BEE Plugin 'Visual Toolbox' AddOn Released
Real-time content for email just turned down Main Street.
On behalf of the Campaign Genius team, I am extremely excited to announce that our partnership with BEE, putting real-time content tools at the fingertips of marketers in over 600 SaaS platforms. To quote Ryan Phelan, a well-respected leader in email marketing:
“Real-time email content has been around for a decade, but the adoption rate has been underwhelming, mainly because of cost and complexity. Campaign-Genius puts these game-changing capabilities within reach of marketers who previously couldn’t easily implement or justify the integration level of effort.”
The ‘Visual Toolbox’ is one of the first “AddOns” in the BEE ecosystem. Platforms that use the BEE Plugin email editor or landing-page editor can activate and configure the Visual Toolbox independently for their customers to use.
There’s a fair bit to unpack here. What I’ll try to do in this post is:
Highlight the benefits of native real-time content.
Explain how this AddOn fits into BEE ecosystem.
Outline the key features of the Visual Toolbox.
Describe how it fits in the Campaign Genius platform.
Touch on the Visual Toolbox implementation options for other (non-BEE) email platforms.
Real-Time
Content
In the BEE Plugin Editor
Lots of exciting stuff! Here goes.
Benefits of Native Real-Time Content
Last week my longtime friend and UPS driver Dan dropped a package at the front door. I was downstairs, but my phone popped up the delivery alert before he got back to the truck. We live in an increasingly-digital, ever-more-real-time economy. Pricing, inventory, deliveries and more are more tightly data-linked and real-time every day.
While email is the most widely used and most effective digital marketing channel, the vast majority of email marketing is anything but real-time. Campaign cycles typically run multiple days or weeks from initial briefing to final send. Organizations scramble to coordinate the marketing message — pricing, promotions, inventory and more — right up to the moment of send.
Because once it’s sent, you can’t change it. Right?
Wrong! Real-time content has been technically feasible within email for over a decade, as Ryan Phelan noted. Well-known brands like REI, Legoland and the DNC have driven dramatic improvements of key metrics — and email-team job satisfaction — with real-time content.
Adoption of third-party solutions for real-time has not gone mainstream or Main Street, though. A tiny fraction of emails use real-time content today. Perhaps it’s due to cost, perhaps integration and technical complexity, perhaps data cleanliness — or perhaps email marketers are just too stretched and busy to open Yet Another Tab.
The Visual Toolbox takes a different approach. It provides email marketers with a set of drag-and-drop, function-targeted tools, right within the email editor. Want to geo-target creative by state? Drop the creative options on the Geo tool, set landing-page links and state codes, and hit Send. Change your mind about Texas? Open the element in the email template, change the US-tx creative, and save. Every email in Texas will get the new creative on-open. That’s one of dozens of real-time possibilities to ignite your email ROI.
It’s a real-time world. Isn’t it time your email marketing went natively real-time? You can BEE there in under an hour.
How the Visual Toolbox AddOn Fits in the BEE Ecosystem
A plugin-in-a-plugin, essentially.
BEE Plugin is a React web plugin, easily and quickly embeddable in your SaaS application. The Visual Toolbox is an AddOn for the BEE plugin. They are software components for SaaS platforms, delivered in real-time into the user interface.
It may sound super-complicated, but most web pages are chock-a-block with components and assets delivered from other companies.
Operationally, BEE and CG “talk to each other”, performing health checks and API key validation. Each instance of the editor and the Toolbox are created — “instantiated” — not only for a specific BEE/CG customer, but for each user of that customer’s platform. Templates are saved in user history, and can be restored and modified even after send.
How does a BEE Plugin customer get the Visual Toolbox AddOn?
Activating the Visual Toolbox takes a couple of steps:
Log in to the BEE developer portal (developers.beefree.io)
Click on the Email Builder application 'Details' button.
Click AddOns at the bottom-left.
Click Browse AddOnes, then click the Visual Toolbox tile.
Use requires an active Visual Toolbox account, which is priced/paid separately from BEE.
The account setup page is here: https://app.campaign-genius.com/toolbox/beesetup
Completed signups are provided with an API key (which needs to be copied back into the BEE Editor AddOn configuration), plus a control panel to select and order Visual Toolbox tools. Toolbox customers have complete visual control with custom CSS, too!
How does a non-BEE marketer get the Visual Toolbox?
Your marketing platform doesn’t offer real-time content tools? You don’t have to wait for them to start taking advantage of real-time in your campaigns. Campaign Genius provides direct subscription options, including a generous low-cost trial subscription. Simply run the Toolbox in another tab, and paste tool output into your email editor or HTML.
Toolbox Feature Highlights
As of release, the Toolbox includes over a dozen tools, and provides over 15 million royalty-free visuals. (Several exciting new tools will be added shortly.) AddOn customers decide what tools to make available in their BEE editor with a live ‘control panel.’
Mail Metrics Map sample
Smart Delivery
Optimize (schedule, test and auto-select winning creative)
Geo (geo-targeting, demographics targeting)
COVID - healthcare-stats targeting
Active Content
Countdown Timers
Live Weather & Forecasts
Google Maps
Package Tracking
Website-to-image ‘Webshots’
Live Twitter Feed
On-Demand Barcodes
YouTube-to-GIF/JPG Thumbnailer
Visual Assets
+2M HD Photos & Artwork
+12M GIFs
+1M Icons
Live Metrics (all tools)
Impressions, Clicks & CTR
“Metrics Map” live geographic view of impressions & clicks
Visual Toolbox and the Campaign Genius Platform
Campaign Genius is a comprehensive platform real-time content, with custom template authoring, an extensive set of 3rd-party API feeds, and content lifecycle management. Visual Toolbox is fundamentally “powered by” the underlying cloud-and-edge based platform.
Platform authoring features include:
Rich Personalization (new or existing creative)
Drag-and-Drop Authoring
Static + Dynamic Text Personalization
Merge-field Data
API Data
Formulas
Dynamic Image Compositing
Formatting & Layout for Each Text Block
100+ Fonts, RGBA Color
Live Design Changes After Send
Change Backgrounds On-the-Fly
Clone Templates
Dynamic Image Slicing & Slice Assignment
Longer-term content livecycle management options include:
Content Livecycles:
Date-Scheduled
Recipient-by-recipient
Cycled (Days, Hours)
By API Result
A/B Test Sets*
Hyperlink & Image Coordination
Coupon Management (1:1 Assignment, Personalization, Expiration)
Direct subscriptions are available for both the Visual Toolbox and the far more powerful authoring platform.
Visual Toolbox: Available for Any Marketing Platform
Any ESP, marketing cloud, CRM — for that matter, any web-based SaaS that sends email can deliver real-time capabilities to customers — and new revenue to shareholders — in very, very little time by incorporating the Toolbox plugin.
The Toolbox plugin is designed for seamless drop-in to practically any email editor. iPost — ‘the email platform that was built for marketers by marketers’ — went live with the plugin in 2019.
“There is a noticeable shift toward visual content in the industry, and we wanted to make the application process of that content as simple as possible for our users. Partnering with Campaign-Genius on this groundbreaking integration was all about creating a seamless way for email marketers to successfully engage audiences with dynamic content while saving time and resources.” —Cameron Kane, CEO, iPost
Expectations for email platforms are beginning to shift as marketers see the impact of real-time content on marketing ROI. Several fledgling startups provide rudimentary real-time capability in their editors, and even industry giants like Salesforce are starting to add real-time features like basic live image swapping. If your platform sends email, jump ahead on your technical roadmap in weeks rather than years. Set up a partnering conversation with our team to learn more.
—Dr. Matthew Dunn
CEO, Campaign Genius