Infusionsoft Architecture Overall Grade: C

The overall technical architecture might not be part of a normal review, but it affects a lot of things and I think it may matter to a lot of users!

The good things about the architecture:

• Infusionsoft is written in Java and JSP.  Java is known for being one of the most reliable, enterprise-grade server languages.
• In my experience, Infusionsoft has very good up time.
• Infusionsoft is very good about communicating outages and updates.

The not so good things, and why I graded Infusionsoft as a C:

• The application does not seem to be structured that well. I know this from digging around in the internals and using the API. Some pieces of data are just hard to get to.
• As a result of the gaps in the way the application is structured, it is hard for Infusionsoft to provide access via the API. This limits what you can do with Infusionsoft.
• Some things are just plain wrong. For example, when someone places an order, the Shipping address is stored as address-2 in the Contact record. The information should be stored as part of the order. Let’s say a customer buys a product and sends it as a gift to someone. Then, later on buys another product and sends it to someone else. The first customers information is overwritten and lost forever. Supposedly, Infusionsoft is working on fixing this. But, the fact that it could get into the product shows there are some gaps in their thinking and process.
• Updates end up causing too many things to break. Even with the best designed applications, an update can cause something to break. However, this happens too often with Infusionsoft. They seem to work hard to solve any problems, but the problems can still hurt users.
• I think the lack of good structure is slowing their progress on adding new features and improving the product.

If you are a typical Infusionsoft user, most of this may not affect you that much. I have personally been the CEO of a software company, and we made many of the same mistakes. That’s why I can see the problem clearly! Still, it does limit the capability of Infusionsoft and affects how much you want to rely on their software.

Clarke Bishop Infusionsoft Infusionsoft, Review

A question came up this morning on one of the Infusionsoft support pages about email ‘open’ rates. This is an important and confusing subject, so I thought I would write more here.

Unfortunately, ‘opens’ are one of the worst named and most confusing email marketing metrics. To a marketer, it seems on the surface to be a valuable metric. After all, who wouldn’t love to know how many and which customers were opening your messages?

The problems are due to the technical limitations of how this works. Here’s how it’s supposed to work:

• Before your email is sent, your email company puts a small invisible image  in each HTML email.
• When the recipient displays the message, the image is retrieved from the email server.
• Each image has a unique name, so the email server knows which recipient got and ‘opened” the message.

But, this doesn’t work very well in actual use:

• Many mail readers have images turned off. The default for Outlook is to turn images off, same with Thunderbird, Google’s gmail service has images off by default, etc.
• The recipient might open and read the message carefully, but never show up as an ‘open’ because their email reader has images disabled.
• Many email readers have a Preview Pane that will automatically retrieve images. So, the recipient could click the message to delete it, and still show up as an ‘open’ even though they ignored your message.
• There is no tracking for plain text messages as you can’t put an image in a plain text message.
• Common open rates are in the 10 – 15% range. Even though a higher open rate can indicate more reader interest, all the noise from the above issues obscures what is really happening. You can easily end up going off in the wrong direction or wasting a lot of  time trying to improve the wrong things.

So, ‘opens’ only provides a very rough measure of how your audience received your message. The main practical use for the ‘open’ metric is to look for a sudden variation in messages sent to the same list. If there is a sudden change, it can indicate a deliverability problem.

How to Really Measure Engagement

Fortunately, there is a way for marketers to find out which customers engaged with their message!

What you really care about isn’t whether your customer ‘opened’ or even read your message. What you really want is for them to take an action and engage with you. That’s how you know your message connected with them.

So, use links and link tracking. If a customer clicked a link, they actually responded to you. This is what matters. This is what you care about and should track.

The trick is to create links that customers want to click. This is part of the art of email marketing!

Here’s an article that covers Tracking User Responses with Infusionsoft trackable links. Similar approaches can work with other email providers.

Please leave a comment below and let us know how this works for you!

Clarke Bishop Infusionsoft, Marketing eMail Marketing

The Infusionsoft shopping cart is one of the weakest parts of Infusionsoft!

Fortunately, there is a work around that let’s you use their checkout and still have the other great parts of Infusionsoft — Marketing automation and email marketing. Here’s what you do:

• Code your own custom storefront and cart
• When the customer clicks Checkout, pass their shopping cart to Infusionsoft’s cart checkout
• Lock Infusionsoft’s cart to prevent the customer from changing quantities

Code your own Storefront and Cart

You can modify one of the open source shopping cart solutions or create your own. This is potentially a broad topic, so if you want to know more, please leave me a question or a comment. The key things that are required are:

• Ways for customers to find the products they want and add them to their cart
• A way to store the products and quantities they have selected
• A shopping cart page that let’s them see the items they are purchasing and add or remove items
• A checkout button that will take them to the Infusionsoft checkout page.

Pass the Shopping Cart Information to Infusionsoft

Now, we have to get the products and quantities from your custom cart into Infusionsoft. Essentially, all you have to do is pass the products and quantities to Infusionsoft via URL parameters. Here is the base URL.

https://YourApp.infusionsoft.com/cart/?update=true&l=n&cart_skin=1&clear=true&Order0_OrderID=123

In this case, I’m also passing in an OrderID which is a custom order field I created in Infusionsoft. Then, add the following for each product:

&product_id=456 &p456_qty=2

I highlighted in red the values that have to be dynamically inserted. Now, when the user clicks checkout, you build this URL, and send them to the URL.

Lock the Infusionsoft Shopping Cart

There’s just one problem. You may not want the customer to change the quantities on the Infusionsoft side. Here’s a trick that let’s you lock the Infusionsoft checkout page. Enter the following javascript in HTML Area-1 in your shopping cart skin:

[cce_js]
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
	var elem = document.getElementById('theOneForm').elements;
	for(var i = 0; i < elem.length; i++) {
		if ( right(elem[i].name, 4) == '_qty' ) {
			elem[i].disabled=true;
		}
	}

	//Overrides the remove(key) function
	function remove(key) {
		alert('Please Click Continue Shopping to modify quantities or remove items.');
	}

	function right(str, n){
		if (n <= 0)
			return "";
		else if (n > String(str).length)
			return str;
		else {
			var iLen = String(str).length;
			return String(str).substring(iLen, iLen - n);
		}
	}
</script>
[/cce_js]

This script will:

• Find all the quantity fields on the form and disable them
• Override the remove link

It’s not a perfect solution, but it does work!

If you need a better, more complete shopping cart, the best thing is to use a 3rd party shopping cart (Like Volusion or many others), and then use the Infusionsoft API to get relevant data into Infusionsoft.

Please leave me a comment below if this is helpful!

Clarke Bishop Infusionsoft Infusionsoft, Shopping Cart

Infusionsoft Software API Overall Grade: B-

API means Application Programming Interface. Essentially it’s a “language” that lets two computers talk to each other.

Let’s say you have some custom system that you use to run your business. If your system could talk to Infusionsoft, but systems could work together to help your business run more efficiently.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, here is a list of ways you can use the Infusionsoft API (from Joe Manna of Infusionsoft). If you have questions about what you might do, please leave a comment below.

For now, I’m going to give you my review of the API. Here are the good things about it:

• It lets you solve a lot of problems that otherwise couldn’t be solved.
• It’s reliable. Once coded and setup, it works well.
• It give you a decent set of functions to query the available database tables and retrieve and update information.

But there are also some things that are incomplete or don’t work as well:

• It uses XMLRPC which is an older web services protocol. It works, but can be harder to use.
• There is a lot of data which you would like to get that isn’t accessible via the API.
  • For example, email statistics are available via the reporting interface, but not the API.
  • Infusionsoft is understandably protective of some data — Double Optins for example. If users could double optin via the API, that’s asking for abuse.
  • Still, for the most part, I think users should be able to retrieve their data.
• The API does not always seem to be a priority for Infusionsoft.  Additional functionality is promised, but then never happens. There are clear gaps in functionality that need to be addressed.
• Support for the API has declined lately. I think there has been some turnover and some key API knowledge left the company.

There is a PHP SDK that can help get a PHP programmer started. And, there are several websites that at least offer some documentation.

Overall, the API has a lot of possibility, but spotty implementation. I’m glad it’s there, but it could also be so much better!

Clarke Bishop Infusionsoft API, Infusionsoft, Review

Infusionsoft Customer Support Overall Grade: C-

I split out Customer Support from Technical Support both because they are different, and because I have have very different experiences with them! (Here’s my review of Infusionsoft’s Technical Support).

Unlike Technical Support, Customer Support just doesn’t seem to be a priority for Infusionsoft. Here are some of the problems I know about:

• I have heard regular stories of people who can’t get Infusionsoft to stop charging their credit cards. Infusionsoft promises “no risk” or “money back,” but then it is sometimes a hassle for the consumer. I don’t have any reason to think this is an intentional policy.  After all, you can always just dispute the charges with your credit card company. My best guess is that Infusionsoft just isn’t paying enough attention to this issue.
• Customer Support systems are cobbled together and don’t work smoothly. I talked about the Fusebox in my Technical Support review. It is a good tool, but has some annoying quirks. For example, you create a technical support case, and their system sends you a status email. Great so far. But, click on the link in the email, and it denies you access — You aren’t logged in. The only thing is you can’t log in — There’s no login box! You have to log in to your Infusionsoft application, then click Help -> Take me to the Fusebox. Then, you have to go back to the email and click the link. It’s just annoying. It probably doesn’t work this way from inside Infusionsoft, or it would have been fixed.
• This seems to have gotten better lately, but in the past, updates to the software have sometimes caused various things to break. Usually not big things, and they usually get them fixed, but the problems can still waste a lot of time.
• Using a multitude of systems that aren’t well integrated together. Infusionsoft has just added their Ideas section into the Fusebox. This used to be on a separate site. The Fusebox version may end up being better. Still, it seems like there is an ongoing churn of separate systems that creates confusion about where you should go to get information. It doesn’t look like customer support was ever fully thought through.
• I don’t think Infusionsoft focuses enough on the customer’s experience. Throughout the application, there are functions that work one place and not in others. Or work differently in one place or another. Here’s an example. There’s an Email Batch Status report that shows results from a broadcast email. It shows you this nice pie chart. But, it’s not clear that you can click on the slices to get more information. Sometimes that is! Some slices behave differently than others. It’s just confusing and annoying.

Most of these things in isolation by themselves are small and easily managed. But in total, they make Infusionsoft less usable. I think Infusionsoft could easily improve in this area with a moderate bit of effort, and I don’t understand why they haven’t made it a priority.

Clarke Bishop Infusionsoft Infusionsoft, Review

Infusionsoft Technical Support Overall Grade: B+

I almost rated technical support as an A-, but it seems like they have slipped a bit in recent months. Maybe it’s the pressure of rapid growth.

At any rate, most of the time technical support is very good. Infusionsoft is a complicated product, and I’m sure it is challenging to answer all the questions people must ask.

I appreciate that telephone support is available — A lot of companies aren’t even offering live human support any more. It’s available during working hours Monday – Friday, except that Infusionsoft closes early on Fridays.

I have consistently found that the support technicians are patient and have a genuine desire to help. And, I have been regularly surprised by some of the creative ideas and tricks I have learned in my support calls.

For more esoteric questions like specific API questions, it may take longer to get an answer, but even then, I think Infusionsoft does better than a lot of companies.

There is also the Fusebox which is like a souped up forum. It has articles on the product, a way to ask or answer questions, discussions, and ideas for improvement. If you ask a question, you are likely to get a response from an actual Infusionsoft employee, but you may also get information from a user or Infusionsoft consultant like me. The Fusebox could be easier to use, but it is a great way to get help when the support desk is closed.

Clarke Bishop Infusionsoft Infusionsoft, Review

Here’s how you can add custom order fields to the Infusionsoft shopping cart!

1. Go to Setup -> Misc. Settings. Under Application Settings, you’ll see a section called Custom Fields. Make sure you select Order from the drop down before clicking Go.
2. Add the custom field you want. Be sure to select the appropriate field type as this will affect the searches you can do later on.
   

   Custom Field Screen

3. Click View the field database names (for the API). Write down or print out the “Database Name.” You’ll need this later on. For example, the name of my Test field is Test1. These names are case-sensitive, so make sure you capture the name exactly!
4. Now, go to Setup -> Shopping Cart and select Theme Gallery. The edit your current theme. Click the HTML Sections tab, and then click the Edit button for Area 1. Enter the HTML code for your custom field like this:
   <input name=”Order0_Test1″ id=”Order0_Test1″ type=”text” value=”Test Order Data”/>
   Notice that you have to put Order0_ in front of the database name. That’s the word, “Order” followed by a zero and an underscore. You should have this in both your name and id attributes.
   Click Save.
5. Click Back to Theme Gallery and click Live Preview. You should see your store front. Add a product to the cart and click Checkout. You’ll see your custom fields in Area1 above the Billing Information.
   

   Shopping Cart with Custom Fields

6. Now, pay for the order. Here’s a good trick. Under Shopping Cart, Payment Options, select the checkbox for payment by check. Then, when you’re testing, you can just click the pay by check option in your shopping cart. You don’t actually have to pay for the order this way!
7. Finally, go to Orders -> Find Orders …, and lookup your new order.  You’ll see a Custom Fields tab. Click that, and you’ll see your order complete with the custom field data.
   

   Order Screen with Custom Fields

I hope this is helpful. Leave a comment below with any questions or to let me know how this works for you!

Clarke Bishop Infusionsoft Infusionsoft, Shopping Cart

Infusionsoft Double Your Sales Promise Overall Grade: B+

Recently, their focus may have shifted. But, over the last year, Infusionsoft has talked a lot about their product being able to Double Your Sales. Is this true?

Actually, it is true for many small businesses. If your business fits into the following, you have a good chance to Double Your Sales with Infusionsoft:

• If you have revenues less than $1M. Obviously, it’s easier to grow your business from $200K to $400K than it is to go from $10M to $20M in a short time.
• If you have a good product or services and a clear, differentiated strategy. If you have a poor or “me too” product, then doing a better job of communication and follow-up still won’t help.
• If you are willing to spend your time and/or money to improve your marketing or follow-up. Sometimes, people allow themselves to believe that all they have to do is spend $200-300 with Infusionsoft and their sales will improve. Of course, this won’t happen by itself. It takes a real effort to realize the potential of Infusionsoft.
• You’re an established business and already have a list of customers. Startups can still benefit from Infusionsoft, but it’s going to take longer and cost more.

Infusionsoft has a famous case study where they were able to double sales in only 72 days — All About Spelling. This company had a good product, was established and had a contact list of almost 6,000 customers, and had revenues of  $200-300K when they started. The one thing that isn’t always pointed out is that Infusionsoft supplied some of their top people to provide consulting help. All About Spelling may have paid for some of the improvements to their website, but they didn’t pay for the top consulting help.

Doing better at attracting leads, building your contact list, and following-up will help any business, and Infusionsoft is very helpful in facilitating this process. Plus, Infusionsoft will help with your education-based marketing programs.

The key is to provide value to your prospects and customers. I know this is obvious, but I talk with people all the time who have the idea the technology like Infusionsoft is the secret. Infusionsoft is a good tool for many companies. But, you have to know your customer, provide value, and communicate clearly. At GreasedSkid, we help Infusionsoft clients accomplish exactly these goals.

So, why a B+ instead of a higher grade? Some of Infusionsoft’s marketing reinforces the idea that if you just buy the product, your sales will quickly double. As described above, it can. Just be prepared to do the needed work!

Clarke Bishop Infusionsoft education-based marketing, Infusionsoft, Review

Infusionsoft Affiliate Module Overall Grade: C-

The big problem with Infusionsoft’s Affiliate Module is that it relies on the Shopping Cart! And, as we already discussed, the shopping cart is a very big weakness of Infusionsoft.

Credit for an affiliate sale is given when a sale is completed. But the sale has to go through the shopping cart, so you have to use the shopping cart for the Affiliate functions to work.

For most of my clients, I have not been able to use the shopping cart, so I have not had the need to do a deep dive into the Affiliate functions. If the shopping cart is suitable for your business, I would give the Affiliate module a much higher grade — At least a B+.

• It supports multiple Affiliate levels
• Affiliates can login and setup their marketing programs, and you can create marketing resources for them.
• You can vary the Affiliate payouts by product and setup different Affiliate programs.

Maybe Infusionsoft will fix their shopping cart, and the Affiliate module will become useful for many more clients!

Clarke Bishop Infusionsoft Affiliate Module, Infusionsoft, Shopping Cart

Infusionsoft Shopping Cart & Storefront Overall Grade: D

The shopping cart and storefront are some of the worst parts of Infusionsoft!

• The customization options are limited
• The product pages are not SEO optimized
• The shipping options are limited, and you can’t integrate with Fedex or UPS.
• It’s not a good fit if you have very many products

Maybe I’m being too hard in some ways. If your needs are very basic, the shopping cart does work. It’s a good fit for you if:

• You have relatively few products and product categories
• You are not picky about the branding for your online store
• You can use simplified shipping options

I think Infusionsoft is aware that their Shopping Cart & Storefront is a big weakness, and they have oriented their marketing toward their strengths in email marketing, follow-up, and automation. It’s a shame, really. It’s really great to be able to do marketing follow-up based on products purchased, etc.

The limits of Infusionsoft’s shopping cart has been good for GreasedSkid, though. We do a lot of project that integrate Infusionsoft with third-party shopping carts like Volusion.

Clarke Bishop Infusionsoft Infusionsoft, Shopping Cart