simplebooklet updates simplebooklet.com/

We've released a few updates today. They include a new map view in collections, a new branded loading screen for simplebooklets, faster booklet loading, and thumbnail updating.

Map View In Collections

You can now choose between two display views in collections. You have the traditional pinterest style layout of your Simplebooklets or the option to show your Simplebooklets on a map. The map view is very good for tourism, restaurants, and any local services. Check out this example with menus for a local audience. https://booklet.growatpip.com/greenvilletakeout

Loading Screen

We've added a loading indicator for your Simplebooklets. This will display your logo, your Simplebooklet title, and a loading bar, letting your reader know that your booklet is being loaded into their browser. This is especially helpful for large catalogs as it helps keep your customer engaged with your booklet.

Lazy Loading Booklets

This is an improvement that helps speed up the loading of a Simplebooklet. You don't have to do anything, but you will see improvements in the speed with which your brochure or catalog loads in the browser. We prioritize loading your first five pages before loading additional pages, saving bandwidth for your reader and speeding up the pages that appear for your customer.

Thumbnail Refresh

You can now manually trigger an update to your Simplebooklet thumbnail. To do this, go to the PUBLISH tab and tap update under the existing thumbnail. Some people have had issues where the thumbnail wouldn't automatically update. This should help out in those situations.

More new features to come soon…

We've released two very big updates to the simplebooklet platform. They are push notifications and custom buttons.

Push Notification

Getting customers to come back and view your content after an update or even if you have something worth notifying them about is very helpful in creating increased engagement and achieving your goal. We wanted to give you the ability to reach your audience using the power of push notifications.

A push notification will allow you to send a message to anyone who has looked at your Simplebooklet and accepted notifications. You can create a custom message including your logo and an image that will be sent to your subscribed audience. These messages will appear on their desktop and mobile devices like a typical notification you've probably already experienced.

You can add push notifications to your Simplebooklet Navbar in the DESIGN tab, under NAVBARS.

Whenever you want to send out a notification, go to the PUBLISH tab and select the NOTIFICATIONS option.

Custom Button

You can now add a custom button to any page in your booklet. This is a rectangular button that you can apply any number of calls to action. The button can be positioned anywhere on your page and can trigger a weblink, email address, phone number, or turn to a specific page in your booklet.

The custom button allows you to add your own label to the button, making it easy to create a clear indication of what the button action will do when a customer taps it.

You can add custom buttons from the EDIT tab.

We've made some more updates to the app. This includes the ability to view your booklet in plaintext for accessibility, make clickable links on your page flash once on page open, and automatically use your Simplebooklet cover for the native app launch button when a user adds it to their device.

Plaintext

With plaintext, your booklet is turned into a single page with each page stripped to its bare essentials. This is to make your booklet accessible to screenreaders and follows the guidelines provided by . We know this is an important requirement for many educational and governmental organizations.

You can turn on or off the plaintext option from the DESIGN tab, under the NAVBARS option.

Link Flash

It can be difficult for some of your readers to tell what is a clickable area on your page. We've introduced the option of having the link areas on your page flash one time when the page is first opened. The reader will see a small flash of the clickable area on your page. Buttons, link hotspots, and text links will all flash yellow for 2 seconds.

Launch Icon For Native App

Now your launch icon will default to your booklet cover. This will replace the generic icon that was used to represent your booklet. This looks much better for your readers and makes it easier to identify your booklet on their device. You can still select to use your logo for your launch icon.

We have more features rolling in the next two weeks. Stay tuned.

We've updated the screenshot used for your Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin posts of your Simplebooklet. The new screenshot captures both the booklet cover and the background you are presenting your Simplebooklet on. It creates a much more engaging image and has led to an increase in the clickthru rate of Facebook posts.

To post your Simplebooklet to any of these social networks, go to the PUBLISH tab for your brochure, then tap the social network button you want to post onto.

Lots of websites you visit have a small chat button in the bottom right corner of their page. This is a customer engagement tool to make it easy to have a customer reach out and connect with the organization. We thought this would be a useful feature for you to have on your Simplebooklet.

You can add a small messaging button in the bottom right corner of your Simplebooklet that will allow a customer to contact you immediately through a simple, easy to use form. This message will be sent to the email address you have designated and you can then continue the conversation through your email client.

To add this messaging feature, go to the DESIGN tab for your brochure, then tap the NAVBARS menu.

Toggle on the MESSAGING option and tap EDIT.

Enter in an email address to send any customer messages.

Enter a custom greeting to let your customer know a little bit about how you'll respond.

Tap SAVE.

You'll now see in your desktop, mobile, and embedded views a new little messaging icon in the bottom right corner of your Simplebooklet microsite.

All messages sent in this messaging app will go to the email address you set AND will also appear under your leads menu for your booklet stored in your analytics page and on your simplebooklet account dashboard.

We've just released a new Double Gate Fold transition, improved the Tri Fold transition, and made some more enhancements to the Analytics page.

Double Gate Fold

This is a new transition for 8 panel or 4 fold brochures. It looks like this:

It works on all devices.

We've also improved the final transition of the trifold brochure so that it's more like what you'd expect when you flip it in your hands. It also works a bit smoother on your mobile device.

We've also made some bug fixes and improvements to our ROI calculator.

Thanks and we're excited by what we have coming up in the next couple of weeks.

We've rolled a significant update to Simplebooklet today. A lot of changes have happened "under the hood" so to speak so you won't visibly see these updates, but you should see performance improvements and less bugs across the app. The big updates that you will see are to the following features:

Analytics and ROI (Return on Investment)

We completely overhauled our Analytics package to give you more relevant and informative details about your simplebooklet and how your audience engages with your content. Now, when you access your booklet's analytics page, you will see the following at the top of the page.

This is a calculation on the overall lifetime value of your simplebooklet and how much engagement with your audience it has brought you in marketing value against what it cost you to use the simplebooklet platform to host and share it.

You can read about what each value is and how its calculated in our help pages here.

We believe this will give you a much better understanding of the value of your booklet to your business marketing and communication efforts.

You will also notice that we've updated the graphs and display of your metrics for your selected date range. Pick any date range and we will provide you a report of the activity of your booklet between that period. This report is much clearer than the previous display of your analytics.

Google Analytics Update

As before, you can apply your google analytics ID to your account to track user activity from your booklets. We've increased the actions that are passed to Google Analytics to give you more details on that engagement. Google will now track all outbound href (links) and any clicks that occur from a hotspot link you place on your pages. This will give you much better measurement of where you are sending readers from your simplebooklet to where. This is especially useful for anyone who promotes advertisers in their booklet pages such as magazines and newsletters.

Email Options

We've updated our publish tool for sending emails. Along with some formatting improvements, we have given you the option to include an install and a download button in your email message. This will give your recipient the option to open your booklet in a browser, or install your booklet as a native app, or download your booklet as a PDF.

Upload Workflow

We are improving the upload workflow to make it simpler to use and generate a better overall booklet result. We're also making these updates to prepare for new transition formats such as Gated Fold, Z-Fold, Accordion Fold, and more.

Change To Our Plans

You may notice that we've changed our subscription plans. This has been done to focus our platform around the way you, our user, is using our platform. However, don't worry, whatever plan you currently have will be the plan you can keep. We grandfather all existing plans for life and you won't have to switch to a new plan.

The first change is to our free plans. We are reducing the way simplebooklet branding and adverts appear on free simplebooklets. Ads will no longer interfere with the reading experience of your booklet. They are small, less conspicuous banners that appear in the bottom navigation bar. All free plans will now include one simplebooklet to use and promote in an unlimited capacity.

The second change is we are removing the Starter Plan. We found that this plan unnecessarily limited features for people who really only had one or two booklets and made the simplebooklet less engaging across the web. This wasn't what we intended with this plan. We want all our users to be able to take advantage of features such as video teasers, your own branding and custom domain, and install the booklet as a native app. We hated the fact that we didn't make these features available to our Starter plans. So now any paid plan you get on Simplebooklet will include all our key features for making and distributing the most effective online brochure possible.

We found the biggest issue around our plans was figuring out how many booklets people need. Some people need a lot while others wanted just a few. So instead of setting an arbitrary booklet count, we've decided to let you decide. You can simply add more booklets to your account as you need them. We measure booklets as concurrent booklets, so if you delete one, you get to use that space again for another booklet. Additional booklets are 50 cents a month (or $6 a year) and if you buy more than 10, you qualify for a discount price.

So now Simplebooklet offers two paid plans (PRO and BUSINESS) and a free plan. You can see the details of those plans here. And you get to decide how many booklets you need in your account.

Thanks again for using simplebooklet and allowing us to keep developing and adding features. We have a number of new features that we plan to release during the month of march so stay tuned.

We've just rolled a series of new tools and features to Simplebooklet.

Themes

Themes are pre-designed layouts for the microsite that your Simplebooklet is displayed on. The theme sets the background, page turn buttons, navbars, and fonts and colors used in your presentation. You can choose one of our professionally designed themes or save your own so you can apply it to any of your booklets. Any theme can be applied and then customized after you apply it.

Themes should help you look more professional when you share your booklet and speed up your design of your Simplebooklet.

Themes are found in the DESIGN tab.

Search Engine Optimization

Simplebooklet's are quite effective at getting indexed on search engines. To improve that search engine discovery, we've released a new set of tools that will help you tell search engines exactly what you want them to know about your Simplebooklet.

From the PUBLISH tab, you can provide a description for your Simplebooklet and provide structured data so search engines index you better.

New PUBLISH Tab

We've redesigned the layout of the PUBLISH tab to make it quicker and easier to use. We've reorganized where you find different ways to publish and hopefully make it clearer to accomplish your distribution goals.

Stay tuned for new updates coming out in the next month.

We've rolled live a vastly improved video export tool. With the new video export tool, you'll get:

much improved video capture of your pages. up to 25 of your booklet's pages captured. an end credits page with your logo, booklet title, and url.

This is a big change in our video tool and we plan to make it easier to use with your social media posting tools as well.

There's been a lot going on at Simplebooklet over the last two months. We have some big updates to come out in the next couple of weeks. But we're just so excited by this feature that we really wanted to get it out as quick as possible. Mobile trifold transitions.

You can now select a trifold transition for the mobile view of your trifold digital brochures. To do this, open your trifold brochure in the DESIGN tab, select TRANSITIONS and the MOBILE tab, then choose trifold and trifold flip.

Now, whenever someone views your trifold on a mobile device, they will get the same page flipping action they would get from a real trifold brochure.

Thanks for using simplebooklet, Scott