When it comes to Infusionsoft campaigns your contacts can have one of three statuses, they are either Active, Queued, or Done.

Active and Done are fairly straightforward, but understanding queued contacts isn’t quite as straightforward.

(More on those status types here)

When you’re looking at the reporting tab of the campaign, queued contacts are represented by the orange number you see in each sequence – in the image below there are 1.3.k queued contacts (and 360 active ones).

Okay, Queued Contacts are contacts that are in a sequence, but they haven’t moved on – right?

So they’re just kinda hanging out – which on its surface seems pretty straight forward, but there are two reasons why I think getting super clear on this concept matters.

Why do Queued Contacts matter?

Two main reasons – they represent risk, and also opportunity.

Why are they risky?

If you don’t understand what queued contacts are and how they behave, then you could inadvertently trigger automation to someone for whom it isn’t appropriate, or that they aren’t expecting.

Beyond just being embarrassing, this can also adversely affect your relationship with that contact, and your email reputation in general.

What about that opportunity?

If you understand that goals act as milestones in your campaigns, and they’re designed to help people progress along the journey you’ve built for them, then you can think of queued contacts as the people who for one reason or another stalled out before they hit the next milestone.

There are plenty of reasons why this might happen, but when I see queued contacts in my campaigns I think of it as a place where contacts are getting stuck and treat it as an opportunity to add another touch point.

Hope you found this post valuable – please leave any comments or questions you have below.

If you want a deeper dive on this – or anything to do with the campaign builder, check out the CB Trilogy Course, or grab the free trial below.

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.

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.

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!

Looping campaigns in Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) is a request that I see pop up at least once a month – it’s one of those things that isn’t exactly straightforward, but may be less complicated than you think.

Before we dig into this I should say that if you are just looking for the basics of how to build a simple campaign, then you probably want to check out my Campaign Builder 101 blog post.

When would you want a campaign to loop?

From time-to-time you may recognize that you need a campaign process to repeat itself, and in those situations it makes a lot of sense for that campaign to loop (looping just means that when the contact reaches the “end” they are automatically restarted).

Some of the most common use cases for this are scenarios where you have reminders for repeating calls or events that happen at the same interval each week, each month, or each year.

For example, let’s say you have a repeating call that always happens on the second Wednesday of the month. And the morning of that call you have an email go out 6 hours in advance, and then a 15-minute sms reminder. It’d look something like this:

You could build that process out each month, but if you know it’s going to be the same structure then it makes a lot of sense to set it up as a loop.

Another situation where looping campaigns might be valuable is when you want to issue a quarterly survey to your subscribers, or to your members – you don’t necessarily need to do this manually, but if you know that once a quarter you want to send them an invite to take the survey then you could build this process out so that it loops four times a year (once each quarter).

Technically speaking, how do I do it?

We know Goals as the “triggers” of campaigns; and largely they serve to start and stop automation.

So to loop a campaign we need to use the exact same goal at the end, and also at the beginning. That way, when the goal is completed it stops the campaign and also restarts the campaign.

The whole reason that this works ties back to a very specific intricacy in how the campaign builder processes these events, and it’s perhaps the most important part of this blog post:

When a goal is achieved, it performs the “stop” functions before it performs the “start” functions.

Now, the lag is imperceptable to humans, so it appears they’re happening simultaneously but it’s important to know that the contact is drawn out of the campaign before they’re readded; if it happened in the opposite order then the loop would immediately stop and we wouldn’t be able to depend on this methodology.

Can I have another example?

Sure, check out the example at 4:09 in the video above – it’s a perpetual resource loop to stay in touch with my referral partners and make sure they have easy access to their links and the resources I’ve created for them.

Do I have to use Tag goals?

Tag goals are by far the most common goal method used to build loops, but technically you could use any goal method that can be configured to be simultaneously achieved.

Another example might be using purchase goals – and if X amount of time elapses between purchases you could create a task to call that contact, or trigger automated outreach from their point of contact.

Here’s an example of what that campaign might look like:

I think the take-away from all this is that looping is possible, and it’s not just a novelty.

It’s a legitimate campaign builder tactic that can save you time and help maximize the mileage you get out of your Keap automations.

If you found this valuable leave a comment below – or, if you’ve got your own scenario where looping saves the day, share that.

Looping Campaigns without using Goals

Infusionsoft released a new sequence widget that permits users to add and remove contacts from campaign sequences without requiring that they achieve a goal – and Kevin Mogavero recorded this short tutorial on how you can use it to create a looping campaign structure without the use of tags (or purchase goals, etc).

Extra Campaign Builder tactics and training…for free?

If you like tactics like this, then you’re gonna love Campaign Builder Finishing School.

It’s a quick video series covering a selection of tactics you can use to level up your existing Keap campaigns.