This week Infusionsoft rolled out a brand new look and feel for the campaign builder, and the reviews are relatively varied – some folks seem to dig the new curvy lines, while others find the published green to be a little…much.

Beyond the line changes, and new colors – the most notable changes are the shift away from a background grid (you’ll see a mostly blank canvas with dots to help align and arrange elements), and the addition of “status indicator” text above the icons.

But no matter how you feel about the new look and feel of the campaign builder it’s still just that, a new look and feel.

Functionally, your existing campaigns won’t require you to do or change anything.

However, alongside this facelift Infusionsoft snuck in some features that I am excited about.

The Email Open Goal

If you’ve been an Infusionsoft user for any length of time, then odds are you’ve heard people asking for the ability to achieve a goal when contacts open an email (or maybe you’ve asked for it yourself.

Either way – the new Email Open Goal does just that.

Pretty slick, right?

With the addition of this new goal method you can now start or stop automation when an email is opened (or a series of emails).

That means you can craft sequences to automatically follow up with contacts who haven’t opened your email, because once they open it, they’ll achieve a goal and transition into the next available sequence.

This is great, but…

As exciting and powerful as this new feature is, I wanna highlight that it’s still dependent on the way email opens are tracked and reported, which has some well documented flaws.

I’ll just say this: There are a number of ways to read an email that don’t report an open, and a number of ways for an open to be reported without the recipient actually reading the email.

Does that mean not to use this goal?

Not at all.

You can totally use it, but I’d be careful about depending on it for absolutely essential parts of your customer journey, because it’s far from iron clad.

Enough about that, let’s take a look at the next shiny new feature.

The Create Order Widget

Historically you’ve been able to create orders inside of a sequence by using a legacy Action Set.

In fact, this was the only way to accomplish a “One Click Upsell” without using any third-party tools.

But with this update Infusionsoft also introduced the ability to create an order as a native step in a sequence.

You might be wondering…

Q: Will it trigger a purchase goal when the order is created?
A: No, it will not trigger a purchase goal if an unpaid order is created – even if you check “$0 invoices” on the purchase goal. However, it WILL trigger a purchase goal when a payment is collected for the order that was created.

(Shout out to Mallory Balnis of Plum Crazy Automation for helping test this.)

What I really like about this feature is that we have the choice to:

1. charge the order automatically (if they have a card on file)
2. send a payable invoice
3. send an invoice without payment options

These are options we’ve had for a while on invoices and quotes we generate manually, but to be able to access them as part of an automated workflow opens up a lot of new possibility.

So, it’s perfect?

Not quite – it doesn’t look like you can easily adjust the price of the product once it’s added – but my hope is that they’ll add some additional options and flexibility in a future update.

What does all this mean?

Candidly, I don’t really care about the new look and feel – what I am excited about is the focus on enhancing and improving the campaign builder.

Yes, the new features – both the email open goal and create order widget give us the ability to build automation that wasn’t previously as accessible.

But beyond that – I’m stoked about the improved performance and reliability. The reduced visual complexity of the new interface has had a positive impact on speed and usability in building and reporting on campaigns.

If I missed anything, leave it in the comments below – otherwise, check out the complete release notes here.