September 11, 2008

OfficeAutopilot Summer Release: New stuff for automationheads.

We’ve got a slew of new features in the beta build… some of you have seen them in your accounts already.  If you’re an existing client and you’d like to give these beta features a run for their money, let us know and we’ll pop you on there.

We’re going to push this one through pretty quickly, because we got another SERIOUS update hot on its heels. Late this month we’re releasing some stuff that changes the game altogether….

For now, here’s what’s new:

1. Totally new and improved fulfillment lists. You’ll be able to schedule when they go out.. once a day, every Tuesday, once a month, whatever.

2. All sorts of new permission settings. Much more granular control over who can do and see what.

3. Call Outcomes.This is cool. For phone-type tasks, you’ll be able to set available ‘outcomes’ for the call and then run rules based on the selected outcome.  For example, the call pop screen says ‘What happened on this call?’ You set the drop down fields: No answer, Left message, Wants Demo, Long-Term Prospect… whatever. Then, you can add those outcomes to ActiveResponse rules: ‘If Call Outcome = Long-Term Prospect then add to long term lead nurture sequence’ or whatever you want. It’ll be interesting to see how y’all use this.

4. Improved Bounce Manager. Yep.

5. Product Management and Purchase History. Record purchases and see the actual revenue you’re generating by marketing channel. See customer lifetime value. Also, purchases will now be in ActiveResponse… so, for example: ‘If contact buys product x, put them on the product x follow up campaign’.

Getting purchases into the system can be done in several ways. Manually, of course, but also via the API or with our snazzy email parser: just copy us on shopping cart receipts and we’ll merge by email address and update the contact record. Ask for more info if this sounds interesting.

6. Email Logging. If you’re not using Outlook but you do want to keep a log of emails back and forth, this is the way. We’ll give each user a unique email address that you can forward or BCC your emails to, and if we find an email match, we’ll pop in into the contact log. Simple, but sweet.

7. New Rule: “Set date field to today” You asked for it, so here it is.

8. Serious backend upgrades. If you’ve got a big database, you’ll notice serious speed improvements. We’ve updated how all kinds of different processes interact with the database, and we’ve found huge speed improvements all over: contact log is much faster, sending large email blasts is about 10x faster, search is faster, adding to sequences, etc etc.

That’s about it, I think. Lots more in a couple weeks. Some BIG stuff.

Talk soon.