10/17 Deployment – Email Comes Alive!

We named last night’s deployment: “Email Comes Alive! (Subtitled: Look out, Peter Frampton)”

Words can’t really express how delighted/ecstatic/overjoyed we are to begin rolling out some truly magical changes to Optify’s Email Manager. So instead of words, I’d like to use a couple pictures. (You really need to click through on each photo to get the full effect – And extra credit for anyone who can identify all the movie references in the After picture)

Before:

After:

“Wow,” you say, “that’s a HUGE improvement. Now I can easily:

• View All my emails or only Sent emails, or only Drafts (Oh, and thanks for showing me how many there are in each group)
• See clearly who Sent/Drafted each email, and when
• See which Contact List each email was sent to
• Sort my emails by any of these very pretty columns
• See exactly how many people were Sent each email, Opened it, Clicked, Hard Bounced, Soft Bounced, etc, etc, and click on the numbers to be brought to Contact Manager”

And usually, this is about the time you see “Optify Connects” and you say, “Wait, what’s this ‘Optify Connect’ thingy?”

We thought you might ask. In fact, we even put a little question mark in there for you to click on, at which point you’ll see this message:

An Optify Connect occurs when Optify is able to connect a person with a browsing device. After this occurs, all visits to your site from that device, including any previous visit history, will be attributed to that Contact. This turns otherwise anonymous traffic into actionable and insightful information.

“Wait,” you say as you shake your head to keep it from exploding, “huh?”

Glad you asked. This is the magic part. This is the thing that Optify can give you that no regular old email provider can. Instead of trying to explain, allow me to illustrate:

You have a website with Optify’s tracking code properly installed. You attend a conference one day and collect Contact Information from all the folks that are excitedly stopping by your booth. You get back to the office and upload these Contacts into Optify’s beautiful, powerful, elegant Contact Manager. You create a Contact List with all these uploaded Contacts and send them a thank you email with a link to your site. Here’s where it gets good. You ready?

Let’s say you have a Contact named Rob Eleveld. I know, it’s a very silly name, but let’s pretend. Let’s say that Rob has visited your site anonymously a few times in the last couple months. Optify has a record of someone visiting, but we don’t have his name — Rob never filled out a form, so he’s just another anonymous visitor. Well now Rob opens your thank you email and clicks on the link to your site. BOOM! Did you just see that? No, you didn’t; but it happened. Optify just connected Rob’s previous visit history with the email address you just used. In other words, when you go back to Rob’s Contact Detail page, which was a mostly blank page when you created him as a Contact only moments earlier, now you’ll see exactly when he’s previously visited your site, exactly which pages he’s viewed and for how long. You have now captured some real, actionable intelligence. This is the stuff that Sales people’s dreams are made of. And the kind of stuff that makes a Marketer a hero.

“Holy crap!” you exclaim. “This is unbelievable. This blows boring old email stuff out of the water.” We cannot disagree. “What about people who haven’t ever been to my site? Can they be Optify Connects?” Why yes, they can. If Rob had never been to your site before he clicked on that link, it is still an Optify Connect. We’ve connected Rob with that visitor on your site. And going forward, any time he comes to your site, you’ll know that it’s Rob. “Wow,” you say. “This is some pretty impressive stuff.” Well thank you. You’re too kind. We thought you’d like to have a column calling out how smart you were to choose Optify. Now we just need to make it so you can click on that number and see exactly who your Optify Connects are – just hold on, have you noticed how quickly we’re shipping new features? It’s coming. We’re going as fast as we can, and we want to give you everything we’ve got, the moment we’ve got it. (On that tip, I suppose I need to warn you that in order to ship this feature as soon as possible, you will only see Optify Connects on new emails – sent on 10/16 or later).

We realize it’s going to take you a while to settle down from the excited state all these new features have put you in. You’re gonna be eagerly clicking on all your stats, each of which take you into Contact Manager with our gorgeous new filters set properly. But we know you. It won’t be long until you’re asking for More, More, More! Well just you wait. We’ve got some more wonderful updates to Email Manager coming soon…

Here’s our very own Iggy (Ignacio) doing a demonstration: