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Tom’s Tips Podcast: Episode 1 – MagHub and Cats!

Written by Zach Gilbert

Published: 04/17/2018

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Audio Transcription

Announcer: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Tom’s Tips Podcast, your place for obscure movie references, cat facts, and everything MagHub related. Now your host MagHub Product Manager, Tom Bellen.

Tom Bellen: Hello, everybody. Welcome to the first ever Tom’s Tips Podcast. I am your host, Tom Bellen. I’m here with our Marketing Director, Zach Gilbert. How are you today, Zach?

Zach Gilbert: I’m well, Tom. How are you?

Tom Bellen: I’m doing all right. Excited and exhausted from the 6.3 release. A lot of exciting things here, and with a lot of the releases, a lot of late nights doing documentation testing, and also I have a newborn at home. Keeps me up at night, and leading into our first cat fact of the Tom’s Tips Podcast is I have cat that’s a polydactyl cat. What that means it has many, many toes that step on my face asking for food. The fact of that is there’s another name for the polydactyl cat and that is actually a Hemingway cat because Ernest Hemingway’s home in Key West is home to over 50 of these types of cats. Again, he was a cat lover, and he had these cats. They’re actually good luck in sailing terms, so again, I have one of those Hemingway cats at home that ruins my life.

Tom Bellen: To get to the meat of why we’re here today talking about the 6.3 release. We did a lot of exciting things. Probably the biggest one that we did that we’re excited about, and it’s really going to lead into some of our future releases, is what we did with emails. Internally, just on our own email templates, when sending out a promotional email from our system, or using our mail merge templates, we provided the recipient to be able to opt out of either there’s that list or the entire promotional email area, and be able to go to clients center, opt back in. It’s really important to know on that in on that in one piece is if you’re sending an order or an invoice or an artwork reminder, that is not something that a customer can opt in and out of. It’s really just promotional emails, and we’re doing this really just to … this is what you need to do for the laws with emails in terms of can spam. Really, making sure that our customers are protected based on all the crazy things that happen in emails.

Tom Bellen: One reason we’re leading to this is because we do plan to support trip campaign management with our automation tool in the upcoming releases, and it’s going to be really important when you are sending a lot of these more promotional emails from our system that you are, again, allowing people to opt out of that. We’re really following suit of one of our big partners of MailChimp. That is a big thing of you go through MailChimp, if you read through their best practices, they really support using one list and making sure you can manage those subscribers because if you have someone on multiple lists, they unsubscribe from one, you send them another email, that is technically spam, and that can get you in a lot of trouble.

Tom Bellen: In order to align more with that partner, with MailChimp is we now allow you to push a ton more information over to MailChimp for list management. Really, you could take one list of all of your contacts, push over information about the company, including who the sales rep is, their category, as well as all the content dynamic attributes, or most of those as long it’s in a single select text or date field. Then you can use the group and segmentation piece in MailChimp to again segment that based on the sales rep, or based on the category, or whatever other attributes you’re tracking. Then you have one master list with a bunch of groups and segments, and then pull that data back in to MagHub for your sales rep to do actions off in terms of opens and clicks. A lot of exciting things on the email front. Again, we’re going to continue that in future releases as well the trip campaigns, having multiple mail merge templates and all that.

Tom Bellen: One other piece that we’ve added similar on the data management side is giving customers more ability to delete things permanently from our system. It’s always a bit scary allowing someone to delete something from the system, because again, you can’t get that back. Again, we do put some rules in place, but now you can delete publications if you created something, never used it, but you want it out of the drop downs, or again, categories, maybe you had this idea of you wanted to do all this category segmentation, and you get crazy into doing that, and you have a thousand categories, but at the end of the day, you just use 50, so you can now delete all that to get those out of your drop down list as well as being able to delete any companies or contacts, assuming that they don’t have any orders on it.

Tom Bellen: That’s really the big piece. If there’s order history, financial history, you shouldn’t be removing that, so that’s why we put that block in there. Again, if it’s a prospect you talked to a few times, and maybe they went out of business, you can just delete them from the data base, so you don’t ever see them again.

Tom Bellen: But one other piece on the category segmentation is I did make a couple of changes to MagBuilder. One of them is being able to re-enable category separation rules in a magazine. If you are selling to a couple of people in the, again, florist category, and you don’t want two ads right next to each other that are about flowers, you get an advertiser yells at you, it’s hey, you put me right next to my competitor. I didn’t like that. Maybe they called you to do a make good ad. You can now enable that feature so that in MagBuilder you’re prevented from placing things too close to one another in the system. That’s something we had to turn back on to get people used to that again, see if they want to use it. Don’t have to. You could just use the number, for reference in a report, place it wherever you want, can be leveraged as well.

Tom Bellen: As well as we’ve now made it possible to place more unique ads in the system in terms of maybe a half page spread. Place that across the bottom of two pages or maybe you have a three, four page spread. Allow you to place that as well. Then being able to show that clearly on the invoice in terms of the electronic tear sheets. If you have four page spread across four pages, and you again upload a final image to MagBuilder on the invoice, you can clearly see the four pages it’s on and the four images about the ad and that really ties, again, into some other exciting things we’re planning to with our end design integration.

Tom Bellen: We had released something back in December. A beta thing. We had worked with it through Creative Cloud 2017, but now we’re looking into expanding that to go into the newer versions of Creative Cloud, and also adding the ability to upload that final image directly from your end design Creative Cloud into MagHub. That’s something that we’re looking into based on feedback we got from other customers as a valuable feature. Again, setting things up for more exciting things we’re doing down the road as well in this 6.3 release.

Tom Bellen: One thing also that 6.3 release is bringing back is something that from my fan club of the release notes might have noticed from time to time, is I would sometimes sneak in a trivia question using the Waldo Juggsy, and if you answer that question, send in a support ticket, then you would get a prize.

Tom Bellen: Aligning that with the movies and staying up all night with my child and many toed cat, I was actually watching a movie the other night, Heat, classic movie. Many Academy Award winners in it. You had Al Pacino. You had Robert De Niro, Jon Voight, and a very young Natalie Portman was in it, also an Academy Award winner. Even though it was a long time ago, it was not her first feature length film, actually. She was in another film before that with a newly crowned Academy Award winning actor is another hint. If you submit a support ticket with the name of that film, again, Natalie Portman’s first feature length film, we will award you a prize. In reward for listening to this entire podcast, getting through my cat facts and all those things, if you answer, again, Natalie Portman’s first feature length film in a support ticket, we will send you a prize to the first person to respond.

Tom Bellen: Again, I want to thank everyone for listening to the podcast. Thank you, Zach, for helping me run this today. We look forward to making more of these for everyone in the future. Have a great, great day.

 

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