Pinpoint Branding – New Major Release is Live (October 2011)
Dear Pinpoint Branding Customers,
We're very happy to announce the new release of the Pinpoint Branding platform.
Our team has been very busy over the last few months focusing on making the application admin interface easier to use for branding administrators, as well as bringing in some new features that have been requested by our customers.
Before we get to the update itself, I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce a new development at SYNAQ. About four months ago SYNAQ launched a new division called "SYNAQ Labs" whose task it is to become the full-time product development arm of SYNAQ.
SYNAQ Labs' first project was to take Pinpoint Branding and productise it for the international market. The end result of this task was the birth of BrandFu and is essentially the new engine which is driving your Pinpoint Branding experience.
Besides all the customer feedback we have received, BrandFu's birth was another major reason for the quite radical changes you'll see in the new admin interface, and what this means is that Pinpoint Branding is essentially a "white labelled" version of BrandFu. Now before you start to stress, don't worry! All that this means is that the people working on BrandFu are a dedicated and full-time team of SYNAQ developers who are working to make BrandFu, and by implication Pinpoint Branding, the best hosted email branding service ever.
Another reason to take note of BrandFu, is that all our training videos, help articles, and support desk services are presented and managed under the BrandFu brand name, so when you watch help videos in the admin interface don't be surprised to see BrandFu's logo there.
OK, now that we've taken care of business, lets take a look at some of the improvements that we've made to the app in the new update:
Dashboard
The dashboard has benefited from some subtle yet important improvements. The previous dashboard was a little confusing, as it displayed info from the date you started using Pinpoint Branding and required that you had to select from a list of campaigns to see specific campaign stats. The fact that we showed data from the "beginning of time" had two side effects. Firstly the dashboard graph became harder and harder to read with more data points appearing as time passed, and secondly the dashboard page started taking a very long time to load when you logged in (and sometimes it just hung).
What we have done in the new release, is to set the dashboard timeframe to always show you the last 30 days of click through rate performance across all your branding campaigns active for that 30 day period. We have removed the drill down feature of the three coloured boxes above the graph (because we have added the new reporting module - see below), and then turned the graph itself into an interactive element that allows you to turn off stats for one of the listed campaigns by clicking on the campaign name in the graph legend, to easily compare just two campaigns when you are running multiple. (Try it, it's pretty cool).
The benefit of all these changes, is that the dashboard now loads really fast, and gives you a quick and meaningful overview of how your campaigns are performing at a glance.
Addresses
One of the biggest pains of the previous version of Pinpoint Branding was the way that admins had to manage addresses. The drop-down list that we implemented was problematic because it required a lot of mouse clicks to access and edit addresses.
We have changed the drop down list to an always visible list which allows to you quickly search for, and access addresses that you wish to edit.
Another problem that admin's had, was when they wanted to quickly add tags to a number of addresses. They had to go to each address and enter the same tag over and over for each address. This has been greatly improved with the new manage tags utility which allows you to quickly select all the address you wish to tag, and then only requires that you enter the tag once to apply it to those addresses.
Finally, addresses can no longer be deleted instead you can only deactivate them. This was a problem in the past, because deleting an address would cause it's statistical data to be lost, which affected statistical reporting over time. With the deactivate feature, if a member of staff leaves your organisation you can just deactivate their address and you'll get that license back to use for any future users, as well as keeping that staff members historical statistics.
Signatures
This area of the app has probably received the most attention. We have improved the way that you select signature templates with the new layout gallery, as well as giving you more styling options for your signature elements and fields. The way that you edit fields and elements has been changed to a click and edit method. This means that you actually click an element in the signature preview to change it's style or edit it's value.
Another cool change has been the addition of field drag-and-drop for the re-ordering of fields in your signature, which allows you to simply drag a field up and down to position it in the field list.
All we can say is … check it out to get the full experience!
Campaigns
Managing campaigns is also a lot easier now, as we also replaced the drop down campaign list with a fully visible list which can be quickly filtered and searched.
Another major request from customers was support for multiple links on banner images. This is now sees its first implementation, and you can now create link areas over specific regions of your banners with a simple to use drag-able area for each link you want to add.
We also now support email banners at the bottom of emails (below the signature) and you can choose to do this when uploading or editing banners for a campaign.
Reports
The most requested feature was more detailed reporting on campaign and banner performance. We are proud to release the first version of the Pinpoint Branding reports module with the **Campaign Analysis** report leading the charge.
This report allows your to gain insight into:
- Your banner click through rates for a selected campaign over a time frame of your choosing.
- How many times each banner in a particular campaign was sent over the selected timeframe.
- The top 10 staff (senders) who are receiving the most clicks.
- The top 10 recipient domains who are clicking the most on your banners.
Next we introduce the delivery report, which allows you to search across sending and recipient addressees to see if final delivery was successful after branding occurred for a particular day.
Settings
The settings area has only received one major change, and that is your disclaimer text is now added here. Once you enable a disclaimer and copy in your disclaimer text, you can go back to your signature editor to select and style the disclaimer element just as you would any other text field.
This was done so that disclaimers could now be dynamically included in any signature template we publish into the future.
In closing...
Well that concludes the tour folks, and we sincerely hope you enjoy the new update!
Please don't hesitate to to contact us with any bugs you find, or problems you have, as well as any new ideas for future functionality or improvements that you'd like to see in the app.
The devlopment teams email address is:
dev[at]synaq.com
Kind regards and happy branding,
Sam Gelbart
Product Development Manager - SYNAQ Labs