Why?

• Without written goals, your thinking will tend to be more muddled. Worse, you’ll probably believe your thinking is clear and not realize how much your unclear thinking is hurting your business.
• Your goals act as a filter to help prioritize your time and effort. If it doesn’t forward a goal, why do it?
• Clear business goals will help you create clear objectives for your website. Do you want a website that generates leads for you, a site that sells products, or something else?
• When you know what you’re looking for, you’re more likely to find it! There are various explanations for why life works this way. All I know is that it works.

So, how do you create good business goals?

Your goals should:

• Be Specific
• Be Measurable
• Have a time frame
• Be stated in the past tense.

This last one needs a little explanation.  Imagine you are in the future, and your goal was already fully realized. Writing your goals this way will make them seem more achievable!

Here’s an example goal:

XYZ company had $546,000 of total revenues in 2010.

This goal is specific, it’s measurable, it states a time frame, and it’s written in the past tense.

So, please, whether you’ve been in business for a long time or are just starting your company, create a set of clear business goals. If you get stuck, leave a comment, and I’ll help you get going! And, when this works for you, please leave a comment to tell everyone how you succeeded.

Infusionsoft Customer Support Overall Grade: C-

I split out Customer Support from Technical Support both because they are different, and because I have have very different experiences with them! (Here’s my review of Infusionsoft’s Technical Support).

Unlike Technical Support, Customer Support just doesn’t seem to be a priority for Infusionsoft. Here are some of the problems I know about:

• I have heard regular stories of people who can’t get Infusionsoft to stop charging their credit cards. Infusionsoft promises “no risk” or “money back,” but then it is sometimes a hassle for the consumer. I don’t have any reason to think this is an intentional policy.  After all, you can always just dispute the charges with your credit card company. My best guess is that Infusionsoft just isn’t paying enough attention to this issue.
• Customer Support systems are cobbled together and don’t work smoothly. I talked about the Fusebox in my Technical Support review. It is a good tool, but has some annoying quirks. For example, you create a technical support case, and their system sends you a status email. Great so far. But, click on the link in the email, and it denies you access — You aren’t logged in. The only thing is you can’t log in — There’s no login box! You have to log in to your Infusionsoft application, then click Help -> Take me to the Fusebox. Then, you have to go back to the email and click the link. It’s just annoying. It probably doesn’t work this way from inside Infusionsoft, or it would have been fixed.
• This seems to have gotten better lately, but in the past, updates to the software have sometimes caused various things to break. Usually not big things, and they usually get them fixed, but the problems can still waste a lot of time.
• Using a multitude of systems that aren’t well integrated together. Infusionsoft has just added their Ideas section into the Fusebox. This used to be on a separate site. The Fusebox version may end up being better. Still, it seems like there is an ongoing churn of separate systems that creates confusion about where you should go to get information. It doesn’t look like customer support was ever fully thought through.
• I don’t think Infusionsoft focuses enough on the customer’s experience. Throughout the application, there are functions that work one place and not in others. Or work differently in one place or another. Here’s an example. There’s an Email Batch Status report that shows results from a broadcast email. It shows you this nice pie chart. But, it’s not clear that you can click on the slices to get more information. Sometimes that is! Some slices behave differently than others. It’s just confusing and annoying.

Most of these things in isolation by themselves are small and easily managed. But in total, they make Infusionsoft less usable. I think Infusionsoft could easily improve in this area with a moderate bit of effort, and I don’t understand why they haven’t made it a priority.

Infusionsoft Technical Support Overall Grade: B+

I almost rated technical support as an A-, but it seems like they have slipped a bit in recent months. Maybe it’s the pressure of rapid growth.

At any rate, most of the time technical support is very good. Infusionsoft is a complicated product, and I’m sure it is challenging to answer all the questions people must ask.

I appreciate that telephone support is available — A lot of companies aren’t even offering live human support any more. It’s available during working hours Monday - Friday, except that Infusionsoft closes early on Fridays.

I have consistently found that the support technicians are patient and have a genuine desire to help. And, I have been regularly surprised by some of the creative ideas and tricks I have learned in my support calls.

For more esoteric questions like specific API questions, it may take longer to get an answer, but even then, I think Infusionsoft does better than a lot of companies.

There is also the Fusebox which is like a souped up forum. It has articles on the product, a way to ask or answer questions, discussions, and ideas for improvement. If you ask a question, you are likely to get a response from an actual Infusionsoft employee, but you may also get information from a user or Infusionsoft consultant like me. The Fusebox could be easier to use, but it is a great way to get help when the support desk is closed.

1. Go to Setup -> Misc. Settings. Under Application Settings, you’ll see a section called Custom Fields. Make sure you select Order from the drop down before clicking Go.
2. Add the custom field you want. Be sure to select the appropriate field type as this will affect the searches you can do later on.
   

   Custom Field Screen

3. Click View the field database names (for the API). Write down or print out the “Database Name.” You’ll need this later on. For example, the name of my Test field is Test1. These names are case-sensitive, so make sure you capture the name exactly!
4. Now, go to Setup -> Shopping Cart and select Theme Gallery. The edit your current theme. Click the HTML Sections tab, and then click the Edit button for Area 1. Enter the HTML code for your custom field like this:
   <input name=”Order0_Test1″ id=”Order0_Test1″ type=”text” value=”Test Order Data”/>
   Notice that you have to put Order0_ in front of the database name. That’s the word, “Order” followed by a zero and an underscore. You should have this in both your name and id attributes.
   Click Save.
5. Click Back to Theme Gallery and click Live Preview. You should see your store front. Add a product to the cart and click Checkout. You’ll see your custom fields in Area1 above the Billing Information.
   

   Shopping Cart with Custom Fields

6. Now, pay for the order. Here’s a good trick. Under Shopping Cart, Payment Options, select the checkbox for payment by check. Then, when you’re testing, you can just click the pay by check option in your shopping cart. You don’t actually have to pay for the order this way!
7. Finally, go to Orders -> Find Orders …, and lookup your new order.  You’ll see a Custom Fields tab. Click that, and you’ll see your order complete with the custom field data.
   

   Order Screen with Custom Fields

I hope this is helpful. Leave a comment below with any questions or to let me know how this works for you!

Infusionsoft Double Your Sales Promise Overall Grade: B+

Recently, their focus may have shifted. But, over the last year, Infusionsoft has talked a lot about their product being able to Double Your Sales. Is this true?

Actually, it is true for many small businesses. If your business fits into the following, you have a good chance to Double Your Sales with Infusionsoft:

• If you have revenues less than $1M. Obviously, it’s easier to grow your business from $200K to $400K than it is to go from $10M to $20M in a short time.
• If you have a good product or services and a clear, differentiated strategy. If you have a poor or “me too” product, then doing a better job of communication and follow-up still won’t help.
• If you are willing to spend your time and/or money to improve your marketing or follow-up. Sometimes, people allow themselves to believe that all they have to do is spend $200-300 with Infusionsoft and their sales will improve. Of course, this won’t happen by itself. It takes a real effort to realize the potential of Infusionsoft.
• You’re an established business and already have a list of customers. Startups can still benefit from Infusionsoft, but it’s going to take longer and cost more.

Infusionsoft has a famous case study where they were able to double sales in only 72 days — All About Spelling. This company had a good product, was established and had a contact list of almost 6,000 customers, and had revenues of  $200-300K when they started. The one thing that isn’t always pointed out is that Infusionsoft supplied some of their top people to provide consulting help. All About Spelling may have paid for some of the improvements to their website, but they didn’t pay for the top consulting help.

Doing better at attracting leads, building your contact list, and following-up will help any business, and Infusionsoft is very helpful in facilitating this process. Plus, Infusionsoft will help with your education-based marketing programs.

The key is to provide value to your prospects and customers. I know this is obvious, but I talk with people all the time who have the idea the technology like Infusionsoft is the secret. Infusionsoft is a good tool for many companies. But, you have to know your customer, provide value, and communicate clearly. At GreasedSkid, we help Infusionsoft clients accomplish exactly these goals.

So, why a B+ instead of a higher grade? Some of Infusionsoft’s marketing reinforces the idea that if you just buy the product, your sales will quickly double. As described above, it can. Just be prepared to do the needed work!

Infusionsoft Affiliate Module Overall Grade: C-

The big problem with Infusionsoft’s Affiliate Module is that it relies on the Shopping Cart! And, as we already discussed, the shopping cart is a very big weakness of Infusionsoft.

Credit for an affiliate sale is given when a sale is completed. But the sale has to go through the shopping cart, so you have to use the shopping cart for the Affiliate functions to work.

For most of my clients, I have not been able to use the shopping cart, so I have not had the need to do a deep dive into the Affiliate functions. If the shopping cart is suitable for your business, I would give the Affiliate module a much higher grade — At least a B+.

• It supports multiple Affiliate levels
• Affiliates can login and setup their marketing programs, and you can create marketing resources for them.
• You can vary the Affiliate payouts by product and setup different Affiliate programs.

Maybe Infusionsoft will fix their shopping cart, and the Affiliate module will become useful for many more clients!

Infusionsoft Shopping Cart & Storefront Overall Grade: D

The shopping cart and storefront are some of the worst parts of Infusionsoft!

• The customization options are limited
• The product pages are not SEO optimized
• The shipping options are limited, and you can’t integrate with Fedex or UPS.
• It’s not a good fit if you have very many products

Maybe I’m being too hard in some ways. If your needs are very basic, the shopping cart does work. It’s a good fit for you if:

• You have relatively few products and product categories
• You are not picky about the branding for your online store
• You can use simplified shipping options

I think Infusionsoft is aware that their Shopping Cart & Storefront is a big weakness, and they have oriented their marketing toward their strengths in email marketing, follow-up, and automation. It’s a shame, really. It’s really great to be able to do marketing follow-up based on products purchased, etc.

The limits of Infusionsoft’s shopping cart has been good for GreasedSkid, though. We do a lot of project that integrate Infusionsoft with third-party shopping carts like Volusion.

Infusionsoft Automation & Multimedia Marketing Overall Grade: A+

Infusionsoft’s follow-up sequences and automation take Autoresponders to the next level. Plus, you can do more than just send email — Letters, faxes, voice mail, and more are all supported.

Nearly anything that happens in Infusionsoft can trigger an Action Set — A group of actions that can including adding the contact to a  follow-up sequence:

• A new opt-in via a web form
• A purchase
• A recurring charge that failed
• A specific date passed (A birthday or an event date)
• A click on a link in an email message
• A manual trigger by one of your sales or support employees
• An event external to Infusionsoft that triggers via the software API

Action sets can include many actions like:

• Tagging a contact to segment your database
• Sending a single email to a contact
• Adding the contact to a follow-up sequence (multiple emails or other media)
• Assign the contact to a specific sales or support employee
• Create a task for an employee
• Create an Opportunity Record
• Create an Order

Follow-up sequences let you schedule a sequence of follow-up activities for a specific contact. People are busy, and staying in touch helps them learn about your company and use your products. More on how to use Follow-up Sequences …

Follow-up sequences can contain many types of multimedia and activities:

• Email messages
• Fax (There is a per fax fee)
• Voice Message (There is a per message fee)
• Letter (You have to pay for printing and postage)
• Fulfillment (You have to pay for fulfillment costs like the product or printing, shipping, and handling)
• Add a task to one of your users
• Run some other Action Set

There is a lot of flexibility regarding how and when each of these follow-up activities happen. You can add rules that control most activities and can have people automatically removed or switched to another follow-up sequence.

In working with Infusionsoft customers, I have always been able to create workable follow-ups and automation.  Sometimes it takes a little creativity, but there’s usually a way.

Automation and Multimedia follow-up are truly strengths of Infusionsoft.

Infusionsoft Integrated CRM Overall Grade: A

The best thing about Infusionsoft is that it integrates together most of the tools you need to run your small business. If you or your employees regularly speak directly with customers, then having a good CRM system becomes invaluable.

Infusionsoft’s CRM has all the things most small businesses will ever need:

• An individual record for each contact
• The ability to associate contacts with companies
• Tracking of tasks and appointments
• Capture of contact history — Emails, phone calls, notes, purchases (If you use the Infusionsoft shopping cart), etc.
• Import contacts from other systems
• The ability to add custom information to each contact or company
• Calendar
• Send email directly from the CRM screen
• Opportunity management (With the $299 per month Deluxe version). Track specific sales opportunities through your sales pipeline.
• Billing and Invoicing  (With the $299 per month Deluxe version). Create orders and invoice clients.
• Integration with Outlook. You can use Outlook for many CRM functions and still have all the information stored and sync’ed with Infusionsoft

In my work with Infusionsoft users, I have not found any feature gaps or problems with the CRM functionality. There are other more flexible systems available, but they are also more expensive!

You can use the CRM for your support team or your sales team.

The only time I would say Infusionsoft’s CRM is not a good fit if you have a large number of users. Beyond the 2-5 users that come with their packages, each user adds another $59 per month. If you have more than 25 support or sales users, you’ve probably outgrown Infusionsoft.

Infusionsoft Email Marketing Overall Grade: B+

Email marketing is one of the best features of Infusionsoft. They do a good job with deliverability, and have all the common functions you need to execute effective email marketing campaigns.

The pricing is competitive, too. For 25,000 emails per month, MailChimp charges $250 (1-cent per message is a typical cost). But, that’s just for sending the email messages. Infusionsoft gives you the whole product (CRM and everything else) for $199 — And that includes 25,000 emails per month.

Why an B+ instead of an A+?

• They stick a message at the bottom of each message that says “Delivered by Infusionsoft.” They’ve been talking about letting you pay extra to get rid of this, but that doesn’t seem reasonable to me.
• The messages come from Bounce@Infusionsoft.com. You can’t change this. More on this problem …
• Most of the reports you’ll want are available, but they could be easier to use.  More on this …
  Also, there’s no real support for split-testing messages. Supposedly, this is in the works …
  You can’t access the email statistics via the API
• The base product doesn’t offer email spam scoring so you can check for messages that are likely to get trapped by spam filters.
• You can’t easily have an HTML page that mirrors the content of the message. So, you can’t do a “Click to see this in your browser” link.

For many small businesses, these are mostly annoyances. Improving your follow-up and communication with customers can be very valuable — Even if it isn’t perfectly branded and smooth.

Infusionsoft Email Marketing probably isn’t a good fit for you if:

• You spend a lot of time and energy on your brand and customer experience, and you want your messages “just so.”
• You are an analytics wizard and you want to know everything about email deliverability, email metrics, etc.

There are a couple of other nice features that I should mention:

• There’s a plugin for Outlook that lets you integrate Outlook with Infusionsoft. You can even use Outlook to send email through Infusionsoft! It’s only available for Outlook, though. This really helps if you are using the CRM features in Infusionsoft.
• You can include trackable links in a message. You can use this to trigger Automation and Segmentation events.
• You can setup sequences of emails that happen according to various rules. For example, you can setup a sequence that goes out every 4 days after someone completes an opt-in form on your website.

Here are a couple of other articles from Greased Skid:

• Infusionsoft is Great for Email and Follow-up
• Infusionsoft Outlook Integration
• eMail Deliverability Reports in Infusionsoft

If I missed anything, or you disagree, please leave a comment. If you want to see an example of an Infusionsoft Email, complete the form at:

Since I may work with you in the future, I want to paint a realistic picture of where it’s good and who it will work for. It’s not good for me to have to tell clients “No, Infusionsoft can’t do that.”

In case you don’t know, Infusionsoft is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Email Marketing product. It gives you a database to store all your customers, and makes it easy to send follow-up email messages to them. Since most businesses don’t do a good job of following up, this can really boost your business.

Their system is specifically targeted at small businesses. The typical starting price is $200 or $300 per month (At the higher price, you get more contacts and features). This price includes 2 users, so if you have more than two salespeople who will use the system, you’ll need to add additional users at $59 per month. Infusionsoft is not recommended for companies with more than 25 users!

Infusionsoft is very aggressive with it’s sales and marketing. I understand their desire to sell their product, but I think it would be better if they were more consultative in their sales approach. The sales people seem to say “Yes” to almost any question regarding the capabilities of the system. I think their sales and marketing aggressiveness is the number one reason for Infusionsoft complaints.

So, I’m going to try to help with a balanced review of their features and service. I’m going to go through each of these in the next several days, and if a link isn’t active, please check back.

And, if you are or become an Infusionsoft user, please Contact Us when you need some help!

Comments are always welcome here, so if you have a specific question, please leave a comment.

Infusionsoft Features

• Email Marketing Grade: B+
  
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Grade: A
• Smart Automation & Multimedia Marketing Grade: A+
• Shopping Cart Grade: D
• Affiliate Module Grade: C-
• Double Your Sales Promise Grade: B+

Infusionsoft Technology and Support

• Technical Support Grade: B+
• Customer Support Grade: C-
• Software API
• Overall Architecture

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.

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!

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.

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 described how Infusionsoft is Great for Email and Follow-up — This is really a strength of the product!  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!

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!

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.

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.
• … 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.

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?

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.GreasedSkid.com/index.php?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 GreasedSkid/InfusionCon.  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!