What’s New in our Fall Software Release

August 9, 2011 | by Brian Gates

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The upcoming Fall software release is the first of many sweeping changes coming to Infusionsoft over the next several months. This release marks the second time we’ve used the POV Method, a research and development methodology created by our VP of Product Management, Richard Tripp, that focuses our product delivery teams on identifying target users and then ensuring that the software creates the benefits they value most.

Watch the recorded webinar to learn more about our Fall Release. Watch Now!

We prepared for this release by investing hundreds of hours mining data, conducting interviews and visiting with customers, prospects, and users of other products, and creating “current reality” sessions that assist us in understanding target users day-to-day experience.  The result from all this work was several clearly defined benefit statements. These benefits statements guide everything that follows in the product development process.

In this release we focused on designing for the following target user benefits:

“I want to be able to work through a list of leads with greater speed and efficiency.”

“I want to easily build, manage and assess the effectiveness of automation campaigns.”

“I want to ensure that my email communications reach my intended recipients.”

These benefits yielded the following new features in the application during our Fall Release:

Interactive List View – Quickly Work Through a List of Leads.
The Interactive List View improves efficiency for CRM users who want to quickly work through a list of contacts or opportunities. Users can view vital contact information at a glance and use the Interactive Panel to add notes, schedule tasks, manage tags, and initiate follow-up sequences with the click of a button.

Campaign Builder – Easily Create Automated Campaigns
The Campaign Builder is an easy-to-use graphical tool that allows users to create, launch and monitor automated campaigns. The new Campaign Builder is flexible, allows users to start campaigns with any trigger and link to existing content to save time. Users will appreciate the confidence that comes from the Campaign Checklist and Readiness Indicators as well as campaign stats and reporting widgets.

99% Email Deliverability – Get More Emails to the Inbox
In this release, we’ve made incremental improvements to Infusionsoft’s state-of-the-art email systems that increase the speed at which emails are sent while maintaining deliverability above 99%. An independent audit confirms Infusionsoft’s position as an industry-leading email sender by awarding us the highest email deliverability audit score on record.

E-Commerce Set-up Wizard – Get Organized and Sell Products
We’re making many under-the-hood improvements to our e-commerce features that you can’t see. In this release, we have organized our E-Commerce Set-up Wizard in a way that is logical and helps users manage every step of selling products and services over the web.

I am extremely excited for our Fall Release and every release leading up to InfusionCon. These future releases will underscore that Infusionsoft is easy and powerful. My team and I will provide more details over the next couple weeks about these upcoming features and their benefits. Stay tuned!

Watch the recorded webinar to learn more about our Fall Release. Watch Now!

 

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  • Matthew Jones

    Will this include the ability to have the date/time correctly set for those using Infusion who dont reside in America..??

  • Jonathan Horne

    As comment above: Why would you spend time and money building features yet ignore a fatal bug of date/time for other countries? Do you not want us as customers?

    • http://www.joemanna.com/blog/ Joseph Manna

      Thanks for the comment, Jonathan. I’m not aware of the issue that you’re referring to. Users can adjust their own time zones by following the advice contained in this help article: http://kb.infusionsoft.com/index.php?/article/AA-00215/0/How-do-I-customize-a-Users-Profile-and-Signature.html . Also, businesses that need to have their dates in the DD/MM/YYYY format can notify our support team and we can switch them over – it’s a back-end change – but we can do it. :)

      Our product management team is laser-focused on making the software easy to use for all users. Period. You give them a shiny object and they’ll throw it out the window. They work on improving the usability, ease of use and capability of core features of our application before “bolting on” new features. Brian explains this in the post and Richard Tripp has in the past as well: http://www.infusionblog.com/infusionsoft-products/know-thy-user/ and http://www.infusionblog.com/infusionsoft-products/are-you-our-target-user/ .

      Our international users are important to us and we love the fact they choose us for their marketing automation software. However, currently, we have designed the software for North American users. While we don’t prohibit non-US users from software, we do our best to set expectations when they get started that not all character-sets and currencies are supported.

      We plan on expanding our international-compatible features in the future. From a development perspective, we’re actually making tweaks behind the scenes that will get us there sooner.

      I appreciate your passion for us to better serve our international users. When I get more concrete details, I’ll be happy to share it for others.

      Thanks!

      ~Joseph

      • Matthew Jones

        the note you mention allows us to change the time zone for calander and for the time stamp on the clients page for when emails have been sent, but…. We still need to send emails based on american Eastern time – Go and try putting an email into a sequence based on a date (which is based on US Eastern time) – If I want to send an email reminder for a webinar based on the date, it will actually go out the day after the actual event. We basically need a mathematical degree to try and work out the time/date in sequences considering that midnight in the US is 2pm in the afternoon here. If we want an email to go out on Monday morning, we need to schedule it to be sent on a Sunday afternoon, but if we want an email to go out on Monday afternoon, we need to schedule it for Monday morning.

        As a test for yourself, just spend 1 week using Infusionsoft in an overseas timezone and see how far you get – I’m sure you will find it just as frustrating as everybody who is based overseas.

        • Fabienne

          Thanks for posting this Matthew. We are in Australia considering buying Infusionsoft but the problem u raised is making us reconsider. Was a solution found?

          • Saiffil

            Infusionsoft is the best in my opinion. However, if you reside slightly different from the server time zone, not to mention if you’re from the other side of the world, its horrible to work with especially if your clients were mainly your local people.

            The problem doesn’t only arise regarding email but on orders, invoices, followups’, campaigns, programming side (http post to another server), basically anything that can be automated will be a disaster.

            The promise that it will be revisit have been repeated again n again, for years. The hope been dragged for years n we’re getting older.

          • http://www.nlpworldwide.com Heidi Heron

            Fabienne,
            I’m in Australia and have been using Infusionsoft for almost 2 years and love it! There are obviously a few things that could be addressed regarding timezones, but all are workable. And, for my company, the timezone issues are manageable. We use a custom field on invoices that are generated by Infusion with the correct date – and set our timezone settings to meet our needs in Australia. The only thing that I haven’t been able to use is the voice broadcast – but more from a cost perspective (I can’t seem to find out how much calls cost to Australia). I have a lot of clients in the US too – they get emails based on my Australian settings, but I’ve never had any complaints.
            Make your settings correct, create some custom fields and bob’s your uncle!
            In a perfect infusion-world it would be great to be able to send things based on my clients location – and be able to customise based on my location. However, I’m happy to give up the perfect world simply because Infusion helps so much on all other sides of business.  
            I would choose Infusion time and time again!
            .

          • http://www.carltaylor.com.au Carl Taylor

            Hi Heidi,

            I too am considering making a switch to Infusionsoft, and was pretty well convinced but am now concerned about this timezone issue.

            Are there knowledgebase articles or anything that explains how to do this workaround that you have setup for yourself? And does that mean you are able to schedule emails in our timezone or do you still have to use a date and time converter before setting the times?

        • http://www.joemanna.com/blog/ Joseph Manna

          Thanks for clarifying what you meant by the time zone conundrums that you find yourself in. I apologize for not catching that earlier.

          Right now, we can’t fix for this because it’s currently all hard-coded throughout the application. However, we do want to revisit this potentially over the next year. There are a lot of major changes to take place before we can do this. Nevertheless, we have our best and brightest working to help make our software valuable, trustworthy and reliable.

          I understand your concerns. The site http://www.timeanddate.com/ has a number of resources to help you convert timezones across the world, so it will help take the complexity from sending broadcasts.

          Thanks for your feedback,
          Joseph

          • Saiffil

            Actually you need to fix it before everything else.

          • Matthew Jones

            Actually 4 years ago I was convinced to sign up based on this being fixed. I wasnt going to join up at $5,000 based on the time zone issue but out of the blue one day got a phone call saying the issue was being fixed and to sign up NOW to get all the bonuses (Which where never sent to me either). 4+ years later and now being told another year. The current issue with date stamping invoices from the prior day is actually a legal issue in Australia, so its an issue that goes way beyond just the scheduling of emails etc. I have had many complaints from clients about the dating of invoices – Sooner or later, one of your Australian Infusion users are going to receive a ‘Please Explain’ from the Tax Office on backdating invoices.

          • Saiffil

            I strongly feel for you. We have been trying to get attention on many ways. Forum, cases, ideas (vote) to get completely ignored or in this case, a very nice word. 

            Joseph, please have a handful of programmers dedicated to solving this. If it has been taken seriously it won’t take long. I believe you will increase your client base from overseas massively if you can fix this.

          • http://www.joemanna.com/blog/ Joseph Manna

            Thanks for bringing this up, Saiffil.

            I want you to know that we do care about user feedback. Our product strategy (as a company) wasn’t always clear a couple years ago. Now, it is. With Richard Tripp and his team at the wheel, we’re in good hands.

            I’ll be honest, this will take long regardless of the resources we throw at it because EST is used so frequently throughout the app for all our automation, marketing and even e-commerce. However, we have a lot of bright minds who want to make our users happy, so it’s not impossible.

            We are growing our development team aggressively so they can take on bigger, bolder and more exciting projects. We’re getting all our systems and processes dialed-in so we can double and triple-down on it and make our app highly recommendable and used by hundreds of thousands of businesses.

            Please see my comment in response to Matt that will give you perspective in this update.

            http://www.infusionblog.com/infusionsoft-products/whats-new-in-our-fall-software-release/#comment-290255329

            Let me know if I can be of any further assistance!

            ~Joseph

          • Helen

            I would love to recommend IS but not in Australia for all the reasons Mathew has outlined. Our invoices show payments made the day before the invoice, if done before 2pm, or USA EST midnight.
            And heres another one. A staff member was sending a voice broadcast voicemail to 3500 people because he thought Infusion had our timezone and Sydney is also Eastern Standard Time in Australia. Our clients  are often over 60 years and imagine what they would be thinking getting a phone call at 4.30am our time!!  Luckily I saw it but it took until 3.30am here to find someone in the US to stop it. That could have been the end of our business full stop.
            Please fix the timezne issues. I have voted, support cased, suggested, snet emails. Only empty promises. 

          • http://www.joemanna.com/blog/ Joseph Manna

            Thanks for bringing this up, Helen.

            I understand your real-world risks in sending at the wrong time. Please see my comments back to Matt at the link below, which will give you an update where things stand.

            http://www.infusionblog.com/infusionsoft-products/whats-new-in-our-fall-software-release/#comment-290255329

            Let me know if I can be of any further assistance!

            ~Joseph

          • http://www.joemanna.com/blog/ Joseph Manna

            Thank you for bringing this up. As you can tell, I wasn’t aware of these concerns, and most notably, the pain that our international users have felt. It’s apparent that we can do better for our users, I don’t question that.

            I mentioned earlier that everything today is hard-coded in around EST time. This is a short-sight that we had many years ago when creating out software …well before we had international users.

            With over a million lines of code (no joke), this change won’t come quick or easy. This is a core component of our software’s architecture that will need to be revisited by our senior developers to address. Additionally, it will need to be tested excessively because we need to make sure it works for all our users correctly. All of this adds up the time for us to execute on.

            On a sidenote, we are ramping up our development team to take on refactor projects like this including innovative ideas from our product management team.

            I can’t promise this will be fixed. However, I can gather your feedback and inform the necessary decision-makers on this and represent your collective and individual feedback.

            Talking with a few others in the company who are more familiar with this, it seems this will more than likely be prioritized a little higher on our backlog of improvements we will make to our software.

            I appreciate your candid feedback, trusting us to improve and being honest with how this affects you. I’ll follow-up with a status update next week with details so you can be assured we care about the satisfaction of ALL our users no matter where they do business.

            This issue aside, I hope these pains don’t sour your experience of our Fall Release. These improvements do provide benefit in light of our EST timezone limitations and I hope you look forward to receiving the update.

            If you have questions or wish to get in touch for anything else, email me.

            Thanks,
            Joseph Manna
            joseph.manna AT infusionsoft.com

          • Matthew Jones

            Actually, this very same comment has been brought up by many people over many years.
            As you explain it now, it seems as though I was lied to so i would part with the $5,000 sign up fee (which it was 4 years ago).
            The software is almost impossible to use for overseas users when using follow up sequences based on date – for example trying to send out a reminder to attend a webinar, it is sent out the following day after the webinar is over.
            After 4 years I will be closing my account – Ive been patient waiting for the time zone change that was promised when I signed up and its now quite clear that this was NEVER going to happen. I’ve signed up to a competing product that has the time zone feature built in and does everything else that Infusion can do.

          • Wes Schaeffer

            Matthew,
            At the risk of starting an international conflict I say “B.S.” that you found a competing product that does EVERYTHING InfusionSoft can do. (The closest I’ve seen is Marketo, which STARTS at $1,200 per month!) How do you use this program for 4+ years, interact with the great staff (there were a few dogs over the years but they’ve been weeded out) and suddenly pull the plug because of this time zone issue? How can Heidi use it for less than 2 years and have a way to address the time zone issue? I thought you Aussies were tough. Maybe Aussies from Heidi’s part of the country are where the tough ones come from.
            Wes

          • Flanders_factory

            This is an issue that I agree would be important to fix. This at the moment is giving us mixed data reports. we are left wondering what the day’s takings are, x or y. Very confusing when viewing the days reports on sales compared to the appointments we’ve seen

    • http://www.joemanna.com/blog/ Joseph Manna

      This isn’t a bug. The software was never designed to have a customizable timezone. Only recently we’ve experienced a rush of new international users using Infusionsoft for their businesses. Unfortunately, we haven’t had time to catch up and address this.

      Please see my response to Matt below for an update:

      http://www.infusionblog.com/infusionsoft-products/whats-new-in-our-fall-software-release/#comment-290255329

      We do want you as customers. However, we do our best to inform ALL international users about the limitations before they choose us. A majority of whom can live with the limitations and are able to work around them. For those that absolutely can’t, we don’t want them to be dissatisfied, either. We are happy to help a customer migrate to another solution of their business if they are not benefiting from us.

      Let me know if I can be of any further assistance!

      ~Joseph

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_FDMQI7QZ5EC4WWVW6MKIXQMIZU Bilal Qayyum

    hmm great software.. I always use infusionsoft for my marketing campaigns. Its really good

    Thanks,

    http://www.the-marketers.com

    • http://www.joemanna.com/blog/ Joseph Manna

      Thank you, Bilal! Glad we can make a difference for your marketing campaigns. :-)

  • Chad and VasserPro

    I’m stoked to see the nitty gritty of the improvements.

    Also, thanks for listening to the little guys.  You rock!

    • http://www.joemanna.com/blog/ Joseph Manna

      Excellent! We’ll be posting more details soon. Thanks for the comments! :-)

  • Fred

    I always look forward to the new releases, and yet one basic feature is always lacking – the ability to put an email on the end of a followup sequence and have it delivered to people who have completed the sequence and may be beyond the number of days attached to that step in the sequence.

    About half of my sales happen past the 30-45 day mark. Some are as many as 300-450 days after they get on my list. Every time I add to my “drip” followup sequence I have to go through a series of ridiculous hurdles to get the new email to people at the end of that sequence. It’s very much the antithesis of “automated” marketing.

    The worst part is that I had to switch to Aweber for my new subscription program because emails were not being delivered to people who had completed the existing sequence and these are my hyper-responsive customers.

    There was a time when there was a checkbox that said “send this email to everyone who has completed this sequence in the last X days.” That disappeared months ago and with its disappearance came a promise that this problem would be resolved. It’s been months and I, along with others, are still waiting.

    On a positive note, there are things I do with Infusionsoft that I truly could not do any other way. The way I can track leads from PPC click through to a sale across potentially months and many promotions is something I absolutely cannot do with any other platform and it’s made me a lot of money. For that I am thankful and it is what keeps me as a client.

    But please, fix this problem once and for all. I don’t need pretty optin forms (that I have to re-engineer anyway because they aren’t formatted correctly) and I don’t need anything new.

    If I’m your target user:

    “I want reporting that is easy to use, relevant, and accurate. Several reports that I’ve tried to use did nothing or don’t do what their name implies (at least to me.)”

    “I want an easy to use way to sell my products – order forms that don’t integrate with paypal or shopping cart pages that won’t let me do an upsell process – these are not good choices.”

    “I want to be able to setup email campaigns and test them. And I want to be able to automate my contact with prospects and not forget about the people who have been on the list for a long time and have completed my existing content.”

    I hope my comments are helpful to the design and implementation team. I know I’m complaining and raining on the parade here… but I’m frustrated by the lack of improvement on some older, core issues in favor of flashy new gadgets and gizmos.

    • Robert

      I’m with you 100% Fred – I’m fed up of providing quality feedback about this from an experienced marketer. I also agree on all this time being wasted making pretty forms that advanced sites simply won’t use.

      I’d like to add one:

      EASY split testing of Templates & Subject lines with respect to open rates & click throughs …. Infusionsoft is in the ark in this respect and loses out to far cheaper competitors.

      On the upside, the automation and segmentation power is unrivalled … but SURELY there must be someone in Infusionsoft who actually is a marketing pro and understand why these basic issues are KEY to growth?

      • http://www.joemanna.com/blog/ Joseph Manna

        We’re listening, Robert. Right now, it’s not something we can fit into our development cycle, but it is on our backlog to get done. We’re working on it and once we get closer, I’ll be happy to follow up and let you know.

        Thanks for the feedback,
        Joseph

    • http://www.joemanna.com/blog/ Joseph Manna

      Fred,

      Thanks for sharing this candid feedback. I’ve shared it with our product management team. You’ll be delighted to hear that we made progress in the Fall Release to manage campaigns and follow-up even better.

      You are our target user from what I can tell. You’ll benefit highly from this release. Regarding the EST timezone issue, see my response to Matt below:

      http://www.infusionblog.com/infusionsoft-products/whats-new-in-our-fall-software-release/#comment-290255329

      Your comments will be used to improve our application. Thanks for taking the time to share them with us. Let me know if I can be of any further assistance!

      ~Joseph

  • Saiffil

    Infusionsoft decided to take on a lot of new features and enhancement but still forget that the majority of the feature became useless as long as the time zone / time stamp for everything could not be set.

    I’m really getting frustated over years and tired of waiting.

    • http://www.joemanna.com/blog/ Joseph Manna

      I respectfully disagree. These features are very useful and we have surveys and data that suggest that the changes are in line with what a majority of users need and benefit from us.

      We do have a minority of customers internationally that have been hurt by this limitation. We’ll take a second look at this and I’ll give you and others an update when we make progress.

      Thanks for the candid feedback.

      ~Joseph

  • Phill

    As a UK customer Joseph, the Time Zone issue is a real pain in the back side and completely undermines the ease of use surrounding follow up sequences. 

    e.g. I start a campaign to a business client and I want his emails to land with him on a Monday at 09.30 am and then again on Wednesday at 10.00 am (GMT) UK time 

    A complete nightmare …. extrapolate this over a long campaign… well I have never done it because I can’t calculate it

    SERIOUSLY – it kills this follow up feature. 

    I too would like a fix. 

    Scheduler could have Day and Time slots for when you want you email to go out

  • Kelly

    Can you please clarify–is the new release available now or is this just a webinar about what is coming?

    • http://www.joemanna.com/blog/ Joseph Manna

      The release is rolling out later this month to all users. We’re letting people know about the upcoming features now so they can become excited for them. :-)

      ~Joseph

  • http://www.facebook.com/www.NotJustWheels.co.uk Richard Munt

    With the sort of  business I run, my customers don’t necessarily want to pay for the services we offer in full on line. It  would be ‘great’ if there was the ability within the shopping cart to place bookings (linked with outlook possibly) for a day, like the software you use to manage appointments in the telephone training sessions you do.  Customers could also pay a booking fee in the shopping cart to confirm their bookings. Surely this is easy to introduce into the shopping cart.
     
    Also, I run my business with two completely seperate websites, and my products are similar on each website but priced differntly and each website has different ‘upsels’. Because of the lack of customisation in the shopping cart I simply Can Not Use the Shopping Cart as the products interact, this is quite poor for such a high end CRM/Order Management/Marketing system which we pay good money for. This is one reason which might make me STOP Using Infusionsoft!!!
     
    Is it possible that this could be addressed in the very short term please?

    • http://www.joemanna.com/blog/ Joseph Manna

      Richard,

      Thanks for describing how intend to benefit from the application. I’ve informed our product management team of this so they can consider it. We’re making major improvements to our e-commerce features and they would value your input.

      Thanks,
      Joseph

    • Marianne Franco

      Hi Richard, I am the Ecommerce product manager. We are in the process of doing an overhaul of our ecommerce platform to make the cart and products easier to setup. This overhaul is not something that can be completed in the short term. We have plans to do many things over the course of the year to update and simplify order processing and ecommerce.

      I can tell you that for our December release we will be overhauling products and will continue to work on the cart and order forms the first half of next year.

      I would be happy to talk to you about the changes we are doing and have a professional and thoughtful conversation about your business. Please let me know if you would like me to reach out to you directly.

  • http://www.vasserpro.com/ Pool Service Software

    I’m stoked for the new updates.  Just one question – when will the updates actually be made available??

  • Cristalyne

    I missed half of the webinar about the Fall software release. When and where can I find it online?

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