Custom fields in contacts

As many of you suggested, we have added ability to define your own fields in contacts’ details.

Custom fields allow you to store any information about your customers which are important to your business. Tax identifier, social insurance number, car registration number… all those can now be easily stored in your customer’s card.

This feature is important because of two reasons:

• allows to add industry specific infromation
• allows importing data without data loss (soon)

Enjoy your custom fields!

Funnela in numbers

We have prepared a brief summary of activity on our servers.

It figured out that our customers since April 2009:

• received over 326 thousand messages
• collected over 56 thousand contacts,
• sent almost 39 thousand e-mails,
• created over 70 e-mail campaigns sending about 20 thousand messages,
• written almost 19 thousand notes attached to contacts,
• written nearly 7 thousand notes attached to messages,
• prepared 7 thousand tasks,
• written over 4 thousand notes attached to tasks and
• planned 2,8 thousand events in calendars.

We are happy that Funnela helps many companies in their daily work. Because the number of customers and their activity is still growing and because we care of their comfort – we will upgrade our servers soon.

We're going on vacation – autoresponder

We have vacation now and many people goes to places with little or no connection to the internet. Hence Funnela allows you to work from every place around the world, not every one is going to do this – during holiday.

Funnela can automatically respond to your e-mails while you are resting. It’s a part of Automators. To set up a vacation message you have to go to “Settings” -> “Automators” and create a new automator.

To create an automator that launches on all messages, you have to set up one rule: subject contains . Of course you can set up an automator to respond messages from particular mailboxes or matching other criteria.

Next, you have to setup a “reply” action and type full vacation message content (subject is generated automatically basing on original message’s subject). You can also add additional actions i.e. add tags so you can easily find messages that were automatically replied.

Please remember NOT to apply this automator to old messages – this may send a lot of unwanted messages.

Here is an example of an automator – autoresponder:

Enjoy your holiday!

PS. You can also use this feature in folders’ automators. Funnela can send an automatic response, while you move a message to a particular folder, i.e. offer queue.

New feature: mass mailing

Probably you had repeatedly confronted with the problem of mass mailing your customers. You have to find the right software to do this, buy, configure and test it. Yes, you may have not enough motivation to do this.

OK – you can easily do this – just add each of your clients to the “BCC” field. Apart from unability to personalize messages, you will face the problem that mail servers may simply ignore a single message with hundreds of recipients.

Here are 5 easy steps to send a mailing:

1. Sign up for Funnela. Note: You may already have completed this step. If not, create a new account – it will take just 30 seconds.
2. Create a group in your address book and add your customers to this group. If you have just created an account, import your contacts first.
3. Go to the mailbox, create a new mail message and switch to the mailing view ( “Show more address fields” -> “Batch mailing mode”).
4. Select the address book ( “Show contacts”), choose group to which you want to send a mailing by dragging to the “Mailing receivers” field.
5. Fill in the subject and content of mail, and select “Send.” That’s it – your mailing will be sent to your customers.

Have a high conversion rate!

Notice: Mass mailing feature is available only in paid plans.

Sales support in Funnela – prototype

From the very beginning our goal was to provide an application that supports small businesses in their daily activities. We decided to deliver easy to use interface and increase efficiency of work. Now is the time to provide functionality that will enable you to effectively manage your sales.

We are happy to present two screens of our sales module.

Here’s the main view, allowing management of sales opportunities and filter information that are most interesting to you.

Main view of sales module

This view illustrates how to add a new sales opportunities.

View of a new deal window

Right now interface for this module is ready and we are working on the “heart” of the module. As usual, we are open to your comments and suggestions. We will announce the exact date of the launch on our blog.

Better workflow with Funnela in Testberries

We have recieved another great use case from Testberries company, specialized in providing services and professionalists for testing and quality assurance in software:

“The most important benefit of using Funnela is the time saving thanks to access to e-mail, contacts, tasks and calendar from one utility. Information can be additionally combined with each other and is accessible from any computer. Second most important advantage is the ability to share these information with coworkers. Funnela is surprisingly easy to use despite variety of it’s functionality.”

Read short conversation with Paweł Kazienko, owner of Testberries company.

New feature: e-mail templates

According to our plans, we have introduced e-mail templates in Funnela. Any template can consist of content, subject, all address fields and attachments.

Why is it worth to use templates? E-mail templates are simple and efficient way to improve communication with customers. Templates can help you by:

• saving your time – you don’t have to write similar e-mails form scratch or search them in your sent messages
• making your customer communication more standardized – you don’t have to think how to respond when customer ask you a question

You can easily manage templates in new e-mail view, using “Templates” menu:

Templates menu in new e-mail view

From here you can create new templates, edit and delete them.

Manage your templates view

Funnela increases customers' satisfaction in online shop Mikran.pl

Another company decided to share their use case of Funnela. This time, it’s online shop Mikran.pl, specialized in medical supply to prosthesis, dentistry and orthodontics.

How Funnela increased customers’ satisfaction in online shop Mikran.pl? Read short conversation with Tomek Zdanowski, co-owner of Mikran company.

Another supported browser for Funnela: Chrome

Since today Chrome is officialy supported browser for Funnela. Currently you can login using Firefox 3.x, Internet Explorer 8, Safari and Chrome.

Our feeling is that Funnela works fastest on Chrome.

Funnela on Chrome

New feature: dashboard

According to our plans, we have introduced dashboard module for Funnela.

Funnela - dashboard view

Currently dashboard consists of 3 main sections:

• summary of data from modules
• list of outstanding and upcoming events and tasks
• list of your activity and if you share some stuff with other users also their activity

Now it’s no way to oversight scheduled tasks and events and additionally it’s easy to be up-to-date with for example new notes or tasks.

Dashboard is currently in beta and will be extend with new functionality, i.e. ability of configuration displayed information.

What would you like to see on the dashboard? Got any ideas? Feel free to write to us.