Product News and Features Preview April 2020

The world may be in chaos, but our mission to make publishers’ lives easier has never been more important. Because of that, rather than scaling anything back, we are rolling out the next wave of technology tools to help our publishers.

We currently have 15 clients taking advantage of our free six-month beta trial of Mirabel’s Marketing Manager, which includes a powerful email service and marketing automation platform. We are looking to take over the newsletter business for our publishers and combine advertising and reader audiences into one platform. If you are interested in trying it yourself, reach out to your software consultant.

We also have 30 clients who have taken advantage of our free email verification trial. We’ve scanned close to a million email addresses to date and have found that about a third of the emails in our clients’ databases are invalid. Sending out emails to bad addresses results in a big hit to your sender reputation, and it’s a great way to get blocked by your email provider. Clients who took advantage of our email verification free trial are now able to cleanup their databases and avoid getting their campaigns “red-flagged”from sending to bad email addresses.

Another 10 clients have signed up for our free prospecting database trial to help find new business. Thus far, we’ve received extremely positive reviews. We encourage you to take advantage of that six-month trial as it’s very helpful for tracking down phone and email addresses.

We also have several concurrent development projects underway, some small and some large. Here are the three coming to you first:

• Our Lightning Search feature is getting its next upgrade with a new “My List” option for building static call lists. It’s similar to the “Saved Search” feature, but rather than being based on a search criterion, the list is based on a chosen group of contacts. You can quickly set up lists like “Top 50,” “Tuesday’s Calls,” or “Hot List” on the fly, and then use our popular split-screen functionality to work those lists.
• Our Payment Plan Plus feature will be released next week on every client’s backup site. Payment Plan Plus is an installment billing system designed to take complicated advertising packages and break them up into even installments that can be paid monthly. As the money comes in, it is then transferred over to the dozens of invoices that often make up complex advertising proposals. Because this feature involves accounting, we are first going to release it in beta on your backup site so you can test it out before we activate it on live sites. Because this feature also allows your sales team to simplify and edit payment plans on the go without affecting closed invoices, Payment Plan Plus will be a big win-win for your accounting and sales departments.

• Finally, expect major enhancements to our opportunities and pipeline reporting within the next month. We spent time surveying the latest technologies in the world of sales pipelines to create our comprehensive Opportunities Module. It combines the power, speed, and split-screen viewing flexibility of our Lightning Search tool with a “Kanban” view for moving opportunities through the sales pipeline.

As a reminder, we are continuing to offer free training for the next month to assist the many publishers who had to furlough staff and are struggling with the Magazine Manager tasks those individuals were responsible for. Best of luck to everybody, and hopefully, this will all be over soon.