In this blog post, we’ve compiled a concise summary of VBOUT’s feature releases and enhancements from the year 2023. We owe this progress to your invaluable feedback and ongoing suggestions for refinement.
For those of you who may be exploring AI-powered marketing solutions and are not currently using VBOUT, this article offers insights into the evolution of our technology and our constant dedication to crafting a superior product over time.
Now, let’s dive into a review of the most significant feature releases and updates that defined 2023:
1. Machine Learning and AI Enhancements
- ChatGPT Plugin for VBOUT: Seamlessly connect with VBOUT’s API through natural language using our new ChatGPT Plugin. This powerful tool facilitates the quick creation of your email marketing campaigns, social media posts and contact management directly from ChatGPT.
- AI Chat Commands in VBOUT: An AI-powered chat support within VBOUT that allows you to execute commands using the power of ChatGPT. Create campaigns, schedule social media posts, and manage contacts using simple prompts.
- AI-Powered Chat Support: This AI-powered feature then searches our documentation and provides personalized answers based on the content found.
- Chat History: With our AI-powered chat support, you can pose queries that are addressed via our help documentation. These conversations are preserved for future reference, allowing you to seamlessly continue discussions from where you last left off.
- Predictive Sending in Automation: After predictive sending functionality has been applied to VBOUT’s email marketing suite, now you can find it in the automation section. This feature is available in automated emails as well as SMS messages.
- Reply Trigger: A new trigger inside VBOUT’s automation builder, which allows you to detect who replies to your SMS messages. This allows you to stop the automated sequence, or build a different workflow based on that engagement.
- Intent Detection: This extension to VBOUT’s AI and machine learning components is new. Based on your contact’s reply to your SMS, you can specify their intent and execute a variety of actions accordingly. For instance, you can create a divergent workflow from the Reply Trigger as follows:
- If your lead is interested -> Notify your sales team to contact them
- If your lead’s intent is neutral -> Send them a series of messages
- If your lead is NOT interested -> Remove them from your workflow
- Social Media AI Content Assistant: Complementing our email and SMS content generation, we’ve now enabled AI to generate social media posts for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and TikTok.
By defining the channel, topic, and tone, you can swiftly create posts and include emojis and hashtags. VBOUT’s AI content generation for social media is available in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Hindi, and Vietnamese.
2. Email Marketing and Automation
- Email Builder Updates: We’ve enhanced our builder based on your feedback. These include load speed, adjustments to margins, fixes for overlays, and overlapping elements on your screen.
- Enhanced Email Validation: This feature allows you to validate the quality of your recipient’s email addresses and unsubscribe any contacts based on the email validation status response. For example, you can choose to suppress a specific contact whose email address is invalid, risky, or has a typo…
Another option is the ability to validate all contacts in a specific list, upon mass import or form submission. Doing so helps you maintain a clean list, improve your email sender reputation, and maximize your deliverability. This feature is available on VBOUT forms and can be triggered upon form submission. - Dark Mode Testing: This feature lets you preview how your emails would look across different devices and browsers, in dark mode.
- Content Filters on New Email Builder: This feature allows you to dynamically show specific blocks or content in email templates based on contact tags.
- Send Campaigns to Folders: Easily send your email campaign to a categorized folder containing all your lists, saving time on selecting multiple lists individually.
- List Templates API Endpoint: This lets you list your pre-designed email templates to pass them into the Create Campaign AI endpoint.
- Precise Email Targeting with Exclusion Feature: Elevate your email campaigns by deciding not only who to send your emails to but also who to exclude. With this feature, you can exclude a list of contacts from receiving a campaign.
- Signatures and Templates: Customize signatures and pre-made email templates for different teams or organizations to be used for one-to-one contact emails or inside your mass email campaigns.
- List Removal in Campaign Selection: Efficiently deselect specific lists during campaign preparations by directly using the “Remove” button, avoiding the hassle of sifting through chosen lists.
- Sync Automation Analytics Using FTP: This tool allows you to export automation analytics from VBOUT to your FTP. It requires the FTP sync plugin to be installed on your account.
3. Contacts and Forms
- Customizable Payment Forms: You can show payment forms on your popups, landing page forms, and even your standalone site. These forms can display products, handle shipping, manage billing (both one-time and recurring), and facilitate checkout via your own Stripe payment gateway. This can be used as a standalone e-commerce checkout or can work with your existing store feed.
All transactions will be stored inside your VBOUT’s deep e-commerce tracking capability to automate follow-ups and reporting. - Multi-Step Forms: This feature enables you to craft more appealing opt-in forms. By dividing the forms into several steps with fewer fields each. This feature has been integrated across all our components, including landing pages and popups.
- Conditional Fields: This feature brings a dynamic element to our form fields, tailoring them based on lead selections. For instance, if a company size is over 10 employees, an additional field can automatically appear asking about the yearly revenue range.
- New Booking Calendar: Our calendar component has been completely rebuilt from the ground up, to help you and your team book meetings more efficiently. This serves as an excellent alternative to third-party apps like Calendly. The settings currently support Google Cal and will soon integrate with Outlook and Zoom meetings.
- Contact Update Trigger: This feature allows you to initiate a trigger with a workflow for a specific contact when a field changes value.
- Refined Email Activity Filters: To help you segment your contacts based on their most recent email engagement, either by the latest campaign activity or within a specific time frame. With these options, you can optimize your sunset policies, build better reactivation campaigns, and get creative with your workflow conditions and targeting.
- Import Notifications: This enhancement allows you to notify your team members when the CVS import is complete.
- Public Shortcodes: With this feature, you can control the content inside your assets using centralized content shortcodes to be used globally inside your emails and landing pages. You can then modify those codes from one place instead of editing each asset individually.
- Double Optin Message Option: This release gives you more control over what your subscribers see after filling out a form with double-optin enabled on the settings of the form.
- Additional Email Shortcodes: Enable contacts who unsubscribe from your mailing lists to be redirected to a custom page, encouraging them to re-subscribe or join your communities on social media.
- More Form Settings: Introducing the freedom to customize error and warning messages on your forms such as “This field required”.
- New Notes View: We’ve refined the way you add notes to customer profiles. Notes now appear in the timeline, instead of the previous placement on the screen’s right side. This offers the flexibility to edit, delete, or filter notes for a specific profile.
- Auto-tag on Form Signup: Automate tag assignments to new contacts in your list when they fill out a form. This is handy for segmentation or initiating workflow automations.
5. Pipeline Management
- Pipeline and Task Notifications: Enhancing your experience with VBOUT’s pipeline manager, you can choose to either enable or disable receiving email updates each time a task is moved from a pipeline’s stage to another. In addition, you can hover over a specific task and instantly see vital details, including its description and due date.
- Email and SMS Directly from Tasks: Within VBOUT’s pipeline manager, send emails or SMS directly to leads associated with a task, eliminating the need to jump to the profile page or the automation section. This is invaluable if you use VBOUT to run your soft CRM needs.
6. Integrations
- Shopify and HubSpot Marketplace: VBOUT is now available in the Shopify and HubSpot Marketplace. VBOUT’s integration with Shopify allows you to automate your e-commerce marketing with email, SMS, web push, and retargeting. VBOUT – HubSpot integration allows users to sync contacts between both platforms along with lead activity and more.
- Custom HTML Widget on Dashboard: This new feature will elevate your dashboard’s functionality. Easily embed the URL or input custom HTML code from a third-party reporting tool right into your dashboard. Whether it’s Google reviews, SEO analysis from platforms like SEMrush, or any other tool that offers embed options, have everything you need at a glance.
7. Agency Features
- Custom AI Chat Support: You can now train the default VBOUT AI chatbot with your own data set and deploy it to your customer’s sub-accounts. They can interact, and ask questions, which will answer directly using your own RSS data source. Moreover, you can choose to hide or show every single support option, giving you the flexibility to white label the support features on VBOUT as you see fit.
- Bulk Folder Action: This enhancement enables you to multi-select assets and move them to folders.
- Shared Pool API: This release allows you to provision your sub-accounts with your shared email pool via VBOUT API.
- Hiding Social Media Profiles: This feature provides more privacy to your social media settings, where you can hide individual pages and profiles from the selection drop-down on VBOUT. This is especially helpful to marketers managing multiple brands and licenses on VBOUT.
8. General Enhancements
- Manage Accessibility and Notifications: You can disable accessibility and notifications appearing on the top right of your app. Additionally, you can opt out of email summaries for overdue tasks in the pipeline management section.
- 2FA Authentication and Session Logs: Access to the VBOUT platform now requires 2FA email verifications. Also, all login sessions will now be recorded and available on the Users page as an audit trail.
- Google Authenticator: In addition to email 2FA, we’ve now introduced Google Authenticator to enhance your account security. To activate the 2FA, navigate to “Security” in your Settings menu’s bottom left corner, enable Google Authenticator, and follow the instructions.
- Speed & Optimization: We are actively working on optimizing the speed across the entire VBOUT platform, including infrastructure improvements. This optimization effort will result in faster loading time for all our builders and improved query performance for our automation.
In 2024, we will continue our dedication to innovation, introducing new features aimed at fostering the growth of your business.
If you want to learn more about additional features that have been launched, are in the development pipeline, are being considered, or are scheduled for future release, or if you’d like to provide any suggestions, please consult our product roadmap.
If you’re not yet a customer but are interested in automating your marketing efforts, you can either sign up for a 14-day trial or schedule a demo with one of our success managers.
Wishing you a joyful holiday season!
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4. Social Media Management