Jetpack CRM: Product Update #3 – Jul 2017

We’re back again with another Product Update. We’ve been compiling these updates into a bumper monthly update. Follow along with these updates to watch how we are building up Jetpack CRM each month based on your feedback.

July has been a month of squatting ass to the grass. If you’ve never heard that saying it means we’ve been going DEEP. Slinging in the man hours to continue to make Jetpack CRM the best WordPress based CRM out there.

But hey, don’t just get caught up in our Product Update series. We’ve also starting writing more across the blog in other series of posts as well. In short. This new home for our blog is where it’s LIT ??.

But, without further ado. Here’s our Product Update for July 2017

Core Updates

New Features

Another month and another batch of New Features that we’ve been adding into the Jetpack CRM core. This month we’ve been making refinements and added some cool new features / improvements.

Zero BS Calendar

It’s been asked for a lot. As mentioned on our knowledge base, we listen to all feedback and if a particular feature gets enough traction we move it higher up the development list.  This new feature is worthy of a blog post all in itself.

You can now add Events in Jetpack CRM and be notified that an Event is starting soon

We’ve chosen the terminology ‘Calendar’ and the term ‘Events‘.  These can be used to set yourself reminders to follow up with certain customers or to do tasks in general.

We’ve built this based on initial feedback and feature requests. We’d love more feedback here and we’ve written a detailed knowledge base article covering the new Calendar (Appointments) system in general. With this new addition you can

• Create Events (single time, all day, start / end date)
• Assign to a CRM user
• Notify the CRM user that their ‘event’ is about to start
• Mark Events as complete (treat as a to-do list)
• View Events on a Calendar
• View Events as a List
• View Completed Events (on a different calendar view)

This really powers up your Jetpack CRM and lets you schedule in follow ups (and be reminded that you have an upcoming event (or task)). You can then login to your CRM to see the details, and which customer it is related to.

Want to learn more about this brand new feature – you can read the knowledge base articles here.

Advanced Search

We’ve added the start to a CRM wide search capability. The Customer Search was only returning results based on a name match and when you’re adding additional data (such as address or custom fields) these weren’t searchable, until now.

Now you can search Customers as well as Activity Logs this means if you have added a note to your customer’s activity you can now search based on a particular term (such as ‘sent a tweet about black Friday’) if this matches any notes you’ve made, it’ll bring up the instances where there’s a match

PDF Invoices

We’ve added some additional information to the PDF invoices. The invoices had the business information on them, but they didn’t have who the invoice was addressed to.

Now they have ‘From’ and ‘To’ at the top of the invoice.

 

We’ve also outputted the ‘additional information’ to the bottom of the PDF invoice. This is used to add payment information (for example) so that recipients know where to send the money to (although we strongly recommend using our Invoicing Pro extension here, to accept payments online and automate the process).

We’re improving the PDF invoices even more in version 2.10.8 which is expected to be released early August.

We also highly recommend that people move to using the Client Portal rather than sending PDF invoices to your clients. This way your clients can see all the invoices in one place, and not need to keep asking you to re-send an invoice. They also look a lot prettier in the Client Portal as there’s more control over the styles.

 

New Action Hooks

We’ve also added some new actions to the CRM to allow some of our newer extensions to fire when certain events happen (like the ConvertKit extension and the MailChimp extension which will do things like adding a new subscriber to a list when a new customer is added to Jetpack CRM).

Bugs Squished

There’s been some more bugs that we’ve squished in Jetpack CRM this month. Hats off to our eagle eyed users for discovering some of these:-

• Tax on invoices when discounts are applied wasn’t reducing the tax (so $1000 with 10% tax = $100 tax) if this was then discounted by 50% then the tax would stay at $100 (when it should reduce to $50). This has now been fixed.
  • When a discount is a $ amount and not a % amount and you’re also applying tax this will cause issues and you’ll need to manually adjust the tax amount (by modifying the % tax in the invoice line items)
• We’ve also removed the settings tab for Contact Form 7 when the Contact Form 7 was active. There aren’t any settings required for Contact Form 7 so this tab wasn’t required

If you’ve found a bug with Jetpack CRM, please please please do let us know about it. You can read about how to report a bug here.

Website Updates

New to the Product Update this month, we’ve also started to include changes that we’ve made to the website(s). This section covers changes we’ve made to main site as well as our supporting blog and knowledge base.

Knowledge Base

In July we’ve added a comprehensive knowledge base which we continue to add to over time. Using the knowledge base you can search for your questions and it’ll bring up articles to help you.

We’ve also added resources on how to submit a bug and how to go about requesting new features to Jetpack CRM.

Extensions Page

We’ve refined our Extensions Page at the main site. We’ve been adding lots of new extensions to the CRM in July and the extensions page was getting messy and hard to navigate. We’ve tidied it up as well as made the link to the bundles easier to see (and not cloud the extensions page with bundle pricing etc).

Extensions are great. They allow you to choose exactly how you want to power up your Jetpack CRM. The core of the CRM will remain a simple free to use CRM, and we hope you continue to feel that it is still simple to use.

New Bundles Page

We’ve also added a new Bundles Page which cover the benefits of the bundles, including frequently asked Questions about the bundles.

 

Extensions really do help. They help make the CRM more powerful and they also help us each time you purchase one. They help us to continue to improve the CRM and make it useful for you as our CRM users. Bundling the extensions locks you into to all the extensions when grabbing the Entrepreneur’s Bundle (or the Reseller)

If you’re not a happy extensions customer yet, please do reach out and chat to us, we’d love to know how we can help you become one of our Jetpack army of self-hosted, empowered CRM users.

Reseller ReBrandr Platform

We’ve also improved on our rebranding platform for our Resellers (white label the CRM and sell to your clients). If you have a Reseller Bundle your credentials will be provided to you as part of your welcome pack

New to WordPress and Jetpack CRM?

We’ve also done something innovative to help new users get to grips with using WordPress and the simple, free CRM plugin. When someone clicks the Download button on the main site, what used to happen was the .ZIP file simply downloaded.  Then what? Here’s what happens now

This helps to onboard the users of the plugin who may be new to WordPress but want to host their own CRM. We’ve also got details on that page about hosting your CRM (if you want us to help you host it).

But keep reading.. we’ve added even more great stuff in July (not to mention FIVE new extensions).

This blog – additional content

You may have also noticed that we’ve ramped up the number of articles up on the blog, including a useful integrations series. Through these we hope that you can learn more about some of the powerful features that Jetpack CRM has to offer and some of the ways that we have found people using the CRM.

Jetpack CRM Community

In July we also launched a Slack Community where you can join and hang out with us (Mike + Woody) as well as other users of the Jetpack CRM system. Talk shop, ask us questions about the CRM (although keep support tickets to the support site) and pick our brains about new features and what you’d like to see in the CRM going forwards. Here’s some of the things people have been saying in the community…

 

 

.. we hear you jeff, join the club #nosleep and mr penguin, thanks for the kind words, our bundles are likely to go up in price soon – we are really close to 20 now – so if you’re still on the fence, make sure to grab one of the bundles while it’s at the current price (any price increases won’t apply to you if you do).

You can find out more about the community here.

New Extensions

We had 12 at the start of the month in the entrepreneur’s bundle, we now have 17. Here’s what we’ve added as new extensions this month (July 2017).

MailChimp

Automatically add your Jetpack CRM Customers to MailChimp using our MailChimp extension.

 

ConvertKit

Do you run email marketing software to complement your Jetpack CRM? You can now (from version 2.10.4+) have any new contacts that you add to Jetpack CRM automatically added to your ConvertKit email list using our lightweight ConvertKit extension.

Awesome Support

We’ve added an integration with the Awesome Support WordPress Plugin. This gives you a fantastic integration available with one of the most popular WordPress help-desk plugins.  You can read more about how to integrate Jetpack CRM and Awesome Support.

Envato Connect

If you sell your digital products through Envato, we’ve got a nifty connect tool which lets you import your transaction information from Envato into your CRM. No customers can be imported here though unfortunately (Envato doesn’t give you access to your customer’s emails or info).

However, this extension does help you analyse your transactions over time (especially when you run it with our Sales Dashboard extension).

Bulk Tagger

Riddle me this. You’ve imported all your transactions (using something like WooSync) and you want to tag which customer has purchased which product. Here’s how you do it

• Head into the manage transactions
• Click into a transaction to edit it
• Make a note of the transaction name
• Find the customer ID
• Pop over and add the same tag to the customer

Once you’ve done that and been through all the transactions, and tagged the customer you can then send emails (using Mail Campaigns) to people who have purchased product X from you (and sell them add ons, etc).

You can also quickly see who’s bought what through the customer search page by filtering by tag. It’s also really useful for doing a Product Coverage Analysis.

Sounds hard work, doesn’t it. Well with the Bulk Tagger it’s made easy.

Once this has been run you’ll be able to click on the tag and filter your customers by that tag which then leads into all the additional operations you can do based on tagged customers.

Extension Updates

Phew, just when you thought this Product Update was almost over. We’ve also made some feature updates to our extensions. If you’ve not downloaded the latest versions of the extensions from your account. Please do pop over and update your extensions to take advantage of these new features.

WooSync

WooSync is a great extension to use if you run a WooCommerce Store. We’ve written a detailed How To: Integrate WooCommerce with Jetpack CRM in our integration series.

Version 1.0 of the extension imported orders as transactions and assigned them to customers. However, there’s been a lot of support and pre-sale questions about whether Products are also imported into the Jetpack CRM.

Now, this, to me, Mike, (and I run 3 WooCommerce stores) seems a bit of an odd request. Through digging deeper this was so that they could add the products to an invoice and generate an invoice for their customers.

Enter the latest update to WooSync it now comes with the option to create invoices for the orders which it imports (and assigns these to customers).

Why is this a good thing to be able to do? Well, if you run a store you might find you’re contacted by customers asking for an invoice for their order (WooCommerce will issue order receipts) or you can generate a manual invoice (but this assumes it’s not been paid).

Also, you can only do this on a order by order manual basis in WooCommerce. Once you’ve run your WooSync import if a customer has made 10 orders, they’ll now have 10 invoices (marked as paid) attached to their customer record.

When using the CRM in conjunction with the Client Portal this means they can login, and see all their invoices for the transactions that they’ve made. Simple, but effective in reducing your time in generating invoices manually via WooCommerce (that aren’t quite right when an order has already been paid for).

Integrations

We’ve been working hard on integrations in July, we want Jetpack CRM to be a simple to use CRM, which integrates incredibly well with other services. We got featured over on the HeroThemes blog where we talked about using Jetpack CRM with a product that you need to offer support to your users for.  Here’s a look at our integrations gallery below

You can read each of the how to’s in our integration category on this blog.

In Summary

We love Jetpack CRM, we build cool new features for it everyday. The main thing which helps us do that is if you also support the plugin too. You can do this by purchasing any of our extensions, feeding back on how easy the CRM is to use and most importantly tell people you know about Jetpack CRM.

Help us spread the word about the power of running your own CRM, and why you’d use WordPress (and Jetpack CRM) to do that.