Infusionsoft Automation & Multimedia Marketing Overall Grade: A+

Infusionsoft’s follow-up sequences and automation take Autoresponders to the next level. Plus, you can do more than just send email — Letters, faxes, voice mail, and more are all supported.

Nearly anything that happens in Infusionsoft can trigger an Action Set — A group of actions that can including adding the contact to a  follow-up sequence:

• A new opt-in via a web form
• A purchase
• A recurring charge that failed
• A specific date passed (A birthday or an event date)
• A click on a link in an email message
• A manual trigger by one of your sales or support employees
• An event external to Infusionsoft that triggers via the software API

Action sets can include many actions like:

• Tagging a contact to segment your database
• Sending a single email to a contact
• Adding the contact to a follow-up sequence (multiple emails or other media)
• Assign the contact to a specific sales or support employee
• Create a task for an employee
• Create an Opportunity Record
• Create an Order

Follow-up sequences let you schedule a sequence of follow-up activities for a specific contact. People are busy, and staying in touch helps them learn about your company and use your products. More on how to use Follow-up Sequences …

Follow-up sequences can contain many types of multimedia and activities:

• Email messages
• Fax (There is a per fax fee)
• Voice Message (There is a per message fee)
• Letter (You have to pay for printing and postage)
• Fulfillment (You have to pay for fulfillment costs like the product or printing, shipping, and handling)
• Add a task to one of your users
• Run some other Action Set

There is a lot of flexibility regarding how and when each of these follow-up activities happen. You can add rules that control most activities and can have people automatically removed or switched to another follow-up sequence.

In working with Infusionsoft customers, I have always been able to create workable follow-ups and automation.  Sometimes it takes a little creativity, but there’s usually a way.

Automation and Multimedia follow-up are truly strengths of Infusionsoft.

Clarke Bishop Infusionsoft eMail Marketing, Infusionsoft, Marketing Automation

Infusionsoft Email Marketing Overall Grade: B+

Email marketing is one of the best features of Infusionsoft. They do a good job with deliverability, and have all the common functions you need to execute effective email marketing campaigns.

The pricing is competitive, too. For 25,000 emails per month, MailChimp charges $250 (1-cent per message is a typical cost). But, that’s just for sending the email messages. Infusionsoft gives you the whole product (CRM and everything else) for $199 — And that includes 25,000 emails per month.

Why an B+ instead of an A+?

• They stick a message at the bottom of each message that says “Delivered by Infusionsoft.” They’ve been talking about letting you pay extra to get rid of this, but that doesn’t seem reasonable to me.
• The messages come from Bounce@Infusionsoft.com. You can’t change this. More on this problem …
• Most of the reports you’ll want are available, but they could be easier to use.  More on this …
  Also, there’s no real support for split-testing messages. Supposedly, this is in the works …
  You can’t access the email statistics via the API
• The base product doesn’t offer email spam scoring so you can check for messages that are likely to get trapped by spam filters.
• You can’t easily have an HTML page that mirrors the content of the message. So, you can’t do a “Click to see this in your browser” link.

For many small businesses, these are mostly annoyances. Improving your follow-up and communication with customers can be very valuable — Even if it isn’t perfectly branded and smooth.

Infusionsoft Email Marketing probably isn’t a good fit for you if:

• You spend a lot of time and energy on your brand and customer experience, and you want your messages “just so.”
• You are an analytics wizard and you want to know everything about email deliverability, email metrics, etc.

There are a couple of other nice features that I should mention:

• There’s a plugin for Outlook that lets you integrate Outlook with Infusionsoft. You can even use Outlook to send email through Infusionsoft! It’s only available for Outlook, though. This really helps if you are using the CRM features in Infusionsoft.
• You can include trackable links in a message. You can use this to trigger Automation and Segmentation events.
• You can setup sequences of emails that happen according to various rules. For example, you can setup a sequence that goes out every 4 days after someone completes an opt-in form on your website.

Here are a couple of other articles from Greased Skid:

• Infusionsoft is Great for Email and Follow-up
• Infusionsoft Outlook Integration
• eMail Deliverability Reports in Infusionsoft

If I missed anything, or you disagree, please leave a comment. If you want to see an example of an Infusionsoft Email, complete the form at:

Clarke Bishop Infusionsoft eMail Marketing, Infusionsoft, Review

Malcolm asked about marketing automation and follow-up:

Email campaigns based on purchases

Generate a “send person A written Thank You card″ or something like that.

I have no e-commerce or web-based sales… I just want something to manage email and real mail campaigns based on clients’ potential interests or recent purchases or referrals.

I’d also like to provide people the opportunity to “request information” off my website so I can (A) send them info, and (B) capture their contact info for additional contact later to try to win them over as a client.

Once you DO get someone as a client, how do you track their change in status?

Much of our business is run off a SQL database kinda program I suspect there would be a lot of manual data entry or updating as our clients buy things or refer people or what have you.

Since much of my business is run on a different program, I wonder if automating my email and regular mail campaigns is kind of like looking for a unicorn.

In another post, I described how Infusionsoft is Great for Email and Follow-up — This is really a strength of the product!  This post goes into detail on how you can define customer follow-up sequences that:

• Send written Thank You cards or other physical packages
• Send different messages or items based various rules involving customer interests or recent purchases
• Have multiple steps over time to stay in touch with your prospect

But Malcolm also raises another question. What if you already have a customer database you’re using to manage your business? Depending on your situation, there are two fundamental options:

• Replace your existing customer database with Infusionsoft. As long as your database is clean and well structured, you can easily import all your customer information. Infusionsoft allows you to create up to 100 custom fields for your specific situation. Amd, if you need to, you can integrate Infusionsoft with your external applications with the API.
• Keep your existing customer database, but synchronize the contact information with Infusionsoft. This may require using the Infusionsoft API to keep everything up to date.

Infusionsoft will only email contacts that are imported into your Infusionsoft application. So, you can’t avoid keeping all your contacts in Infusionsoft.Either way, giving people the opportunity to “request information” off your website is simple. You just create an Infusionsoft web form and put the code on your website. Then, the propspects information is automatically captured in Infusionsoft.

For more information, see our special report: Infusionsoft: 7 Keys to Top Results.

And, thanks again for the great question, Malcolm!

Clarke Bishop Infusionsoft eMail Marketing, Infusionsoft, Marketing Automation

Adam asked about using Infusionsoft primarily for eMail and Follow-Up:

I’m not looking to use Infusionsoft for everything that they advocate using it for…just as an email tool so that I can build rules-driven email campaigns that reference customer behavior data (we will send daily transactional data via API). For example, if customer purchases X, send them message 1…if customer is in Florida and has not purchased Y in more than 12 days, send them message 2, etc.

Follow-up up eMail campaigns are a real strength of Infusionsoft!

First, specifically for Adam. I am assuming that you are going to use your own shopping cart with your own customer behavior data. Then, via the API, you’ll trigger a Follow-up Sequence or Action Set. If this is your plan, I expect that Infusionsoft will work wonderfully for you!

Follow-up sequences are one of the best features of Infusionsoft. You can:

• Setup a sequence that includes multiple messages and even multiple types of media (Fax, direct mail, gift fulfillment, etc.)
• Specify the delay between steps in a sequence
• Schedule steps forward or backwards from a date or event
• Have a sequence trigger a follow-up phone call from your sales team
• Cancel the sequence when your prospect responds (Or put them in a different sequence)

Here’s how you would typical use a follow-up sequence. Let’s say a customer buys a product from you. You use that event to trigger a customer satisfaction follow-up sequence like this:

• Day Zero: Dear Customer, thank you for buying our product …
• Day 7: I hope you’re enjoying your new product. Did you know it can …
• Day 30: Please complete our survey and let us know how the product can be better …

It’s also great to complement your eMail messages with direct mail, and Infusionsoft can easily handle this as part of a follow-up sequence.

There are a lot of great ways to trigger a follow-up sequence, a specific action, or an ActionSet.

• A follow-up sequence is a sequence of actions or events that with set time delays (Like I described above)
• A single action can be things like sending an email, assigning a task to a salesperson, sending a direct mail piece, etc.
• An Action Set is a set of actions, but there are no set time delays or sequence. These are essentially just a group of actions.

Some of the ways you can trigger any of these are:

• A prospect fills out a web form on your website
• A customer buys a product
• A user manually causes a trigger (Example: a salesperson finishes a phone call and puts someone in a follow-up sequence)
• A person clicks on a link in an eMail message

I hope this helps Adam and any other current or prospective Infusionsoft users. There’s a lot you can do! It make take something to set all this up, but once you do, it’s wonderful.  Usually, the hard part is doing the serious business thinking about how you actually want things to work.

There are some other ideas in our Special Report: Infusionsoft: 7 Keys to Top Results. Check it out, and let me know what you think.

And, keep those questions coming!

Clarke Bishop Infusionsoft eMail Marketing, Follow-up, Infusionsoft