How to Track Conversion Rates with Infusionsoft

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Patrick

One of the biggest strengths of software like Infusionsoft is finding out how well you’re doing with your marketing. As a new user there are several points you should be looking at to find the baseline results. As your business grows you can target areas that need improvement and consistently test and adjust.

Here are a few of the key areas you should track when you get started with Infusionsoft:

You may have multiple opt-ins or forms on different pages and each should be tracked. How many people opt-in for your offer from Facebook vs Twitter? Do people sign up after watching a video or in a light box?

Knowing how you best capture the attention of your audience is great and can inform you on how best to design and style future offers. You should also be measuring which offers get the most conversions, not only by numbers but percentages. An offer that converts 50% of unique viewers is more compelling than one with twice as many opt-ins converting at 5%. Focus on driving traffic to the opt-in offer that has better conversions and your advertising investments will likely pay off.

Advertising Return on Investment (ROI)

Advertising without tracking your numbers is a little like gambling with your eyes closed. You might hit it big or bust but you will likely have no idea why. By tracking which ads are converting to leads you’ll know which graphics, offers, calls to action or designs are best for your business. Especially in pay-per-click advertising you want to know that your ad is drawing the attention of the right people and then they’re taking the action you want so you can capture those leads.

Once you have the leads then you have to nurture and sell to them. Taking this a step further, we can use the tracking abilities in Infusionsoft to measure your cost per lead, cost per prospect, and ultimately cost per customer. This is where things get fun. If we can find a sweet spot where the Lifetime Customer Value (LCV) of a particular lead source is higher than the cost of acquiring that customer (Cost per Customer), we’ve just found the BEST places to spend our advertising dollars to maximize our ROI.

Email Click Rates

It’s absolutely worthless to have a list of 10,000 people if you don’t know how many of those people are actively reading your emails and messages. When you start out in Infusionsoft, begin tracking the open rate of your campaigns and newsletters and test regularly to improve the open rate with better subject lines, high quality content and regular updates (without spamming your list!).

If your emails include a call to action (which they should) then you should also be tracking who is clicking and what percent of readers click on your video, sales page, register for a webinar or request more information. This not only measures the engagement level of your list but can help you determine if your offers are appealing to the list.

Finding your numbers is not about manipulating data – it’s a powerful tool to better serve your clients and followers with content that’s valuable and compelling.

Conversions

Without sales all the work up to this point is worthless. An important factor to making the sale is knowing what works and what doesn’t. So just like every other point in this process you need to test to see what works. Should you provide a discount code? Add a bonus? Send a letter in the mail? Call them and ask for the sale?

What works will depend on your business, your offers and the clients. When you get started in Infusionsoft make sure to utilize the lead tracking system to measure who the best leads are and the opportunities section to track where your prospects are in the sales pipeline.

Your goal should be to increase percentages at each point in this funnel and massively increase your traffic and pool of qualified leads.

Infusionsoft is a great tool to measure and track these metrics but it does require some set up out of the box. If you don’t have these tracking points set up or need support finding out how you can identify and tweak your campaigns to convert better contact us to learn how we can help.

How Healers Can Use Infusionsoft

Posted on November 27, 2012 by Patrick

I have many friends and colleagues who own and operate businesses in the healing industry – massage therapists, holistic practitioners, medical doctors, and much more.

One of the most common traits that I notice is a huge aversion to software.

In fact, most healing professionals that I know would rather do just about anything other than learn how to use software for their business.

But what if you embraced a software solution that enabled serving your clients at an even deeper level and brought more money into your business effortlessly?

Why Constant Communication is Key

One of the most common and true ideas in marketing is that your prospects must “know, like, and trust” you before they are ready to buy something from you. This holds true whether you’re selling widgets, providing consulting advice, or trying to grow a healing practice.

But how can you focus on growing a healing practice and STILL have time to serve your clients? The answer lies in the authentic use of automation marketing software.

Through automation software like Infusionsoft, you can achieve those 5 to 12 touches that marketing gurus are always talking about – where you are building the “know, like, trust” factor consistently over time.

The magic happens through the nurture process. Once you have the right system in place, your new leads will feel just as loved as your long time customers, and this attention to detail will scale up as your business grows.

Reach out with Resources

For your best clients who visit you for healing on a regular basis, you can roll out the red carpet: update them regularly with great health tips, daily inspiration and challenges, and regular exercise reminders can add even more value to your clients and inspire loyalty.

Take it a step further by having automated gifts sent to your clients when they purchase a high end package from you.

How do you offer this without adding hundreds of extra emails to your daily schedule? The key is in automation. Set up your business so that this happens without your direct involvement, and it will free up your time to focus on improving the lives of your clients – not feeling like a robot!

Want to Make More Money in Your Practice?

Put the tasks of your business on autopilot: Remind your clients to come in for their sessions. Introduce new services to long time customers. Share promotional gift cards and allow online payments. Make their life easier and better, and they will love you for it!

Healers who use Infusionsoft in their Business

If you’re a healer who wants to learn more about Infusionsoft and if it is the right tool for your business, I have a great resource for you. Check out my free guide: 5 Indicators That You’re Ready For Infusionsoft.

You’ll learn how to assess what stage your business is in now, and how to authentically build your business with this amazing software. If you are not quite ready for Infusionsoft, that’s totally okay, and you’ll get some great tips on what steps to take to grow your practice right now!

*image credit: o5com

How to Build Your Perfect Customer Lifecycle Brick by Brick

Posted on November 2, 2012 by Patrick

“It won’t happen as fast as you want, but it won’t take as long as you think”

This is one of my favorite quotes from my friend Johnny Dzubak. Johnny is an expert in the personal development field and teaches people how to hone their social skills. But today I was thinking about this quote in the context of growing and marketing your business – and there’s a TON of parallels!

In our busy society, we all want immediate results – and if you look at the ads on TV, it’s obvious as to why. In the world of “6 minute abs” and get rich quick schemes, we’ve lost our patience. Rome wasn’t built in a day!

I have some good and bad news for you: building a business won’t happen overnight, but if you consistently take action it will grow and attract new customers impressively fast.

One of the well known statistics in marketing is that it typically takes somewhere between 5-12 “touches” with a prospect before they will be ready to buy from you. However if you try to fit all 12 touches into one day, you’ll likely scare away your prospect and come across as overly needy.

Luckily we have client relationship marketing tools that can spread these points of contact out over time in a way that feels authentic and natural to your prospects, yet automated so that you don’t have to remember to reach out to each person those 5-12 times.

I really love the concept of the “Perfect Customer Lifecycle”. In essence, it’s the process of breaking down your interaction with each customer in a systematic way that WOW’s them, follows up appropriately, addresses their reservations, nurtures them towards a sale in an authentic manner, and ultimately turns them into raving fans who promote your business for you!

You can download a free workbook to check out the process here. I go through the Perfect Customer Lifecycle with my private coaching clients and it always amazes me to watch the transformation of their business as we apply these systems.

It can be daunting when you look at the whole customer lifecycle so remember “It won’t happen as fast as you want, but it won’t take as long as you think!” Begin today with the very beginning of the process and be consistent in building it out piece by piece.

If you need to implement quickly with an expert guiding the process, reach out for support and accelerate your results! One of the best parts of investing in this process is that – while you may tweak things over time – once it’s done your marketing and follow up is on auto pilot and creates so much freedom in your business!

Need help getting started? Head over to my contact page and get in touch!

How Can Lawyers Use Infusionsoft Automation Marketing?

Posted on October 4, 2012 by Patrick

I recently watched a funny video about using Infusionsoft to power a law practice. You can check it out here:

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Traditionally, we can think of some great ways that a law firm would use a fully functioned CRM solution. Keeping your client data up to date and clean is essential for a solid business! But how could we utilize the advanced automated follow-up abilities of Infusionsoft?

As with many professional service businesses, lawyers face an issue of deliver valuable content to clients who’s issues vary greatly. Depending on the practice, you could be dealing with estate planning, traffic violations, criminal cases, tax issues, and on and on. So how do you set up a system that will automatically send the right targeted information to the right people?

Segmenting Your Leads

The solution is through properly tagging and segmentation. By monitoring your incoming leads closely, you can apply tags that automatically segment your leads into groups that address their specific issues. For example, leads who are coming to you for traffic violations could be served by receiving a specific follow up sequence that details all that they need to know about points on their drivers license, how to dress for court if needed, and what information about their vehicle and the incident will be required to work on the case.

By segmenting these leads on the front end, you can save yourself tremendous time sorting through your leads on the back end. You’ll have the piece of mind that the right information is automatically filtering to the right people!

Just as importantly, you can automate your internal processes. Let’s examine your on-boarding procedures for when a new client visits your office. As your client signs the original welcome packet, your assistant can enter their information into your Infusionsoft system so that the new client welcome sequence is triggered. The client will receive a friendly email welcoming them to your practice, followed by a questionnaire and instructions on what to do next.

Now this is where the power of automation truly kicks in. In a perfect world, the client would promptly fill out the information and return it to your office. However, we know that everyone has a lot on their plate these days – so what happens if your new client forgets about the email? We can automatically trigger a reminder email to the client that sends a few days after the initial meeting, as well as a task reminder to your assistant asking them to reach out to your new client via phone.

Automating Your Followup Process

Similarly, we can automate all of the next steps of the process: setting up an appointment for your new client to come back into the office, tasks for your assistant to make all of the appropriate legal copies, etc. Ready to reward your excellent new client? Use a service to send out a free gift such as cookies automatically once they have completed their assigned tasks…. who doesn’t love getting cookies in the mail?

Complete the sequence by sending out requests for testimonials and referrals, annual followups, and more – all automatically!

Interested in using Infusionsoft to power your business?
>> Click here to check out an awesome free demo! <<

*image credit

How to Skyrocket Your Business with an Affiliate Program

Posted on September 27, 2012 by Patrick

Check out this video where I answer a few commonly asked questions about setting up an affiliate program for your business:

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Is your business leveraging the power of an affiliate program? If not, what’s stopping you? Using a platform like Infusionsoft, you can set up an affiliate program that is fully automated — your referral partners can sign up automatically, promote your products, earn a commission, and increase your bottom line and audience.

Share in the comments: What’s your biggest obstacle in setting up your own affiliate program?

How An Affiliate Program Can Grow Your Audience

Posted on September 20, 2012 by Patrick

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There’s a common misconception that running an affiliate program is only good for driving extra sales. While this is definitely a big perk, it’s certainly not the only reason.

An affiliate program, properly designed and executed, can drastically increase your audience. This means more customers now and, more importantly, more prospects for future product sales.

In fact, many top entrepreneurs openly admit that they will run affiliate programs where they actually pay out MORE money in commissions then they earn in the sale.

What?! Why would you ever want to run a campaign that intentionally loses money? Well these smart guys have figured out that they are likely to make so much additional income on future sales, that it actually dwarfs the losses from the affiliate launch and they are willing to take the initial hit.

Running an affiliate program is one of the fastest ways to grow your sales and audience, but it’s not magic — you MUST have products and services that are high value and WOW your customers. Without this critical component, your launch will backfire and actually hurt your reputation in the marketplace.

As in all good businesses, providing high quality service and great products is the cornerstone of successful growth and integrity.

Interested in setting up an affiliate program for your business?

[button link=”http://www.patrick-conley.com/contact”]Click Here To Contact Me[/button]

*image credit: buddawiggi

Livin’ the Good Life with Automated Marketing

Posted on September 17, 2012 by Patrick

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Last week I attended Fabienne Fredrickson’s conference in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. I had an amazing time with a bunch of great entrepreneur friends, and made many new connections that I’m sure will lead to some pretty fantastic opportunities in the future.

One of the greatest parts of building an automated marketing system is that you have the freedom to take a trip like I did without worrying about missing out on potential leads. I was gone for about a week and didn’t sweat it because my emails, facebook posts, and more were being sent automatically without me touching a thing.

Location independence and freedom are two cornerstones of the modern online entrepreneur movement. However, they both require some big work up front.

Have you started building an automated marketing system yet? If not, what’s holding you back? Even if you aren’t ready to invest in a premium solution like Infusionsoft (check out my free guide to find out), you can still build some great automation with tools like Aweber and Mailchimp.

I want to know — what’s holding you back from getting your business automated so that you can focus on your passions? Leave your answer in the comments :)

*image credit: avrene

The Value of Awesome Customer Support

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Patrick

How to Rock at Customer Service

I just had a really amazing customer service experience that contained a really awesome lesson for us small business owners. I had recently bought a few T-shirts from CafePress.com. Overall the shirts were okay but I had a few quality issues with two of them — in fact, one had a hole in the armpit!

I submitted a ticket to their support help desk and I was promptly greeted with an automated response. Fairly typical these days, but it’s still nice to get quick feedback that they are aware of your issue. I’m doing some work with FuseDesk lately (awesome software by the way!), so customer service is always running through my mind. Ignored customers are NOT happy customers!

I received a quick reply email from one of their service reps saying:

“In order for me to process a refund for you, please reply to this email with the product numbers or a brief description of the designs on the items you would like refunded. I will process your request when I receive your reply. I look forward to your response.”

This of course seems pretty straight forward as well, but with a slight amazing twist: “or a brief description“. Trying to match up the product item # with the product was a total pain because the numbers were long and the descriptions on the receipt were vague. However, they made my life easy. I just described the two shirts that I wanted to return and I was done with it.

Customers Service Key #1 – Make Your Customer’s Job Easy!

The easier it is for the customer to interact with your customer service department, the happier they will be. After all, we are all just humans and want to be taken care of. Make our live a bit easier and we will love you for it!

After replying to the first email from my customer service rep, I received one that totally blew me away.

Dear Patrick,

Thank you for your reply! We want you to be 100% satisfied with your CaféPress.com experience.

I have processed a refund for you and you will receive an e-mail from Amazon confirming the refund amount and timeframe for the credit to be received (usually 5-10 days).

I know the items received are not up to your complete satisfaction but as our way of an apology please go ahead and keep them. There is no need for a return!

If there is anything else I can do for you, please let me know.

They don’t even want me to send it back? This is awesome! If you’ve been buying products online for the past few years, chances are that you’ve had to return something at least once. At best, this is usually just a small inconvenience, at worst it can be a nightmare. I already had the next steps running through my head before this email came… “Well now I’m going to need to find a box to put these in… Crap the printer is still out of ink, need to go to a friend’s house to print the return label… When am I going to have time to get to UPS or the post office?”

Customers Service Key #2 – “WOW” Your Customer!

That one single email changed my opinion of CafePress.com from a midly disgruntled customer with a lackluster purchasing experience, to that of a RAVING fan who will almost certainly be a repeat purchaser and spread the word to my network.

This is the kind of amazing customer service experience that has propelled companies like Zappos to incredible success.

What action steps can you take in your business to WOW your customers? Trust me, it will be worth it!