Our product updates tell you what's new, why we made the change and how it works.
New Text Campaign
What's new?
We've added a new text campaign: 'Questionnaire via SMS prior to appointment".
This new questionnaire type will allow you to automatically send a questionnaire to a participant before the first session booked on an activity.
You'll need to create the campaign then edit the activity and select the campaign from its list of options.
In the configuration for the campaign, you can set an offset.
'0' would send the message when the first session of that activity starts.
'-72' would send the message three days prior.
When configuring the activity, you should set the 'Max Messages' field to '1' otherwise, the message would be sent again if you booked in multiple sessions for the activity.
Why does it matter?
It's a useful tool for users to provide the participants with an opportunity to complete a specified questionnaire before a specific session when it might be needed.
Email Bounces
What's new?
How we manage emails that have bounced
'Bounced' is when an email cannot reach its destination inbox. Instead, it will fail to deliver.
Why does it matter?
Previously, if emails bounced, we would allow you to immediately resend these to the recipient.
The outcome of bounced emails being repeatedly re-sent, has a detrimental impact to our outbound mailing service, causing our "sender reputation" to external domain mail providers, at worst having our IP Address being blocked from sending, which in turn impacts you, our customers.
This can have a knock-on effect as emails with a low 'score' can then arrive in spam or junk folders, this can prevent information from being readily available to the recipient.
What we've changed
We've now made it so if an email 'soft bounces', this will still be tried. However, 'Hard bounces' will now require the email address to be changed before the message can be sent again as it will be deemed that this email address will never be reachable.
Soft bounces are when an email cannot reach the inbox, but it is deemed to be a transient issue and may be deliverable upon trying again.
Hard bounces are when the email cannot reach the inbox due to it not being found on the server, or being blocked, these will not work upon retrying.
The outcome of introducing the above changes, will aid our sender reputation, preventing non-validated emails from being sent, ensuring your data is safe and secure and is unlikely to land in the hands of an incorrect receiving mailboxes. This improving the ability to achieve clean 1st time send emails to your clients.