PCon 2015 Recap Part 2

Keap, Tips and Tricks

As you may have gathered from the first post, Infusionsoft seems to have a renewed focus on improving the product, and they were committed at PartnerCon to demonstrating this in a meaningful way.

Lemme get back to outlining the upcoming features that I’m most excited about, and why they matter to you.

Note: It’s worth mentioning that some of these features were really raw when they were discussed/demoed, and depending on how QA goes they’ll likely be sprinkled throughout the next few releases; but look to Infusionsoft for formal release notifications.

Feature: Copy and Delete Campaign Items
Why it matters: Yes, you’ve been able to copy and delete campaign builder elements for quite some time now, but it’s always been clunky. The click-steps to cloning campaign elements were not intuitive, and they even varied slightly between Apple and PC users – well, not anymore. Now you’ll be able to select a campaign item(s), and right click, and select between Copy and Delete. This is a huge win and will make building campaigns a much easier process.

Feature: Stop a Campaign Sequence
Why it matters: Let’s say you need to remove someone from a campaign – without having them achieve a goal. This process can be a bit of a challenge, the current process isn’t exactly straightforward. And if you simply cancel the upcoming steps on their contact record, it actually fast-forwards them into the next process, instead of removing them altogether. It can be a mess. But they’re fixing it. Now there will be a Sequences section on the Campaigns tab on the contact record, and in the interactive list view. This tab will allow you to easily see all the sequences in which someone is active, and from that panel you’ll be able to extract someone from one or multiple sequences. Bing, bang, boom.

Feature: New fields accessible through the API
Why it matters: Effectively the API is a way to push information into or pull information out of Infusionsoft. At least, that’s my rudimentary understanding of it. Well, the way it works is that certain pieces of information are accessible, and other types of info aren’t. And as you may gather, as more information becomes available through the API, the number of things that you can do with that info grows accordingly. Infusionsoft announced they’ll be making a batch of new fields accessible through the API.

Here are the new fields: Read only permissions for Email Status, RESTHooks for Orders, RESTHooks for Tag Add/Update/Delete, Open Up Social Fields on the Contact Record, Create Custom Fields for Integrations.

I wrote these down in a hurry, so it’s entirely possible that I missed one, or wrote something down incorrectly. Full disclosure: I don’t do any work with the API. But for those who do, I’m told this is very exciting.

Feature: Opportunities in My Day
Why it matters: When My Day was released, it was really exciting. It was designed to be this centralized page to help Infusionsoft users decide what they had on their plate for the day, and how to best approach it. But there was one major component missing – opportunities didn’t make the cut. If you were an Infusionsoft user who leveraged Opportunities it effectively made My Day useless, because a good portion of the information you needed wasn’t there, and so you ended up building a custom dashboard from scratch just like before. But not anymore. They’re bringing opportunities to My Day (Dec 2015).

Feature: New Email Builder
Why it matters: If you’ve had Infusionsoft for any amount of time, then you’ve probably experienced a hiccup or ten while using the email builder. I love the drag and drop functionality, and I think it’s pretty easy to use; but I also acknowledge that there are some nuances. And sometimes there are bugs, a word misused so frequently that I generally stay away from it at all costs. Well, they’ve completely rebuilt the email design experience, and it’s much cleaner. Yes, the new emails will be mobile responsive. Yes, the new builder is sexier, and will include templates that you can use as a starting point. Yes, you’ll be able to easily link out to all of your various social channels. And yes, you’ll be able to edit, crop and add filters to images you upload right then and there. Did you hear me? You’ll be able to add filters and text directly to your images as you upload them? WHAT?! Anyway. I’ve been using some version of the new email builder for a little while now, and it’s definitely a massive step in the right direction.

Well, that’s about it for the things I can share. Rest assured, the product is heading in a direction that I think we’ll all be really pleased with. And I feel like we can all breathe a little more easily with the fact that Infusionsoft has formally recommitted to demonstrating their dedication to their product, partners and customers.

Personally, I have a ton of respect for the tough choices they’re going to have to make, or have already made, in order to continue to grow and expand in the ways that they need to in order to serve the small business community.

PCon 2015 Recap Part 1

Keap, Tips and Tricks

I’m back in San Diego after a full week in Phoenix for Infusionsoft’s annual Partner Conference, PartnerCon.  In case you aren’t familiar, it’s a conference where hundreds of Infusionsoft partners descend on Phoenix from all over the globe to learn about the direction Infusionsoft is going, to get advice and wisdom from keynote speakers and one another through breakout sessions and networking.

It was an awesome week overall. If I’m being completely honest, I was caught off guard by how emotional it was for me. I’ll save the personal stuff for a later blog post, because right now I’m just too geeked up by the product updates that are coming. And, I feel like that’s probably the stuff you’re most excited about too, eh?

Okay, so a big part of PartnerCon is updating the partner community on what is coming for Infusionsoft, the software as well as the company. You know, so the partners are up to speed, and we can decide how and where it may affect our businesses. But here’s the thing, there’s an issue right now in the Infusionsoft ecosystem.

Infusionsoft has lost a lot of trust with not only their users, but also with many of their partners.

I was an Infusionsoft employee until May of this year. And I was easily one of the most customer facing employees in the building. I traveled around delivering Infusionsoft University to groups of 30-70 attendees (In fact, that’s where I met many of you). And one of the worst parts about being in this role was that I was intimately aware of all of the intricacies, quirks, and shortcomings in the software. Not only because I’m an expert on the app, but also because they frequently came up in the course of interacting with attendees.

This dynamic made me somewhat of a lightning rod for issues. When something was affecting our user base, I would shout about it. Sometimes I felt like I was heard, and I made a difference; and other times I was frustrated that the issue just wasn’t able to be prioritized.

One of the common complaints I fielded was that users had been told something was coming, and then it didn’t come. Whether it was more features for the mobile app, new integrations, a new email builder, or localized time zones for the campaign builder. I can’t speak to every single issue that was raised, but I can say that the general sense I got was that a lot of trust had been lost. Things had been promised, and some of those things hadn’t been delivered.

Well, it’s for this reason specifically that this week was so important for me. Infusionsoft addressed this trust issue head on. They introduced their new Chief Product Office Terry Hicks, and he acknowledged that they have a lot of work to do, and then also (and more importantly) said that talking about it won’t do anyone any good. And that the only real way to earn this trust back is by taking action. By showing their users and their partners that they can do what they say they’ll do (which is one of the core values), and that when they commit to deadlines, that we can hold them to it.

So, without further ado, I’d like to share with you what I can about the bright future of the product. Some of what we were shown was done so under explicit instructions that it shouldn’t be shared outside of PartnerCon, and I want to make sure that I’m respectful of that, but rest assured, the things I can share are still very exciting.

Here’s what is coming in the near to short term future, and why it matters to you:

Feature: The quick add form will now support internal forms.
Why it matters: The plus sign in the corner of your application is the quickest way to add a contact to Infusionsoft, but until now you’ve been unable to attach any actions to that form. Moving forward you’ll be able to select an internal form as you add a contact there, and if it’s tied to a campaign, you can trigger automation right then and there.

Feature: Cloning Order Forms
Why it matters: Right now you can create an order form, and add products to it, and create a thank you page and start using it. But if you want to create something similar, the only way to do it is by starting from scratch. No more. Now you’ll be able to click “Clone” and duplicate the order form on the spot.

Feature: Functional Inventory
Why it matters: The Infusionsoft inventory function is a point of pain for the businesses who need it. In fact, it’s so incomplete that many of you may not even know it’s there. Here’s why – it doesn’t prevent someone from buying a product when the inventory hits zero. It allows you to set up a notification email to yourself when inventory hits a certain number, but that’s it. Well, not anymore sports fans. Now when inventory hits zero it’ll actually prevent sales by displaying a sold out message on order forms and in the shopping cart.

Feature: Mobile Responsive Order Forms
Why it matters: Right now the native order form themes in Infusionsoft aren’t very sexy, but they’re also not mobile responsive. With an increasing amount of traffic coming from and happening on mobile, this is a bigger and bigger deal. If someone can’t easily checkout, then the chance they they’ll lose interest and disappear is magnified. Well, um, yeah, not anymore. In the very short term (Dec 2015) future they’ll be introducing mobile order form themes. Hooray!

I hate to do this to you, but this post is starting to get a little long, and I’ve still got plenty more to cover. So I’m going to split this into a multi-part post. The short version is that I saw all sorts of positive indicators this week, both in terms of the direction of the product, but also in terms of improved transparency and communication.

Stay tuned for the rest of the product updates, and also the personal perspective I promised to share.

Automate a “Personal” Email in 9 Steps

Keap, Tips and Tricks

As you are probably well aware, I’m a pretty big fan of marketing automation. And I am a firm believer that automation plays a massive role in an small business’s ability to scale.

But, along with the luxury of growing and scaling comes a handful of drawbacks. The fact of the matter is that people receive automated emails differently than they receive personal emails. They read them differently and they even respond to them differently (or not at all).

Think about the way you engage with your inbox.  When an email was written to you by an actual person, you are exponentially more likely to respond than when you get a blog update, or newsletter, right?

Well, this reality also creates an opportunity. If you’re conditioning your prospects to expect one type of email from you (HTML, branded, newsletters, etc), then you have an opportunity to strategically deviate from that and capitalize on higher engagement.

One way to do this is be sending an automated email that appears to be a plain text personal email. I’m not saying to lie to anyone, I’m just saying that if you mix up the way you’re communicating you’ll experience a spike in engagement. This can be wildly effective if you sprinkle it into the middle of your nurture sequence, or your holiday promo campaign; try it.

You can use the HTML email builder (in a campaign or as a broadcast) and build an email that looks like a plain text email. Navigate to the email editor in a campaign sequence, in your templates section, or as a broadcast and follow these 9 steps to try it out:

1. • Change the “from:” address to come from your actual email address. That’s right. If someone replies, you’re going to have to actually read it and do something with it. This one can’t come “noreply@” or “newsletter@”, it has to come from a person. (This alone can boost open rates significantly)

1. • Write a subject line that you would actually write. That means, go to your sent folder of your actual email client, and look at the subject lines you actually use. For this particular email you should avoid “Top Banana Slicer Reviews of 2014” or whatever. Just write what you would write if you were emailing me go to go happy hour.

1. • Click on Layout & Style. Now on Layout. Turn Off the Header, Footer and PreHeader. And change the email alignment to Left.

1. • Click on Style, and select the style labeled Simple. This style should be preconfigured, what we’re going for is a black text email on a white background.

1. • Now remove any default snippets from the email. The only thing you should have remaining is a single paragraph, the unsubscribe link, and the address block at the footer.
     

1. • Now write the body of the email. You can use a merge field for their first name, but remember to write it as if you were crafting a personal message to this person. Nothing extravagant. No frills. If you don’t usually use a fancy email signature, then don’t use one here. If you usually just paste a link in instead of putting it behind text, then do that.
   • Your email has to have an unsubscribe, but try this. Move the unsubscribe below the address block, and then add a divider above both of them.
     
   • • Send a test version of the email to yourself. This is a good habit to get into for any email you build. Occasionally emails will look different depending on where you’re viewing them.
     • Recommended: Save this email as a template for future use. If it’s a broadcast, you may need to send it to yourself, and then save it from the broadcast results page. If you built it in the template library, then you can skip this step.
       

     So there you have it. 9 easy-to-follow steps and you’ve got yourself an email template that looks like one you personally wrote in outlook or gmail, or wherever you write emails.

     Two things to note:

     A. Yes, you can go so far as to add something to the footer like “Sent from my iPhone”; but personally I think that’s overkill, and maybe even borderline unethical. The way I’ve outlined it above doesn’t overtly claim that we’re actually writing it. But, I’ll leave that to everyone’s own discretion.
     B. Most email clients track opens when images are loaded, so if your email doesn’t have any images, then it’ll be really hard for Infusionsoft (or any system) to accurately track opens. One thing you could do is include a small white or clear 1×1 pixel image to help with this. (EDIT: Infusionsoft should do this for you automatically. See comments.)

     Sending this email that doesn’t look like what they’re used to, at an irregular time, from a different address, will make it stand out. You can reasonably expect a higher engagement level, both in email opens as well as in replies and clicks.

     All in all, this tactic is one way you can leverage pattern interrupt in your marketing to increase prospect engagement. It’s important to exercise this sparingly. In general I don’t think people mind automation, but that doesn’t mean we should beat them over the head with it. Thoughts?

     Pro-tip: If you want to get rid of the default padding the email builder adds to the body of the email, you can turn the header back on (no forced padding there), and move all email elements up into the header section.