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
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:
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