Can You Tell What Your Visitors Are Thinking?

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?

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.

The Value of Awesome Customer Support

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!

*image credit 

12 Infusionsoft Tag Categories You Should Be Using

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.