Needless to say, I’ve been busy playing around with it to get to know all the many, many features, to set up external add-ons that I purchased that hook into the Infusionsoft API, and sent the first campaigns from IS.

So – here’s a bit of feedback for anyone thinking about “going InfusionSoft”.

Why I love it.

For one of my previous companies, I’ve used a very, very powerful email marketing service provider (called CampaignCommander, by Emailvision) to handle the large volumes of mails we would sent, and the complex setup we used.

With that, you could do pretty much everything – there’s a reason why companies such as Sony use it.

It was great, but In a way, it was a dinosaur – it was huge, it was complicated, and you’d basically need somebody just to take care of the campaign stuff. Everything had to be done in html, so setting up new campaigns was a nightmare. Also, it was very expensive (expensive means: It made Infusionsoft look like a 5c candy bar…)

It got everything done, though, and I got used to all the options that I had with it.

With the projects we used it for no longer active, it made no sense to maintain it any longer.

So when I started using aWeber & Co. for smaller projects, I always felt like I was going back to stone age.

Sure, the interface was nice and user friendly, but contact tagging, sophisticated segmentation, automatic triggers, flexible follow up sequences etc. were almost impossible to do.

I found some workarounds to do some of the things I wanted to do, but as soon as my email list grew, I noticed that there was one basic yet substantial feature that I really, really missed with aWeber (and with GetResponse, CampaignMonitor and all the other services):

Good segmentation.

I knew InfusionSoft could do all I wanted, but I somehow refrained from it because the price *relative* to other solutions was pretty steep.

Which, by the way, absolutely is the most idiotic way to think about anything that helps you in your business.

NEVER think in terms of “relative to”. Think in terms of “how will I benefit from this, and do the benefits outweigh the price”, which they CERTAINLY do with InfusionSoft.

So while spending yet another night to find some half-baked workaround, I lost it. I finally made the decision to switch over to InfusionSoft,  and got in touch with the guy I knew at InfusionSoft (Gary Parker, great pal btw).  Actually, I’ve tested IS a few month before, but never actually spent too much time on the trial, as I didn’t have the time (another STUPID argument!) to have a real, close look at it.

Gary basically told me “told ya you’d be back” – and got me in.

(and yes, he was right from the beginning. Eh.)

So when I started using it, it was – ah, wonderful.

Flexible tagging instead of unflexible lists.
Action triggers.
Visual Campaign Setup.
An API that deserves its name (not like some of the other APIs that only allow very limited access to functionality).
Goals that trigger different follow up sequences.

And so on, and so on and so on….

And my joy didn’t (well, doesn’t…) stop there.

Everytime I am thinking “ah damn, I wish I could do this or that” – there is an easy way to do that. Such as – completely rearranging how your data gets displayed. Adding, Removing Columns? Easy.

And the best thing is – due to their open architecture, there are a lot of third party “add ons” that will alow you wonderful stuff such as:
-    Easily implementing text messages into your campaigns.
-    Easy use of direct mail – sending postcards, letters, etc. as part of your online campaigns
-    Easy integration with “physical fullfillment” partners such as Kayako, Disk.com etc…

Basically, it’s a marketer’s dream. It’s the most flexible system I’ve seen in a while, and it’s really mature, meaning you can see this has not been designed to fit the needs of the people who actually use it.

I should have pulled the trigger months ago, would have saved me a LOT of trouble.

Ah, I could go on for pages about some of the great features that I love and will instantly put into action.

Take, for example, Click-based tagging.

This is awesome, and there’s no way to do this with aweber & co without going apeshit.
In Infusionsoft, you can apply “tags” to contacts. Basically, you don’t hae separate “lists”, but you have your contacts, that you tag.

So let’s say you’re selling blue balls and red balls.

With aWeber, you’d probably create two lists “blue ball buyers” and “red ball buyers”.

Now what if, for example, you’d want to start selling green balls?

You could send out offers for green balls to both lists, but then some people might be on both lists at the same time…. And you wouldn’t know who is actually interested in green balls, so you’d annoy all the others who want to stick with their red/blue balls when mailing them (if you have them on one list).

With InfusionSoft – easy thing.

Apply a tag called something like “interested in green balls” to a contact when he clicks on a link in a marketing email about green balls.

Yup, that’s right!

You can attach tags to contacts to people who show interest by clicking links!

How great is that – next time you mail, you have all the people who were intersted in green balls, and can use them as a beta review group, or send them more details about green balls, or send them special offers, etc. etc. – without annoying the rest of your list, for example.

Awesome.

Now that’s what I love about IS.

However, as always in life – nothing is “too good to be true”. And in fact, there are a few reasons…..

Why I hate it.

The developers over at InfusionSoft must be a funny crowd.

I really think that the way the work goes like this:

They sit together, and think about the most awesome set of features any marketer / business owner could wish for.

They develop it, make it perfect, and add even more awesome, perfect things, that will simply blow anyone away.

Then they look at their incredibly, breath-takingly awesome creation – and then they say „okay, now let’s take one crucial feature away. Something like, the most common and used one. Just to annoy the heck out of our customers“.

Want just one  example? Here we go.

You can’t split-test with Infusionsoft.

Yup, you heard that right. You’ve got the most powerful, flexible solution you could wish for – but simple split-testing of emails, something that every 5-dollar-per-month autoresponder piece of **** lets you do since 1983, you can’t with Infusionsoft.

Well technically, there are some workarounds. You could manually tag your customers in the most awkward way you could think of, then manually segment them, sub-segment those segment, manually send different emails to those sub-segments, then manually run some stats about which segment performed better, and then manually send the winning campaign to the remaining segment of the segment.

But yeah, that takes like a week of work and involves no automation.

I couldn’t believe it when I heard it, and I had a look at every page Google has in it’s index, but it’s the sad truth.

No split-testing with Infusionsoft.

There are some third-party add-ons that kinda try to workaround this, but they are ugly, awkward and still far away from what you can do with ANY other email marketing provider I’ve seen in my life.

Un-be-lie-va-ble.

And there are other reasons why IS is responsible for a few grey hairs on my head:

They recently (before I actually became a customer) changed their whole user  interface. Which is nice, because it looks fresh and clear. There are, however, two problems with that.

a)    A lot of the „how to…“ information you can find out there on infusionsoft is based on the old system. As the new user interface is structured in a completely different way, that is pretty much useless, and finding the menu entry (that often have been renamed as well), can be tedious.

They do have some sort of „old to new“ interactive tool (which is actually pretty cool), but it kinda flawed and just helps with top-level menu entries, which gets you nowhere when you’re looking for that hidden little sub-menu.

b)    After they completely overhauled the UI, they created help videos. Which is nice.

But then, they changed the new UI again, which makes some of their new help videos outdated. D’oh.

And last, but not least:

The horrible, horrible support chat they use.

Did I mention it’s horrible?

While their support staff is actually great and was able to answer any question that I had so far they use this horrible piece of “support chat” crap by Velaro.

The main problem is that you basically always end up in a waiting queue. “You will be transferered to the first available service rep. There are XX users ahead of you). “

Now – this is quite common and wouldn’t be bad, but the awful Velaro box doesn’t auto-update.

No, you have to sit there like an idiot and hit refresh to see when you’re getting close to a support rep.

Then, this damned thing doesn’t inform you when you’re actually connected with a rep. No audio signal, no popping up on top of other windows, nothing.

So it happened like 10 times to me that I had this window in the background, was connected for 10 minutes with a rep until he finally closed the chat due to inactivity on my end.

So – back in queue.

And refreshing that window again, until…..

You get the idea.

Then – this one drives me absolutely crazy – sometimes, the connection just drops. You wait for 5 minutes for an answer of your rep (often, in a chat takes some time to answer – probably, they are busy waiting for other people who don’t know they are first in queue) – and then you realize that this ridiculous piece of support uselessness has dropped the connection.

So, back in queue onece more….

Ah, and while you would think that every piece of support software developed after 1996 will automatically send you a transcript of your support chat automatically for future reference – not Velaro, no.

Either you send it to yourself (before you get disconnected), or it’s gone. No easy way to get it.

Pathetic.

And while I don’t blame InfusionSoft for the fact that Velaro can’t support-chat their way out of a paperbag (does this sentence make any sense? Nevermind….) – I blame InfusionSoft for their bad choice.
Ah, and btw – the InfusionSoft support reps hate it, as well. Heard that more than once, on the quiet.

My Velaro rant ends with this finding:

At least Velaro is honest about their stinking software, look at their tagline:

“When it comes to live chat, whe do what our competitors don’t”.

(They just forget to mention what it is they “do”: “fail at everything”, more or less. Because everyone else gets this simple stuff right)

So, what’s my conclusion?

I wouldn’t go back for any price. For what I’m doing, it’s the PERFECT solution.

If you have 1000 employees, there probably is better stuff… but then you probably have people who take care of finding a good solution for you.

If you’re a smaller business, and you want to automate your marketing, improve the quality of your customer communication and actually really create a DIALOGUE with your customers, InfusionSoft is the way to go.

There’s so many things that I didn’t mention yet – I’m looking at IS from an “online marketer’s perspective”,  however there are endless functionalities that make it great for “brick-and-mortar” businesses that generate leads with an actual sales team. So all the great stuff that’s in “for me” is actually just a fraction of what InfusionSoft can do for others.

For absolute beginners, I think it’s too much. Learn to understand your business, learn to understand some basic tools first, and then you’ll be able to fully use the potential of this great solution.

Also, the set-up fee plus the monthly fee won’t be an issue then, as you’re probably already generating money by then.

The only BIG, big problem for me at the moment:

Right now, Infusionsoft DOES NOT WORK WITH PAYPAL.

They used to, and they will do, but right at this point there’s a nasty bug in the system that basically causes orders to actually process and to get registered in the database, but the end users sees an error message along the lines of “sorry mate, didn’t work”.

I’ve contacted support about 5 times now with this, and I was told they’re working on it and will keep me in the loop, but I didn’t hear back from them, which is my only bad support experience.

However, InfusionSoft does have a pretty cool rep, Joseph Manna (@JoeManna), that answers IS-related questions in public forums, on Twitter etc. etc. and is generally very helpful.

I’m sure his Google Alerts will go crazy after I post this article, so maybe after he reads this he can put some internal pressure to get this issue resolved.

Until then – and this is also for Google – I have to state: InfusionSoft does NOT work with Paypal.

(I’ll happily remove this statement after the bug is fixed, btw.)

So the lesson is clear – if you want to grow your online marketing business, consider InfusionSoft.

1. Remember to reward your customers.

Mobile marketing allows you to target the individuals you contacted. Therefore, it is easy to send an offer to your customers that apply to them personally.

2. If you want the phone number of your prospects, create an incentive.

Few people decide to give their phone number to a company with no consideration or incentive. The most widely used method is the famous loyalty card that. Moreover, the seller can always ask you if you have the loyalty card already when someone purchase, thereby opening up further sales conversation. Another equally effective solution is to ask the prospect’s phone number to send coupons directly by SMS.

3. Pay attention to the number of offers sent to your contacts.

It would be a mistake to think that the more you send promotional offers to your contacts, the more they will buy. In fact, getting a discount does not always promote the product you are selling, nor does it give your potential customer enough money to buy the product. Moreover, the more they receive offers then the less incentive they have to buy from you at full price. Instead, the potential customers will wait for the offers to come every few weeks.

4. Always add a call to action.

You can offer the best deal, but if you do not tell people to register, buy, visit your website, etc, they simply will not. Use a call to action to direct them. Thus, they go where you tell them to. Add calls to action on your promotions such as in your SMS, on your posters, on your website, etc.

5. Think of more than just a message

You can just use your text message as an introduction or a way of getting your potential customers to do something. You do not have to make the sale with the text message. Just use it as a way of getting your potential customers on tract to becoming actual customers.

6. Develop a strategy double opt-in

Obtain the consent of your contacts (opt-in). It is a requirement in SMS marketing before you are allowed to send SMS messages. So, to go further, develop a strategy double opt-in (send a confirmation message). This practice is highly recommended because it ensures that the phone number is valid and helps to ensure that the recipient of the message is the one who sent it.

7. Get information about your contacts

If you want to create campaigns with targeted messages and calls, you will need additional information about your contacts.

8. Personalize your messages

Behind every marketing message lies a person. Write to your contacts so that they do not consider it a simple marketing text. For example, make use of personal details and offer them relevant content matching their interests.

9. Test items in your messages

Testing the most effective variables is the best way to figure out what works and what does not. Be sure to test variables in your calls and messages, to find the elements that have the most impact on your performance campaigns. By taking the time to figure out these elements, your strategy for mobile marketing will improve significantly.

10. Whether you call or text, do not use a script

Calling someone with a script, or having a template text message is not going to win you any new customers. Some people are really dumb, but most are not. If you want to appeal to really dumb people then go the easier route and start a lottery. If you want to appeal to normal people then use sales people on your phone calls, not script readers.

If you are marketing via text messages then do not send out the same advert to everyone. The text for jeans going to the 14-year-old girl should not resemble the advert for jeans that is going out to the 21-year-old man.

I think that’s pretty strong proof that it IS possible to rank to google page 1 within a short amount of time, if you have good, high-quality backlinks.

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In this Car Recording Session, I’ll explain how you can maximize your autoresponder conversions by split-testing it with a nice little workaround (most email marketing providers will only allow to split-test broadcast messages, but here’s how you can do it anyway).

David Eisner’s Solo Ad Rolodex will launch today, September 27th at 09:00 EST.

Everyone will be promoting it (it’s REALLY that good), and as I had a secret access from David I was able to shoot this video of the members area, so that you can look at what you get and don’t have to buy blind, if you think this is interesting. (the videos I show and mention in the vid are part of the upsell, just so that you know).

The product will launch 09:00 EST here, and if you like it make sure to get it FAST because it’ll be a dimesale and prices will rise in NO time.

Ah, and please don’t tell David about this

Cheers,
Rob

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If you want to make money online, you need traffic.

Solo Ads traffic is about the most targeted and cheapest you can get. It’s basically, buying traffic from people with big lists that will send visitors over to your page.

No SEO, no trying to get your paid traffic ad copy convert, etc. etc…

You contact a list owner, you negotiate a price and a result, you pay, and the traffic flows in.

That’s the theory – the catch is, a lot of those traffic sellers will sell you crap traffic.

This product will give you a list of proven, reliable guys – that’s worth THOUSANDS that you save until you find the “good guys”. The upsell is a few videos that show you exactly how to use it.