New Release Sneak Preview #2

[Matt]

New Release Sneak Preview #2

 

We’ll be releasing the beta version for our upcoming new release next week, but in the meantime, here’s a further preview of what we’ve been working on over the past few months...

 

Email Marketer

 

Keep in touch with & promote to your client base automatically

 

Have you ever wanted to follow up on clients who cancel? Maybe try to entice them back with offers? Or maybe you’ve got some addon services that if users don’t buy from you initially, you’d like to remind them about after a few weeks? If the answer to any of those is yes, then the new Email Marketer Utility from WHMCS is for you!

 

Think of it like Mass Mailing, but reloaded – with definable conditions and fully automated sending, every day of the year! This new functionality will allow you to configure emails to be sent when specific criteria are met, and here are just a few examples of what you can do with it:

 

1. Send an email to clients 5 days after ordering if their product is still pending

2. Send an email to clients 30 days after signup to check everything is going ok

3. Send an email to clients 15 days after their last due date to give them a return offer

 

Now those alone would be useful. But we’ve taken things a step further allowing you to create more complex conditional cases that require certain products or addons. So for example you could:

 

1. Send an email after 30 days if the client has bought product X but not purchased any of the addons X, Y or Z

2. Send an email after 30 days if the client has bought product X but not purchased product Y

 

The possibilities with this tool are massive, and should help you maximise on your existing client base, both to ensure you’re keeping them happy, and to promote the other products/services you offer.

 

Configurable Options Enhancements

 

Show products with options as Starting from $x.xx

 

We wanted to improve how products with options are displayed to customers, and so with the new version, we’ve changed the way product pricing is shown so that rather than just listing the base price of the product (which can often be zero if a price is based purely on options), it will instead show the total value of all the default config options being selected. So a product with a $0 base price, and a $50 minimum configurable option will now show a pricing label of “Starting from $50.00” rather than just $0.00 as it might have previously.

 

 

Domain Management Enhancements

 

Support for auto assigning default nameservers, up to 5 nameserver values & Bulk Domain Management

 

Another area we’ve looked at for the new release is domain management, with an aim to make it both simpler & easier for clients to manage their domains. These updates include support for an additional nameserver bringing the total up to 5, as well as a simple one click option to assign a domain to the default nameservers (automatically matching the server the hosting account of the same domain is assigned to if hosting exists, or using the system wide default for domain only orders) and finally the ability to edit multiple domains at the same time, including changing nameservers, auto renew status, registrar lock status & editing WHOIS contact information.

 

 

Added Promotional Opportunities

 

New Price Override Functionality

 

Have you ever wanted to offer a promotion where it’s a fixed price for the first month, no matter what the product starting price? Previously this would only have been possible by creating a promo code for each of your products, with the appropriate fixed amount discount specified for each, but now it will be much easier with the new Price Override promotional type. What this allows you to do is setup a promotion that rather than giving a specific $x or y% discount allows you to set the price you want to be charged for that product, and thus one promotion code can give an introductory trial offer on multiple products all of varying prices (think first month just $1 type offers).

 

Social Integration

 

Integrate with both Twitter & Facebook to harness the power of social networking

 

As I’m sure many of you are already aware, and indeed utilising, WHMCS has allowed integration with Twitter for some time now. This uses an ajax based routine to load your recent tweets and display them as an up to date news feed to visitors of your client area, as well as giving you an easy way to integrate tweets into any custom pages of your site. But for the next version we’ve taken Social Integration in WHMCS a step further, with the addition of an automatic “Tweet” button on news announcements, Facebook Recommend & Send integration, and Facebook Comments exactly like we have on our blog here.

 

 

Thanks for reading.

 

Any questions or comments regarding the new version, please feel free to ask them below.

 

And in case you missed it, preview part 1 can be found @ http://blog.whmcs.com/?t=41400