Did your business grow in 2011 when compared to 2012?

If not, that’s a problem. But it’s not a problem that can’t be resolved. The majority of struggling businesses we work with aren’t underachieving due to poor products or services, it isn’t due to competition in their market or because of a “down economy” either. It’s because they lack a clear vision of where they’re headed and equally as important, they’re missing a marketing plan that will get them there.

“Marketing Plan? Like an entire years worth of planning?” you say. If the task seems daunting, don’t stress. I recently attended a kick-butt webinar my friend Tyler Garnes from Infusionsoft put on, teaching businesses how to map out their 2012 marketing plan, absolutely free of charge. Some registrants were actually turned away the day of the webinar due to GoToWebinar’s 1000 seat limit. So Ty is delivering an encore. If you’ve been a little slow moving in preparing a realistic, achievable plan for huge success in 2012, I recommend you REGISTER FOR THIS WEBINAR ASAP.

You’ll leave with not only seasoned guidance on marketing efforts that drive more traffic, capture more leads and generate more sales, you’ll be given tools and files that will help you create your custom MAP (Marketing Automation Plan).

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THE WEBINAR

Wishing you the best 2012 possible,

Jarrod Morris

Infusionsoft, the leader in all-in-one sales and marketing software for small business, today announced it has acquired CustomerHub, a web-based application that provides an easy-to-use membership site and customer portal platform to small businesses who market and sell content online. CustomerHub, one of the top app integrations in the Infusionsoft marketplace, allows users to share unlimited password-protected content with subscribers.

More than 7,500 small businesses use Infusionsoft’s powerful software that combines CRM, email marketing and e-commerce with automation to nurture and convert leads, grow sales and save time.

Specifically designed to work with Infusionsoft, CustomerHub allows small businesses to easily deliver protected content to paying customers and automate the subscription and collections process, helping them generate recurring revenue, save time and eliminate administrative overhead. CustomerHub also allows small businesses to share free protected content by integrating with marketing campaigns.

“Membership sites are growing in popularity as marketers shift their content delivery channels from physical media, like DVDs and binders, to online membership sites, which are easier to manage and more profitable to operate,” says Infusionsoft CEO and Co-founder Clate Mask. “Membership site tools are the way of the future as small businesses look to generate high-quality leads, as well as monetize content and establish recurring revenue streams.”

The acquisition brings top talent to Infusionsoft with CustomerHub founders, Kyle and Nathan Leavitt, along with their team joining the Infusionsoft team to oversee the CustomerHub product.

“We founded CustomerHub because we recognized that there are thousands of small businesses that need a tool to help them deliver protected content to their customers and followers,” says Kyle Leavitt, co-founder of CustomerHub. “Now that we have the power of Infusionsoft behind us, we’ll be able to bring the benefits of CustomerHub to more small businesses. We are excited about joining this dynamic team, the future of the CustomerHub product and other innovations we’ve developed, and the added value this partnership brings to our customers.”

CustomerHub’s pricing is affordable for small businesses at monthly plans starting at $59 that begins with a 30-day free trial.

How Small Businesses Use CustomerHub to Deliver and Monetize Content

“When customers get automated e-mails from us, they are directed to auto-log in to our CustomerHub portal, where we deliver the video and audio content,” says Jermaine Griggs, founder of Hear and Play Music. “This gives us a controlled environment to track customer activity and manage subscriptions and collections. Since we launched this campaign, over 20,000 new users have signed up for our video lesson series and logged into CustomerHub on multiple occasions to access the content.”

“The reason we love CustomerHub so much is because it provides a one-stop portal for our customers to learn best-practices on social media, marketing automation and social customer management, and it allows us the ability to cross-sell and upsell our content to customers at the right time, without being intrusive,” says Adam Metz, founder and CEO of Metz Consulting.

“CustomerHub is a must-have if you’re using Infusionsoft and delivering paid content to customers,” explains Marty Schulting, owner of Accelerated Solutions. “We had no plan on how to handle our declined recurring orders. After 90 days, we had recovered over $5,000. CustomerHub took a ton of workload off our customer support team, and has allowed us to focus more of our energy on the growth of our business.”

Webinar Explaining What CustomerHub Means to Infusionsoft Users

Infusionsoft will host a webinar on Nov. 4 at 10 a.m. PDT to explain how Infusionsoft customers can benefit from CustomerHub in their sales and marketing. You can register here.

You can also read a post from Mask about the acquisition on the Infusionsoft Blog.

About Infusionsoft

Infusionsoft is the leader in all-in-one sales and marketing software for small business. Designed for marketers who have outgrown basic email autoresponder or contact management systems, Infusionsoft is powerful software that combines CRM, email marketing and e-commerce with automated followup into one efficient, easy-to-use system that helps small businesses nurture and convert leads, grow sales and save time. Infusionsoft has a rapidly growing customer base of more than 7,500 customers and 25,000 users. For more information, visit www.infusionsoft.com .

About CustomerHub

CustomerHub was created by Infused Systems, a leading provider of Infusionsoft services and technology. CustomerHub is a web-based application that provides an easy-to-use membership site and customer portal platform to small businesses who market and sell content online. CustomerHub is one of the top app integrations in the Infusionsoft marketplace. For more information, visit www.customerhub.net .

SOURCE: Infusionsoft

Moving past the excuses, we have a real cool find for you here – an “Easter Egg” programmed into Infusionsoft. Now I’ve seen a lot of nested eggs in sites, dvds, software, but this one is just awesome because it’s actually useable. Heck, I took a break the moment I saw it and played a game. You should to:

Now about that contest…

Here’s my result, and I want to paste our customers’ results on this page as well. So send us your completed Sudoku screenshots for a chance to win a special prize.

Oh, and here’s the URL to find Sudoku:
https://appname.infusionsoft.com/EasterEgg/sudoku.jsp (replace “appname” with your account/appname, this URL is case sensitive)

Other Resources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg_%28media%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudoku

Best,

Jarrod

P.S. I used to have to leave Infusionsoft to get my Sudoku fix. Now, I just click a Favorite link on my expandable menu in order to work hard and play hard, all within Infusionsoft.

We hope to see you at InfusionCon. If you’re attending, make sure to connect with us. We’ve prepared all kinds of cool integrations to make your usage of Infusionsoft better, and your life a whole lot easier. You can see a sneak peak of a few of these products at: http://infusionsoftmavens.com.

Click here to learn more about CustomerHub Workshop 2011

What is CustomerHub?

* Membership Site
* Collections Software
* Seamless Integration with Infusionsoft

We’ve had numerous clients ask us for help related to this need, but have been unable to develop a solution with out a serious time investment; time we didn’t have to invest. That’s when it hit me, “ResponseFlow recently purchased InfusionSMS from an Infusionsoft employee, why don’t we purchase Email To Infusionsoft from an Infusionsoft employee?”

I reached out to Matt and TJ, who happen to be best friends of mine since elementary. When they showed me the “behind the curtain” view of what they had developed, I was blown away. These guys poured a lot of time and money into the hardware, software and overall customization that went into this solution. And though they’re unable to carry the torch forward on it, I wanted to make sure they were compensated well for their efforts.

I could go on and on about what problems people are experiencing, and how the solution solves them, or, I can just give you a link to a quick video.

Check out the video and let me know your thoughts.

Jarrod Morris

We already have a few customers using the service prior to this official announcement. And many people are asking when we’ll be releasing the other products on our site. I don’t have a date and time for each one yet, but just know that they are all coming soon, very soon.

Let me start with the last group and work backwards. If you use Infusionsoft and have recently logged in (congratulations), you probably saw a huge banner that looked something like this:

If you haven’t had a chance to attend InfusionCon (Infusionsoft’s Annual User Conference), start making plans right now to do so in 2011. This event is primarily a user event. This means that you can expect solid content related to the software and cutting-edge marketing strategies that are working today. Over the last few years, I have picked up golden nuggets from presenters that I truly believe I couldn’t have learned anywhere else.

Now, for those of you who aren’t logging into your application as often as you should…
Out of all of the Infusionsoft users, you’re the group who needs to attend InfusionCon the most! My guess is that you’re not utilizing Infusionsoft as much as you should because you either:

1) Don’t fully understand it’s capabilities or how to apply the functionality to your business

…or

2) Your business has you so busy doing the work you feel like you don’t have time to invest in automating your processes

Take the time to learn what Infusionsoft can do, how to apply it to your business. I feel confident promising just about anyone, that implementing Infusionsoft will bring sanity back to your business and life, no matter how chaotic it currently is.

The last group I mentioned were the “tire kickers.” InfusionCon would be a great investment of your time because you’ll get to meet the very people developing the software and supporting its users. You’ll find a passion and a sense of care unmatched by any of the competing providers. You may have seen a demo, you may have talked with a salesperson for hours. But now you’ll get a real look under the hood and maybe even get to know businesses similar to yours who are thriving with Infusionsoft.

Whoever you are, I hope you’ll register for InfusionCon and I hope to see you there.

Jarrod Morris

{Published about a week late due to Christmas vacation}

It would be impossible for me to document 8 hours of goodness here, but I thought I’d give you a few bullet points and take-aways.

During one of the morning presentations, Scott Martineau (Co-Founder of Infusionsoft) surveyed the crowd to find out what kind of metrics the attendees were tracking in their business. I was shocked to see very few raise their hands as he listed off some very basic, must-know data. How are you going to get where you want to go if you don’t know where it is you want to go? I highly recommend setting your end goal, and then working backwards, creating smaller goals and checkpoints that will get you to your final destination.

Scott gave a challenge for every business to start tracking the following immediately:

1) New Leads Generated (weekly basis, rolled into a monthly number)
2) Lead Conversion Rate (same as above)
3) Lifetime Customer Value (this helps you know how much you can spend to acquire new customers)
4) Set a goal for # of things you’ll automate in your business (time is money)
5) Time / $$ Spent on Marketing (you’re probably not spending enough of either)

I’d give anyone reading this post the same challenge – if you’re not tracking these metrics, start today. I’d also challenge you to set aside time each week (same day, same time) to track these metrics, execute on them and give accountability to someone you can trust.

Now for the really cool stuff. The Infusionsoft developers revealed 3 really cool tools/features that are in beta right now and will be released to the public…in the future. Here they are:

• Campaign Designer – This is an end to end view of a particular process flow. How many times have you wondered what form connects to what action set that connects to what sequence and tags? With enough digging I can usually make sense of what it is an Infusionsoft user is trying to accomplish in their application. With this new Campaign Designer, you basically have a dashboard where you can see how all of the different elements link together to take your prospect from optin to follow-up, to adjusted messaging because of some type of end-user action, to you get the point. It’s a big picture view instead of working in the trenches. I also liked how if it’s a 52 step sequence it can create those 52 steps / templates for me with a single click. Then it’s just a question of pasting content.
• Drag & Drop Webforms – If you’ve used the drag and drop email builder, you already have an idea of where I’m headed. You can literally change width, background color, font, images and more with a few mouse clicks. And when you build a template you like, you can save those settings. This will cut out a lot of the custom webform skinning we’ve been doing for people but I’m really excited for the average user to be able to create nice-looking forms for their website.
• Email Series Wizard – After helping hundreds of businesses use Infusionsoft I’ve come to realize that their are two big hurdles that tie into your overall success. I’ll leave one for discussion on another day, but the obvious one is content creation. It’s laborious, time consuming and not everyone is able to create enticing copy that keeps readers hooked. Well, Infusionsoft has built a really awesome tool (big credit to Jordan Hatch on this) that helps you create lead magnets and follow-up sequences that deliver the content once created. I could go on and on about this tool, but perhaps it would be better to give you the back door URL: http://tinyurl.com/eswdemo.
  
  Ignore the video on the right, and remember this tool is still in beta. You’ll need 20-30 minutes of time to give it a whirl. I was impressed with the functionality and know it will help many users who struggle with organizing their thoughts and delivering them in such a way that compels prospects to opt in and delivers valuable content that will make them raving fans. My only suggestion for Jordan is to change the naming convention of the templates that are auto-generated in the customer’s application to list “Part 1 of 3″ at the end of the template name, and not at the beginning. This will avoid a long list of templates all starting with the word “part”.

There’s so much more to share, but if I revealed everything you wouldn’t want to attend the next RevTour. So for now, I’m signing off.

Wish you the best and hope to see you at the next Infusionsoft event!

Jarrod Morris