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Tom’s Tips Podcast: Episode 2 – Golf, MagHub, and Black Panther

Written by Zach Gilbert

Published: 05/10/2018

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Audio Transcription

Announcer: Hey everyone, welcome to Tom’s Tips Podcast. Your place for obscure movie references, cat facts, and everything MagHub related. And now, your host, MagHub Product Manager, Tom Bellen.

Tom Bellen: Hello everyone, welcome to the second edition of Tom’s Tips Podcast, Release 6.4. I am here with our Marketing Director, Zach Gilbert. Zach, how are you doing today?

Zach Gilbert: Doing well, Tom, how are you?

Tom Bellen: I’m doing all right, another long week. It’s a beautiful day though. Spring has actually come to Michigan I think for a while. I think it’s actually predicted to snow in about an hour, but we’ll see. It’s the Spring, so getting ready for golf season. Getting ready for just living life again, walking out into nature. Do you have any exciting outdoor activities that you’re going to hope to do in the near future?

Zach Gilbert: I am going to pick up some kayaks here in the next couple weeks so hopefully go kayaking some more. I have a couple at home, but we’re going to do a bigger group out on the lake that I live by.

Tom Bellen: Are you like intense kayaking, white water rafting?

Zach Gilbert: No, it’s going to be kind of a casual, lake, have a drink. We take our dog, our dog is a small little rat that has a life vest that has a little handle, so it’s kind of fun to play with him on that one. But no, it’s going to be a relaxing weekend.

Tom Bellen: So you know that dogs aren’t welcome on my podcast, this is a cat-centric podcast, so please leave your dog comments out there.

Zach Gilbert: He’s a great dog, and he’s about the size of a cat though, that’s something.

Tom Bellen: Well hopefully you enjoy that time with your inferior animal on your kayak while I enjoy time hitting golf balls and playing with my superior animals.

Zach Gilbert: Sure.

Tom Bellen: But people came here for the release, maybe, or maybe they came here for the cat facts, which we’ll get to later. But the 6.4 Release, we had a lot of big, exciting features that we’ve actually been working towards that are part of this release along with a lot of the odds and ends as well, fixes and improvements, but we’re really going to focus on kind of for the bigger things that we did. One was releasing drip campaign workflow management to automation. We also introduced a new kind of quick order feature, and we have a new way to add web forms for gathering subscription information, and made an update to our InDesign plugin.

Let’s start just talking about the drip campaign. Again, this has been working toward for a while, last release we had introduced allowing you to put in more mail merge templates. Again, we talked about how we work with Mandrill, it’s a big part of that, and again, we’ve had the automation tool function for a while through doing if/then statements. So really, the concept is you have a list of people, you want to send them an email, and maybe after a little while you want to send them another one, and just keeping them engaged with content and what you’re doing, and then you could add other little functions like hey, if somebody opened the email, let the sales rep know that someone just opened the email, they’re probably engaged and you should talk to them directly.

So you can get crazy with drip campaigns and do all kinds of branchy rules, but at the end of the day, it’s a way to keep engaged with your customers or prospects by just sending that email on a regular cadence so you don’t lose them throughout the sales process.

Again another big thing that we did with the sales is our new quick order. We’ve talked a lot about adjusting how we do ordering, sometimes we say this can be a complicated order and it definitely can be at times, so what quick order is really for is if you’re on the phone with a customer, and they’re like, “I just want to buy a half page ad in this issue, here’s my credit card number”, you can use quick order to do that. All you need is the company, the publication, a size, the issue, and a payment method and you can get that all done in just one form, so we’ve introduced that into the interface. Looking at down the road putting a similar concept, actually in the client center to allow your customers to maybe place small ad buys directly through the site so you can let your sales reps go after bigger fish and get those small ones in and let that customer self service there.

Also along that route, our new subscription web forms by publication. This actually gives you that flexibility of if you have multiple titles, you want to have one form that has some fields, ’cause you catch your additional information, maybe one publication about dogs, so you want to capture dog breeds as a dynamic IQ, what type of dog do you have? Why do you have a dog instead of a cat? Maybe a question like that, or maybe you have a cat magazine and that begins a similar thing of how much does your cat ruin your life? That’s an open question ’cause that is true of me.

So now you can have one form for each different publication or maybe again, you have a free publication you want people to subscribe to, track in our system, but you know you always had to give your payment information, now you can disable that, create that end, along with just more bigger ways to configure the form, it’s also an updated form in terms of being able to … I can buy a cat magazine gift and send it to Zach, and maybe send one to someone else as well, multiple transactions on one form on that particular case.

And then one other item we’ve been working on for a bit, we’ve had it with Creative Cloud 2017 is our InDesign plugin. Our InDesign plugin was only with Creative Cloud 2017, obviously Adobe updates every chance they get, so now we support Creative Cloud 2018 and plan to support any version in the future, so if you are on CC 2017, it will work. And in conversations with customers, one of the big items was just getting that final page into MagBuilder. Right now you have to download it and then click on the button to upload it to each individual page, but now actually, if you’re in InDesign, you can open up Mag builder, do our tool, you can drag the image into InDesign, that same image, if it’s a PDF, whatever file type will stay the same, you can then work on it, mark it as placed in InDesign and then click an upload button and whatever InDesign file you’re working on that one page will upload directly into Mag builder, so you never have to leave InDesign to do that and again, you don’t have to be a MagHub user technically to do it.

You do have to purchase the InDesign tool, but you can give that to all of your InDesign users so they can access the same key to get in. Again, those are some of the big, big features that we have, and I’ll ask Zach if there’s any particular one that excites you the most in this release that you were like all right, that’s …

Zach Gilbert: Yeah. So being the big host by user and advocate that I am, I am definitely excited for the drip campaigns. I got to see it a little bit today and I was pretty impressed by it. It will help with the retention, so I’m excited for it, we’re going to be using it here a lot for our MagHub University. It’s very exciting.

Tom Bellen: Yeah, I’m excited, we’re going to use it ourselves and Zach and I are working on other ways that we can add other tweaks and improvements to it, so as customers start using it, let us know, we’re pretty excited about it.

Yeah, check out our release notes, see all the things that we’ve added and we’ve done or kind of fixed within this release, but let’s get to why people came. Let’s talk about our cat. First podcast, you mentioned my cat Bentley, and all his toes. I had a second cat, which I was guilt-tripped into adopting because when I lived in Baltimore, we had this wonderful place, Arden’s Arc, and housed cats and my wife picked Bentley for some reason. And then when we went to go visit to see it, she’s like you know, you should really have two. Cats are very social creatures, and I never heard that, I still don’t believe it but she did. So she locked us in the room with all these cats, and we were supposed to play with them and pick one. There was one cat who wanted nothing to do with us and wanted out of the room desperately, and obviously that’s the cat I picked. His name is George Costanza.

The other thing about George is he’s actually a black cat, which black cats obviously everyone is afraid of them, they’ll cause terror in your life, and they actually have very low adoption rates, and it’s kind of sad, so that’s another reason, it makes me feel good about myself ’cause I adopted a black cat, so I’m a great human being. But actually, recently, adoption of black cats has gone up quite a bit thanks to the Marvel Universe and the big blockbuster Black Panther. Because of Black Panther, the interest in black cats has gone up.

So that’s very good, and leading into our movie trivia question of the week, related to Black Panther is actually the actor in that film, Chadwick Boseman, hopefully I’m pronouncing that correctly, he’s kind of blown up recently. He’s obviously a big star of these movies, but he’s also interestingly played three pretty significant biopic films, he’s been pretty big characters. If you tweet to us, tweet back to us, the three real life people that he’s played in his film history, you will win a prize.

And I just want to also state to our first question on our first podcast if you go back and listen to it, I don’t think anyone actually replied the answer, so that’s still available. And instead of putting tickets, if you just tweet the answer to either this question, what three biopic films was Chadwick Boseman in and then answer our first podcast, again there’s prizes out there to be had. So hopefully everyone enjoyed the cat facts, and as well will answer our trivia questions. Zach, any closing thoughts on podcast number two?

Zach Gilbert: No, I think it went really well. My biggest thing is make sure everyone, when you’re tweeting the answer, to @MagHub, you do not have to be a MagHub user to tweet us the answer, we’ll still give you the gifts, of course we love our MagHub users, but this is open to everybody. Let the games begin.

Tom Bellen: So we should tweet that at Chadwick Boseman to see if he can answer that.

Zach Gilbert: Sure, I hope he gets it.

Tom Bellen: All right, well thank you again Zach for helping me run this, hopefully everyone enjoys the 6.4 release, and we give out some prizes.

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