What’s new at Goodkind?
A few short weeks ago, I published a post about new updates to Goodkind. Today, we’re excited to announce our next release is here - our largest release yet. As more organizations choose Goodkind, we've been able to accelerate our roadmap and launch a number of exciting new features, many of which were requested.
We named this release Garibaldi, after the pristine National Park in British Columbia.
A defining theme of Garibaldi is simplifying campaign creation and providing admins more control in managing contacts as they move through a journey.
If you would like to be walked through the update, feel free to book my calendar here.
TL;DR: Release highlights!
New home page & cleaner navigation
Recipes (pre-built campaigns)
Campaign scheduling (!)
Activity page (one stop shop to easily manage activity across all campaigns)
Replies (that’s right - contacts can reply to your story with one of their own)
New story page design
Audiences (new tagging and audience builder)
Unique story page per campaign
Tags & custom attributes (add merge tags to Actions)
GIF quality improvements
Re-built caption editing
Your new Goodkind Home(page)
The pandemic has changed the definition of the many roles our homes now play in our lives. They are our gyms, our offices, our movie theaters all rolled into one. We took this idea of a multi-functional home to make you even more productive when using Goodkind. We started by refreshing the layout. Goodkind now puts your work front and center. A navigation bar on the left pane lets you navigate through Goodkind with ease.
The same tabs you are familiar (e.g., Contacts, Actions) are now represented as icons on the left. Presenting the new menu bar:
Home will surface actions and activities that are relevant to you. In its first iteration, Home will inform you of pending stories, as well as recommend ideas for your next campaign. We are calling them recipes. Recipes... What? Glad you asked. Read on.
PS: We also refreshed our logo & branding. It now reflects our ethos of putting human connection and authenticity at the heart of each interaction.
Introducing Recipes
We heard your feedback on the campaign builder, and rebuilt it! We analyzed campaigns created by all our customers to identify how you engage with your audience and what your goals are through those engagements. One insight stood out for us. Campaigns that had triggers based on the behaviour of your contacts drove better conversions. We applied this insight into building “Recipes”. Fresh from the Goodkind pantry, Recipes have all the ingredients to easily create a multi-step campaign. We have added over a dozen recipes as a start and will continue to add more. Recipes make building campaigns way easier and will drive better results. Be sure to let us know what you think.
Scheduling Campaigns
If there is one feature that has been consistently requested by our customers, it would probably be the ability to schedule Campaigns. We are excited to now support Campaign Scheduling. In the first step of building a campaign, you will have the option to specify a date and time to send your stories.
In addition to scheduling sending your campaign, you can also set up sending windows by going to Settings > Sending settings. You can set preferences for sending your unscheduled stories to send within a specific window ( by default 9am - 4pm of your local timezone ). Alongside setting preferences, you can also set up auto-resending of stories. The stories are re-sent to contacts who didn’t visit the story page. The data shows this will likely increase the engagement rate and click through rates of your stories.
Stay on top of activities
The new Activity page enables your admins to easily and quickly see and manage all events across your campaigns. Especially those that require your attention (e.g., stories waiting for your approval).
Activity is the new home for viewing assigned stories and stories in the approval queue. The story library will continue to be a standalone tab to filter and view sent stories.
Last, Activity will also be the place to see all Scheduled activities and Replies. Did I say Replies? Yup. “Hey, we are waiting for you to talk about replies,can you talk about it already?”
Replies
“All right I am on it”
We know your contacts are delighted when they get a Goodkind story, many have replied to you via emails about the experience of receiving a Goodkind story. We have now made it easy for your contacts to reply to the stories via video or message, and those replies show up under replies. Replies unlock a boatload of new opportunities for customers to use Goodkind in new ways. Think not about individual touchpoints, or campaigns - but conversations.
A new story page
We are constantly running micro experiments to see which story pages perform the best. What we’ve learned is that the story page viewing experience needed to feel far more immersive. A video preview now fills the screen when the story page loads. When the contact clicks play, they see the story and a prominently placed call to action button. The reply button is next to the call to the action.
The Action button, share and reply will overlay on the story once it has been played.
The big change to take note here is how Actions are created. The description of the action shows up in the preview. The way to think about action description is more email subject line and header and less email body. Short and snappy descriptions will do better than long and winded ones.
Re-thinking Tags and Audience
Building a list of contacts who receive a story required working through a web of tags for many customers. Managing tags can become a task unto itself. Therefore, we’ve simplified this process by creating “Audiences.” Audiences are how you will choose who receives a story. Audiences are built in the Contacts tab. Audiences can also be descriptive (e.g., Accepted MBA students - 2021). Tags are still important, as they will be used to define the Audience. So the next time you are building a campaign, first head to Contacts and create the audience, then you can come back to Campaign Builder.
A template for your campaign
There are often multiple teams working on Campaigns and their campaigns require different visual elements. We have now made it easy to have a custom Story page for your campaigns. You can now create Templates for different kinds of messages you send from Goodkind.
Tags and Custom Attributes
It’s no secret that our mission is to personalize communication at scale, so we are constantly looking for ways to expand opportunities to personalize the Story page. We have two exciting developments to share. The first is the ability to add merge tags in Actions. Actions can be personalized with the First and Last name of the contact receiving a story as well as the name of the storyteller. We will expand on what merge fields are supported as more of you start using them. Do let us know what you would like to see!
The second key feature is the ability to create custom attributes. This was necessary to allow more data from your CRM to inform Stories and Actions. A popular example is scheduling one on one meetings. The invite links are personalized to the contact and creating an action which would have supported a different link for each contact in the same campaign was hitherto not supported. With Custom attributes, admins can now create new fields which can be updated from the data coming in from your CRM. Read more custom attributes here.
Under the hood improvements
We are improving the quality of GIFs that are generated in the email previews. Some of our users were finding the GIFs to be dark and hazy. We have improved how we optimize the video for creating the GIFs.
Next, the caption editor was rebuilt. The screen won’t refresh like it used to while editing captions. So, if you are making small changes or big ones, you can now edit the captions per timestamp. Once you are done editing, press the save captions button and the new captions will update automatically on the video. We tested this extensively and are confident that this will simplify the caption editing process for all of you.
If you made this far, I want to thank you for reading about this very significant update to Goodkind. If you have any questions, or you would like to schedule to go through the changes. Feel free to book some time with me by clicking the link here.