Welcome back to What’s New in Podium! 

Here at Podium HQ, we’ve been calling this the summer of Contact Profiles. These new additions to your Podium experience centralize every conversation and activity you’ve had with a customer through Podium. 

They also give you an easy, convenient way to manage segmentation for your business’s text marketing. More detail below.

There’s also exciting news on the Podium Payments front: it’s never been easier to send a payment request. Below, see how to give it a try.

This and much more in the September 2021 round up. Read on to learn more.

One spot for everything about your customer.

Contact Profiles. Access to all of the customer context that matters to you—in one place. Now you can keep track of all conversations, reviews, campaigns, and very soon, payments history to enable even more meaningful conversations. 

Best of all, Contact Profiles are available in Podium today. All you have to do is hop into your Inbox and take a look.

Learn a little more about Contact Profiles.

Organize your customers for better marketing.

Campaigns Tags. Send targeted messages to your marketable contacts. The introduction of Contact Profiles also allows you to easily create specific audiences by adding a tag to a profile. You can also upload a list of contacts and assign a tag attribute. 

Once you have a tag, you can use it to select contacts for Podium Campaigns and send even more impactful messages. In fact, using a tag boosts click rates and reply rates for Podium Campaigns by over 200%.

See how to start using tags in your marketing today.

Attract more opt-ins & plan future campaigns

Incentivized Opt-Ins. Incentivized opt-ins allow businesses to attach offers/discounts to the sign up pages and website pop-ups to increase opt-in conversion. 

To start customizing your opt-in process, check out this article for a step-by-step walkthrough.

Introducing the Podium audience growth kit. In recent months, Podium has introduced a number of digital and hybrid SMS marketing opt-in tools. Now, you can now view, customize, and see the subscribers collected from them all (with best practices!) in one handy place. 

Get growing! You can find this page in the left-hand navigation of the Campaigns experience in Podium by clicking on “Growth.” 

Scheduled Campaigns. You can also now pre-schedule a campaign to go out at a predetermined time in the future.

Work smarter in Podium with Workflows.

Automations is now Workflows. In Podium, you may have noticed that the “Automations” tab in the navigation bar was changed to “Workflows.” Workflows allow you to automate many tasks inside of Podium, eliminating manual and repetitive tasks from your team’s to-do list. 

Pre-built Workflows. Podium’s pre-built workflows make it even more convenient to automate the most common tasks in Podium, including:

• Automated thank you’s for opt-ins and positive reviews 
• Instant review invitations after a payment is received
• Missed call and voicemail responses

With a few simple clicks, you can set up your choice of default workflows, which trigger actions you’re already doing every day in Podium. Browse the collection of pre-built workflows now and look forward to the library growing over time!

Add valuable time back to your day. Learn how to turn on Workflows for your business here.

Get Paid—it’s never been easier.

Universal Payments Navigation. Make a new payment request or credit card charge from anywhere in the Podium product. The “New” button in the top right corner now offers the option to select “Payment Request,” allowing you to power quick, convenient transactions without missing a beat.

Podium Payments is the fastest way to get paid. Learn how to start making payment requests.

Manual Card Entry. Input credit card numbers when initiating a Credit Card charge. If a card isn’t working or you have to take a payment over the phone, you can enter in the customer’s card and information and enter it directly in Podium.

Note that manual card entry is a new method of collecting payment and may have different processing rates than text-to-pay. 

For more on using manual entry, check out this guide.

One delightful thing: Inbox notifications just got a lot more helpful.

Action Required Enhancement. Your Inbox might start looking a little different in the coming weeks. And if you’re like us, you’ll also find the little red notifications a lot more helpful: they only turn red if they’re assigned to you, and a customer is waiting for a response.

Hear from Podium Inbox Product Manager Thomas Stockham about why Podium users are so delighted about this change.

Stay tuned for more Inbox enhancements ahead. Making notifications work for you is only the beginning. See you next month!