Samba Closes Out 2019 with New Additions and Optimizations

The end of the year is nearly upon us and that means most eshops are currently in the thick of their busiest time of the year. To those reading this, the Samba team wishes you the best of luck and the healthiest of bottom lines!

But we’re not just making those wishes, but now granting them! If you haven’t heard the news yet, we’re already providing our new consulting services to many businesses and through that we’re able to help them with their AI-powered marketing and significantly increase their performance. If you want to know more about these services, which includes complete eshop management, don’t hesitate to contact us at sales@samba.ai.

Beyond that, we’ve been working hard improving and optimizing Samba and have collected some of the highlights of those efforts.

Autopilot’s New Modern Design and Functionality

Our Autopilot feature is an important part of Samba because it provides users with a simple, yet powerful option for running automated, optimized marketing. As part of our overall design improvements, we went to work on our Autopilot UI, redesigning the look of it to reflect a more modern style and reworking the controls to make everything more clear and accessible.

In terms of functionality, Autopilot can now be shut down whenever a user needs. For those who aren’t familiar with Autopilot, through Samba’s artificial intelligence capabilities it continually monitors and learns the behaviors of customers, executing targeted marketing based upon that. To get started, the AI issues email campaigns over the course of several days to get “warmed-up” before it becomes fully optimized. During this “warm-up” period, it was previously not possible to shut down the process, but now it is!

This primarily acts as a safeguard for those instances when a user accidentally sets a campaign incorrectly and needs to shut down Autopilot. With that said, it’s important to take into account that this will interrupt the required process of Samba’s initial learning and it will have to start from the beginning once it’s started up again.

Expanded Support for Push Notifications

Support for Push Notification is slowly being rolled out across several phases, which began a month ago when we started offering a script (inserted into the root directory of the eshop) that gathers consent from visitors for push notifications.

On the heels of that, we’re happy to announce that Samba Enterprise users will now be able to include push notifications in custom campaigns. With that, you’ll be able to set both the text and image and be able to preview how it will appear on both Windows and macOS computers.

When sending push notifications, it’s important to try to only send a maximum of one per week and in general, it’s only recommend using them for special offers.

Currently, push notifications don’t support filtering or segmentation but we’re working to implement the possibility for that in the near future. In addition, we’ll be looking to add an option to send test push notifications and work them directly into flow campaigns for more effective omnichannel orchestration.

UTM Parameter Option for Duplicated Campaigns

If you’ve previously duplicated campaigns in Samba, you may have noticed that the revenue-related UTM parameters were also automatically copied. As a result, despite different statistics for the new campaign, it had the same revenue listed as the original campaign.

While you could previously delete the UTM parameter or change it to another, we’ve simplified this process and now when duplicating the UTM, Samba will alert users and offer the option to insert a prefix that will make the new UTM parameter unique. Different settings are suitable for different cases.

Improved Design for Samba Dashboard and Triggers

The design of Samba’s main dashboard has been improved and now provides a more accessible, optimized overview of total revenue in a given period, as well as revenue per day, number of orders, and other high-level statistics.

In addition, all of Samba’s triggers now have a new, airy design, which allows users to set up everything in a much faster, more efficient manner.

Business Insights New Additions and Improvements

Over this past month, we’ve made a host of new improvements to our Business Insights, further building on this vital tool that empowers businesses to better analyze their data, helping them increase their sales, campaign quality, and more.

• Dashboard Overview of Reports

We’ve been regularly expanding the reports available to our users and came to a point where accessing each report only from the tabs wasn’t sufficient. To help rectify that, we’ve introduced a dashboard overview that lists each report and allows you to quickly get to the report you’re interested in. In addition, each report now has a back arrow, located in the upper-left corner, which returns you to the overview. Ultimately, this feature will help users work with their reports much more efficiently.

• Cohort Analytics Expanded

Before November, our cohort reports only analyzed two metrics: Number of Purchases and Average Order Value (AOV). Since then, we’ve greatly expanded the list of metrics now available for cohort analysis, including the addition of Average Item Value, Average Number of Items, Average Number of Purchases, Average Total Spending, Churn Rate (%), Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Retention Rate (%), and Total Spending.

All metrics are easily accessible from the drop-down menu located at the top of the report and you can also set how many months you want to compare within a cohort.

• Repeat Customers Insights Report

We’ve recently added a new report to Business Insights called Repeat Customers Insights. This report details the overall split of your customers based on ratio of customers who have made 1 or more purchases in the graph. Retaining existing customers and getting them to make regular purchases is very important to every eshop because you’re effectively cutting costs from advertising and other expensive channels that are used in acquiring new customers.

• Implementation of Business Insights Accelerated!

Good news! If you have all of your basic eshop feeds properly integrated with Samba, we’re now able to start bringing you your Business Insights analytics within a day. That’s right! We’ve optimized the process of integrating our Business Insights to make it easier and faster.

So even though the overall time it takes to get started still depends on how large your database of customers and orders are, since the analysis of all data is computational and time-consuming in the initial implementation, that process is now that much faster.

Three New Accelerators

For all of our Samba Enterprise users, we’re continually expanding our catalog of Samba Accelerators, which are guides that showcase step-by-step instructions on how to better interpret business data and employ Samba best practices to get the most out of their efforts.

With that in mind, we’ve added three new Accelerators that are focused on helping you work with customers who haven’t purchased in a long time; RFM segmentation; and how to read individual Business Insights reports.

We’re Now an Official Microsoft Partner

This month, Samba has reached a significant milestone - we’re now a part of the MPN (Microsoft Partner Network) and therefore, included on the Microsoft Partner platform.

You can find us on both the Azure Marketplace and Microsoft AppSource.