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Enhancements to the Timeline events feature

The BlueConic product team marked the start of fall with several product updates related to events and order imports. Recent enhancements to the Timeline events feature make it easier to import customer order data, perform calculations and predictions based on orders and the events on a profile's timeline.

Introduced last spring, the BlueConic Timeline stores events to capture information about the timing and sequence of events for an individual BlueConic profile. A Timeline belongs to an individual profile and includes the set of all events for that profile, such as product orders, page views, calls, store visits, subscriptions, etc.

This example data structure shows how BlueConic customer profiles can also have related event timelines, and how profiles can be part of groups such as households, companies, or accounts.

Storing relevant customer events in profile timelines enables your marketing team to do much deeper analysis and data collection that is time-based. You can leverage BlueConic event data to enhance product recommendations, improve customer targeting, or to calculate customer value metrics in AI Workbench. 

Import BlueConic Timeline events via SFTP

Marketing teams can import customer Timeline events to individual customer profiles. With the enhanced file selection tool, you can import order data from multiple CSV files relating to customer orders.

Recent enhancements to BlueConic include improvements to the UI for importing customer order events via the SFTP connection. You can import data from several nested CSV files, and a lightbox preview shows the file contents and columns.

The Timeline feature now includes a new default Order event type you can use to import order event data to BlueConic via CSV files with the SFTP Connection.

Enhance product recommendations with Timeline data 

If you have uploaded data to a Timeline event of type Order, BlueConic can use this Order event data to update the product store statistics and add the bought products to the buyer's BlueConic profile. This improves recommendations both for the current profile and overall, with new statistics on the products your customers are buying or placing in the shopping cart.

See About Timeline events in BlueConic for more information on storing and using Timeline events. 

Calculate CLV and RFM with prebuilt AI Workbench models

BlueConic provides several prebuilt AI notebooks marketing teams can use (without writing any code) to apply the power of AI to your customer order data to calculate a user's customer lifetime value (CLV) or a recency, frequency, monetary value(RFM) score.

To get started, open the AI Workbench page in BlueConic, choose Add notebook, and select CLV notebook or RFM notebook. The CLV and RFM notebooks use Order event information you upload to customers' BlueConic Timelines to calculate customer CLV and RFM metrics. Follow the directions in the notebook editor panel for setting parameters and order data that feed these calculations.

Resource usage for Timeline events

By default, there is currently no extra cost to use Timeline events, but events being stored are added to your BlueConic total data storage. If you have a lot of events to store, you may need to buy more data storage to be able to use Timeline events under your current contract. Contact your Customer Success Manager at support@blueconic.com to discuss your data storage needs.

Learn more about how BlueConic stores Timeline events: Data Storage in BlueConic. 

Use the REST API for retrieving Timeline events with profiles

You can use the BlueConic REST API to retrieve Timeline events along with profile data. You can use a single bulk handler to combine profile data and event data. Timeline events can now also be added to a profile base on any unique identifier property. You can also filter timeline events by selecting: from date, end date, event type, and count (default = 20; max_count = 500).
Note that you can no longer use the API to retrieve the Timeline separate from retrieving profile data.

Analyzing your customer recognition ratio

What percentage of your customers and visitors can you recognize online? Use the new Profile Recognition Dashboard to find out how many of your profiles have one or more unique identifiers (for example, email, customer ID, mobile phone number, etc.).

• Determine the most common profile identifier among your profiles.
• Establish what percent of your total profiles are known by a unique identifier.
• Analyze how your customer recognition ratio improves over time.

Create your Profile Recognition Dashboard from the Notifications menu in BlueConic.

Learn more about the BlueConic Customer Profile Recognition Dashboard.

All the little things

• In the BlueConic Engagement Listener, you can select which channels or URLs are used for measuring engagement, select or create a profile property other than Engagement to store engagement labels, and now set decay period in weeks. 
• The BlueConic Firehose connections for Microsoft Azure Events Hub, Google Cloud Pub/Sub, and Amazon Kinesis can now stream PAGEVIEW events, so you can record if someone enters a particular page. 

Updates to Profile Property Values: 

• Average values for profile properties of type Decimal and Currency are now being calculated.
• In addition to the average value, you can now also retrieve the SUM of values in profile properties of type Number, Decimal, and Currency.

Coming soon

• Redesigned Profile Timeline that illustrates the events associated with an individual profile. You'll be able to visualize the profile event timeline and zero in on individual events.
• Single sign-on (SAML) support for logging into your BlueConic tenant.
• New feature for embedding up-to-the-minute personalized recommendations in emails. Stay tuned for some exciting new ways to send email with content and product recommendations that update when your customers open their email.