You guys know the drill. Infusionsoft releases an update – I write a blog post geeking out on all the new features we have to play with. The February 2016 release is coming out this week, and this update brought the noise and the funk just in time for ICON. Let’s do this. Here are the 4 features I’m most excited about, AND the one feature that I really think they got wrong.

Update #1: Improved Inventory Management
What it does: You can set an inventory for your physical products, and when that inventory is reached the product will be marked as “sold out” and Infusionsoft won’t process any additional orders.
Why it matters: This is really straight forward e-commerce functionality – but until today, it hasn’t existed in Infusionsoft. Yes, Infusionsoft had an Inventory feature, but very few people actually knew about it or how it “worked”. This was probably the case because it didn’t really work. Basically you were able to set a notification limit and Infusionsoft would ping you when that limit was hit, then you’d have to manually go set the product to inactive to prevent it from being sold. This really didn’t do the trick if you were selling physical goods, or tickets to an event with limited seating.

Pro-tip: Turn this feature on under Ecommerce->Settings, then manage the inventory right from a new tab that appears on the contact record.

Update #2: Mobile Friendly Landing Pages
What it does: New Landing Pages you created will be responsive when viewed on a mobile device.
Why it matters: Yesssssss. Finally! I think most people know what this means, but yeah, any new landing pages you build using the Infusionsoft Landing Page builder will now be responsive when they’re viewed from a mobile device. That means that these landing pages have gone from borderline unusable (for a lot of people) to now being a reasonable tool to create a quick and dirty landing page. They’re much better looking right off the bat too.

Pro-tip: The features and sections of the landing page builder have been renamed, so spend a little time playing with the new sections to familiarize yourself with them.

Update #3: Internal Forms available for Quick-Add
What it does: You can now access internal forms from the Quick-Add feature in the top right.
Why it matters: This matters because now you can quickly and easily add contacts AND trigger automation. Adding contacts has always been harder than it needed to be. That quick-add was a step in the right direction as far as making it easier to add contacts, but now it even goes one step further as it can be tied to automation which will save users lots of time.

Update #4: New Opt-Out Confirmation Page
What it does: They have updated the page that your prospects will see if they click opt-out.
Why it matters: This matters because the page before was dated and not very aesthetically appealing. It was “off-brand” and wasn’t consistent with the customer experience anyone wanted to create. Oh, and after the click process – it prompted with “was this email spam?” – and lots of people felt that it was encouraging spam complaints (although to be fair, these would be internal ISP complaints).

Here’s the old opt-out page:

And here’s the new one:

Now that I’ve covered all the things I like, time for me to give Infusionsoft some tough love. If you read the fine print on the FAQs for the mobile landing pages, here’s the bit I’m upset about:They’re effectively removing the label for your radio snippets on a web form. This isn’t that big a deal if the question is “Are you right or left handed?” and the options are “Left, Right, or Ambidextrous”.

But it becomes a much bigger deal if you’re using radio options as survey questions (and I think many of us are). Let’s say you have a survey, and you ask multiple questions, and you ask people to answer on a scale of 1-5, or 1-10. Well, if you have labels, you can tell that they gave your customer service a 9, they gave your sales team a 8 and they gave their payment processing experience a 10.

Without labels, you’d just see that they gave you and 9, and 8 and a 10, but you’d have no context for what they were rating. Here are the three places that radio option labels are most important and why I feel they should revisit this:

1. Labels are used when creating rules in decision diamonds. Labels were used to differentiate between the options on a landing page or web form. Without them, it just reads “false”, and as soon as you have multiple questions with the same set of answers (1-5 or 1-10, etc), then you’re unable to tell them apart.
   
2. Labels are used in form notification emails – when a form is submitted you have the ability to have a notification sent to you that contains all the information they submitted. Well, without a label, the information that it sends just isn’t as useful.
   
3. Labels are also used to help you understand context when reviewing form submission history on a contact record. I’ve noticed that without the label it simply says “False” where it used to say the label to that particular question. Presumably false means that there was no value provided.
   

Listen, I’m as big a fan of Infusionsoft as you’ll find, but I think they overlooked something on this one, and I trust that they’ll review it, and get it right. But for now, be aware that without labels you may run into some of the issues I just outlined.

Overall, this release was really solid, and I’d encourage you to check out the detailed release notes and FAQs they had on their release page. There are a few features (Partner User designation, Contact-Company creation, etc) that were included in this release that I didn’t break down in this post.

I’ve also heard some rumors that there will be another update in the days following this release that will give everyone the option of using the new mobile responsive Email Broadcast Builder. I’ve been using the beta version of the new builder for a few months now, and it’s sexy and keeps getting sexier. So, you can expect another post dedicated to just that feature once it’s rolled out as well.

I’d love to hear what you most excited about in the comments below!