Category: Infusionsoft

Boost Your Open Rates to 47% and Higher

If you ever send out marketing emails, and if you’re an internet marketer then you almost certainly will be, you want to make sure that your emails are getting read by the biggest amount of people possible.

Here are the average open-rates for different industries, taken from MailChimps analysis on http://mailchimp.com/resources/research/email-marketing-benchmarks/:

Industry	Open	Click	Soft Bounce	Hard Bounce	Abuse	Unsub
Agriculture and Food Services	26.21%	3.58%	0.74%	0.57%	0.03%	0.28%
Architecture and Construction	25.84%	3.47%	1.81%	1.33%	0.04%	0.37%
Arts and Artists	28.35%	3.06%	0.87%	0.64%	0.03%	0.28%
Beauty and Personal Care	19.91%	2.34%	0.58%	0.57%	0.05%	0.34%
Business and Finance	21.73%	2.95%	0.89%	0.75%	0.03%	0.25%
Computers and Electronics	22.10%	2.73%	1.27%	0.91%	0.03%	0.31%
Construction	22.72%	2.11%	1.97%	1.53%	0.06%	0.46%
Consulting	20.40%	2.64%	1.20%	0.91%	0.03%	0.30%
Creative Services/Agency	23.90%	3.13%	1.38%	1.10%	0.04%	0.38%
Daily Deals/E-Coupons	13.84%	1.90%	0.14%	0.10%	0.01%	0.09%
eCommerce	17.19%	2.70%	0.37%	0.30%	0.03%	0.21%
Education and Training	23.33%	3.15%	0.73%	0.63%	0.03%	0.21%
Entertainment and Events	21.81%	2.47%	0.65%	0.54%	0.03%	0.28%
Gambling	18.92%	2.33%	0.66%	0.85%	0.05%	0.21%
Games	22.66%	3.94%	0.61%	0.68%	0.04%	0.23%
Government	27.15%	3.67%	0.68%	0.55%	0.02%	0.14%
Health and Fitness	23.99%	3.19%	0.60%	0.60%	0.04%	0.38%
Hobbies	29.93%	5.77%	0.44%	0.35%	0.03%	0.23%
Home and Garden	26.11%	4.17%	0.80%	0.56%	0.05%	0.38%
Insurance	20.19%	2.26%	0.81%	0.87%	0.04%	0.22%
Legal	22.42%	3.08%	0.83%	0.69%	0.02%	0.20%
Manufacturing	24.03%	2.75%	1.76%	1.22%	0.04%	0.39%
Marketing and Advertising	18.99%	2.25%	0.99%	0.79%	0.04%	0.29%
Media and Publishing	23.05%	4.77%	0.37%	0.25%	0.01%	0.13%
Medical, Dental, and Healthcare	23.95%	2.84%	0.94%	0.94%	0.05%	0.31%
Mobile	23.22%	2.79%	0.96%	0.88%	0.04%	0.43%
Music and Musicians	23.26%	2.90%	0.79%	0.60%	0.04%	0.31%
Non-Profit	25.96%	3.05%	0.61%	0.51%	0.02%	0.19%
Other	23.60%	3.15%	1.00%	0.79%	0.04%	0.29%
Pharmaceuticals	18.88%	2.66%	0.80%	0.73%	0.03%	0.22%
Photo and Video	27.17%	4.07%	0.90%	0.78%	0.04%	0.41%
Politics	23.32%	2.36%	0.61%	0.58%	0.04%	0.24%
Professional Services	22.05%	2.88%	1.18%	0.94%	0.03%	0.33%
Public Relations	21.54%	2.01%	1.01%	0.83%	0.03%	0.25%
Real Estate	22.41%	2.32%	0.90%	0.77%	0.06%	0.35%
Recruitment and Staffing	21.53%	2.67%	0.75%	0.80%	0.03%	0.33%
Religion	27.03%	3.26%	0.24%	0.22%	0.02%	0.12%
Restaurant	25.01%	1.68%	0.39%	0.34%	0.03%	0.30%
Restaurant and Venue	23.07%	1.49%	0.76%	0.63%	0.04%	0.40%
Retail	22.64%	2.97%	0.49%	0.41%	0.03%	0.29%
Social Networks and Online Communities	22.78%	3.84%	0.46%	0.40%	0.03%	0.24%
Software and Web App	23.50%	2.83%	1.19%	0.97%	0.03%	0.40%
Sports	26.46%	3.67%	0.66%	0.58%	0.03%	0.28%
Telecommunications	20.52%	2.26%	1.30%	1.07%	0.03%	0.26%
Travel and Transportation	20.80%	2.51%	0.83%	0.60%	0.03%	0.25%
Vitamin Supplements	17.60%	2.09%	0.42%	0.35%	0.05%	0.25%

The average of these figures are:

Open	Click	Soft Bounce	Hard Bounce	Abuse	Unsub
22.85%	2.93%	0.83%	0.70%	0.03%	0.28%

To be honest, if you’re only getting a 2.93% click through then you’re doing something wrong. You should be able to get a much better click through rate than that if you’re targeting your emails properly.

But, the best open rate in that entire list is just under 39%.

So how do we get our open rates to 50% and higher, with click-throughs reaching 10% and higher?

Well, of course there is a lot to take into account when running email campaigns. Most importantly there is the segmentation, are the right people being sent the right message.

Then there is whether the mailing list is interested in hearing from you, how well have you managed them and their expectations before you move on to the more basic elements such as subject line and copywriting.

And we mustn’t forget that there is technical side of deliverability. The more people who see your email in their inbox then the more people will open it.

Of course, most people will use an email provider such as GetResponse, Aweber, InfusionSoft etc…

But for ultimate delivery, you want to start running your own mail servers and build their reputation.

Lead nurturing and building up email funnels that create contacts who actually want to hear from you is something that I’m going to look at in other posts in the future.

Today though I want to look at a new tool we recently developed in-house. This tool was made to connect and email through InfusionSoft because that’s what we use. But the principles remain the same and are very powerful.

The entire tool is based around the time that you send your emails out.

What time do you send your emails? 6am? 10am? 11am? 3pm? 6pm? 10pm?

Maybe you’ve split tested and found that you get the best response at 10am EST. If you’re market is primarily in the UK it may be GMT.

It doesn’t matter which because you will always be sending your email to someone who doesn’t want to get it when you’re sending it.

And that’s going to be putting them off.

Different people have different work and personal timetables. Some people can’t access personal emails at work, whilst others can’t check them at home due to families until late at night.

The problem is, get this wrong and your email is going to be at the bottom of a long list, instead of at the top, when they come to check their emails.

But this problem goes much further than simply choosing the right-time for an individual to open emails. It also goes into what action you want them to perform.

Maybe they like to read their emails when they first get into work. But they can’t click on any links or buy any products at work, so they do that at home in the evening.

For other people it could be opposite.

And of course… it’s also going to be dependent on your product. If you’re selling sex toys then you may find your buyers spend their money at night when others are in bed. If you’re selling baby clothes then it might be in the middle of the day when the babies are having a nap.

So the sending of your email should be personal to every individual.

Which is exactly what the tool we developed, Fusion Crunch, does.

It allows you to send your emails based on the optimum conversion for each individual person on your mailing list. It looks at their email history for opens, clicks and sales and depending on which of those you choose to optimise for will send each person an email in the 15 minute time window when they’re most likely to take the action you want.

And that means that you don’t have to send your emails all at the same time!

You can send them over an hour sure. But you can now send over 48 hours, a week or even a month and know that your email is arriving at the best time for each person.

Just doing that has incredible results, for example:

(some emails had no links, reducing the average click-through rate)

You can boost it further by using time decay.

This means that you also take into account how long ago a contact took action. If you look at one contacts email history with you, it could span months or years. Obviously, in that time their situation is going to have changed.

Time decay will place more importance on the actions taken most recently and less on the actions taken further ago.

In order to improve your email marketing, or in fact any form of marketing, you just need to think out of the box.

The additional benefit of using this approach of emailing is that you aren’t sending all your emails at the same time. They’re sent individually. This means you get a higher inbox placement because they don’t look like mass email broadcasts.

If you’re an InfusionSoft user and would like to get early access to FusionCrunch, please leave me a message below.

March 2, 2015

One-Click Upsells In InfusionSoft

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be writing a some posts about InfusionSoft. I have a love-hate relationship with the software, but ultimately the love wins.

However, I believe that InfusionSoft are missing out on some things that are crucial to digital marketers.

Considering the size of the software now, and that a lot of users aren’t digital marketers, that’s understandable.

But as digital marketers we want to make it work for us as much as possible. So, my next post is going to be about how you can improve your open rates to levels like this in just a few weeks:

But today I want to focus on one-click upsells.

There’s no doubt that one-click upsells are powerful. In fact, on one of our services we see a 24% conversion on the one-click upsell which is a monthly recurring fee.

There are companies out there selling one-click upsell applications for hundreds of dollars.

Are they worth it?

In my opinion no. There’s a manual way of doing which costs a total of… NOTHING.

Admittedly there are a few downsides of using this approach, but I believe nothing that makes it worth paying hundreds of dollars for an add-on.

So here is how you can create one-click upsells inside InfusionSoft for free…

The secret is to use a web form with invisible fields on your upsell page.

When somebody orders your product you direct them to the upsell page. When you go to your Order Form in InfusionSoft there is a Thank You page tab.

Clicking on this will bring up something like:

Change the Thank You Page To Display to a Web Address.

Then enter the URL of your Upsell page.

Finally check the box labelled Pass Contact’s Information To The Thank You Page.

Checking this box means that InfusionSoft will automatically send all your new customers details to the thank you page at the end of the URL.

That’s the first part done.

Next you need to create a web form in InfusionSoft, this can be in a Campaign Builder campaign.

All you need on this web form is the email address, but it needs to be a hidden field. You’ll find this under Field Snippets > Hidden. Drag the Hidden icon to your form and you can choose the field you want, select Email and remove everything else from your form.

Go to the Code tab for your web form and choose HTML Code (Unstyled).

This is the code to use for a web form.

When you put it on your upsell page, nothing will display except for the Submit button. Of course, with a bit of editing the form code you can change this to something pretty.

If you use a tool like LeadPages to create your Upsell Page then you can see the Hidden Fields in the Integration Settings on your form under Advanced.

When someone gets directed to your upsell page, this email field will be pre-populated with the email from the URL.

Again, if you’re using a tool like LeadPages you may need to put in what it should be using from the URL to pre-populate the field with.

The field that you want to pull from the URL is: inf_field_Email

Now that part is done, you need to add some actions in your Campaign Builder when someone submits the form.

These could be creating and processing an order, setting up a subscription or creating an order and setting up a subscription dependent on what your upsell offer is for.

When your customer presses the Buy Upsell button the email address which has gone in automatically is submitted in the form and they are opted in using that form, when the form is submitted the order actions you have setup to run on the form submission run for the contact associated with the email address and their upsell order is processed.

So what are the downsides to this?

Well, there’s only really one…

Because the payment is processed by an action, it isn’t processed immediately. This means that it could fail and you won’t get any feedback.

And admittedly this could cause a big problem.

However, a lot of the one-click upsell add-ons also have this problem.

You can get around it by using the API, or hunting high and low for a solution that works through the API.

Although possible, we’ve never had a huge amount of failed payments using this approach and the ones that have usually see the customer getting in touch with us to ask where his service is, which allows us to process it again for them manually.

Having tried a number of upsell add-ons, if this solution for any reason no longer becomes good enough then the only other solution would be to develop our own API add-on to process the upsells instantly and provide feedback on whether the payment was accepted or not.

But… this process will work perfectly for 99% of InfusionSoft users.

If you have any questions on how to implement this then please don’t hesitate to get in touch by leaving a comment below.

February 23, 2015
The Secret InfusionSoft Campaign Builder Raving Fan Sales Funnel
I thought that today I would share with you a powerful way to build an auto-responder sequence inside InfusionSoft.

The InfusionSoft Campaign Builder is an incredibly powerful piece of kit. But, most people only scratch the service of using it the way it can be.

Of course, simple campaigns can be very effective.

But, you can make advanced campaigns that not only build trust with your audience but put them through a long-running sales funnel that can make a massive increase on your ROI.

The slight snag is… it can be a bit confusing!

I’m about to simplify for you one of the most powerful campaign structures I’ve developed yet. It both provides powerful content and sells, at the right times and the right products to the right people.

So here’s how you do it…

Start by creating a new campaign:

This will ask you to name your campaign and then bring you to the Edit tab.

The first thing we’re going to do is work from top to bottom instead of left to right.

Most InfusionSoft users work in the Campaign Builder from left to right. Which makes sense as we read from left to right and someone would enter the campaign first (on the left) and make their way through it until they finish it on the right.

But… if you’re building big campaigns, and trust me you’re going to want to if you want to automate your income, then this starts to become unmanageable from a visual point of view.

So instead…

…we build our campaign funnel from top to bottom.

A prospect will come in at the top of your funnel and work their way through it to the bottom.

From a funnel perspective working from top to bottom actually makes more sense because you may want multiple ways of a prospect entering the same funnel and you’ve got the entire width of your screen to use for them.

Let’s assume that for the moment you have a single web form as the way for a prospect to enter your campaign and we then send them straight into an email sequence.

All good so far.

Now inside this email sequence you are going to want to start by setting some tags. Everything in InfusionSoft works on tags and they are incredibly powerful when used correctly.

Inside your Email Sequence 1 you would have something that looks like this:

Let’s talk through this. First of all we are applying some tags, these would be:
- Started Campaign Tag
- Started Campaign Email Sequence 1-4 Tag
- Website Blog Reader Tag (if you’re also adding them to your general broadcast emails as well)
Next we have to remove some tags. This is a step that a lot of people forget but is very important.

There is one set of crucial tags that you should remove:
- Any Inactive Contact Tags
If you’re regularly cleaning your list so that only the active people continue to receive your emails, then you’re going to have a bunch of Contacts that have an inactive tag.

You want to remove this tag when they re-optin to get whatever you’ve offered as a lead magnet for this campaign.

These tags will be applied and removed almost instantaneously when someone goes into this sequence and then they’ll get the first email. This can be your welcome, the lead magnet you offered them and information on what to expect from you over the coming days and weeks.

All good so far.

Next we come to a Time Delay icon which is where you’d set the delay between your emails. This is likely to be different for each site depending on whether you’re sending broadcast emails as well.

If you’re not then you can schedule this based purely on the content, if you are then I find scheduling the sequence emails in the evening three to five days a week works very well because broadcasts can then be sent in the mornings on the other days and you know they’ll never cross over.

You can then see there is a repetitive pattern. We have the second email in our sequence followed by a time delay, the third email in our sequence followed by a time delay and the fourth email followed by another Apply Tags function.

This Apply Tags function simply adds a tag that says:
- Finished Campaign Email Sequence 1-4 Tag
You now know when someone began the campaign, when they started email sequence 1-4 and when (or if) they finished it. And this information can be used at any time.

But now we get to where the power lies…

Let’s say that your emails two, three and four were building up to the possibility of a product you’re going to sell.

For example, your leads have opted in to learn how to become super-affiliates. You’ve given them a guide as the lead magnet and then started your email sequence by showing them how to find super-profitable niches.

But finding these niches is time-consuming, and instead you can offer them a piece of software or a done-for-you service which is going to reduce that time consuming job down to just a few minutes.

Pretty awesome.

But… not everyone is going to be interested in this.

Not everyone who joins your campaign is going to want to even discover profitable niches first, they may want to test a whole range of niches with one traffic source to see which generates a positive ROI for them.

So there’s not going to be any point in selling them a product to find profitable niches. We only want to sell this product to people who are interested in following that particular avenue.

By doing that we generate a list of people who love what you’re teaching them because you’re giving them a complete education of the different ways they can achieve their desires, but at the same time you’re never trying to sell them something that doesn’t interest them.

The question is…

How do we determine whether someone is interested in this type of product?

Luckily, it’s very simple.

In emails two, three and four we provide a link somewhere else. This could be to a blog post, or a bonus PDF guide which gives more advanced techniques, a video guide, podcast etc…

Whenever they click on one of these links we tag them!

We would apply two tags, one that says they clicked on the link to download the advanced PDF and one that applies what I call an Interest Tag.

An Interest Tag is simply a list of interests within the niche you are marketing to. For example, in IM you may have:
- Profitable Niche Discovery
- Copywriting
- Conversion
- Landing Page Design
- Website Building
- Free Traffic
- Paid Traffic
And of course there are many more. You can also tag them with the type of content they’re interested in receiving. e.g.
- Video
- PDF
- Podcasts
- Blog Posts
Now you can segment the people out who are interested in Profitable Niche Discovery. And when you’ve had a decent amount of traffic through you will be able to see what format the majority of people are going to prefer your content delivered in.

As we can now segment out the people who are like interested in profitable niche discovery, we can move on to the next stage:

Now we’re starting to build our campaign out nicely. When someone finishes Email Sequence 1 they will go into the decision diamond.

This diamond will look like:

The top section is the Rules For: Profitable Niche Discovery Sales Sequence and the bottom section is the Rules For: Email Sequence 2.

Adding the rules is a very simple process…

In the top half you want to set it so that any Contact who has the Tag you’ve set for the interest in finding Profitable Niches will be sent to the Profitable Niche Discovery sequence.

In the bottom half you want to set it so that any Contact who doesn’t have the Tag you set for the interest in finding Profitable Niches will be sent to the Email Sequence 2.

There are two last elements in this campaign that we haven’t mentioned:
1. The Purchase Product Goal
2. The Connections from Purchase Product and Sales Sequence to Email Sequence 2
We use the Purchase Product Goal and connect our sales sequence to it. In this goal we set the goal as a purchase of the product we are selling.

This means that when a prospect purchases this product then the sales sequence will stop. We then connect this Goal to the Email Sequence 2 because once someone has purchased the product we want them to continue on their journey through our funnel by getting our content based emails again.

We also connect the Profitable Niche Discovery Sales Sequence to our Email Sequence 2 because if someone goes through the entire sales sequence but doesn’t buy, we still want them to carry on through our funnel as they may purchase other products.

And what you can do now is… rinse and repeat these steps throughout each stage of your campaign.

The structure is:
- Educational content about how to achieve a goal, this links to external information so contacts can be tagged with an interest and pre-sells the product that will make it easier.
Leading into…
- A sales sequence for the related product which is sent only to those people who have shown an interest.
Using this approach you can create an incredibly powerful funnel that not only converts but turns your prospects into raving fans.

If you’ve got any questions on how to implement this then please leave me a comment. In another post I’m going to show you how you can double your conversion rates using InfusionSoft in 3 simple steps.
January 5, 2015
How To Build A Sales Funnel In InfusionSoft

InfusionSoft is one of the leading small business automation tools. It’s the one that I use every single day but… it can be very confusing. In the video below Nicola Cairncross, check out her blog here, asked me to go through how to create an automated sales funnel in InfusionSoft.

Check out the video to see exactly how you can create an automated sales funnel below..

Download The Video Transcript Here

November 10, 2014
The 3 Truths About InfusionSoft
I’m going to start this post with a full disclaimer, I have been using InfusionSoft for many years and am a big advocate of it.

With that said, this is not a review and it is not a sales pitch. It is purely what it says on the tin… the truth about InfusionSoft.

It’s important to me to write this article because if you’re considering InfusionSoft for your own business and you head over to Google to check out what people have said you’re going to find three things:
1. People who love it
2. People who hate it
3. Articles and reviews that never really go into much depth
InfusionSoft is expensive. And if you’re considering it at the moment then the chances are that you’re business has reached a level where it can afford it, but it’s a big expenditure to add to your company so you need to be sure that it’s going to do what you want it to.

Which is what this post is going to help you with.

As I’m sure you’ve probably already read about on a dozen websites, InfusionSoft is not just an emailing system it’s a huge amount more.

But the truth is that you’re very unlikely to be using all the elements of it.

And even if you do ultimately use all the elements, it’s very unlikely that you‘re actually going to do it from the moment you join. Or even in the first few months.

Because quite simply it’s a monster.

A very powerful one, but one that you need to understand and be in control of before it’s going to be doing everything you want it to.

And that is truth number 1. It’s going to take time to understand the software, how it works and put it into practice.

This isn’t like importing a list of names into Aweber or GetResponse, so expect to spend a few weeks exploring and getting used to the interface before you’re using it as you want.

The process of learning how to use the software is supposed to be sped up by the obligatory purchase of training sessions when you join.

The real reason that you’re forced to purchase these comes back to truth number one. When you didn’t have the initial big cost they found people trying the software without the training, or big upfront investment, found the software too big and gave up on using it before they had a chance to understand it.

So… the real reason to make you purchase the training is to make you give a bigger commitment to learning how to use the software.

And, while the support staff over at the InfusionSoft headquarters do a great job, their training is basic and not very efficient.

In fact, my biggest issue with the software is the quality of this training. A systematic approach is used that, while designed to be slightly different to each persons situation, is actually so basic as to be obsolete to everyone but the very beginner in CRM and mailing software.

Eight weeks after the training I deleted everything I had created with my tutor because it was clunky and inefficient. They would have done much better to provide an overview of the entire system and then focus in on specific areas that are most important.

The people I’ve recommended to InfusionSoft have all left the training feeling that they weren’t helped at all and coming to me to ask questions. One of them even went to an InfusionSoft University and was asked questions on how to do things by one of the tutors!

Bottom line is that I believe I could give a better overview of how to use the software in a video or a live morning session than you get in all the training you get when you join InfusionSoft.

And that’s truth number 2. When you join InfusionSoft expect to investigate how to use the software yourself, ask questions in communities or on blogs such as mine and assume that what InfusionSoft are teaching you is not the best way to do things.

Moving on, the lovers of InfusionSoft will tell you that there’s nothing wrong with the software. It does everything they want and can ever imagine wanting.

To them I say… you must have a very boring imagination.

There is no software on the planet that is perfect. There’s always more that can be done or that you would like it do. And it’s no different for InfusionSoft.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot it can do. There is, a huge amount. It’s just that there’s always room for more development.

And one of the great things InfusionSoft do is to continually develop. Something which I think all software companies should do.

They release great features. The only problem is… they release them without providing full documentation on how they work or how users will want to use them.

Take one of the recent updates as an example, the Paypal recurring billing integration.

This was a big release for me as I’d been wanting to accept Paypal for a while but didn’t want to go the route of using external applications to make the recurring billing work in InfusionSoft.

So I got approved by Paypal within a couple of weeks of it being released and started using it.

Which is when I discovered the issues. The biggest being that if someone cancels their billing in Paypal it doesn’t cancel in InfusionSoft and apply the relevant tags.

Pardon?

Surely you’re mistaken. A CRM system designed around automation wouldn’t do something so stupid as to release a payment function that requires you to go into the application and manually cancel and apply tags by hand?

Well… yes it does.

To make matters worse not everyones email address is the same as their Paypal email address so you can’t find them in your application from Paypals cancellation emails. You can’t search in InfusionSoft for the billing ID because it’s stored as a text field on the order form and you can’t search Paypal for the billing ID either. Which means…

…you have to go through every cancellation in Paypal to find the persons name so you can search for the name in InfusionSoft and cancel them.

Whoever thought this function was ready to release to the InfusionSoft user base without clearly telling them that none of these functions exist should be considering their position very carefully.

It require us to take on an employee specifically to manage Paypal customers until we could move as many as possible back to our normal payment processor.

This function was pure and simply not ready for a main release when almost none of the software features integrate with it.

Which brings me to the InfusionSoft truth number 3. Be careful with their new releases as they often release features that are not fully ready.

This post has got pretty long and I’ve managed to list what some people would consider as negatives.

But I would disagree, these aren’t negatives. They are realities. And they’re realities that almost every software company is likely to face.

I love InfusionSoft.

One of the best decisions I made was to move over to using it and I would recommend anybody who feels they’re ready for it to also do that. But do your research first and make sure you understand the software.

Be clear on the main reason you have been thinking about moving and when you do the move focus on learning that area of the software first. Once you’ve got that under control break out into the other areas from there. You don’t need to do everything at once.

The one thing to remember is that InfusionSoft allows you to do almost anything you can think of. Sometimes you will have to do it through the API and sometimes you won’t. But the point is… you can.

So if you’re thinking about joining InfusionSoft and have any questions, or are already a user struggling how to figure out how to do something, then post a comment and let me know. I’ll do my best to answer any questions you have.
September 15, 2014