The 5 Most Powerful ShortStack Features You’re Not Using (but Should be!)

ShortStack is the most powerful and flexible campaign-building software available.

We’re biased, of course, but we also get tons of feedback from our users who have used our competitors’ products and found them wanting in some way. While there are dozens of features our users tell us over and over again that they love — flexibility/customizability, creative templates, customer support, mobile-readiness, and price — there are a few features we think have superpowers.

If you haven’t tried our embedding capabilities, used a custom domain name for a Campaign, tried our Action Widget, or dived into our analytics, you’re missing out. And if you’re not the only one at your company using ShortStack, you’ll definitely want to learn about ShortStack for Teams. 

Here are the four most powerful ShortStack features you should try with your next Campaign:

1. Embedding

The ShortStack users who already embed their Campaigns on their websites know just how powerful the option is. And how simple. Embedding is as easy as pasting a bit of code into any web page that accepts an iframe — it’s like embedding a YouTube video in a blog post.

Embedding lets you take advantage of all the traffic your website and blog already get every day.

So why else should you embed your Campaigns? In addition to leveraging your website’s organic traffic, we can think of these three reasons:

• To make it clear who is hosting the Campaign. When your Campaigns are embedded on your website, there’s no question about who is hosting them. People can get nervous about sharing information and filling out forms if they’re not certain about who is collecting the information. An embedded Campaign becomes part of your larger website.

• To increase exposure to your business. When people share a link to your Campaign with their friends and those friends come to your embedded Campaign, they’re more likely to click around, giving them exposure to your business.

• To offer a better user experience. Embedded campaigns are responsive (as are all ShortStack Campaigns) so you don’t have to worry about how the campaigns will look on specific social networks or devices. They’ll look the same, and function perfectly, everywhere.

To embed your Campaigns, just hit publish, at which point you’ll be offered three different types of code: Responsive, Fixed or WordPress (to use with ShortStack’s plugin).

2. Custom domain and subdomain.

• Uniform Verbiage: As we previously explained, it’s important to brand all of your marketing materials. Using a custom Campaign URL gives you the opportunity to include relevant words and your business name in your URL. This will keep your Campaign consistent with the rest of the materials you’re sharing online.

• SEO: URLs are one of the fundamental building blocks for SEO. The easier you can make it for top search sites to find your URL the better they’ll rank. Using your business name in your Campaign URL makes it easy for anyone online to find your Campaign if they’re searching your business.

• Looks more trustworthy: Including your company name in your Campaign URL makes it look more professional than a default URL does.

In this post, you can learn more about branding your ShortStack Campaigns.

3. Action-Gating.

Action-Gating is when you ask users for information and then reward them after they fill out your form. What you ask for on the form is entirely up to you. It could be an email address or a birthday or other demographic information.

Action-Gating is different from Like-gating (which Facebook banned in 2014 anyway) in which you ask a user to simply like your page or your post. Action-gating delivers more useful information.

Learn more about how you can integrate Action-Gating in your Campaigns here. 

4. Exporting and using collected data.

One of the reasons you run Campaigns is to interact with your customers and learn more about them so you can tailor your products and services to them. But unless you’re studying the data you collect, it’s hard to know what they’re motivated by.

ShortStack’s advanced analytics show you the Campaign metrics that matter, in real time. Our analytics let you compare the number of views your Campaigns received yesterday compared to today, or this week vs. last — any timespan you’re interested in. You can also learn where your Campaign traffic is coming from: search engines, websites, social media platforms and email. This is the kind of knowledge that will help you settle on promotion tactics.

Our analytics can also tell you about entry spikes, the environment people are coming from, device type and platforms.

5. ShortStack for Teams

One of our newest features allows you to add clients and coworkers as “Team Members” who work with you, and with each other, to create Campaigns, manage databases and monitor analytics. It’s a feature that saves you time and money because it makes it possible to collaborate and finish projects faster.

As always, our support team is on hand to walk you through using these features. All you have to do is email theteam[at]shortstacklab[dot]com.