One of my favorite features in our recent Email Creation Upgrade is the integration with Picnik. For those who aren’t familiar, Picnik is a web-based image editing tool that makes it really easy to crop, re-size and polish up your images to use within your VerticalResponse email marketing campaigns. They recently got snatched up by Google which is a testament to the great product they have – congrats Picnik people.
See below for a walkthrough, or check out our brief demo video from Jill.
There is an interesting story about how this integrated feature
got included into our recent release. Early on in the planning stages of the
Email Creation Upgrade we brought members of our Customer Advisory Board (CAB) into
our offices here in San Francisco. We wanted to give them a preview of what
we’d been working on and get their honest, real-world feedback to make sure we
were building something they’d love to use.
As we went through our presentation there was a great back-and-forth dialogue and general head-nodding we were on the right track with how we planned to upgrade our email creation tools. But as the meeting went on, we started hearing a common theme in the voices of our users: they wanted an easier and better way to upload images into their email campaigns.
So while we definitely had “upgrade our image editing tools” on our product backlog, it was a bit lower on the list because we had intended to tackle a few other features we thought were more important. What was great about this meeting is that it (a) gave us a good reality check in terms of what real-life users wanted to see in the app (b) took place early enough on in the development process that we were able to shuffle some priorities around to slot this into the big release on March 19, 2010.
So thanks to the CAB folks for your candid feedback – you’ve put your stamp on the VerticalResponse product. And thanks of course to all our customers who made their voices heard on features they wanted to see included in our Email Creation Upgrade. We’re certainly not done and we’re working on some other great things for release later in the year – stay tuned!
Lastly, if you’re interested in joining our Customer Advisory Board or would like to participate in early access beta programs for new features please let us know via email. We’d love to have you join us.
Josh Feinberg - VP Product Management

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