About to head out of the office when I saw a google alert hit my inbox. It was a post from Joe Manna over on Infusionsoft’s Blog announcing the contest winners.
They awarded me with the Funniest Video and dropped a Flip Mino HD in the mail. I’d love to share a quick business lesson on the awesomeness of this contest but that will have to wait for another day because I’m running late to my Krav Maga Class!
Dustin and I own and operate a few businesses – all rely heavily on Infusionsoft. One particular business, Integrity Safe, provides 3rd party website verification and issues trust seals to websites who meet certain safety and security measures. Thanks to Infusionsoft, 90% of that business runs on autopilot, allowing us to do the things we really love (like what you’re about to see in the video below).
Last minute update about a must-attend webinar being held by Infusionsoft tomorrow:
Sorry for the late notice but believe me – you’ll want to clear your schedule for this. I received an email today from a friend over at Infusionsoft about a very special webinar that Clate (CEO of Infusionsoft) is hosting on Wednesday, July 28th.
Not only is Clate going to reveal some pretty awesome email strategies that will have you drooling over all the cash you’ve been leaving on the table, a little birdie told me there is going to be a sweat deal on the software.
Listen, Infusionsoft never discounts their software. Have you been kicking the Infusionsoft tire for a while? Get off the fence and join us tomorrow. I’m not sure what the definition of “sweet deal” is exactly, but I know you’ll want to be there.
I just read a highly impressive post over at Infusionsoft’s Official Blog. The author of the post – Tyler Garns, Infusionsoft’s own VP of Marketing. Tyler shares his recent experience (yesterday) of capturing leads via SMS at Ramon Ray’s 12 Hours of Tech conference in New York.
Now if you were with us at InfusionCon this last March, you probably already saw Tyler use the InfusionSMS platform to drive opt-ins. Seeing that the audience there was comprised of Infusionsoft Users, dying to know how the integration worked, he had a huge number of people bite. No surprise.
So how did Tyler achieve a 94% opt-in rate? Here’s his story, “At the end of my presentation, I told the audience how to get a free copy of the book and request more information about Infusionsoft. All they had to do was text the word “chaos” followed by their email address to 411247. Of the approximate 51 people in the room, 48 of them texted in. They were automatically tagged (segmented) in Infusionsoft, received an email, immediate text response, and they were started on a follow-up sequence.”
If you haven’t checked out InfusionSMS yet, I recommend you do so now. You can even watch the demo here below to see it in action. I probably don’t need to state this, but just in case anyone is uncertain, you’ll need to have Infusionsoft for this to work
Tyler goes on to say: “Once people are in your Infusionsoft CRM, you can send broadcast texts from Infusionsoft or even use text messages as part of follow-up sequence. It’s great for appointment and event reminders and just about anything else that could be accomplished with a text message.”
“This example is among many that shows how you can take Email Marketing 2.0 to the next level in your business. It’s not just emails … it’s not just texting … it’s leveraging both platforms to accomplish the need to send the right message at the right time to the right people. When you think of Infusionsoft, think of it as the engine to your marketing machine – it can really do anything.”
Do you sell digital products like eBooks MP3’s or videos? If so, we recently developed an awesome Infusionsoft integration just for you.
As you probably already know, Infusionsoft has some pretty awesome functionality around delivering and protecting the above digital products.
What you may or may not know is that Infusionsoft has a 10 MB file size limit. Unfortunately most digital products are larger than 10 MB, rendering this feature almost useless for most of our clients.
So after a few late nights and some extra-large pizzas, we found a solution to serve up files larger than 10 MB. The best part is, the solution still uses the native feature within Infusionsoft.
We recently shot a video to show exactly how this works. If you’d like to see it, go to:
If you’re using order forms, you will love/hate this video. Infusionsoft made recent changes (inadvertent I’m guessing) that placed the “Form Name” with in Infusionsoft as the title tag on the live order form. Since it’s thrown in the head tag, any titles you add to the CSS template or in the order form header are pretty much obsolete. Bottom line, all of your “titles” have been replaced with the “Form Name,” and you may want to make changes immediately. The video below explains everything in greater detail.
P.S. When you host your own order forms (highly recommended) you have absolute control over the layout and overall design. You obviously can control simple things like the Page Title as well. But that’s another training video…
Of course not! Clate has to be one of the most optimistic guys I know, only to be surpassed by his brother Jeff. This just happened to be the still frame on a video I recently watched where Clate and Scott Martineau delivered a really cool presentation at the Demo Spring 2010 event. You’ve probably already seen the new email editor, but there’s more important lessons to be learned from this video. Listen to the way these guys articulate their service. Learn from the clarity with which they describe their positioning in the marketplace. Is your dream, your vision, your purpose and your mission clearly defined?
A valuable lesson about overcoming obstacles related to both buying and selling – you may be hitting these speed bumps right now and not even know it.
When we first started our business, we needed a way to collect payment from customers across the world. We were literally making sales on day 3 of our new venture. We hadn’t even formed a corporation yet. So the quick and obvious solution was PayPal. It seemed easy enough and would work just fine for our needs…at least that’s what we thought initially.
Over time we found that not only was the checkout process cumbersome for our clients, we ourselves didn’t want to go in and create a unique money request for each and every client. I won’t tell you how long we ran our sales like this. I’m turning red just writing about it.
Long story short, we finally got hooked up with a gentleman by the name of Paul Lonsford. I had sold Paul Infusionsoft years ago when I was still with the company. He really hooked us up. Here’s what you really need to know though:
Once we had our merchant account in place, it streamlined the way we processed credit cards. Here we were Infusionsoft Mavens and we weren’t using the shopping cart for what it was really designed for. We were losing out on all sorts of automation with PayPal.
We didn’t realize it, but we had been neglecting our sales efforts because of the difficulty in processing the actual transaction once a deal had been closed.
Here’s the really clincher – when we switched from routing sales through PayPal to our new merchant account, we almost doubled our revenue in the first month! It’s like there was some unknown barrier to our success processing sales the old way. Thank heavens for Merchant Processing 2.0.
If you are running your business with Infusionsoft, using only PayPal and not a merchant account, I’m calling you to repentance. Wink. Wink. You are going to face the exact same challenges we faced. Learn from our experience:
1) When you make it easier for a client to pay you, they are more likely to do so.
2) When you make it easier to close a deal, you are more likely to do so.
3) Storing credit cards on file for payment plans and subscriptions is priceless.
4) Having a cart skin/theme that is branded with your site curbs the shopping cart abandonment you get when throwing people over to PayPal to complete a transaction.
Since the time of our transition we have referred 12-15 clients asking for merchant recommendations over to Paul. We’re pleased to say that each and every one of them have come back with rave reviews of his unmatched pricing and customer service.
We recently partnered up with Paul to provide our clients as well as Infusionsoft Users a unique package to help them get up and running (and doubling sales) in no time. We really have put together the sweetest merchant account deal for internet credit card processing. Absolutely no one can beat this offer.
I’m shaking the dust off of my blogging vacation to ask you a very important question. The question I’m posing is the same question that I’ve been getting from my clients over the last few weeks…are you attending InfusionCon?
Well, my answer is a resounding YES! Not only am I going, but our company will have a booth there. So please make sure you stop by and say hi to Dustin, Dallin and myself.
To mention a few of our clients and partners who will be there:
Paul Lonsford: First Data Independent Sales Dallas
Wes Schaefer: The Sales Whisperer®
Mike Searls: LA Boxing & Success Training Systems
Brian Johnston: Johnston Search
Chris Wise: Credit Line Millionaire
Curtis Dueck: Muvezi & Guardian Silver
Ray O’Donnell: TotalRewards Software
Jennie Jorgens: Small Business Lifeline
Chris Griffin: 3 Day Dentist
James St. Clair DVM: TopDog
Jess Wilkinson: Dorado Vista
Wade Ungaro: Jodo Collections
I know I’m leaving out many of you that I’ve already spoken with. We have 3 short days and would like you to connect with as many clients as possible. If we didn’t mention you on the list, but you’d like us to know you’re coming, you can either comment on this post or CLICK HERE to fill out our contact form.
If you’d like us to mention you in the list above, just disclose that in your submission and we’ll gladly add you to it.
If you haven’t made arrangements to be at InfusionCon, I highly recommend you do so (as long as they are still accepting registrants). If the seats aren’t completely taken already, go to http://infusioncon.com and reserve yours now.
I look forward to meeting many of you in person. Please let me know if I can help you make any connections with Infusionsoft Employees, Partners or any of our clients. I am happy to assist you with anything I can.
It’s the day before Thanksgiving and while I have a list of To-Do’s before taking off for the holiday weekend, I felt the need to spotlight a fascinating blog post I read earlier this morning. You see, I work with a lot of clients who use autoresponders to streamline their communication and automate their sales and marketing efforts. The majority of our clients use Infusionsoft however, from time to time we see the shoestring start-up try to get by with Constant Contact or Aweber. The sole determining factor in their choice of email provider: price.
Obviously there’s a lot more to calculating total return on investment than just keeping the investment low. I’d rather spend $200 and get back $10,000 than spend $20 and get back $1,000…but maybe that’s just me. In my mind any comparison of Infusionsoft and Aweber is apples and oranges anyway. Moving on to the purpose of this post, clients are constantly asking me about Infusionsoft’s deliverability. I share with them the honest facts, based on the time I spent as an employee at Infusionsoft as well as my own usage of the service in my day-to-day business. Let me clarify that our company does a lot of testing and measuring when it comes to opened emails and click-thru rates – and we have been more than satisfied with Infusionsoft’s deliverability.
Yet, on a weekly basis I’ll listen to something like this, “I heard Aweber has better deliverability than Infusionsoft.” This statement is usually hearsay by someone who knows someone who uses Aweber. There never seems to be any raw data to support this theory. Recently though, I had two clients who left Aweber for the host of additional features and functionality Infusionsoft has to offer. They actually seemed (SEEMED) to have data to support higher open rates and click-thru rates using Aweber than Infusionsoft. I was stumped. Was it time to get off of my soap box and put my foot in my mouth?
Nope. Joey Novak to the rescue! Joey is the author of the blog post I’ve been rambling about. He decided to put Aweber to the test and while doing so uncovered some pretty interesting facts about the way Aweber measures deliverability and counts their open rates and click-thru rates. I was shocked to learn about the logic Aweber developers used to program email tracking and reporting statistics. Either they weren’t thinking like marketers (which Infusionsoft is really, really good at) or they knowingly designed this sneaky secret to sway the statistics in their favor. I’ll let you decide for yourself.
I hope the 2 clients I mentioned above read this post. (I’m emailing them about it now). I also hope it’s helpful to new Infusionsoft users or prospective users who are investigating Infusionsoft. If you have any questions, post them below and I will make sure to respond quickly. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
About to head out of the office when I saw a google alert hit my inbox. It was a post from Joe Manna over on Infusionsoft’s Blog announcing the contest winners.
Of course not! Clate has to be one of the most optimistic guys I know, only to be surpassed by his brother Jeff. This just happened to be the still frame on a video I recently watched where Clate and Scott Martineau delivered a really cool presentation at the Demo Spring 2010 event. You’ve probably already seen the new email editor, but there’s more important lessons to be learned from this video. Listen to the way these guys articulate their service. Learn from the clarity with which they describe their positioning in the marketplace. Is your dream, your vision, your purpose and your mission clearly defined?
I’m shaking the dust off of my blogging vacation to ask you a very important question. The question I’m posing is the same question that I’ve been getting from my clients over the last few weeks…are you attending InfusionCon?
It’s the day before Thanksgiving and while I have a list of To-Do’s before taking off for the holiday weekend, I felt the need to spotlight a fascinating blog post I read earlier this morning. You see, I work with a lot of clients who use autoresponders to streamline their communication and automate their sales and marketing efforts. The majority of our clients use Infusionsoft however, from time to time we see the shoestring start-up try to get by with Constant Contact or Aweber. The sole determining factor in their choice of email provider: price.