Five Reasons to Use InfusionSoft
Before I get to the five reasons to use InfusionSoft, gimme a minute to lay out the basics of what any decent Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system does:
• Houses your email list and lets you send emails
• Provides an e-commerce portal with credit card processing
• Enables you to track your interactions with your customers
Aside from my own twisted enjoyment of creating logic-based systems and workflows, I have a ton of reasons I like to connect my clients with the automation powerhouse that is InfusionSoft. (Getting a cut of the action is NOT one of them – I’m NOT an InfusionSoft referral partner.) In no particular order, here are five:
1. Tags
This is the key to InfusionSoft, and makes your subscription just about worth it all on its own. So there actually is a reason “Tags” is first on this list.
I have a client with an e-course. As her students complete various sections of the course, they have to complete reflections on what they’ve learned. I set up a system where the reflection forms are delivered automatically when the student completes a certain lesson (and is tagged as such). Then, when the reflection form is completed, another tag is applied. And if that tag isn’t applied within a couple of days, the student gets a reminder – and my client gets notified. This way, she doesn’t have to actively check on her students’ progress. InfusionSoft does it for her and saves her a ton of time.
Knowing what her customers have done, and having InfusionSoft trigger correspondence and course access automatically and plausibly personally takes care of the day-to-day administration, freeing her up to teach. And that’s unbelievably important for a teacher!
2. Customer Service
InfusionSoft is “Software as a Service”, and it actually focuses on the Service part.
Last Thanksgiving Eve, once the kids were in bed, I was working on how to notify a client when a customer had attempted a purchase, but had had their credit card declined. I had a question about extracting a certain piece of information from the customer record, and I couldn’t figure it out. So I checked in with InfusionSoft’s support chat. Jeremy set me right up. It was a simple thing I’d missed. But InfusionSoft support was there, in Arizona, on the holiday. Awesome.
3. Searchability
Because if you can’t find what you’re looking for, you might as well not have it.
In their records, each customer can have something like 90 standard information fields, like “First Name” and “Email Address #3”, plus 100 custom fields, like “Webinar Registration Date”, “Favorite Product”, or “Review Rating”, plus dozens of ecommerce fields, plus as many tags as I feel like giving them.
What this does is enable me to facilitate both big-picture searches to find patterns of behavior, and super-specific drill-down to find, say, which of my client’s potential customers live in New Jersey. And have downloaded a specific ebook. And did that between two and three weeks ago. But have never made a purchase. This is great for re-targeting.
4. Behavior Tracking
Knowing where your customers are in the marketing cycle is a Good Thing. Sure, it’s a little Big Brother-ish, but what isn’t on the Internet? And it’s only when they’re interacting with *your* business. Think of it as observing what they’re looking at while they’re in a brick-and-mortar boutique.
As a small business person, you have a List. Big or small, that list of emails, phone numbers, etc., is the lifeblood of your marketing. You want to be able to figure out where your people came from, how they’ve been interacting with you, and where they might have lost interest.
The most exciting thing here is in customizing contact. Instead of a generic series of emails that goes out to any new contact, my client can tailor his message, depending on how a contact responds to each new step. Hasn’t opened the last three emails? Send an “Are you still interested?” email. Clicked a link in each of the first two emails? Maybe schedule a sales call! Made a purchase? You can stop sending that series of emails and cancel the sales call – and send a series containing a thank-you and a bonus or an upsell. All automatically – which leads us to…
5. Automation
Automating some of the 37 bazillion things to do in your day saves time, money, and sanity.
I like to use InfusionSoft’s capability to track what customers are (or aren’t) doing to help clients work smarter with reminders and auto-populated lists. I’ve set up email series to kick in if a subscriber’s credit card is expiring soon, so there’s no need to track and follow up on that for the first couple of reminders, anyway. Another client has a membership directory that needs to be updated on the website weekly – I created an InfusionSoft campaign to send the updated list to the client each week. No need to run a report; it’s right there, in the inbox, like clockwork.
This kind of automation frees up my clients to complete projects, or write, or go to lunch a little more often.
So basically…
What I like about working with InfusionSoft is how much functionality it has. And part of the fun is finding new ways that functionality can save my clients a ton of time. Software has to pay for itself to be worth having, and given that a modicum of automation will save several hours a week of my clients’ time, InfusionSoft, which is one of the most expensive pieces of software I deal with on a day-to-day basis, is also one of the easiest to afford.
Think of it this way: if you value your time at a measly $15/hour, which is what you get paid if you work at McDonald’s in Seattle, the $300/month that you spend on a mid-level Infusionsoft subscription is completely paid for if it saves you an hour per weekday. Which it will. And which means that your List hosting, e-commerce, and customer tracking are all just freebie bonuses. What a no-brainer!
(Like I said above, I’m not getting anything from InfusionSoft for saying all these nice things about them. Which probably makes me a dope. But a trustworthy dope.)
