You don’t need 100% of Infusionsoft

If you’ve been a Keap user for any amount of time you’ve probably heard someone say “I’m only using 10% of the platform.”

Or maybe you’ve even said a version of it yourself.

Something about this phrase, and the mindset it represents, has always bugged me a little – and recently I think I figured out why.

Keap wasn’t created for you.

It wasn’t created for me either.

It wasn’t created for any individual – it was designed to solve problems for a variety of businesses, across industries, and around the world.

And the result of a tool being that robust is that it generally offers more than any single business needs from it.

I think that’s why the idea of using 100% of Keap (formerly known as Infusionsoft) always made me raise an eyebrow.

You don’t need 100% of Keap.

No one does.

Saying you aren’t using all of Keap implies that you should be.

Saying you’re only using 10% infers that you’re missing out on 90% of what it has to offer.

That logic doesn’t add up – and it’s why I think this is a myth.

Lemme explain:

Can you imagine if the same logic was applied to a Las Vegas buffet?

You may leave absolutely stuffed, but there’s way more food that you didn’t eat – right?

There’s more at one of those buffets than anyone can or should consume – both in quantity and variety.

You don’t need to eat everything (though some of us still try) – you just need to eat whatever you personally need for nourishment, or to satisfy your appetite, and to feel good about the value you got from the buffet.

And that same idea is true for Keap, and probably for many softwares – you don’t need everything they offer, so get clear on what you and your business have the appetite for, and prioritize that.

So rather than trying to eat the whole buffet, or ride all the rides, my advice is to focus on articulating your personal needs.

Define what 100% would look like for your business.

And then focus on doing that.

The Campaign Builder Facelift

Campaign Builder, Keap

This week Infusionsoft rolled out a brand new look and feel for the campaign builder, and the reviews are relatively varied – some folks seem to dig the new curvy lines, while others find the published green to be a little…much.

Beyond the line changes, and new colors – the most notable changes are the shift away from a background grid (you’ll see a mostly blank canvas with dots to help align and arrange elements), and the addition of “status indicator” text above the icons.

But no matter how you feel about the new look and feel of the campaign builder it’s still just that, a new look and feel.

Functionally, your existing campaigns won’t require you to do or change anything.

However, alongside this facelift Infusionsoft snuck in some features that I am excited about.

The Email Open Goal

If you’ve been an Infusionsoft user for any length of time, then odds are you’ve heard people asking for the ability to achieve a goal when contacts open an email (or maybe you’ve asked for it yourself.

Either way – the new Email Open Goal does just that.

Pretty slick, right?

With the addition of this new goal method you can now start or stop automation when an email is opened (or a series of emails).

That means you can craft sequences to automatically follow up with contacts who haven’t opened your email, because once they open it, they’ll achieve a goal and transition into the next available sequence.

This is great, but…

As exciting and powerful as this new feature is, I wanna highlight that it’s still dependent on the way email opens are tracked and reported, which has some well documented flaws.

I’ll just say this: There are a number of ways to read an email that don’t report an open, and a number of ways for an open to be reported without the recipient actually reading the email.

Does that mean not to use this goal?

Not at all.

You can totally use it, but I’d be careful about depending on it for absolutely essential parts of your customer journey, because it’s far from iron clad.

Enough about that, let’s take a look at the next shiny new feature.

The Create Order Widget

Historically you’ve been able to create orders inside of a sequence by using a legacy Action Set.

In fact, this was the only way to accomplish a “One Click Upsell” without using any third-party tools.

But with this update Infusionsoft also introduced the ability to create an order as a native step in a sequence.

You might be wondering…

Q: Will it trigger a purchase goal when the order is created?
A: No, it will not trigger a purchase goal if an unpaid order is created – even if you check “$0 invoices” on the purchase goal. However, it WILL trigger a purchase goal when a payment is collected for the order that was created.

(Shout out to Mallory Balnis of Plum Crazy Automation for helping test this.)

What I really like about this feature is that we have the choice to:

charge the order automatically (if they have a card on file)
send a payable invoice
send an invoice without payment options

These are options we’ve had for a while on invoices and quotes we generate manually, but to be able to access them as part of an automated workflow opens up a lot of new possibility.

So, it’s perfect?

Not quite – it doesn’t look like you can easily adjust the price of the product once it’s added – but my hope is that they’ll add some additional options and flexibility in a future update.

What does all this mean?

Candidly, I don’t really care about the new look and feel – what I am excited about is the focus on enhancing and improving the campaign builder.

Yes, the new features – both the email open goal and create order widget give us the ability to build automation that wasn’t previously as accessible.

But beyond that – I’m stoked about the improved performance and reliability. The reduced visual complexity of the new interface has had a positive impact on speed and usability in building and reporting on campaigns.

If I missed anything, leave it in the comments below – otherwise, check out the complete release notes here.

Evergreen Webinar Launch List

Keap, Marketing, Tools

This is what it takes to launch an evergreen webinar – mine happens to be integrated with Infusionsoft, but you could use the CRM and follow-up platform of your choice.

Just for funsies we attempted tackle everything on this launch list in a marathon day, here’s the entire livestream and link to the final product.

✅ Step 1: Prep The Content

The biggest hurdle for launching a webinar is figuring out what you’re going to say; for this project I’m going to use an updated version of a presentation I did about a year ago.

✅ Step 2: Record the Content

The benefit of an evergreen webinar is the content can be prepared in advance – this means you can rehearse, it also means you can record in smaller chunks – which allows you to follow an outline, and stay focused on individual sections of the webinar.

✅ Step 3: Edit the Video

Because you’re preparing the webinar in advance, that means you can edit the video to add effects, and remove segments that are distracting or confusing.

✅ Step 4: Set-up the Webinar

You’ll want to choose a webinar platform – Demio is my tool of choice. Use whatever you like, just make sure that the platform you choose integrates with your CRM.

✅ Step 5: Create the Registration Page

Demio actually has native registration pages – but my preference is to build my own using LeadPages, and then integrate it with Demio by using the registration box embed code that Demio supplies.

✅ Step 6: Build the Post-Webinar Page

After the webinar finishes you’ll want to have a page to send people to with the recommended next action steps, an offer of some sort, or a recap of the material covered on the webinar.

✅ Step 7: Connect the Webinar to your CRM

Technically you could just launch your webinar as is, but integrating it with your CRM (Infusionsoft in my case) allows you to track whether or not people attended, and segment your database based on their behavior and engagement.

✅ Step 8: Build a Webinar Campaign

Once it’s integrated with Infusionsoft you can build a campaign to invite people to the webinar, follow up with people afterward, or encourage folks who miss the webinar to re-register for another one.

Here’s a campaign structure I’ve had success with.

✅ Step 9: Test the Webinar

Before you put people through the webinar, or the campaign, test them both. You want to make sure that the technical components are working, the integrations are stable, and that the experience reflects what you set out to create.

✅ Step 10: Create a Traffic Strategy

Once your webinar is configured you’ve done most of the heavy lifting you can tell the world about it – but you’ll also want an ongoing plan for traffic in order to maximize the mileage you get out of your work. For my, my plan is to integrate this into my existing nurture process, add registration buttons to some of my complementary content, and run some low dollar Facebook ads to drive direct registrations.

We wanted to see if we could to tackle everything on this list (except the content planning) and launch an evergreen webinar in a single marathon-style day.

We’re done now, but if you want to check out the recap, summary, or the webinar we built – here ya go.

I WANT THAT

Tips for Troubleshooting Infusionsoft

Campaign Builder, Keap, Tips and Tricks

The more you depend on technology and automation, the more vulnerable you are when things don’t work as planned.

In this post I wanted to cover a few tactics that can help you right the ship when things go sideways.

1. When troubleshooting campaigns…

When you build a campaign you should test it thoroughly, of course.

But even with regular testing from time-to-time you’ll find yourself trying to unravel why things didn’t play out the way your expected, and one of the best pieces of advice I can give for this scenario is to test using clean contact records.

What I mean is that most contacts have a history; a record of the things they’ve done in the past, and what upcoming automations are scheduled for them – but when you’re trying to test a specific part of a specific campaign it can be tricky to pinpoint where things aren’t working if you have other variables in the equation.

So, the advice here is to isolate by create a new contact – one who has never been in your application before, and that way you’ve got a blank slate to work with.

Pro-tip for Gmail Users

Did you know that Gmail allows you to quickly and easily create unlimited test addresses? It does.

If your normal email is hello@monkeypodmarketing.com then all you need to do is add a + after the word hello, and add anything before the @ symbol. (Example: hello+test@monkeypodmarketing.com)

As a pro-pro-tip you could also include the test number, or the actual time that the test contact was created (that can help if you’re testing and there’s a delay of any kind). So, for example a test created at 3:45 pm might be hello+345@monkeypodmarketing.com.

Just remember to periodically clean up dummy contacts you’ve created during testing.

2. When troubleshooting Ecommerce…

Use an incognito window, or private browsing tab.

This one might sound obvious but I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen this simple trick resolve an otherwise befuddling scenario.

Here’s why: Infusionsoft’s ecommerce components are trying to help simplify things for buyers – it’s trying to make their lives easier by remembering who they are, who their affiliate was, what products they wanted, and what promo codes they’ve used; and most of the time that’s what we want as well.

But, this can create unexpected behavior when we’re testing, updating, adding/removing promotions, and re-testing; so for the sake of your own sanity train yourself and your team to always use private browsing tabs when you’re testing your order forms or shopping cart.

3. When troubleshooting Emails…

Emails are Infusionsoft’s bread and butter, but one gotcha I regularly see trip people up is that when you use the test function from within the email it sends that test to the user, not to an actual contact.

Did you catch that? The built in test option sends using the details available on the user record, not the details from a contact record.

You might be wondering why that matters – and the answer is this: User Records don’t have custom fields.

So, if your email is using any custom field information in the email body (or merged into links) then testing the email to a user will lead you to think it’s not working.

To replicate the experience an actual contact would have you should test your emails by sending to a contact record (use an email other than the one tied to your user record).

4. Assumptions will ruin us

I know, you’re smart. I get it. Heck, I like to think I’m pretty clever too.

But assumptions will ruin us when it comes to troubleshooting, because if we assume something is working we’ll skip right over it, and that leads us into sketchy territory because now we’re building off of something we think is true, but might not actually be.

The reason I included this tip was because it’s burned me before, in a big way.

To make a long story short: I tested a campaign and it worked the way I wanted it to – then when I added a bunch of contacts to the campaign it didn’t do what we expected.

I assumed that what worked for individual test contacts would also be true when we loaded the campaign up en masse; and it wasn’t.

Want the longer story?

So, this stems back to when I was working with the African Leadership University. (Btw, have you seen that case study?)

The basic idea was that we were sending out the notifications to let prospective students know whether they had been admitted, declined, or waitlisted.

But we had to build a relatively complex campaign because we had to deliver those three messages in either English, French, or Portugese, depending on the language that prospect had denoted during their application.

So, we had a series of decision diamonds – first segmenting by language, and then segmenting by their actual admission decision – and when I tested this campaign I did so by adding individual test records.

The first one was an admitted student with French as their language – it worked.

Then a declined student with English as their language – worked again.

I ran four or five tests and when I was satisfied with the results we decided it was time to add the contacts.

If you haven’t guessed by now, well, it didn’t go very well.

The decision diamonds went haywire and the contacts we added were incorrectly sent all three of the emails (admitted, declined, and waitlisted).

They all got the correct email – but they also got two others, and they had no way of knowing which one was accurate.

For some of these students this email was the single most important piece of news they’d ever received – and we botched it.

I was crushed.

As it turns out the decision diamonds had been corrupted during the process of cloning different campaign structures – and testing it one-by-one had worked just fine, but adding hundreds of contacts at the same time somehow exacerbated the issue.

We did our best to mitigate the impact – we quickly (and carefully) reached out to students to explain what had happened, and to let them know which decision was correct.

The issue was caused by a technical glitch – and my recourse is limited when it comes to fixing bugs in the software; but I still kick myself because I think might have been able to avoid substantial pain if I had thought to test with a batch of contacts, rather than individuals.

Most the of ALU project went much more smoothly than this, if you haven’t seen the whole case study it’s worth a watch.

This was one of the most painful experience of my automation career – but the lesson was this: Assumptions will ruin us.

Just because it looks good on desktop doesn’t mean it’ll look good on mobile.
Just because it works in gmail doesn’t mean it’ll work in outlook.
Just because it worked for an individual doesn’t mean it’ll work for a group.
Just because it created the outcome you expected doesn’t mean did what you expected.

5. Arm yourself with examples

If you’re troubleshooting something and it’s not making sense, at a certain point you’re probably going to end up liaising with Infusionsoft’s support team.

There are plenty of tips for talking to technical support, heck, I’ve even got two blog posts on it (one annnnd two) – but the most important piece of advice I have is to find yourself a screencapture software you like and get in the habit of using it.

I use and recommend Loom, but another popular option is Soapbox (from the fine folks at Wistia).

Infusionsoft’s support team genuinely wants to help you – but if they can’t replicate an issue then it’s infinitely more challenging.

(Sorta like when you take your car to the mechanic and the noise it was making suddenly stops…)

So, if you know you’re gearing up for a convo with support, do yourself a favor by firing up your screencapture software and recording examples of the behavior you’re seeing (or not seeing).

This is helpful for a few reasons, but primarily because it reduces the opportunity for something to get lost in translation – the longer it takes for the support rep to understand the issue, the more frustration you’re likely to experience. And being able to shortcut that process helps get everyone on the same page more rapidly.

The second benefit is that sometimes by recording the test you’re running it forces you to think differently, or helps you notice something you wouldn’t otherwise have seen; personally I’ve stumbled across more than one solution simply by trying to document the issue.

My sincerest hope is that these tips will save you some headache the next time you find yourself troubleshooting some misbehaving automation.

If you’ve got your own tips that have worked for you, or a painful automation story, please feel free to share in the comments below!

How to sleuth which Infusionsoft app sent an Email using Gmail’s Show Original

Guest Posts, Tips and Tricks

This post is for anyone who works in more than one Infusionsoft account, or anyone who just likes technical tricks, or digital snooping.

K, so, if you work with a lot of different Infusionsoft applications, you may get a random notification in your email sometimes, for whatever reason.

For example, a saved search/report doing its automated reporting to you as the User.

These system notifications don’t always leave a clear paper trail as to which app the notification originated. And if that notification needs some action, this can be particularly problematic.

The good news is that with Infusionsoft, the source app name can be uncovered with a little technical know how. Which is of course the whole point of today’s post 🙂

Introducing “Show Original”

If you use Gmail (read below if you don’t) there is an esoteric function known as ‘Show Original’. This allows you to view the raw HTML of the email.

As you’ve probably guessed, the app name from a mystery notification can be found in the raw HTML of any Infusionsoft-sent email and this can easily be extracted if you know what to look for.

Which means that, even if you don’t use Gmail, you can still use this general tactic of looking at the HTML. All you need to do is figure out how to view the raw HTML for a particular email in your system.

First, let explore how the HTML of an email is structured, and I’ll try to make it exciting 🙂

Emails are similar to those websites we all know and love. There is the header information that the machines care about, and the body of the page that we see.

See, its thrilling!

Emails are the same way. You have the header information and the email body. Think of it like the envelope and the letter inside.

To see the raw HTML of an email, in gmail, click the ellipsis and ‘Show Original’

Boom! The HTML of your email.

Infusionsoft packs app data in your email headers. It’s pretty easy to spot.

There is a bunch of neat info here. My favorite is the batch ID.

(Pro-tip: Which can be particularly helpful when debugging campaign emails.)

So there you have it. Nice and simple. Show original opens up new worlds.

And if you want to have a little fun, show original on spam emails. It gets pretty wacky!

Happy Sleuthing!

Contact Update Links

Keap, Tips and Tricks

So, if you want to let a contact update their phone number, their address, or nearly any other detail about themselves you can do it by sending them a link to a landing page or a web form, right?

And if you use a hidden field for Email address then they won’t even see their email address and the system will automatically know which contact to update with the new info.

A common example of this is building an email preferences center for your subscribers (here’s a demo on how that one works).

But this method has one glaring restriction: It doesn’t allow your subscribers to update their email.

You could expose the email address and let them change it, but because Email acts as the unique identifier in Infusionsoft this means when they click “Submit” Infusionsoft would notice the new email and would create a new contact record – giving you the original contact with the original email, and a second contact with the new email address.

Not ideal, right?

So, the solution – well, if you have a membership site you can normally create a profile or “my account” page and let them update it there.

But Infusionsoft also offers a built-in option for handling this – it’s under the Marketing >> Settings section.

Because this section is largely considered legacy it seems to remain undiscovered to most people.

This handy feature also includes options for triggering automation, and giving the subscriber access to a few extra fields to update (Billing Address and Phone Number).

Check it out:

One caveat to this feature is that you can’t really edit/adjust which fields they are able to update – you can choose “email only” or “contact info”, and if you select contact info it will let them update their First and Last Name, Billing Address (Street, City, State, and Post Code), Phone Number, Email and Language.

The reason I point that out is because I don’t see a way to adjust these options, or to add custom fields, or even add an option for Country.

That’s it folks – tuck this little trick in your bag of tri – er, I didn’t plan that sentence very well.

Anyway, if you use this in your business (or plan to) leave a comment below and let me know.

« Older Entries

Next Entries »