1/29 Deployment – Multiple lists, Exclusions, Form Dates, and New Year’s Resolutions

Sending to multiple lists, adding exclusions, and filtering by date of form submission

Two of the most requested features for Email Manager were:

1. The ability to send an email to multiple lists
2. The ability to add exclusions to an email

I’m happy to say that we have delivered both of these today. We understand that sometimes it’s easier to slice and dice your contacts into several lists and then choose to a single email to multiple of those lists. We also understand that sometimes you have a list of contacts that you want to exclude from an email blast. So now when you log in to Optify’s Email Manager, you’ll see this in the ‘To’ section:

And yes, you can also choose multiple lists to exclude.

Another very useful feature we’re happy to deliver is the ability to filter your contacts based on the date of their last form submission.

Customers often want to see just a list of people who have submitted a form in the last n days. If I may, I highly recommend creating a Saved Filter for a use case like this, so that in the future you can simply call up your saved filter in a single click.

New Year’s Resolutions

About a week ago, one of our developers noticed that despite the fact that we’re now a few weeks into 2013 our copyright still said 2012. It was one of those moments that clearly exemplifies the need to pay constant attention to the small stuff. Sure, having the wrong year in the little copyright message isn’t really going to impact our customers (I’d be very surprised if a single customer noticed it), but there are all sorts of other small things that can make a big difference. So we made a new year’s resolution: if we see a small change that will have a big impact, we’re gonna make sure we find the time to just get it done. Over the last couple weeks, we decided to make a couple such changes.

First, as you saw in the second screenshot of this post, we took an enormous single-column drop-down list and turned it into a multi-column drop-down complete with helpful headers. It’s amazing how much more enjoyable it is now to filter your contacts and build lists.

Second, we moved Lead Scoring in our navigation menu. For a while now, we’ve felt that it really belongs with Lead Intelligence and Alerts; your lead scores are reflected in Lead Intelligence, and your Alerts are keyed off the same items as your lead scores.

Third, we know that it hasn’t always been clear to customers that any report they create in the Reports section of Optify can be added as a widget to their dashboard. And it’s not their fault; we never made it explicitly clear. Hopefully it is now :)

Lastly, we’ve added email validation to our Landing Pages. If you’re anything like us, you get a lot of email addresses that are something like asdf or blahblahblah. When you’re collecting email addresses, there’s no way to make sure it’s a legitimate one without sending a confirmation email to that address), but what we can do is at least look for an ‘@’ symbol and a ‘.’ So now we do that.

So if you ever think there’s a small change that would make a big difference, please let us know.

Here’s to (copyright) 2013! ;)