In a galaxy not so far away... what to expect from Apteco in 2025

A spacewalk through major software innovations and new feature announcements at Apteco

One giant leap for Apteco's growth and vision

The Apteco story began 38 years ago, and remains true to the same core beliefs today - with a mission of creating industry-leading software to speedily convert customer data into actionable insights. Apteco is the powerful engine that works hard behind the scenes at hundreds of organisations, to ensure that every piece of marketing is relevant, targeted and personal – and all of this is now available in one easy-to-use platform making it even simpler for marketers to manage their campaigns from start to finish.

Landmark events to launch Apteco globally

In 2024, two milestone events took place to help cement Apteco's vision in the hearts and minds of its customers - to be the world's best insight into action marketing platform. On Wednesday 22 May 2024, Apteco founder and MD, James Alty hosted the UK kick-off event 'Apteco global launch' live before embarking on a tour of international conferences and events in Europe, North America and Australasia. Live streamed around the world to Apteco partners and users, the Apteco global launch included representatives from Apteco's international offices, including contributions from Germany, The Netherlands, Australia and Canada.

Six months later, Apteco's 18th annual user group conference and third hybrid event, Apteco Live, took place over two days on 15 and 18 November 2024. Apteco Live is considered one of the year's highlights for Apteco's partners and end users, and an opportunity to demonstrate the latest enhancements to Apteco's range of marketing software solutions.

Apteco partners and customers gathered in person on day one at the National Space Centre in Leicester where the event was live-streamed to online delegates in the UK and worldwide. On day two all delegates attended online where they watched this year’s shortlisted finalists present their award entries before an online vote.

Several exciting announcements were made at Apteco Live in November 2024, with those attending the conference in-person being treated to various feature reveals in the Planetarium! 

New feature announcements - what to look out for in 2025

Apteco CDP (version one)

The pre-release of the first version of the Apteco CDP (Customer Data Platform) is being launched in February 2025 available on the Apteco Cloud. This first incarnation is a new persistent data store capability, with identity resolution and validation rules, built in within the Apteco platform. The expected production release will be at the end of Q1 2025 subject to testing and feedback.

The Apteco CDP is designed for software users that have multiple data sources and want to put them into Apteco Orbit as one system - with sixty different identity resolution rules built into the application - in order to help identify distinct email addresses, phone numbers and physical addresses, each of which may be qualified by a unique ID, and linked to a unique individual, with the matching rules that have been developed. 

The Apteco CDP is the first version of a persistent data store, that can help users create a persistent ID on an individual, with four different contact points, permissions and update capability - along with the ability to have campaign data flowing around the platform.

A cosmic AI announcement... Apteco's GenAI

Much like many businesses over recent years, Apteco has been looking into AI. Extraordinary work has been undertaken by the Apteco product, development and commercial teams to research, understand, position and develop its AI capabilities for their partners and customers. AI is going to keep growing - the global AI market is projected to expand by 54% annually. Marketing teams are not immune to this huge wave of change; 66% of marketers have used AI in their marketing activities, 41% have used AI for content production, and 19% of marketers spent more than 40% of their marketing budget on AI-driven campaigns. Therefore, since it's here to stay, the marketing sector must adapt and take AI on board. 

At Apteco Live in November 2023, Apteco's annual user conference, James Alty, Managing Director, announced to partners and users that Apteco would find out how AI (particularly generative AI) can be used in a safe, constructive and practical manner within its existing product - and that's exactly what happened in development in the year that followed that announcement. Exactly one year later, at Apteco Live in November 2024, James spoke on how AI is going to revolutionise Apteco's end-to-end excellence:

"It's been a massive undertaking, that changes everything about how we think of software, how we think of data, how we think of analytics, and how we will interface and work with the systems that we provide."

James then officially introduced the new Apteco generative AI assistant - Orin.

Orin will be working with Apteco's many partners and customers over the months and years to come, and will become available in 2025 with capability in three tiers; as a knowledge guide, as a data navigator and as a solution builder. Watch this space for more detail and news to be announced about Orin in Q1 2025.

Recent major product developments

The launch of Apteco email

The launch of Apteco email in Q4 2023 was a major enhancement of Apteco’s fully comprehensive campaigning solution in the Apteco Orbit platform. Orbit is the next generation of Apteco technology, and email extends the existing campaign journey building functionality and follows in the footsteps of Apteco PeopleStage.

With Apteco email users don’t need to leave the Apteco platform to design their emails. Apteco's marketing insights platform now allows users to design, automate and send responsive, highly personalised emails.

The integrated email builder provides a secure and reliable email delivery platform, where users can seamlessly move from interrogating their data and creating highly targeted audience lists, to creating and delivering beautiful responsive emails that turn customer insights into campaign actions and results. 

Multi-stage, multi-channel campaigns

Since Q1 2024, Apteco Orbit offers multi-stage campaigning, enabling users to expand a single-stage campaign flow to accommodate their recipients' interactions with previous communications.

Users can create rules for moving recipients through a campaign using audience splits to ensure their messages are reaching the right audience segments. By integrating features such as time delays, audience splits, and interaction splits into campaigns, Orbit users can create targeted and impactful customer journeys and communication strategies within their business. 

The launch of the Apteco SMS service

Did you know that around 90% of customers check their phone within 20 minutes of waking up? And 75% of people reply to an SMS within 10 minutes of receiving it?

These statistics are why Apteco were raring to launch their new SMS service. Apteco SMS makes message creation easy, allowing users to personalise content, track character count, monitor SMS credits, and preview messages.

Apteco SMS is ideal for multi-channel campaigns, urgent notifications, promotions, and reminders, offering flexible targeting to help users reach the right audience and improve customer experience. The latest tool in Apteco Orbit's arsenal allows users to send personal, timely messages that are simple to create and add to automated campaign journeys, and reach customers instantly for time-sensitive alerts.

Introducing the landing page builder

Quick and easy to set-up with a smooth and responsive drag and drop interface, the new Apteco landing page builder is available to all Apteco email users.

Landing pages are an essential part of a digital marketing campaign and serve as entry points for visitors who click on specific ads, email links, or search engine results. They are designed to guide visitors towards a specific, clear call-to-action (CTA), such as making a purchase, booking a demo, or downloading a resource.

Users can capture visitor information with an embedded form to generate valuable leads, design a landing page from scratch, or use pre-built templates to help craft beautiful landing pages with ease. All quick and easy to set-up with a smooth and responsive drag and drop interface. Users can boost landing page performance with custom URLs, subdomains, SEO settings, and page descriptions for improved visibility.

Triggered events in campaigns

Apteco Orbit users can now enhance engagement and boost overall marketing effectiveness by guiding customers through their journey using pre-defined campaign actions (triggered events) that are initiated by a specific customer behaviour or action. Triggered events in Orbit campaigns allow users to automatically respond to key recipient actions to deliver timely and relevant messages to customers and prospects.

These could include thank you messages triggered by new purchases, subscriptions or donations, product recommendations triggered by browsing activity, or confirmations triggered by enquiries. By leveraging triggered events, marketers can automate their outreach efforts, personalise their customer experiences, and improve overall campaign performance. 

Message objectives in campaigns

As an extension to Apteco's campaign goals functionality, users can now set specific objectives for each message in a campaign. This includes tracking the performance of key actions, such as registrations, purchases, or app downloads, and assessing how individual messages contribute to overall campaign goals. This real-time response tracking enables immediate monitoring of message actions, providing instant insights into campaign performance and allowing for swift adjustments to optimise results.

Campaign-linked dashboards

Apteco Orbit users can now launch a real-time tracker or reporting dashboard directly from their published campaigns. Dashboards are generated pre-populated with key metrics – which is a huge time-saver and will pull costs, campaign objectives and goals directly from the campaign. Users can then customise and edit their dashboard, in exactly the same way they would a standard dashboard – by adding themes, metrics and filters, specific to their needs.

Once they have refined their dashboard, they can share it with their wider team for maximum impact. Users can expect to instantly access key performance indicators like communications, recipients, and revenue, eliminating the need for manual setup. They can also gain flexibility to customise dashboards by adding data, filters, and themes for tailored insights, and with data integration that supports real-time SQL data for immediate updates or FastStats data for detailed reporting - this really is a game changer in campaign reporting.

Dynamic maps in audience workbooks 

Administrators can now easily upload shapefiles directly into Orbit. GeoJSON files up to 10 MB can be uploaded directly into Orbit in the ‘map settings’ (in Orbit ‘application settings’) and the upload process is uncomplicated and intuitive. Administrators can also view and manage their shapefiles in this area. Once the shapefiles have been uploaded, the user can then, in just a few quick clicks, utilise the new map settings in an audience to generate dynamic, zoomable, pannable maps to further analyse and refine their data. 

Find out more about Apteco's product milestones, along with various resources and blogs.