Inbound & Digital Marketing Blog

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

It IS possible to send SMS text messages as part of a follow-up sequence from Infusionsoft!

There are a couple of tricks, though.

• You have to buy an external SMS text messaging service like Clickatell.

• Set the To address for the template to: sms@messaging.clickatell.com, and all messages get sent to this address.

• In the body of the message, embed a custom field with the contact’s SMS phone number. The number should be unformatted to match Clickatell’s requirements.

You can't use one of Infusionsoft's phone number fields because it automatically formats the number and Clickatell won't work right! But, if you just use a Custom field, then everything will be OK.

I made this work with Clickatell's SMTP API, by sending an email template like this:

user:xxxxx   {Your specific Clickatell info}
password:xxxxx   {Your specific Clickatell info}
api_id:xxxxx    {Your specific Clickatell info}
to: 448311234567  {Insert the custom field data here}
reply:youremail@yourdomain.com
text:Meet me at home {This is the message you want to send}

I hope this helps. There's also more on the Infusionsoft Blog.

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

Mike asked a question about eMail Deliverability Reports in Infusionsoft:

First of all, as a newbie to Infusionsoft, its good to find your site and the pdf download (the analytics clickable links helped already).

My question is, is there a way to get an email deliverability (opens/clicks/hard and soft bounces etc) for all emails sent over a certain period?

I'd love to see Infusionsoft improve their reporting or open up more of the data to the API so I could create better reports.

One report you can run is the Email Batch Status report (Under Reports --> Marketing Reports). Then, click the View button to see the report.

It's not obvious, but you can click on the pie charts to get more detail! If you want a more detailed explanation, please download my free special report: Infusionsoft: 7 Keys to Top Results. Key number 6 has some detailed information on how to use the pie charts and get all the information.

You can also request new features at ideas.infusionsoft.com.  They do pay attention and do implement some of the requests!

Please leave a comment if you have other questions!

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

Conrad asked about using Infusionsoft web forms inside of WordPress:

Can I put Infusionsoft forms in a Wordpress blog?

Is there a plug-in?

This is actually quite easy, and here's a movie that shows you how to use Infusionsoft Web Forms in WordPress: 

Basically, the steps are:

• Create the Web Form in Infusionsoft
• Click the "Gimme the Code" button, select all (ctrl-A), and copy (ctrl-c)
• Create a WordPress Post or Page and click the HTML tab in the WordPress editor
• Paste in the Infusionsoft web form code
• Edit the web form code to clean it up or style it if you want
• Switch back to Visual mode and add other text, images, etc.

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

Malcolm asked about marketing automation and follow-up:

Email campaigns based on purchases

Generate a “send person A written Thank You card″ or something like that.

I have no e-commerce or web-based sales… I just want something to manage email and real mail campaigns based on clients’ potential interests or recent purchases or referrals.

I’d also like to provide people the opportunity to “request information” off my website so I can (A) send them info, and (B) capture their contact info for additional contact later to try to win them over as a client.

Once you DO get someone as a client, how do you track their change in status?

Much of our business is run off a SQL database kinda program I suspect there would be a lot of manual data entry or updating as our clients buy things or refer people or what have you.

Since much of my business is run on a different program, I wonder if automating my email and regular mail campaigns is kind of like looking for a unicorn.

In another post, I explained Email Marketing & Lead Nurturing to Grow Your Sales -- This is really a strength of Infusionsoft!  This post goes into detail on how you can define customer follow-up sequences that:

• Send written Thank You cards or other physical packages

• Send different messages or items based various rules involving customer interests or recent purchases

• Have multiple steps over time to stay in touch with your prospect

But Malcolm also raises another question. What if you already have a customer database you're using to manage your business? Depending on your situation, there are two fundamental options:

• Replace your existing customer database with Infusionsoft. As long as your database is clean and well structured, you can easily import all your customer information. Infusionsoft allows you to create up to 100 custom fields for your specific situation. Amd, if you need to, you can integrate Infusionsoft with your external applications with the API.

• Keep your existing customer database, but synchronize the contact information with Infusionsoft. This may require using the Infusionsoft API to keep everything up to date.

Infusionsoft will only email contacts that are imported into your Infusionsoft application. So, you can't avoid keeping all your contacts in Infusionsoft.Either way, giving people the opportunity to “request information” off your website is simple. You just create an Infusionsoft web form and put the code on your website. Then, the propspects information is automatically captured in Infusionsoft.

For more information, see our special report: Infusionsoft: 7 Keys to Top Results.

And, thanks again for the great question, Malcolm!

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!

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

John recently left me a question asking:

What is API? I just signed up with InfusionSoft and I'm pretty annoyed at their support. I put a ticket in on Wednesday - to fix a ticket they did not fix earlier in the week - and 48 hours have passed and I have not heard a thing. I am not at all happy with them.

API stands for Application Programing Interface. That helped a lot didn't it!

An API is a way for two different computer programs to communicate with each other. Sometimes you want to do this to integrate two systems and have them work together. Or, you might use an API to extend a system and add new capabilities.

If you want some examples,  Joe Manna posted his ideas on ways to use the Infusionsoft API on the Infusionsoft blog.

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

I came across some complaints about Infusionsoft on Jon Gales blog today. This reminded me that I've been meaning to write a review on Infusionsoft. So, here's a review of Infusionsoft mixed with some comments on Jon's experience!

I am an Infusionsoft user and a Certified Infusionsoft consultant (CMAC). I'm not an employee of Infusionsoft, but I would like to see them succeed. I think some of Jon's comments are right on, and some of them go way too far. Now, here are some specifics:

• Jon said: "Their API is one of the most difficult I’ve ever integrated with" Yea, it could be easier. I'd rather they used SOAP instead of the older XMLRPC. And, I wish the API really allowed full access to everything in Infusionsoft -- There's some data you just can't get to. Still, for the things you can do with the API, I've not found it hard to work with. He complained about having to make 4 calls do do something. What I do is just wrap up the 4 calls into a single function -- After that, it's only one call!

• API requests then aren’t processed in real time. I've run into this problem, too! I think Infusionsoft should be able to do customer-related things like email and transactions immediately. That's what my customer expect.

• The technical staff had no idea of really huge gaps in functionality. and later on, They say whatever they need to get you off the phone.  I really disagree with Jon on this one. I've found the support people really bend over backwards to help you. I've never felt like they were trying to get me off the phone. Yea, some are more knowledgeable than others, but they will go get help when appropriate.

• There’s only one guy here who deals with the API That's right, Justin is the API Guy. He's the one who deals with the heavy duty technical questions on the API. I have found Justin to be consistently responsive and helpful. In my experience, there aren't a lot of companies who make someone this capable so easily available. Justin even posted his direct contact information in one of the responses.

• Infusionsoft found this post ... and has been busy getting in touch with me. I see this as a positive thing.  How many companies wouldn't bother to search the web for users who are having trouble? Infusionsoft has been growing very quickly and they definitely have problems. I've certainly been frustrated by them! If there was a good alternative, I would tell you. If it's out there, I haven't found it yet.

OK, enough about the post on John Gales blog. What's good and bad about Infusionsoft? I may expand on this later, but here's a quick list:

The Good

• Integration. Having CRM, eMail, and Shopping Cart all integrated together is great! It really save a bunch of time over trying to use separate systems.

• Automation. With a little creativity, you really can use this tool to automate a lot of your business.

• The Power of the System. I am continually amazed at the things you can do with Infusionsoft. It really is powerful. Of course, it does take some effort to learn it and use it well.

• Support. As mentioned above, I have found support to be very helpful. It can take a little effort to find the right person, but even outside of the official support team, Infusionsoft employees will try to help.

The Bad

• Shopping Cart is too limited. The shipping options are too limited and tt doesn't support Fedex/UPS shipping.  Also, the storefront is pretty limited. As long as your needs are basic, though, it is fine.

• Reports are a real weakness, and you can't get data via the API. This is probably my biggest complaint. I believe in testing and leveraging data. It's there, but I can't get it in a usable form. I think this is a priority that is being addressed in an upcoming release.

• The user interface could be a lot better. Some of this is due to the power of the system, but sometimes, functions just seem to be in the wrong place.

• Documentation is behind. The documentation seems to lag behind the capabilities of the system, and this makes it harder to get things done.

Those are my top good and bad items. If you want to see more, leave a comment and I'll address your questions.

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

John Jantsch of  DuctTape Marketing wrote a recent post on Twitter and small business (http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog/2009/03/31/all-tweet-and-no-cattle/).

His main point is that small businesses should get the basics of business in place before chasing the latest hot idea or fad. I have to agree!

Execution is essential in effective marketing. No matter how clever the strategy or idea, it's usually consistency and persistence that gets business results.

I think human beings want to imagine there's a magical way to get results. And, the latest fad or technology gets annointed as "The Answer."

Do you find yourself running around chasing the latest big thing?

Or, do you have a system for doing the boring things that will make a difference for your business?

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

Infusionsoft is great for managing your customers and opportunities. And it automates the follow-up process that is frequently broken in small companies!

Still, some of the tracking and reporting functions could be better. I know Infusionsoft is working on some improvements, but in the meantime, here's a way to use Google Analytics to track user responses. Here's what you do:

1. Create a "Trackable Link" in Infusionsoft. (You probably already know how, but if not, enter a question and I'll do a post on it!)
2. In the Trackable Link, add Google Analytics tags to the URL like this:http://www.InboundTeam.com?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=tracking
3. Merge the Trackable Link into your eMail follow-up messages.

Your eMail audience will receive a message with the Infusionsoft link. When they click, Infusionsoft will forward them to the link and include the Google Analytics tags. Then, inside Google Analytics, you can see how many people clicked the link, where they went on your site, etc. Even better, Google Analytics stores the tags in a cookie, and can report on conversions and transactions based on the tracking tags!

Google provides a handy URL Builder tool that makes it easier to create the URL. Really, all you need to decide is what information you want to track. Typically, you might have:

• utm_medium: This says how the message got to the user. For an email message, you might just set this to email.

• utm_source: This indicates who the user is. You might set it to the name of one of your segments.

• utm_campaign: This indicates the campaign or follow-up sequence the message belongs to.

One more thing. When you create the Trackable Link in Infusionsoft, you will often want to add an action to tag the person.That way, you can see who is interested in which topics. This is how you can actually automate the process of getting to know your customers.

For an example of how all this works, go to InboundTeam-Infusionsoft.  Enter your information and click Download. Don't worry about a flood of spam, you'll get a message asking how frequently you want to hear from us again. And one option is to not send more information!

Behind the scenes, each of the links is trackable and assigns a tag. Each link also has the Google Analytics tracking.

Happy Tracking!

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

Here is a 4:50 video demonstrating the Outlook integration feature of Infusionsoft.

See the Video ... (It's best to click the Full Size button before watching the video.

Infusionsoft offers CRM features along with eMail marketing, follow-up automation, and a shopping cart.

Outlook integration lets you access the CRM features and link eMail messages to Infusionsoft -- All without leaving Outlook!

It's still a beta, and there are even some glitches in the video, but it definitely makes it easier to use Infusionsoft.