Updates, Enhancements and New Helpers – Oh My!
[April 26th, 2016 – on the road in Portland, Oregon] – We've been so busy working on new improvements and enhancements to the MyFusion Helper app these past few weeks that we've been a neglecting to take the time to tell you about all of them. It's also keeping us quite busy keeping up with the rapid growth – a good problem to have and one that we want to thank you for! After all, this is as much your app as ours.
Infrastructure
We've made several enhancements to our network infrastructure to grow with the rapidly growing user base. We've added more servers into our cloud hosting. We've also added some very intense realtime network traffic logging and reporting so that we can more quickly isolate bottlenecks in performance, scalability and areas to focus our development cycles on.
While this might not seem like a direct benefit to you, it is. These enhanced logging and network monitoring solutions will allow us to make the product better for everyone and allow us to keep our costs (and yours) down as well.
The Interface
We've made several improvements to the interface of MyFusion Helper in the past several weeks and some of them are still underway. The new interface is much faster – as much as 3x faster in the create Helper screens. Now this interface update for the Helpers is being applied one Helper at a time. So you may see some of them that are already updated and others that haven't been updated yet. Don't worry, we're getting to them all, but with more than 40+ Helpers to work our way through, it takes a little time (NOTE TO SELF: Work on cloning Nick). 🙂
So let's break down some of the various interface changes and talk about them more specifically.
Improved Toolbar
The toolbar that is visible from the main screen for each of your Helpers has been enhanced. We've added more buttons, made it easier to copy differently formatted links, as well as provided quick access to the training videos and another new feature – Helper Tips.
This is the a view of the new toolbar (image on the left). We streamlined the blue image by reducing the text on it and adding the link icon to make it more understandable.
You'll also see that the toolbar changes for many of the Helpers with additional buttons. All of the Helpers have the round gear icon at the far right.
This gear icon will pull up a settings menu that is specific for the selected Helper. This allows you to View, Copy, Edit or Delete the Helper. We've added some new features too that we'll talk about in just a minute.
You'll also see that some of the Helpers have a new email icon. The email icon will allow you to copy a link that already has the Infusionsoft contact ID merged into the link and formatted correctly for you. This is very useful for Helpers that require this ID when used in emails.
You'll also see that some of the helpers have the small goal icon. You can see this in the last row of the image above. This goal icon will bring up a screen that allows you to quickly and easily copy any API Goal names to help speed along the process of building out your campaigns.
Helper Tips
This is brand spanking new (Nick just completed coding on it in the past couple of days) and we think you're really gonna like it. We've gotten a lot of good feedback on the Helper videos, but we also get feedback of things that are missing in the videos or could be improved or explained further.
Many times these enhancements come from you using the Helpers in ways we had never even thought of when we designed them (we love that)! While we try to update the videos as quickly as possible, there are times when we just want to provide some additional quick tips.
So now we've added a way to give you quick and easy additional “tips” that are relevant and specific to the selected Helper. To access these tips, simply click on the gear icon and select Helper Tips from the menu (pictured above and to the right). When you do, you'll get a popup window that will show you the tip and allow you to scroll through more of them (if there are more available for the selected Helper).
Here's what that looks like:
In this particular example, we're looking at the tips for the GotoWebinar Helper. You can see that there are more than one because there are numbered tips down at the bottom (blue 1 and 2 above the green “Close” button). These Helper Tips will also be available on the MyFusion Helper Blog. In fact, they're dynamically loaded from the blog realtime.
NOTE: We've just started creating these tips, so most of the Helpers won't have them just yet. But over the next few weeks you'll see more and more of them showing up. We're even going back through our Helpdesk responses to people and creating tips from those as well.
How To Video Quick Access
You'll also see in the Helper Settings Menu (shown above in the Tips section), that we've also added quick access to the How to Video. This makes it easy for you to access the training video from the main screen. The video that you'll have access to will be for the type of the Helper that you have selected.
GotoWebinar Helper Enhancements
The GotoWebinar Integration Helper is one of the most popular Helpers we offer. So we're continually looking for ways to improve and enhance it.
Improved Stability
The first and most important enhancement has to do with improved stability. There have been issues for some clients where sometimes the attendee data wasn't being applied. We tracked down the error and improved our interface with GotoWebinar so that we continually poll it and check for the data availability. Sometimes, however, GotoWebinar attendee data is not available for several hours after the webinar. We've seen this happen several times in the past month.
So our advice is that you don't setup timers that rely on that attendance data until the day after the webinar. Because if you're relying on the data being available immediately after the webinar, things may break. We now have updated our logic to retry every hour until it gets the data back from GotoWebinar, but there is still the real possibility of a delay in availability.
Un-Register Attendees & Calendar Links
Some of you had asked to be able to programmatically un-register someone from a webinar. The primary use case would be if someone opts out and you want to opt them out of the webinar emails as well. We've added this feature and also created a toolbar button for it. See the image above. The button to the right of the blue Copy Link button has a person with an x on the icon. That button will allow you to copy a link that can be used to unregister a contact within the Campaign Builder.
The next button on the toolbar – the one that looks like a calendar – is another great new feature, the ability to create calendar links for your webinar. You've surely seen those icons for Outlook, iCal and Gmail calendars before, well, now you can generate those links yourself and include them in your email sequences so that people put the webinar right onto their calendar.
Other Improvements
In order to keep this blog post from turning into a book, I'm just going to go ahead and list out the other changes below.
- Route It Helper – Added Query String Passing for Advanced Users – will by default, pass contactId. This allows you to use the Route It Helper even in the middle of 1-Click upsells or other areas where you're already passing information on the URL query string.
- GoToWebinar Improvement – Added Attendee Recurring Checking – This ensures that we schedule rechecks every half hour until we have attendee details from GoToWebinar. This addresses larger list sizes
- GoToWebinar Improvement – Increased Timeouts – Users with large webinars (1000>) were experiencing some delays/incompleteness in processing. This ensures that even the largest webinars will sync up with Infusionsoft.
- GoToWebinar Improvement – Increased Tracking for Script – We can better see what is going on.
- Google Sheet Improvement – Added warning message when using Product Name in Report. This negates the issue in the Infusionsoft API
- Google Sheets Improvement – Better date predictability and formatting – Infusionsoft date searches are all over the place, we will query the custom fields that are date types and format them so they can be automatically set as date fields in Google Sheets
- Overall Improvement Email Merge – Added new navigation with email to select helpers
- Scaled Server Infrastructure to handle more demand
- Added Advance Override to Math It – this gives support for custom fields and such until new UI is built