to see in the system. This will help us gauge interest in features to be developed into future versions of Listrak.
One of the behind the scenes changes with Listrak 4.0 is a completely rewritten sending engine. Speed increases and deliverability enhancements have been made. This new sender also paves the way for future developments like Event Triggered Messaging. Look for much more information on Event Triggered Messaging coming from Listrak in the future.
To help you organize your messages within your lists, Listrak 4.0 introduces campaign groupings. This can help you categorize or separate out multiple sends into groups for better reporting functionality. When authoring a message, you can choose an existing campaign or create a new one to assign the message to. The saved messages and scheduled messages areas will organize your emails by the assigned campaign grouping. Reports now show the campaign row as a roll up with totals for all emails sent in that campaign. There is a new plus / minus icon next to each campaign name in order to display the data from all emails contained within. A Campaign Manager is now available under the Manage menu giving you the ability to move saved, scheduled, test, or sent messages between campaigns, add new campaigns or delete ones that are no longer used.
All Listrak reports now have additional export functionality. Plain text exports include the addition of a column for the assigned campaign. Microsoft Excel and XML exports are also now exportable options. The Excel export includes the campaign rows with included rollup functionality. The print option now exports a nicely formatted PDF version matching the appearance of the report you see in the application. Whatever campaign rows you have open and parameters you have set in your current view will be what is shown in the PDF that is generated.
The old Monthly Summary report is now expanded to become the Message Summary report. This report is now an account wide overview with list name row groupings in addition to the campaign roll ups.
Message Tracking Reports are now able to separate out multiple links to the same URL. In order to better organize your URL reports, I highly suggest using a title tag for your links. The Listrak reports will use the text in the title tag instead of the URL in the reports if this exists for the link. This allows you to give descriptive names that can be easier to see when viewing detailed reports.
I’ve saved what I consider the biggest new feature for last. With the launch of Listrak 4.0, you will be able to put together dynamic content messages that display full HTML and text blocks in your message based on profiling filters. You could target an area of your message based on region, sex, past purchase history… the list goes on and on. The only limitation is the profiling information you have stored with your contacts.
Blocks of text and HTML content can be put together, organized, and named in the new Content Library. Within the author page, you can generate dynamic content containers and set different content versions to show base on the profiling filters you set up. In order to see the dynamic content container options, be sure to set the radio button to yes in the List Settings area for “Enable Dynamic Content within Author page”. The dynamic content container will be inserted into the text or HTML of you message by pasting in the named dynamic content tag. This can be done manually or using the new dynamic content icon within the WYSIWYG editor. When you preview dynamic content messages, you will have the ability to select from drop downs the version for each dynamic content container to display for the preview.
Once you send a dynamic content email, that message row will display a dynamic content icon within any of the Listrak reports. If you click on this icon, you can drill down into the individual recipes (or combination of dynamic content versions) detailed information.
While dynamic content is meant for advanced users, if you follow the documentation and try a few experimentations, you’ll be ready to generate full dynamic content messages in no time.
For more information on all of the new features, log into the beta version of Listrak 4.0 here: http://v4.listrak.com/admin and view the Release Notes area under the Support & Information menu. Direct links into the help system documentation are listed here with each new feature description.
If you see any issues while using the beta version, please email support@listrak.com with detailed information on the issue.
Currently, we are looking at early September to take version 4.0 live. In the next few weeks we will be putting together training videos on the new 4.0 features. I will post the links to the training videos here as well as the resources area of the application.
We hope you enjoy these new features. Keep an eye out for many more Listrak enhancements and features to come in the future.