Well, if you read my post the other day recapping my experience at PartnerCon, then you probably already know that the product updates were one of the things that I absolutely loved, and I’m excited to get down to it.

But first, I’d better give a little COA. I am not an official representative of Infusionsoft, so I’m only reporting what I heard, and the way that I understood it. I did go out of my way to ask questions, and to gather as much information as I could, but it’s entirely possible that the features as I understood them may vary slightly or dramatically by the time they’re introduced into the app. Also, I’m going to project when some of the features are coming out based on either what was said, or what I inferred; but because there are so many factors that go into software development, it’s possible that some features might be released sooner or later than I predict.

Okay then, let’s party:

Feature: Campaign Categories
Why it matters: Well, right now a lot of people have developed complex naming conventions for their campaigns. The reason that most people do this is so that they can easily sort and filter their campaigns. Soon here you won’t need to do that anymore, because Infusionsoft is going to add the ability to categorize your campaigns. This is a feature I’ve heard requested for years, but because it isn’t really critical, it hasn’t made the cut. Until now.

I see this simple update making life easier, making apps more organized, and just generally saving time. I think a lot of people will create broad categories for the various stages of lifecycle marketing (Lead Gen, Nurture, Sales, Fulfillment, etc), but I’ve also talked to a few partners who plan to use categories for their various products, so that all the campaigns pertaining to one product are all in a single “folder”. Eventually you’ll be able to archive campaigns too, but for the meantime you could just create an archive folder for your retired campaigns.
When: November Release

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Feature: New features coming to the Infusionsoft Sync for Gmail
Why it matters: When the Gmail sync first came out it was awesome and overdue, Infusionsoft saw the value in it and purchased it so that it could be available for all users for free. But, it had it’s fair share of issues, and my impression is that it just didn’t get a whole lot of attention internally, until now.

There are a handful of updates coming to the gmail sync app, here are the highlights:

• If you receive an email from someone who isn’t in your database, the plugin will now pre-parse information from an emails signature into the appropriate fields and give you the choice to add this contact to Infusionsoft.
• When sending an email in Gmail you’ll have two “send” buttons, one that just sends like normal, and another that sends with an Infusionsoft tracking pixel AND records that email back to Infusionsoft.
• You’ll have the option to have pop-up browser notifications (in Chrome and Firefox) when an email you sent is opened, based on that tracking pixel.
• You’ll have access to internal forms right within the gmail sidebar.
• Multiple languages will be supported in the plugin (Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, etc)

When: My understanding is that some of these features are available as of this week, and others will be added over the upcoming months.

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Feature: Changing Goal Methods on the Fly
Why it matters: With a recent update, Infusionsoft restricted the ability to quickly change the setting of an existing goal. So, if you had a link click goal and you wanted to switch it to a tag goal, you’d have to delete the first goal, drag out the new goal, and then name and configure this new goal. Depending on how you use Infusionsoft, those few extra steps could be wasting you a fair amount of time. Not anymore friends. Infusionsoft has listened to our feedback and is bringing back the ability to quickly and easily adjust goal methods without having to delete/replace goals.
When: November Release

Oh, and btw, you’ll also be able to collapse the campaign builder menu. Hooray!

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Feature: Mobile App Update
Why it matters: Infusionsoft is going to update a few things in their mobile app. If you didn’t know Infusionsoft had a mobile app, you’re not alone. They’ve had it for years, but the functionality has been severely limited. The mobile app gave you the ability to look up contacts, pull up their address, or phone number, and if you wanted to, you could apply a tag. But that was really it, and as far as I could tell the mobile app was primarily used by organizations that had/have sales reps. Well, if you’re a sales rep and you’re using a mobile app on your phone, it seems pretty natural that you’d want the ability to see your contacts opportunities, and possible update an opportunity stage from your phone, right? Bingo. Sales teams can rejoice, because that’s coming.
When: My notes say that Opportunities will be in mobile in October initially, with a follow-up “full scale” release in December.

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Feature: Merge Fields and API Upgraded to support UTF-8
Why it matters: This matters because acronyms are super fancy. No, jk, honestly this might not matter to you at all, but supporting UTF-8 (as I understand it) is a really big deal to anyone who uses a non-english character set. Being able to merge these characters into emails and tasks is important, and having the API support this means that information added to Infusionsoft (names, cities, etc) don’t have to be translated to English, and won’t be corrupted when being added. This one is fairly technical, but for the folks who need this, it’s a pretty big deal.
When: I think the merge field part is already out, and the API support is coming soon?

Okay, that’s a lot of awesome features, and I hope you’re as jazzed as I am. This post is starting to sprawl, so let’s break it off here and I’ll recap the last three features in the next post. In the meantime, see anything on this list that you’re excited about?