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Broadcast, our bulk email tool, keeps getting better

We’ve had tracking stats on Broadcast bulk email since we launched it back in December. But today we announce real time stats for opens and clicks:

As your Broadcast message is sent to your contacts, any opens and clicks will be reflected in your Highrise account in real time.

Additionally, a very popular request for Broadcast, you can now view recently failed messages such as bounces and spam complaints by clicking the link on the right side of your Broadcast page:

Here you can see a list of failed messages, which includes the date, reason, and recipient’s email address among other info:

You can download a CSV of all the failures by clicking the Download CSV button.

Keep in mind that bounces and spam complaints will result in the contact being unsubscribed automatically by Highrise.

Hope these features help you enjoy Broadcast even more. Also note, that Broadcast is only available on paid accounts. If you’re on a free plan, use coupon code: HRFREEUP today to save $10 on your first month and give it a try.

New Filter UI

We teased how our Filters/Tags were going to be redesigned back in December and again a couple of weeks ago.

Now that they’re out there, here’s a brief introduction video:

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And for more on each type of filter see our Help site:

Search filters: https://help.highrisehq.com/contacts/filter-fields/
View filters: https://help.highrisehq.com/contacts/filter-contacts/
Tag filters: https://help.highrisehq.com/contacts/using-tags/

We hope you’re loving the new organization. This gives us the infrastructure to soon many more powerful filtering features folks have been asking for.

And be on the lookout for a few short term improvements that are well on the way. But in case you’re having any trouble don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

Lufo – Menu UX improvements all over Highrise

You may have noticed an improvement on the many menu options around Highrise lately:

We call our latest feature LUFO as in:

Last
Used
First
Out

Highrise will now remember several of the recent options you’ve picked on just about all of the menus throughout the app (assuming you have more than 10 options in the menu). This is especially useful if you’re always picking the same country or use the same email template over and over.

We know this will be super useful on the new filter UI as well, so look for some changes there soon. Also stay tuned, we’ll be open sourcing the Javascript we use to accomplish this next week. We think a lot of developers are going to enjoy the easy UX improvement this brings.

Hope you have a great weekend and Happy Mother’s Day to all of the mothers out there!

Create custom fields while importing

Our next feature is for those of you who are just getting started with Highrise. Or long time users who have a large number of contacts to add soon.
Or those of you who have avoided getting all your contacts into Highrise because the whole process is a little intimidating.

Today we announce the ability to create custom fields during an import!

Instead of having to go back and forth between your file and Highrise, making sure all your custom fields are defined correctly, you can just go ahead and map your file. As you do so, any fields that don’t map directly to a field in Highrise can be added on the fly based on the label in your file:

This is another feature we hope alleviates steps and pain in your day.

We do recommend taking advantage of our custom field pre-defined values and generally going through your data first to make sure it’s clean from the start. Look for things like typos, email addresses that don’t end with the appropriate suffix, data that shouldn’t be blank, data in the wrong columns, etc.

However, you can always tweak after you’ve imported, by undoing the import and starting over or doing a bulk update.

And if you’re still having trouble with your imports, we can help! We’re experts at getting contacts in and can save you time there too. Don’t be shy about reaching out if you need help.

Have a great day!

Preview: new header colors and default avatars

Here’s another feature coming soon to Highrise… New header colors.

As part of our ongoing efforts to freshen Highrise up a bit we’re just about ready to introduce some slightly refreshed header colors:

The options are similar as you had before, they’re just a bit more modern.

You’ll also soon be seeing some changes in the default avatars for contacts:

cases:

and deals:

Note – these changes won’t impact any preloaded avatar images; only the defaults.

And if you feel your account still has too much of a ‘sea’ of grey avatars, we hear you! We’ll have more color we’re adding soon. This was just a small step in a better direction.

If you have any questions or feedback just send us a note.

Have a great day!

Preview feature… New Filter UI

We teased how our Filters/Tags were going to be redesigned back in December, and now it’s ready for deployment.

But it’s big change so we wanted to show it off one more time before we roll it out:

Instead of having a list of every single field across the top of your screen for filtering, we’ll now have a nice clean slate to start from. You can still combine

Tags:

Field filters:

and View filters:

and all of the rest of the functionality you’re used to like Company Tags:

And NOT (or Excluded) Tags:

Here’s a Tags, Field filters, and View filters all working together:

It’s not that it’s just more organized. Folks with many custom fields know the pain of having to scroll down the screen before finally see actual contacts.

But these changes also allow us to do even more powerful actions with these filters in the near future. Like search for a tag, boolean operators, and more.

We hope you’re as excited as we are for the upcoming filters. If you have any questions or feedback just send us a note. Have a great day!

Using Highrise for Recruiting

As we continue to make changes and grow the Highrise business, we find we sometimes need more hands on deck. We recently published 2 job postings, one full time position for customer support and one for a contract android developer. Job postings like that can generate a ton of email replies and workflow headaches. Did we get back to that candidate? When did we say we’d follow up? How do we message 100s of people that we found our gal or guy?

It’s a no brainer to manage this with Highrise.

We knew we didn’t want all the job applications crowding out our support email that we manage in the same Highrise account. So we had to set up a few things.

First we created a new Group of the 3 Highrise employees who would be most involved in filtering and interviewing, etc. And then we created a Case owned by that Group, which would help contain all the activity related to this job search.

Then we autoforwarded the email address in our job posting (jobs@ouremail.com) to that case.

(Highrise now also has filters in Good Morning our group inbox. Because our job application emails were being sent to a specific Case + Group that’s different from our Support Group, all the emails were sectioned off nicely in our group inbox.)

When emails came in, we processed them just like we do anything else in Good Morning, going through them one at a time to read the submission. We’d Tag the Yeses and Maybes.

Once we had identified several candidates we wanted to hear more from, we created an email template we reviewed and edited as a group internally before sending.

We then used our bulk email tool, Broadcast, to email all our potential candidates, asking them to provide us with a few answers to some screening questions we had (we had a ton of promising candidates, so we needed to still use bulk email at this point. Good thing we had Broadcast at our disposal.)

Broadcast was also used to send a note to the No’s as promptly as possible.

We used Highrise for tracking notes on the conversations with the interview candidates and we assigned tasks to keep track of our interview slots.

Highrise was the perfect tool for tracking our job application process. And after weeks of meeting some wonderful folks, we found someone we’re super excited to have joining our team… more on that soon 🙂

Hopefully you’ll find the same thing!

How do you use Highrise? We’d love to hear about it and possibly share with the rest of the Highrise community. Send your use case to lynette@highrisehq.com.

Group dropboxes and Good Morning filters

Ever since we released Good Morning, people have been requesting a way to filter all of the emails coming in. For us, this became an issue when we tried to use Highrise for recent job postings. We use Good Morning actively for our support queue and didn’t want support requests to get lost in the flow of applications. So today we introduce filters on Good Morning:

You can still view all messages that are in the Group Inbox that are viewable to Everyone.

But now, you can also switch to emails that belong to a specific Group.

Some great examples of groups for the inbox you might create are Support or Operations.

If you want to see the messages sent to a specific user (which don’t belong to a Group and you have permission to see) you can also switch to that user’s inbox.

I keep my User inbox open all day, and if there’s something that gets in there that Support can help me with I just change the permissions on that email to our Support group, and it disappears from my personal inbox in Good Morning.

We also made fixes to the asterisk indicator that tells you something is new in Good Morning as well (i.e. if you’re filtered on Support only, you don’t want to receive notifications for new job applicants and vice versa):

And finally we gave Groups their own dropbox address so we could autoforward the emails directly to the Group instead of to one of us individually:

While these changes were excellent to support our candidate searches, we hope you’ll find them useful in other ways as well.

Using Highrise to track important things on Twitter

Highrise is used to track who said what to whom. And social media is another place where those conversations are happening. We don’t yet have a native integration with the likes of Facebook or Twitter (it’s coming…), but in the meantime here’s a simple workaround we use with Zapier and Twitter:

Using Zapier we are able to keep track of Contacts and what they said on Twitter. Once you have a Zapier account here’s how you set those up.

Click Make a Zap!:

Next choose Twitter as your Trigger App:

Next pick Search mentions:

We’re interested in people on Twitter talking about us. We’ll add some Search options soon.

Next, add your Twitter account:

Here’s where we get to what matters. Add some search terms you’d like to keep track of. You’re probably interested in people mentioning your Twitter account or your url:

Separate multiple search terms with ORs. You can get fancier if you’re looking for certain topics which may alert you to leads.

Test your search:

Now, choose Highrise as your Action:

Our goal is to first make sure the Contact at Highrise exists, then we can use Zapier to add notes to that Contact. So our first action is to create/update the contact:

Connect it to your Highrise account:

You want to use your API token. Here’s some help for finding that.

Now use the field dropdowns to pick Twitter fields that should get matched up into Highrise fields:

Really the only important one here is the Full Name of the Twitter user. We will add that to the Full Name of the Highrise contact. We also add a tag to each contact called “Feedback from Twitter” to help us find folks from Twitter.

(Zapier won’t let you add the Twitter username to the Highrise contact’s fields yet. However, you could add the data to a custom field or we’ll be adding it to a note below.)

You can test out your setup:

Once you’ve completed the test, let’s add a note to this contact.

Just like above your Action is the Highrise app. This time we’ll pick Create a Note:

Pick your same Highrise account you added above. And here’s we map to our notes:

This captures the Twitter username, text, and url of the tweet. Make sure you use the Twitter user’s Full Name for the Full Name of Highrise contact, so Zapier can find the right person:

And that’s it! You can test this part of the Zap:

And make sure to turn it on.

There’s other actions you can take too like adding Tasks or Deals to this flow. Let us know if this works for you and if you have other creative Highrise/Zapier use cases.