Inbound & Digital Marketing Blog

Email Marketing & Lead Nurturing to Grow Your Sales

May 28, 2009, Clarke Bishop

Greased Skid Marketing is now part of Inbound Team --The Atlanta, Georgia Inbound Marketing Agency specializing in helping businesses grow with online marketing.

Adam asked about using Infusionsoft primarily for eMail and Follow-Up:

I’m not looking to use Infusionsoft for everything that they advocate using it for…just as an email tool so that I can build rules-driven email campaigns that reference customer behavior data (we will send daily transactional data via API). For example, if customer purchases X, send them message 1…if customer is in Florida and has not purchased Y in more than 12 days, send them message 2, etc.

Follow-up up eMail campaigns are a real strength of Infusionsoft!

First, specifically for Adam. I am assuming that you are going to use your own shopping cart with your own customer behavior data. Then, via the API, you'll trigger a Follow-up Sequence or Action Set. If this is your plan, I expect that Infusionsoft will work wonderfully for you!

Follow-up sequences are one of the best features of Infusionsoft. You can:

  • Setup a sequence that includes multiple messages and even multiple types of media (Fax, direct mail, gift fulfillment, etc.)
  • Specify the delay between steps in a sequence
  • Schedule steps forward or backwards from a date or event
  • Have a sequence trigger a follow-up phone call from your sales team
  • Cancel the sequence when your prospect responds (Or put them in a different sequence)

Here's how you would typical use a follow-up sequence. Let's say a customer buys a product from you. You use that event to trigger a customer satisfaction follow-up sequence like this:

  • Day Zero: Dear Customer, thank you for buying our product ...
  • Day 7: I hope you're enjoying your new product. Did you know it can ...
  • Day 30: Please complete our survey and let us know how the product can be better ...

It's also great to complement your eMail messages with direct mail, and Infusionsoft can easily handle this as part of a follow-up sequence.

There are a lot of great ways to trigger a follow-up sequence, a specific action, or an ActionSet.

  • A follow-up sequence is a sequence of actions or events that with set time delays (Like I described above)
  • A single action can be things like sending an email, assigning a task to a salesperson, sending a direct mail piece, etc.
  • An Action Set is a set of actions, but there are no set time delays or sequence. These are essentially just a group of actions.

Some of the ways you can trigger any of these are:

  • A prospect fills out a web form on your website
  • A customer buys a product
  • A user manually causes a trigger (Example: a salesperson finishes a phone call and puts someone in a follow-up sequence)
  • A person clicks on a link in an eMail message

I hope this helps Adam and any other current or prospective Infusionsoft users. There's a lot you can do! It make take something to set all this up, but once you do, it's wonderful.  Usually, the hard part is doing the serious business thinking about how you actually want things to work.

There are some other ideas in our Special Report: Infusionsoft: 7 Keys to Top Results. Check it out, and let me know what you think.

And, keep those questions coming!

Topics: Inbound Marketing, Infusionsoft, Sales & CRM