Kentico Xperience 13 Refresh 8: Schedule the end of your campaigns and enjoy the holidays

At Kentico, we believe that your digital experience platform should help your business grow, not cause you more stress. That’s why we publish regular small refreshes instead of forcing you into a complex upgrade once a year. The latest enhancement for Kentico Xperience 13, Refresh 8, offers a large pack of features and integrations to help you schedule campaigns, please search engines, and improve user experience.

• Automatically redirect traffic from an expired landing page
• Schedule activation of your marketing automation process  
• Fill your metadata automatically with dynamic content
• Protect your forms against spam without impacting the customer experience with reCAPTCHA v3 integration
• Extend your multichannel marketing to SMS thanks to Twilio integration
• Level up your personalization with an updated Salesforce integration  

Automatically redirect traffic from an expired landing page

Your seasonal campaign is coming to an end and your landing page is scheduled to be unpublished during the holidays. In Kentico, you can all set this up automatically. But what will happen with all the visitors coming from saved emails and bookmarked links? You surely don’t want to put them off by taking them to the 404-error page.  

Yet another step towards automating tedious tasks, we have extended our content management application with a field for automatic redirection of traffic after page expiration. Now, if your landing page is switched off during the holidays, your visitors will be redirected to your chosen page. You can set it all up when launching the campaign. One less task on your to do list and one less thing to remember. As one of our partner implementation agencies said: “The redirect functionality for old content is always critical for the business.”

This enhancement will help you:

• Eliminate the number of 404-error pages – happier visitors and better ranking in search engines.
• Redirect visitors at the right moment – No need to manually redirect traffic when pages switch off.

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Schedule activation of your marketing automation process 

Imagine that you’re using marketing automation to hook new business partners. After they fill in a form on your website, you send them an email with an annual report that expires at the end of the year. To turn this process off, you had to manually deactivate it.  

With Refresh 8, you can set up the start and the end of the marketing automation process, so you don’t have to get up at midnight to switch it off when it becomes obsolete. One less reminder in your calendar, one less thing to worry about.  

This enhancement will help you:

• Keep marketing automation processes under control – no more obsolete emails.
• Switch marketing automation on and off at the right time – set up automatic activation of the process.

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Fill your metadata automatically with dynamic content

When marketers publish a new blog post on their website, they often forget to fill in metadata. But well-structured metadata helps increase organic traffic and attract visitors. That’s why we’ve already provided the option to prefill meta title with dynamic content, such as a brand’s name and category.  

Now, we’re extending this functionality to the meta description and keywords, too. Instead of adding the description manually, developers can configure macros for metadata fields, so you can reuse the content of other fields, for example summary, in meta description and keywords. As always with Kentico, you have the final word, and you can revise and edit the metadata if it doesn’t fit. “This makes managing metadata easy for highly structured content and when managing large numbers of pages," says Brenden Kehren, Kentico MVP and owner of Kehren Development.  

This enhancement will help you:

• Manage metadata of large pages with ease – auto-fill meta description and keywords.
• Unify your metadata across all content – with macros, all your metadata will have the same structure.

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Protect your online forms against spam without impacting the customer experience with reCAPTCHA v3 integration

Nobody likes spam, especially when robots clog up your forms and slow your work down. That’s why we already use the well-known “I’m not a robot” checkbox of reCAPTCHA v2 in the Kentico Xperience 13 Form Builder but you can make the user experience even better. Refresh 8 brings you reCAPTCHA v3, the latest, frictionless version, which blocks suspicious form submissions without needing any action from the user.

This simple integration lets you embed reCAPTCHA v3 into a form using Form Builder. When a page with this form loads, Google's reCAPTCHA v3 analyzes user's behavior and calculates a bot score from 0.0 (likely bot) to 1.0 (likely human). You can adjust the threshold of how strict your form validation should be to keep spam at bay while providing a smooth experience to real customers.

What does the reCAPTCHA v3 integration bring you?  

• A frictionless user experience - reCAPTCHA v3 does all the magic in the background.
• This integration is extremely simple to set up and use in the Form Builder. No development required.
• reCAPTCHA v3 requires a badge with Privacy Policy to be displayed. This integration provides several options to customize the position of this badge.

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Extend your multichannel marketing to SMS thanks to Twilio integration

Text messages can reach your customers anywhere. Our new integration with the Twilio text messaging service allows you to send anything directly to the device in your customers' hands. Marketers can use a new marketing automation step to react to form submissions, remind customers of abandoned checkouts, send notifications, and much more. You can use a phone number or the name of your company as a sender.
We made it simple for developers to just reuse our exposed Twilio API. It’s even easier now to set up custom functionalities like phone number verification, out of stock product watchdog, and order updates. We have also included a simple guide to help you get started with multi-factor authentication.

And, if you already use Twilio SendGrid, the Twilio SMS service is a convenient addition from an already approved company.

What does the Twilio integration bring you?  

• Add SMS to your multichannel arsenal and reach your customers wherever they are.
• Don’t rely on developers, marketers can easily set up SMSes in marketing automation.

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Level up your personalization with an updated Salesforce integration  

The Salesforce integration has been part of Kentico for six years and our customers use it heavily. It enables you to replicate leads from Kentico Xperience 13 to Salesforce based on Lead Scoring or through Marketing Automation after users submit a form. In Refresh 8 we updated the integration, so you can keep the data flowing both ways and leverage more customization options.  

If you want to move your personalization to the next level, the newly introduced two-way synchronization of contacts / leads is perfect for you. After your sales team marks a lead’s status as closed, you can propagate this information to Kentico Xperience 13 and stop showing them paid ads that cost you money. Additionally, when a lead has already been in touch with your sales team, you can personalize your content to fit their stage of buyer’s journey, nudging them to make a buying decision.

The new integration lets you synchronize a broader set of data with Salesforce. You can also add contact group data and other information directly in the admin UI through macros. And there is an even wider range of possibilities for a developer to easily customize and expand the integration through a broader API set.

What does the extended Salesforce integration bring you?  

•  Level up your personalization based on lead status and other data coming from Salesforce.
• Save your marketing budget by targeting only contacts with a buying potential.
• Equip your Sales team with more details on leads coming from Kentico.
• The synchronization goes both ways – a change in Salesforce is transferred to Kentico.

How does it help developers?  

• Improved and extended API to make customizations easier.
• Added support for Salesforce sandbox for easier testing.
• Updated Salesforce API to keep your tech stack future-proof.

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Keep your digital experience platform secure and up to date

Enhance your instance of Kentico Xperience 13 with Refresh 8 today. You will be able to use the out-of-the box features from this and all previous refreshes right away. And aside from that, you’ll get the latest hotfixes and security tests. Speak to one of our experts and discuss how Refresh 8 can help your everyday work with Kentico Xperience 13.  
 
Curious about what we’re preparing next? Stay tuned! The next refresh is coming in March.