Category Archives: Infusionsoft

How Can Lawyers Use Infusionsoft Automation Marketing?

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

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6D3XQILrjg&vq=hd720

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! <<

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How Effective Is Your Sales Process?

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Keeping track of your prospects through your sales pipeline is one huge aspect that separates newbie small businesses from those generating serious income and impressive conversion rates.  

I recently listened to a fantastic interview on Mixergy with Justin Roff-Marsh — the Founder of Ballistix, a management and marketing consultancy, specializing in Sales Process Engineering.  I generally love everything on Mixergy, but this one really piqued my interested since my background is in engineering and systematically breaking down and optimizing a process.

Sales: Person or Process Driven?

Justin makes a fairly outlandish claim in the world of traditional sales: that the effectiveness of a sale is centered around the optimization of the sales process, not the salesperson.  He makes the comparison of modern manufacturing methods compared to the artisan era of building.  

We know that by tracking the history of manufacturing — accuracy and repeatability increase exponentially over time when using an assembly line (where each step can be broken down into its smallest pieces and optimized) as compared to a single craftsman building the entire widget from start to finish.

Justin believes that similar to manufacturing – sales can be improved by breaking each step of the process into its smallest elements, optimizing, and focusing each member of the sales force on being razor sharp at one particular piece of the process.

Automating and Optimizing Sales to Increase Conversion Rate

Whether you agree or disagree with his premise, we can learn from his company’s success and emulate his process through automating marketing and sales procedures.  

In Infusionsoft, we have an incredibly useful tool at our fingertips: The “opportunity” sales pipeline.  Using this tool effectively ensures that each prospect in the pipeline receives the same process and the sale isn’t dropped through the cracks.

Take a look at this sample opportunity pipeline in Infusionsoft:

Opportunity Sales Pipeline

Keep in mind that this process should be reflective of your business staff and operations — but it’s a great example to showcase the process. As a new lead comes into the process, he or she is marked as a “new opportunity” and the sales team is notified.  If a direct phone call connection cannot be made at first, the sales team must leave 3 voice mails trying to connect — this builds consistency and helps to make scientific observations about where the process needs improvement.

After working the prospect and attempting to make a sale, the sales rep will mark the sale as “won” (and indicate which product was sold) or “lost” with a reason that the prospect was not able to be converted into a customer.  This is fantastic from an analytical standpoint.  Given enough data, we can start to determine where the holes exist in the sales process and make corrections iteratively!

This system scales with the complexity of the sales process, but it can and should be applied to any business that is selling products (aka all of them!).

What pieces of this methodology could you implement in your business?  Need help setting it up?  Check out my service packages.

How to Skyrocket Your Business with an Affiliate Program

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

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwMBGWhQYHs&vq=hd720

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

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httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8slH_XZEeo&feature=plcp&vq=hd720

 

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

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httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x8WS7_r7Dk&feature=plcp&vq=hd720

 

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

Are Your Split Test Results Lying to You?

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Statistical DifferenceStatistical Significance in Split Testing

In Marketing, we LOVE split testing — and for good reason — it’s a fantastic method of optimizing a campaign for the best conversion rates and ultimately biggest profit margins.

However, one very important thing to keep in mind when performing these split testing experiments is the “statistical significance” of the results from a split test.  For those of you who’s eyes just glazed over when I dropped the word statistics… I’ll try to keep this topic high-touch and easy to digest.

If you look up the wiki on statistical significance, you’ll find that we’re essentially attempting to predict if the results we get from a split test are meaningful and repeatable.

Why is this important?

Let’s imagine that we are attempting to test the effectiveness of 2 headline options on the sales page for our next launch.   We want to figure out if headline “A” or headline “B” is producing more sales.

Here are the theoretical results after sending 1100 visitors to both sales pages:

[hr]

Example #1

[twocol_one]Headline “A”

# of visitors: 1100

conversion 5%

[/twocol_one]

[twocol_one_last]Headline “B”

# of visitors: 1100

conversion 9%

[/twocol_one_last]

[hr]

Using a Statistical Difference calculator, we can determine that the difference is 4%, with a comparative error of 2.1.  Don’t worry if you don’t understand the math behind it, just be aware that a higher comparative error is bad!

The part you should care about is that the answer is “YES“, there is a statistical difference.  We have statistically proven that Headline “B” is converting better, so we’ll go ahead and run all of our advertising dollars towards Headline “B”.

Now what happens if we reduce the traffic to the site during the test?  Can we still be sure that Headline “B” is better?  Let’s suppose that we were only able to drive 200 visitors to each test.  Are our results still valid?

[hr]

Example #2

[twocol_one]Headline “A”

# of visitors: 200

conversion 5%

[/twocol_one]

[twocol_one_last]Headline “B”

# of visitors: 200

conversion 9%

[/twocol_one_last]

[hr]

Checking the calculator again, we now see that the comparative error has jumped up from 2.1 to 5 (remember, higher is worse!).  And the result is that there is NOT a statistical difference between our results.

What does this mean in practical terms?

Say we have $10,000 to spend on advertising for this campaign.  From our quick calculations, we have proven that the results from Example 2 could be a total fluke.  We didn’t have enough visitors to the site to validate that the results are meaningful!  So now we really DON’T know what headline should yield higher results without sending more traffic to verify.  Better do some more testing!

Have you ever run a split test with interesting results?  Post your story below in the comments.

Can You Tell What Your Visitors Are Thinking?

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DemographicOne of the most commonly under-used parts of Infusionsoft (or marketing automation in general) is collecting psychographic data and acting upon it.  It’s hard because it forces us to use our heads.

It’s much easier to collect demographic data (location, age, etc.) but that’s not nearly as helpful when it comes to developing a solution to a deep seated goal or pain.

For example, let’s pretend that we are creating a few campaigns to market new products for a health and fitness website.  If visitors opt-in on a page related to losing weight, we can assume that losing weight is likely a goal of theirs, and we can capture that information by tagging anyone who opts-in on that web page as [Goals -> Lose Weight] in Infusionsoft.

Now that we understand a primary goal of the visitor, we can add them to a sequence that specifically offers advice on the best ways to lose weight. Doing so, we’ll also be able to reduce the chance of losing their attention by sending information that he or she is NOT interested in.

Sending ultra-targeted information will reduce unsubscribe rates and improve conversions!

Now let’s look at another example.  An older gentleman visits our theoretical site, fills in his info to download a free report on nutrition to slow down the effects of aging on our body.  We notice (by paying attention to Infusionsoft analytics) that he has viewed nearly every page related to nutrition for wellness, but hasn’t clicked a single link related to losing weight.

For this guy, it makes way more sense for us to send him a tailored campaign surrounding the content that he’s shown interest in.  By sending him relevant information, he’s more likely to stick around and hopefully become a customer!

Can you think of any good examples of psychographic data to be collecting for your CRM?  Share them below in the comments!

What is Marketing Automation and Why Should I Care About It?

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In an ideal world, we would have the time to reach out to each customer in a very personal manner.  We’d call them and chat with them for hours on end, trying to help them in any way possible.

We’d treat them as if they were the only other person in the world, and our only goal would be to help them achieve their goals.

Unfortunately most of us don’t have time to spend endless hours with every single customer.  As our businesses grow, our time available to interact with each customer starts to dwindle.  Responsibilities arise, management duties expand, and the customer is often forgotten amidst the hustle of running the business.

However, new tools are emerging that help us to leverage our time so that each customer feels loved and appreciated.  Those tools are bundled into marketing automation software such as Infusionsoft.

The Problem With Automation

The problem with sitting behind a powerful piece of software like Infusionsoft is that it’s easy start talking like a robot.  There’s some psychological switch that gets flicked when we gain the power of speak to a large audience online.  What starts as well-meaning, value-adding information somehow twists into a cold corporate voice when blasting emails to a list.

Think about it — would you write emails to your best friend that sound like that?  If not then why are we talking to people (our loved customers) in such a way?

Jermaine Griggs coined the term “Scaling Personal Attention”, and I think it really suits the optimal way to take advantage of a tool like Infusionsoft.

Marketing automation provides us with the ability to treat each customer as if they were our only customer.  We can listen closely to them and discover their deepest goals through intelligent web forms and tagging.  We can customize product suggestions based on what we already know about their frustrations.  We can stay in touch with them via multiple channels of communication.  We can automatically follow up with customers if we haven’t heard from them in a while.

Treat your customers like your best friend.  We have the power to do so with marketing automation – the key is tweaking how we approach the power.

12 Infusionsoft Tag Categories You Should Be Using

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Last week Jordan Hatch from Infusionsoft gave another awesome mastermind call.  (If you aren’t already registered for these, I highly recommend them! You’ll pick up some great tips and Jordan is an awesome guy.  You can get set up for those here.)

My favorite bit of this week’s call was about tag categories that everyone should be using in Infusionsoft .  I think this is a big piece of confusion for people just getting started with the system, because you only get set up with a few categories by default and you need to figure out what to set up to best suit your business.  This can be tough to know what to do if you haven’t already been using Infusionsoft for quite some time.

How to Set Up Tag Categories

Just in case you’re not sure where to do this, here’s a quick primer.  First, you need to navigate to the CRM settings.  Click Infusionsoft Nav -> Settings (Under the CRM category).

 

 

 

 

Next, click “Tag Categories” on the left side panel.  Now that you’re on the right page, you just click “Add Tag Category” and start adding as many as you’d like.

 

 

 

 

Jordan provided a pretty huge list of tags, but here’s my condensed list of tags that just about anyone using Infusionsoft should be utilizing.  After you’ve set up the tag categories, the next step is to actually go through and add your specific tags.  (You can do this by clicking “Tags” on the left hand panel on this same page.)

For example, if you have someone who bought product XYZ, you’d want to create a tag for “Product XYZ” in the “Ordered” tag category.

Without further ado… here’s the list:

Clicked – When anyone is clicking links in your emails, you should be tagging them with this category.  You can start building some pretty impressive psychographic data about your customers and prospects with this alone.

Ordered – This one is probably obvious, but it’s important none the less.  It’s essential to easily be able to identify which of your customers ordered which products.

Problem Client – When you’re running a business, it’s an unfortunate reality that some of your customers are just going to give you way more trouble than others.  Why not reduce your headaches by creating tags to avoid them for products that aren’t quite perfected yet?

Financial Issues – Use this for clients that have billing issues like failed credit card payments.

Refund/Return – It’s very helpful to know which customers have requested a refund for you.  Often you can re-capture them as a future buyer with the right nurture sequence lovin’.

Event Registered – Hosting a webinar, teleconference, or live event? Set up tags to know which prospects are registered so you can target your emails towards this group.

Event Attended – Take the last one a step further: figure out which people actually attended the list.  This way you can be sure to send the ones who didn’t attend another chance to see a replay, attend an encore event, etc.  You can figure this out by filtering for people WITH the “event registered” tag, and WITHOUT the “event attended” tag.

Web Form Filled Out – You definitely want to know where your leads are coming from.  This is super easy by applying tags based on which web forms lead them into your CRM database.

Pains – When you are building your infusionsoft system, you really want to build out your psychographic data just as much your demographic data.  If someone fills out a web form where you offer a free giveaway to fix a particular problem, you can capture their motivation and be sure to target them with similar solutions in the future.  When you can solve your prospects pains, you’ll have plenty of happy customers ready to buy anything you throw towards them.

Goals – Similarly to pains, what goals are your prospects and customers trying to achieve?  Create these tags and it will be easy to see which people in your database are looking for your solutions.  More targeted email = better conversion and less opt-outs = profit!

Social Media – How are your prospects finding you?  In addition to making a custom field in your CRM for their social media handles, you can also tag where they came from.

From Partner – Have some joint venture partners?  You better know which customers came from them so you can offers some special incentives and really capture them as YOUR customers now.

Time to Take Action

Start by automating these tags in your Infusionsoft campaigns and action sets, even if you do one per week . It takes time to utilize the automation power of Infusionsoft so you can maximize your business growth with targeted campaigns.

Add your questions below or leave a comment on which tags you’re implementing in your Infusionsoft account first.