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

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