It's been just over a month since UpViral went live... so it's about time to send out an update on where things stand.
The first month could be best described as both FUN and HECTIC! With over 2,500 new customers joining a brand new platform there's one thing to be certain off: you'll run into all kinds that you didn't foresee (both good and bad).
The good
The best part is obviously seeing our customers have success with UpViral. Many people have already collected thousands or even tens of thousands of new email subscribers using viral giveaways and contests.
One customer has even broke through 100,000 new email subscribers using UpViral - which I think proves there's no limit to it. Once a campaign goes viral, the sky is the limit!
The bad
Let's be real - it's not all perfect.
Because various customers had massive viral success, our servers were heavily "tested". We got more traffic than we were prepared to handle, meaning we had spent a lot of time and resources into optimizing our servers & database infrastructure.
Because of the viral attention, our customers also collected massive amounts of email subscribers - resulting in massive amounts of outgoing emails (since UpViral also takes care of email automation). We didn't foresee this amount of emails (= our mistake), meaning we had to re-do the whole email infrastructure as well.
Thirdly we ran into all kinds of smaller bugs and issues. Something every new software experiences... but not every software gets 2,500 new customers in their first 2 weeks!
All together these 3 things required a lot of time from our development team. We're happy to say that we worked through most of these "initial setbacks"...
... but at least this means that we can move forward again!
What's coming?
Well... a lot 🙂
We got a long list of feature ideas that we're working on and/or planning on adding. Here's how this process goes:
That's our process in a nutshell. As you can imagine it takes a bit more time than "simply adding it and see how it goes" - but it's important in order to ensure UpViral's effectiveness.
So... what kind of things are in progress and/or on our idea list at the moment?
Just to name a few:
- More autoresponders added (this is something we're constantly doing - right now we support 16 natively and you can use our HTML forms with all others).
- Easier to use visual editor (to edit the templates, with things like drag & drop image upload etc)
- Multi email senders (so you can decide from which name & email they are sent)
- Custom SMTP server (optional, for advanced users only)
- New integration that doesn't require the UpViral HTML form (so you can use your own forms with phone numbers etc)
- Custom fields when using our opt-in form (for phone numbers and other fields)
- Share by email (so participants can share the campaign with their friends by email easily)
And a LOT more to come.
Note: we can't give an exact ETA on these features, but rest assured we're doing everything we can do add them ASAP 🙂
We'll also be blogging more actively with tips & tricks on how to get more results using viral referral marketing campaigns.
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