Affino 7.1 Mindmap

Super Scaling

The biggest evolution for Affino with 7.1 is it’s ability to run on a super-scaling cloud architecture. Affino instances can now be created and dropped on-the-fly with minimal disruption to users and admins. It means we will be moving all Affino SaaS sites to the new infrastructure over the coming days as they’re updated to the latest release. For load-balanced clients we’ll be moving to auto-scaling so that busy sites ramp up to more servers during peak demand and back down again when demand eases up.

The net result of all the work we’ve done is that Affino sites will scale much further, be more responsive and incur less down-time.

Analysis and Insight

When you go into Analysis you’ll see an immediate change with live active users, usage charts, re-organised menu, and if you’ve set up your Customer Ladder you’ll see the level of engagement. We’ve added two key new tools for tracking your messaging: Message Campaign Analysis and Mailing List Analysis, and have updated Message Analysis. These collectively add up to a new level of insight into your bulk messaging.

What’s not so obvious is that we’ve completely re-worked all the analytics behind the scenes to be far more scalable. This has allowed us to extend the previous 3 month analysis timeframe up to two years. We’ve also updated a number of the analysis interfaces to make them more useful and productive.

Search

The third big Scaling related improvement is the new Search engine. Affino’s previous search struggled when it got to millions of content and media items. The new search is far more scalable. It is also far more capable in that you can do logic searches, range searches and much more.

Messaging

The single biggest project for this release has been the new Messaging platform. The new platform separates out Mailing Lists and Message Campaigns, and allows you for the first time to run SMS and personal messaging campaigns as well as premium email messages. There are also far more ways you can now trigger auto-responses, and demographically filter your target lists and it’s far easier to message than ever before.

Sales and Marketing Automation through the Customer Ladder

The Cutomer Ladder has been extensively evolved in this release, so that it will now be a critical part of the running of any Affino site. Firstly we’ve added conditional logic to the Conversion Events. This means they can be triggered (or not) depending on a sequence of customer / prospect interactions. We have added many more trigger events, so now Affino tracks users updating their information, adding products to their shopping cart, sharing via social media and email, and much more. We’ve extended the incentives and actions that can be taken when an activity takes place, so that it is now possible to message users personally or via SMS as well as give them points which act as store credits that can be used for purchases. The Cutomer Ladder Analysis centre has also been greatly improved to help track and target engagement, activity and members.

Recruitment

Recruitment hasn’t had top billing in Affino, but this release sees the culmination of two years work with an incredibly solid pro-grade recruitment platform. We’ll be posting more on that soon.

Design

Design Panels are a real breakthrough for Affino, and are somewhat overdue. You can now popup any of hundreds of variations in Design Panels. When combined with Sticky Buttons and the Mouseover focus, you can create a great and somewhat dramatic navigation experience. We’ve also added the ability to set the padding around images, and target them more effectively with IDs. The new Topic Filter and Ticke Design Elements will offer new dynamism and drill-down ability to any page.

Productivity

There are a couple of hundred improvements which can be classed as productivity improvements in one way or other, whether is is the great new relationship system, or the instant selections on popup selectors, or the auto-filling of Dynamic Forms.