Business

We’d like to congratulate the three winners of the InfusionCon 2013 Social Media VIP Contest. It was difficult to select them because we had many great entrants filled with energy and passion. We chose them based on their interest in InfusionCon, their ability to share interesting and engaging stories, and their overall creativity. I think you’ll love who we picked.

With no further ado, here are the winners:

WARDEE HARMON, Social Media VIP for Live Blogging
Wardee authors an in-depth and engaging blog at GNOWFGLINS, which is an acronym for “God’s Natural, Organic, Whole Foods, Grown Locally, In Season.” She has been using Infusionsoft since May of last year, so she has been around since the inception of the Campaign Builder. She’s excited to experience InfusionCon for the first time and is thrilled to be covering it as one of our live bloggers. In her own words, she wants to be inspired – I guarantee she will after attending InfusionCon!

DESIREE SCALES, Social Media VIP for Live Updates
Desiree is CEO of Bella Web Design and is a seasoned Twitter user who loves Infusionsoft. She’s been thrilled with our all-in-one sales and marketing software since joining us in November. She credits her Success Coach, Christina Kehoe, for her success with Infusionsoft. She’s covered other notable live events and conferences, so she’ll fit right in at InfusionCon. Be sure to follow her on Twitter at @DesireeScales. You’ll be reading her 140-character live updates from InfusionCon soon.

SARAH RICHARDSON, Social Media VIP for Live Photos
Sarah is the Team Lead for the Infusionsoft Lead Development team who has a native talent for taking photos and sharing them across various photo networks. While she didn’t enter our contest, we decided that she was the best person to share the activities during InfusionCon 2013. You can follow her on Instagram at @Sarahbezeee to see her fun photos.

They won an all-expenses-paid trip to attend InfusionCon 2013 so they can share all the excitement and priceless moments from the ground at the biggest sales and marketing event all from their perspective. And they’ll be doing it from the front row in all the sessions.

I want to thank everyone who participated in this contest! There’s still time left to enter the 2013 Ultimate Marketer Contest. Trust me, it’s worth it – just ask Jim Cavale from Iron Tribe Fitness. We hope to see you there!

Read more about this post, Meet the InfusionCon 2013 Social Media VIPs! on The Infusionsoft Blog.

We’re off to a great start this year! This morning, our team took a different commute to our new home in Chandler, Arizona. We’re still settling into our new offices, but here is an inside look at our new home. We’d also like to thank the numerous individuals and organizations who have helped us along the way.

If you’re interested in writing us a letter, going on a Culture tour or even sending our development team some delicious Barro’s Pizza, take note of our new office address:

Infusionsoft

1260 S. Spectrum Blvd.

Chandler, AZ 85286

We’re also updating all other directories that include our previous address, but it may take a while for the updates to take effect. For your convenience, here is a link to a Google Map of our new address.

We’d like to acknowledge the following companies and organizations for helping us make our office move seamless. Thank you for all your support!

City of Chandler

Chandler Chamber of Commerce

Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce

Olympian Movers

bluemedia

Total Office Interiors

Goodman’s Interior Solutions

Douglas Allred Company

Willmeng Construction

AspenTech

Immedia

Sixth Division

We’d also like to highlight the following employees who went well above and beyond during the past several months to make our move as smooth as possible for the entire company:

Clate Mask

Alyssa Peterson

Brett Gilliland

Brian Luckey

Kathy Sacks

Ray Eldard

Hal Halladay

Eric Larson

Joseph Mask

Devin Merrill

Dan Christiansen

Duston Turner

Christian LeCheminant

Bryan Stradling

Thank you to everyone who has helped us in this move. This is about so much more than abundant parking, immediate access to the restrooms or an enormous football field. It’s about us following through on our company’s purpose of helping small businesses succeed.

Our move to Chandler is only one chapter in our journey and we look forward to writing many more this year. Stay tuned!

Read more about this post, We’re All Moved In! on The Infusionsoft Blog.

Practically every kind of software and hardware available today has ways to optimize, fine-tune and tweak it to yield higher performance. Infusionsoft is not any different. Our Systems team already does most of that, but we want to offer you some actionable tips that you can use to help you with maximizing the performance of your Infusionsoft account.

I’m an eternal optimizer. If it can be modified, I love to adjust, test and tweak it. Whether it’s cars, Androids, (Jailbroken) iPhones or computers. If there’s a switch, I’ll toggle it and observe the results. One thing I learned over all these years is that with a significant change or modification, there’s an inherent risk, so it’s always a good idea to back up and save your data before you apply the changes. I know, I know, we don’t read manuals and we like to live life on the edge; just trust me on this one.

Do you need to do all these optimizations? No, but if you’ve run into situations where you’re running actions on contacts and it appears to be sluggish, or if you’ve sent a broadcast and it’s not sending around 200 emails per second, it would be a good idea to optimize your Infusionsoft application. I recommend doing these if your account is older than a couple years. Let’s get started!

Warning: Proceed with caution before deleting or removing data from your Infusionsoft account. If you would like professional assistance in performing any of these tasks, Infusionsoft Certified Consultants are qualified to carry out these suggestions for you.

1. Trim the fat from your contact list.

The goal here is to remove the excess contacts that haven’t had any activity in a while. One method that worked well for me is to take look into your recent broadcasts over the past three months and search for people who did not open or click your email messages and tag those contacts separately. Then do a final search for those who are in all those tags. From there, you can decide to do a final export, and then delete them to shed the dead weight from your list. You can also find unresponsive contacts on your list by using the “Click Through Percentage Search” found in Marketing Reports. You can even search for a threshold of click-through rates (e.g., 0-20% CTR) by specific Tag.

[Read more about this on the Infusionsoft Help Center]

2. Remove old and unnecessary Tags.

Word from our Systems team indicates that Contact Records containing a lot of Tags tend to slow down database performance on larger accounts. There are two ways to address this. The first is to actually remove redundant and unnecessary tags from contacts. The second is to actually remove the tags from your Infusionsoft account. My understanding is that you can still keep these tags, but removing them from the Contact Records is the most beneficial.

[Read more about this on the Infusionsoft Help Center]
[Read more about this on the Infusionsoft Help Center]

3. Remove obsolete Custom Fields.

Every Infusionsoft account is provided 100 custom fields for their unlimited use. For our users who leverage the Infusionsoft API frequently, this will yield a massive performance gain, but for most others, it won’t. Consider removing obsolete Custom Fields that you no longer use for day to day sales and marketing activities. As always; backup first, because once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. An alternative to Custom Fields is to use Infusionsoft’s native fields and you can re-label and re-purpose them.

[Read more about this on the Infusionsoft Help Center]

4. Use the latest Mozilla Firefox browser.

At this time, Mozilla Firefox is the preferred browser that is most compatible with Infusionsoft. Every major release of Firefox aims to improve memory management, Javascript rendering performance and overall reliability. We recommend that you use the latest version of Firefox when using Infusionsoft. Additionally, try to minimize any unnecessary toolbars or add-ons. These may interfere with the rendering of pages and may cause problems later.

Just a note on Google Chrome because I know it’ll come up in this discussion about performance. We know Chrome is an amazing web browser and offers superior Javascript performance, but right now, the advanced features of our software like the drag-and-drop ‘Builders’ are incompatible with it. As we innovate and constantly improve, there may be a time when we are compatible with Chrome.

5. Customize your User Home Dashboard so it’s useful.

Are you not interacting with your User Home Dashboard like you did before? Maybe it’s time for some new widgets. I recommend using the “Box ‘o Stats” widget to provide immediate KPIs for your business. You’ll need to first create saved searches and reports for what you need. Once you do it, you never have to do it again. This widget in particular is specifically designed to be light on our database resources, so you can click the numbers to be taken to the results if you need them.

[Read more about this on the Infusionsoft Help Center]

6. Adjust your Follow-Up Sequence Schedule to your preferred contact periods.

Do you send emails at 1AM? How about at 4AM? Probably not. If you do, that’s fine, but many of our users want to be prescriptive with the times that they run legacy Follow-Up Sequences. Keep in mind that time times are hard-coded to be Eastern Standard Time (EST). It’s a good idea to setup a “blackout period” where automated activities don’t run. Events from Follow-Up Sequences will be queued up and executed at the next available hour. You can always send Scheduled Broadcasts any time you want because those override the Follow-Up Sequence Schedule.

Just so you know, everything within the Campaign Builder is completely exempt from the Follow-Up Sequence Schedule; you would want to configure timers for more granular control over the timing of sequences developed within it.

[Read more about this on the Infusionsoft Help Center]

7. Send an email confirmation to your contacts to re-gain their permission.

If you haven’t gained permission from your contacts to email them in the past six months, it’s a very smart and calculated decision to ask them to confirm their interest in receiving updates from you. (I previously went into detail about this when we moved over our blog’s subscribers from FeedBurner – it’s a good read.) Permission typically expires about nine months after people initially opt-in to your email marketing. We’ve seen that users who adopt a confirmed email strategy typically have exponentially fewer spam complaints, higher open rates and ultimately, higher click-through rates on their marketing messages. If you want to find all the contacts with unconfirmed email addresses (formerly, single opt-in), you can review the “Email Status Search” found in Marketing Reports. This is a great method to put those individuals into an email confirmation campaign.

[Read more about this on the Infusionsoft Help Center]

8. De-duplicate and merge contacts.

Last and certainly not least, is the occasional need to de-duplicate (or de-dupe) contacts in your database. Why would you have duplicate records? If you imported a list of people and they had a different email address, maybe you specifically permitted duplicates in a Web Form, or simply you’ve always had duplicates when you initially configured your Infusionsoft account. Infusionsoft tries to be smart about not sending emails to people twice, which is why you may observe “skips” on whenever you send an email broadcast. Merging these records will allow you to have complete Contact Records with a high degree of accuracy for future sales and marketing activities. In addition, you will have better reporting capabilities since duplicates won’t be padding your results one way or the other.

[Read more about this on the Infusionsoft Help Center]
[Read more about this on the Infusionsoft Help Center]

After making these optimizations, you’ll find that your Infusionsoft account is a bit speedier and the analytics and reporting may become much more accurate when you need to measure your sales and marketing activities. Performance gains or improved reporting capabilities – it’s a win-win if you get this done.

If your account has more than 500,000 contacts, these optimizations will help greatly, but won’t necessarily cure all the performance ills you might run into. We’re continually working on speeding up our backend so we’re blazing fast no matter how much your business grows. If you ever need some advanced help, just ask, we’ll work with you and can do some pretty complex tasks on our backend.

As I mentioned before – I can’t stress this enough – please make a backup of your data before making these changes to your account. And with that data, please store it securely so no one else can access it.  Nothing would upset you more than if you made a mistake along the way and had to pay us to do an advanced data restore. Of course, if you get stuck, please contact us and we’ll be happy to help.

There are likely more optimizations, but these are top ones that come to mind that will help most Infusionsoft users. Do you have any performance tips or tricks that you’d like to share? Go ahead and let us know in the comments below.

Image credit: Thorbard, modified

Read more about this post, 8 Powerful Tips to Optimize Your Infusionsoft Account for Greater Performance on The Infusionsoft Blog.

This time of year, we tend to look back at our year’s accomplishments, acknowledge them and look ahead. Our blog has been greatly improved recently and we have a lot of newer subscribers who haven’t read posts from earlier this year. I’ll point out 12 noteworthy blog posts that you can catch up on.

The top posts highlighted below are blended from our traffic stats as well as major events in our company this year. Even if you’ve never read our blog until now, you can quickly fast-forward through this year by reading these posts.

You may notice that some posts have moved over to the Big Ideas Blog. We moved a handful of posts when we updated company blog this fall. The Big Ideas Blog is where we publish small business sales and marketing advice and tips that aren’t specific to Infusionsoft.

1. HOW TO: Collect Leads on Facebook Timeline with Tabs – Facebook is a significant platform that small businesses use to reach their prospects and customers. This tutorial explained how you can add a custom ‘Tab’ to your Facebook Page.
2. 2012 Ultimate Marketer Winner: Iron Tribe Fitness – The competition for this award was no easy feat for Jim Cavale and Forrest Walden from Iron Tribe Fitness. They were elected by you as this year’s top marketers using Infusionsoft. (By the way, you should enter the 2013 Ultimate Marketer Contest!)
3. 5 Things to Love About the New Campaign Builder – Our Campaign Builder received many improvements throughout the year since it was released. Our Director of Product Marketing shared five major enhancements seen in the Campaign Builder feature.
4. Introducing our Drag & Drop Campaign Builder – One of the ways we made sales and marketing easier was to launch our visual Campaign Builder, where users literally build marketing campaigns by dragging and dropping. It was launched at InfusionCon 2012.
5. A New Look for Infusionsoft – We adopted a new logo and color palette and retired our red and black tones. Our Chief Marketing Officer explained why we did this.
6. 2012 Spring Release Overview – When we launched the Campaign Builder at InfusionCon, it was only one of the features found in the Spring 2012 Release. Our Director of Product Management shared what his vision for the release and what to expect from us moving forward.
7. 5 Ways to Spice Up Your Lead Scoring – Many of you have wanted a way to rank and score leads for your business. We recently beefed it up its capabilities and our Product Marketing Director revealed the latest enhancements made to our lead scoring features.
8. Refining our Vision – Infusionsoft has evolved into a stronger sales and marketing software company that is built to last. Our CEO and Co-founder went into great detail to communicate about changes made to our purpose and core values.
9. We’re Moving to Chandler! – After a very long search at all the different workspaces found across Phoenix, we decided to move to Chandler to accommodate for our sustained growth.
10. Top 10 Predictions for Infusionsoft in 2012 – Our CEO and Co-founder made 10 ambitious predictions at the start of 2012. Well, if you look at his list, you’ll see that they all came true.
11. INFOGRAPHIC: Four Ways to Boost Business with CustomerHub – Not too long ago, we deeply integrated CustomerHub into our company. This is a helpful infographic that explained what CustomerHub does for small businesses.
12. INFOGRAPHIC: The 7 Stages of Small Business Success – Our CEO and Co-founder (and our entire company) is incredibly passionate about small business. But what exactly is meant by small business? In this infographic, we defined the differences between being a ‘solopreneur’ to corporate player.

There has been also plenty of amazing, informative and useful blog posts published on the Big Ideas Blog and the Culture Corner. These blogs are just as much members of the Infusionsoft family as our company blog. I invite you to go ahead and check them out and comment on an entry or two!

What was YOUR favorite blog post this year? Go ahead and tell us in the comments!

Image credit: franda, modified 

Read more about this post, Our Greatest Blog Posts from 2012 on The Infusionsoft Blog.

After we moved from FeedBurner to Infusionsoft, you’re probably curious about the results. There were a few lessons learned as well as some great outcomes, too. This is the third and final installment of this series.

From this experience, I learned that it was a very wise and sensible move for us to migrate from FeedBurner to Infusionsoft. In the results described below, it will vary from what you will experience, but I used the exact same tool that you have access to — Infusionsoft.

I’m interested in sharing my insights and lessons so you can learn from it and improve your marketing strategies. I purposefully omitted our list size because that’s not important; I don’t want you to be discouraged if your list size is smaller or larger than ours. The point is that anyone can do this and achieve favorable results.

1. Introduction – An explanation as to why we moved away from FeedBurner
2. Tutorial – Step-by-step guide explaining how to migrate to Infusionsoft
3. Results – A look at the performance, lessons and more.

When I ventured in this project, I had an assumption – you might have it, too. It goes something like this, “I have a very loyal and responsive list of folks who subscribe to the blog in FeedBurner.” Well, it isn’t wrong to think this, but the results tell another story. I’ll explain.

I adopted an email confirmation strategy when importing the list of people from FeedBurner. This was intentional because I didn’t want to continue to mail to people who either abandoned their email account or who were uninterested in our blog content. In other words, I wanted to test the recommendations from our amazing Email Compliance Team and validate that leveraging email confirmation is a sensible email marketing practice.

We sent an email broadcast to this newly imported list of people four times over a month. But, it wasn’t to the same people; each subsequent broadcast excluded people who did not open or click the previous one. Obviously, this is prone to error (e.g., not all email clients render tracking images), but it proved to be successful nevertheless. I discovered a very useful email marketing metric along the way – Click to Open Rate (CTOR). I looked closely at this metric after listening to DJ Waldow speak about how he measures successful email marketing campaigns.

Click to Open Rate is a score of “efficiency” because it reflects how well the content resonated with people once they opened the email. If recipients did not click, well, it probably wasn’t relevant. If they clicked, it was probably well-targeted and relevant. I used this as a gauge that would tell me if my attempts were proving to be effective (or not). It’s calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the opens. There’s a bit of wiggle room in this formula because one could click, but not necessarily load the tracking image, but it gives you a decent metric to work with.

If you track your gas mileage in your car, you’re really tracking the overall efficiency of your engine, aerodynamics and the weight of your vehicle. Putting the laws of physics aside, you could achieve an “infinite” miles per gallon if you pushed your car. It’s not only efficiency that matters; it’s the results that matter, such as getting to your destination in a reasonable amount of time.

We achieved results, too.

You can see that with each additional email broadcast, with a slightly different subject line and message, we achieved different results. The subject line in the third email rendered a 98% CTOR was titled, “Please confirm your email.” It’s not rocket science; it’s about being simple, direct and even a bit personable along the way.

Each email was arguably quite effective except the last one. Why? Well, I goofed and I forgot to exclude people who already confirmed their interest (sorry!) and it was targeted toward anyone who did not open or click the previous emails. Regardless, it was the last attempt in case someone skimmed it the first time, it was a “last chance” to engage them. We picked up a handful of signups, but as you can see, it wasn’t very efficient, and I even got a couple annoyed responses.

The outcome of this was very positive despite realizing that my list size in FeedBurner was perhaps a bit inflated. Here’s the final result of the list after four email confirmations over a month. About two-thirds have interacted with the emails, but what about the remaining third? Let’s talk about them.

Bounces were classified as hard bounces, which is another way of saying “This email does not exist.” This above average bounce rate led me to confirm with our email compliance team and they verified that it was indeed accurate (with email transaction logs to prove it). I could draw the conclusion that in the small business market, some people change emails addresses frequently due to job changes, domain changes and all that.

No Engagement is a bit vague, but there are a few reasons why someone did not open or click these emails. It’s plausible that someone did read the email and actively chose to delete it. It’s important to me that I only deliver our latest blog posts to those who want it. And maybe when they initially signed up, they loved our blog, but now it just doesn’t satisfy them. This was okay with me. It’s also plausible that these were abandoned (but still functional) email accounts. I don’t really know for sure, but I do know that they did not engage with these attempts, so it makes no sense to continue to email them.

Both of these stats were surprising because Google would still attempt to to deliver blog posts to these people and even listed them as ‘active’. Yikes!

Coming back to why I adopted an email confirmation strategy, you can see the value of it. If I did not ask for people’s permission again, I could have really upset them, which would result in a very high unsubscribe rate and an unwanted volume of spam complaints. Email confirmations are designed to insulate you from the risk of spam complaints and prevents you from upsetting your subscribers. Had I not done an email confirmation, I might not have achieved the very results that I was going after. Speaking of complaints, I only incurred one spam report, and only had about 15 people unsubscribe. People respect being respected.

In the end, we re-engaged, gained permission from and successfully migrated about two-thirds of our FeedBurner subscribers over to Infusionsoft. While it’s not required to do an email confirmation, I strongly recommend it if you’re going to migrate from FeedBurner to Infusionsoft! Now our list is more engaged than ever before, healthy and responsive.

As a blog publisher (and/or marketer), you have to make sacrifices for the greater good. Letting go of one-third or more of your subscribers can be difficult, but only if you put a lot of weight into the vanity metric of “list size.”

As a quick recap of this series, you can read more about why we migrated from FeedBurner, read our step-by-step tutorial on how to migrate from FeedBurner and in this post, you can see the results from doing it. If you have questions or comments, go ahead and ask them in the comments section below.

Read more about this post, An Inside Look at Migrating from FeedBurner to Infusionsoft (Part 3) on The Infusionsoft Blog.