Infusionsoft recently had a contest that generated an outpouring of videos, blog posts, and Facebook updates from fans of the program. People who use Infusionsoft love not only the software, but also what it allows them to do – increase their bottom line without adding extra staff.

All around the world, people use this program because it is remarkably powerful. They’re not die-hard techies, just real business people who needed a trackable, all-in-one CRM and marketing program.

Six Features Which Outclass the Rest

If you’re shopping for an online CRM but remain confused which to choose, here are six features that may give you that extra tip towards Infusionsoft:

1. Tags. These became popular with WordPress.  Tag Clouds – a way to classify information so that it can be easily found – are also great for segmenting your list. These tags allow identification of the right message to the right prospect.
2. Action Sequences.  You can easily add or change a record’s status based on certain conditions. For example, a prospect buys “Product X” from you, you can change the record’s status from prospect to client, add a tag indicating that they’ve purchased “Product X”, and initiate the marketing sequence of emails for Product X – marketing your up-sell packages based on what they bought.
3. Trackable Links.  You can send an email with a link that says, “Please have someone call me”, and once someone clicks the link, it starts an action sequence – perhaps it creates a task, assigns it to a salesperson to follow up, and sends off a sequence of emails.
4. Infusionsoft API.  It’s one of the few systems that allows direct access to your database via an API (Application Programming Interface). Basically, this gives it unlimited scope to ‘automate’ business operations. Read 19 More Ways to Use Infusionsoft APIs
5. Subscriptions and Recurring Payments. You can create order forms that accept credit cards and even spread payments out over a period of time.  After you’ve sold something, this allows you to concentrate on delivering the goods.  It takes a lot of worry out of chasing payments, just “set it and forget it.”
6. Custom Reports. If you really like to keep a handle on things, Custom Reporting is for you. The possibilities are: Marketing & Sales Funnels (graphical), Google Analytics through API, Managing Marketing Budget, etc. Infusionsoft users can copy the code from this informative post. You can create custom reports by pulling data from Contact Records, Tags, Order History, Opportunity Records, and many other database tables.

Of course, some people need to see it working to fully understand the functionality. So if you’d like to see it in action, click here to see a demo or have a go at the 15-day FREE trial.

When we think of automation, many different things come to mind.  Some people imagine computers, whilst others picture factory lines and robotic machinery.  Automation occurs everywhere. It’s in our alarm clocks, our ovens… our computer calendar reminders and even our wristwatches.  Automation is a part of modern life, working away without our noticing.

What about in business – do micro and small business owners need automation?

In any business, automation can easily be set up in a number of ways:

• Scheduling daily tasks in the computer calendar, with timers to remind you when a task is due.
• Using software programs that automatically run a program every month.
• Operating system is set to check for updates on a regular basis.

These are all examples of automation.

So how does a Small Business Owner utilise automation more to save time and make life easy?

Firstly, look at the tools you have available.  A calendar is a great way to set things up so that you’re keeping on track.  If you’ve created a schedule of your day and allocated time to do certain things, then set it up in Calendar (inside Outlook or Entourage), with alerts to remind you when to finish and start the next one.

Let’s face it – emails often distract us from our task at hand. If you don’t want to be distracted by emails, turn off the automatic downloading of emails or set it to download only twice a day.

You can also create different views or types of calendars for the different activities you have – very handy for those of us leading double lives!  Some calendars – such as Google Calendar – allow you to colour code your different calendars and activities, so that you have a visual representation of the different activities you’re doing.

Taking It One Step Further – Complete Business Automation

You can take things to another level in your business by actually automating processes, so that tasks normally done manually are done using technology.  This is where a system like Infusionsoft can put your business on Steroids (good ones) with marketing, sales, and billing automation – to name a few.

The best part about automation is that you control the set up – so it can be customised to your business and personal needs. Before setting it up, my advice is to find some smart tools and ensure you’ve identified all the processes that can be automated.  The benefits are well worth it.  And if you’d like some help with this, just give me a call.

If you’re a micro or small business owner you may be wondering if a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is worth the cost or time… It’s a fair question, one that is often debated online or in magazines, because small business is naturally less resourced. So today we look at the benefits of a CRM.

What is a CRM?
A CRM system – Customer Relationship Management – is a database that allows you to store information on your clients, prospects and other people related to your business.  The larger, fancier CRMs are more flexible and customisable, whereas the simpler, lower-priced ones are stock standard and hence have limitations.  Price follows functionality in this case.

What can it do for you?
I recall a client a couple of years ago who had a very profitable business, but was extremely inefficient in their processes and systems – so they hired me to sort things out.  What surprised me was that they had built a massively large database and huge client list using just Outlook, Word, Post-it notes and lists.  It’s no wonder they were in disarray!

Since they were adept at attracting business, imagine how much better off they were once they could view all their clients and sales details, and then follow-up with them all.

Ultimately you want a system that is going to make life easy for you.  So it should:

-       save you time
-       improve your productivity
-       streamline your processes
-       help you to make money

You might think that using those paper files, post-it notes, Outlook lists and Excel spreadsheets is safe – but it could be costing you dearly in time, not to mention efficiency.

Having all your client and contact information in the one central location is not just  ‘mandatory’ for big business; it’s essential for small business too.  As a solo business owner your time is precious – and you need to be able to access important information quickly.

Do your homework, set up a system, and reap the rewards.  Your time and business success is worth it.

Email Marketing Tricks of the Trade

While social media is the belle of the ball, Email marketing still arguably provides one of the most cost effective returns on investment… if you have a well-managed database.  So how do you spin those database names into pure gold?

Give it a Branded Look

Effective email marketing systems let you use easy templates, which you can have customised with your branding. Use them time and time again. This gives a consistent look to your prospects when delivered over time.

Send Laser-Targeted Campaigns

You can improve your campaign performance by segmenting your audience based on information collected with web forms, emails they’ve opened and clicked, their location, and previously purchased products.  This is the ‘gold’ in email marketing!

Track All Email Activities

If you want to know how successful your emails are, you need to track your email campaigns to see how well your campaigns engage (and convert) those that respond.

When you can easily view open rates, click rates, opt-out rates, and bounce rates for each campaign, you will know how to tailor future emails.

If you have a large database you should also test new emails on smaller sample groups (i.e. A/B split testing). You can test things like subject lines and pricing offers.

Automated Marketing

Most email marketing tools can send autoresponders (a series of pre-set emails sent by the system).  These are often lists of email addresses, rather than a database for your prospects and customers – which can prove quite limiting if you want to store and manage information about your prospects.  As well as the ability to have unlimited autoresponders, Infusionsoft can automatically start or stop any autoresponder when a person fills out a form, opens an email, or clicks a link.  And the database will tell you exactly who has done it, and who hasn’t.  Hence – you are using a far more sophisticated tool to manage campaigns that make the data crunching and analysis a whole lot easier.

Deliverability

While the average legitimate email delivery rate is around 56% (Return Path, 2008), a good commercial delivery rate is over 90%. Infusionsoft has a 97% delivery rate. A careful watch on wording will also see it get past the individual’s junk mail filters.

Delivering more emails makes the most of your marketing efforts, so it’s important to use your time and choose your system wisely.

Follow-up of Interested Prospects

I’d also recommend you employ a follow up system for all email and web form enquiries; people will have questions about your products, service, or costings. After all, this is how you bring people into your sales funnel and learn more about them!  Customer-focussed businesses need to watch they don’t ‘forget’ to respond. Australian businesses have a dismal rate of follow-up: 59% of businesses do not respond to email or web form enquiries within seven days (Strike Force Sales survey, 2008, NETT).

Copywriting of Emails

Use the right writer! While it calls for a journalistic style for newsletters, it takes stronger persuasive writing for effective lead generation emails.  Don’t think because you wrote a good essay back in 9th grade that you automatically know how to write to capture leads!  So seek out assistance of those who can do it better, quicker and more effective than you can.

Here are some guidelines:

1. The messages will need a consistent style and tone (especially if you’re marketing as if it were coming direct from you).
2. The copy must be not too wordy, and it should draw attention right from the subject line.
3. Of course, it must deliver on your campaign goals. Calls to action must be there!
4. Good writing needs time. Planning your campaigns well in advance with a copywriter will ensure that your emails are written in both good time and good style.  Let them know all the research on your customers that you have gathered, because then they will be better able to connect with your prospects.

If you hire a copywriter, expect to pay around $70 to $140 per hour. You can negotiate a good rate for multiple email projects.

Remember: email marketing when done properly with the right tools and resources will make a huge difference to your business.

You can do 50 different things to bring people to your website. But what about actually MARKETING to those prospects so that they eventually buy from you? 

One business owner I know had a website in a very crowded marketplace – gift baskets. Her site was nice enough but her conversion was very poor. If you’re in the gift basket industry in Sydney, you’d better be ahead of the game. If studies show that it takes an average of seven contacts from a business to convert a sale from a qualified lead, why do website owners often expect the people just browsing their site to instantly buy? Capturing people’s emails (with a tantalising offer just for subscribers) was my first piece of advice to her.

Where is Helpful Advice on Email Marketing?
Although there is a plethora of info on attracting people to your website, actually marketing to them and getting action (sales/calls/bookings) is often left to chance. 

Email marketing has been around for awhile now, but it is rare to get advice on what to send, how often, how to segment your list, and how to get a great response. So most business owners just send untargeted offers, which seriously under-utilises this low cost avenue for customer acquisition. (Of course I work with Infusionsoft, the tool to use to get those high performing results you want).

In addition, pay-per-click advertising to attract customers can get quite expensive if 95% of the prospects sail away before any contact. Email marketing works brilliantly with PPC advertising because it allows businesses:

• to tell them more details about the services/products
• to learn more about their visitors’ real interests
• to offer value through information prior to purchase (i.e. handy tips, news, events)
• to keep the relationship between business and prospect alive, right after they showed interest

Fortunately, I am working on a solution to help end the marketing confusion generally circulating in the small business world. It will be an exclusive Business Builder’s membership program. Stay tuned for some interesting, results-focussed advice.

Some E-marketing Tips

You need to encourage people to give you their email address, so what do you give them in return? While it is the most popular, you don’t necessarily have to offer a newsletter. Other options are: a free white paper with some facts about your industry, a free consultation or evaluation, or a free webinar or teleseminar.

Thank them for signing up to your list (automatically of course), personalising this message based on their encounter with your website. Once they read your newsletter/email, track which links they clicked on, and then target mailings to their interests and habits. You can even segment people who found you through search engine marketing in a separate mailing list from your general list.

As I come across a lot of different business types in the small business sector, I often notice similar problems crop up within the very heart of the business: sales & marketing.

SME owners without adequate systems often struggle to keep up with different enquiries from different sources, trying to remember who gets what and when. Prospects are at different stages of the sales cycle, and it usually falls on the SME owner to keep track of each prospect and send them the right information, to keep building trust one step at a time. Utilising a great sales & marketing process can mean the difference between having a successful business, or a busy job.

If this sounds familiar, it might be time to seek some assistance. As Greg Chapman says on Business Builders:

“By systematising your business, you make your business more efficient, reduce your costs, and ultimately, make your business run without you.”

If you are too busy, you dread opening your email, or your work style is haphazard at best… an integrated system like Infusionsoft that combines Automated Email Marketing, a powerful CRM that keeps all sales activities on track, and a helpful person to set it all up… could sound like business nirvana to you. After all, if you can make part of your business run without you, you get that most precious commodity of all back: TIME.

Every business owner I speak to has the problem of wearing multiple hats, chasing their tail and doing many things at once.  Is there an answer to this problem?  I think each business type is different but they all have common issues to deal with.

Because there are so many options, and so much information at our fingertips, many business owners get really frustrated and time poor. So what are some simple steps to get out of the mire and into productivity and growth mode?

Reminding ourselves to “Eat that Frog” and do just the most important things first in our day is the first step (recommended book: Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy).

Once you have your task list prioritised and under control, the next step is delegation of some tasks.  Sometimes you can outsource administrative/marketing tasks to someone who is either paid a lot less than you or else is much better at it, freeing up your time to focus on your core talent.

Next, you can set up a system to deal with repeated or follow-up tasks. You need a way to not only capture interested people’s details, but also build trust and respect. Say for example your system captures email addresses and emails a seven part course to interested prospects. It also tracks their interests and follows up with recommended products/services. They are invited to events you have put into the email service – and have a way of responding that is easy, like booking/paying through your own portal. This is all possible from within Infusionsoft.

What you are trying to achieve with these sytems is automation, to take less of your time and to increase the results from marketing activities. Infusionsoft is a powerful tool that enables business owners to leverage their time, grow their leads, and increase revenue and profits.

Hello and welcome to the first blog post for Infusionoz!  We’re in exciting times.  At least, we feel that we are!  And I hope you feel that way too.

I must share with you something that happened on the weekend that has got me thinking… and that has made me realise the ‘social media’ age that we are now living in and how important it is to be a part of it.

Last night I went to the Adam Hills live performance at the Powerhouse in Brisbane, seated just a few rows from the front (I love being up close so I can see expressions and the REAL person!!).  Adam came onto stage to a very excited crowd and within minutes he had discovered a man seated in the front row who looked a little like Santa.  Actually maybe a LOT like Santa! No kidding, and his name was Lex Cush.  Lex went along with Adam’s frivolity of wanting to take a picture of them both together and he then posted it on his blog page via his mobile phone, and then posted a tweet (on Twitter) to see who could come back with the funniest caption.

This might not sound that strange, however it was a live show and Adam was sitting on the edge of the stage with his mobile phone in hand, sending tweets and reading some back.  Not your usual stand-up comedy!  And it wasn’t just the photo of him and Lex that was posted either, as he found humour in some of the audience’s surnames (and admittedly it was VERY funny) so had to ID them and of course take more photos to post off.

After a little while Adam checked his mobile phone for responses and read out some tweets from around the world, with proposed captions for the picture of him and Lex, and we had a laugh.

What struck me as both funny and interesting is that one of the tweet replies came from a guy in the audience… who used his mobile to respond to Adam’s tweet.   As Adam remarked: “how funny that you’re communicating with me via a satellite and we’re about 15 metres apart”.

That is exactly the sign of our times:  tweeting, blog posting, re-tweeting, and using mobile phones to post comments and keep in contact with strangers all around the world, at any time, anywhere.

Not everyone is up with it though… it’s generally seen as a ‘young persons thing’.  Yet here was Adam Hills, an almost-40-yr-old sitting on stage with his blackberry taking photos, posting them and tweeting during his show.  Technology is available and accessible to anyone who wants it, and to anyone who chooses to get on board.

In business circles the traditional marketing channels are slowly being overtaken by our social media and technology advances in marketing automation such as Infusionsoft.  Those people who haven’t yet caught on are either looking in or choosing to let it go by.  I believe, to their detriment.

Regardless of what worked yesterday, we do know that things are always changing.  Traditional marketing of the past won’t bring the same results today or tomorrow, and with social media taking charge of the way we communicate – it’s something that simply can’t be ignored.

So with the memory of last night’s performance and Adam’s versatility with his tweeting and posting, I’m off to go tweeting myself.

Have a great week!

Aveline