Email Marketing & Automation
Infusionsoft – Infusionsoft is the “Ferrari” of marketing automation tools. It handles CRM, email scheduling & delivery, payment processing, affiliate programs, analytics, lead scoring, and much more! I recommend Infusionsoft for small businesses looking to experience some explosive growth – but it isn’t necessarily right for every business, which is why I wrote a comprehensive guide to determine if it’s right for your business. Click here to check out the guide.
Mailchimp – For businesses that aren’t quite ready for Infusionsoft, I think Mailchimp is a fantastic starting point. You can get the basics of email marketing down with Mailchimp, then upgrade to Infusionsoft later on when you’re ready for the explosive growth. If you go with Mailchimp and want visually attractive web forms for your site, you’ll need to learn how to customize some CSS/HTML or hire someone to do it for you. Alternatively, you can use a 3rd party plugin like Coffee Cup!
Aweber – A good alternative to Mailchimp is Aweber. It’s slightly more expensive for a basic plan ($20/month vs free), but it does offer some ease-of-use benefits for setting up pretty web forms.
iMember360 – This is the ultimate plugin to bond WordPress to Infusionsoft. It can be used to create amazing membership content protection programs, create super customized wordpress pages that pull information from infusionsoft, and much more! Interested in having this installed and configured for your site? Contact us for details.
OptimizePress – OptimizePress is one of my favorite WordPress themes. I use it for quickly building beautiful landing pages, squeeze pages, sales pages, and much more. It costs less than $100 and can help you build pages that would ordinarily cost you several times that to hire a web designer to build.
InstaBuilder – InstaBuilder is one of my favorite new WordPress plugins. It handles much of the same tasks as OptimizePress, but with one big difference – InstaBuilder is a PLUGIN, not a THEME. This means that you can use all of the powerful features of InstaBuilder while still using your own custom WordPress theme. Very powerful, awesome, and ultra affordable! Check it out.
Payment Processing
1ShoppingCart – 1ShoppingCart is the go-to solution for purchasing products online. However, if you use a more comprehensive solution like Infusionsoft, you won’t need 1SC.
Webinars
GotoMeeting / GotoWebinar – GoToMeeting is great for small demonstrations and tele-classes, but it’s limited to 25 participants. If you need more than 25 slots, you’ll need to turn to GoToWebinar.
InstantTeleseminar – A number of my clients have been using Instant Teleseminar for webinars. It’s an emerging new brand and looking very impressive. If you’re shopping around for webinar companies, IT is worth a shot! They even offer a 21 day satisfaction guarantee.
Web Hosting
HostGator – I’ve been using HostGator for years with all of my sites. It’s a fantastic company with very reasonable hosting plans, great support, and a clean interface. As long as you aren’t generating an insane amount of traffic, and you use a good caching plugin like WP Super Cache, you should be fine running your site on HostGator.
MediaTemple – If your site is pushing into the big leagues, you’ll want a premium host like MediaTemple. These guys are serious, and host some of the bigger names in the small internet business industry.
Customer Service
FuseDesk – If your business is running Infusionsoft, and you have more than 50 customers, FuseDesk is a MUST HAVE. Customer service is one of the most critical components of scaling a business. If you don’t have a good system in place, your business will not be able to keep up with the flux of new customer quality issues. FuseDesk is a ticketing system that tightly integrates with Infusionsoft so that customer support emails never fall through the tracks, and cases are easy to find over time because they are tied to each individual contact record. Used properly, FuseDesk will pay for itself many times over.
ZenDesk – If you business isn’t running Infusionsoft, ZenDesk is the next best option to FuseDesk. ZenDesk offers a pretty comprehensive customer service solution, including some handy integrations with alternative CRM platforms.
Miscellaneous
TextMate – One of the absolutely most frustrating parts of building an auto-responder sequence in any email marketing tool is getting your emails to format correctly. No one wants to have emails going out to customers that look copy-and-pasted together with mismatched formatting. My solution? I paste all email content into TextMate first to remove all formatting, then I copy the contents from TextMate into whatever graphical email builder I happen to be using (Infusionsoft, Aweber, Mailchimp, etc.) so that it inherits the formatting of the other text in the email that I’m pasting into.
Why TextMate instead of a built in program like Notepad or TextEdit? If you do any HTML/CSS/programming work, TextMate does a fantastic job of color-coding your important words so that you can easily identify elements of a program. Editing CSS without TextMate is a pain in the rear after you’ve been spoiled by it’s color coding awesomeness!
TextMate is Mac OS only. If you’re running Windows, or never have to touch any code… Notepad or TextEdit should work just fine for this instead.
LastPass – I honestly don’t know what I’d do without LastPass. I’m a stickler for password security, and you should be too if you’ve read any accounts of the big hacking that’s been happening lately. However remembering 1000 unique passwords makes my head spin. LastPass securely stores your passwords in an online vault, and allows you to generate secure random passwords easily. I literally use this service all day long, and I don’t know what I’d do without it! For $1/month you can get the premium version (which I use) that allows you to use LastPass on your mobile devices and tablets as well.
Chains.cc – Jerry Seinfeld has a very cool productivity hack that he shared a few years ago. When trying to form a new habit, you mark an “X” on the calendar for each day that you accomplished your goal. After a few successful days, these days form a “chain” of accomplished goals. After several days, the goal is to simply “not break the chain” which makes it much easier to stick with new habits and make them part of your routine. Chains.cc offers a digital version of this concept, which is totally free! :)
*Note: Some of the links above are affiliate links that help support the website costs by bringing in a few bucks. However, I promise to only recommend products that I have personally tested and vouch for as being excellent and beneficial. Anything less than that is lacking integrity which is one of the core values of our company.