In part two of my series on e-mail marketing and spam, I build upon the points I made in part one. Don’t bury your prospects or customers with too many messages. (Read more…)
 
I’ve noticed something interesting lately with regard to SPAM complaints. First, let me set up the situation: A customer buys a product online. The customer fills out a web form with their contact information to complete the transaction. This customer even checks the box on the form indicating that they want to receive future marketing communications from the seller. An opt-in email confirmation is sent out and the customer promptly confirms their email address and opt-in status. Infusionsoft records everything including the opt-in confirmation with the original web form, IP address and time stamp data. (Read more…) Infusion users send a lot of email. By “a lot” I mean over 250,000,000 messages in 2007! We’ve worked hard here at infusion to build the technological infrastructure and to establish the relationships in the email deliverability industry to get our user’s email delivered. However, much of the success of getting email delivered rests solely with the sender using best practices. The following are a few tips to help: Focus special attention on the beginning of the email relationship Clearly establish expectations Test, Test, and Retest Use Content Best Practices Get Permission! The email deliverability landscape is always changing as ISPs try to keep ahead of the SPAMers. The thoughts above are just a few of the many best practices used to get email delivered. Post your ideas on what works and share your success tips and trick a little effort, everyone should be able to have successful and profitable email marketing campaigns. A few weeks ago we had the 2008 Infusion User’s Conference held in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was AWESOME! This is the third year we have held the conference and it was great to reconnect with old friends/customers and meet so many new members of the Infusion family. Small business and entrepreneur uber-guru Michael Gerber was the keynote speaker on the second day. It was great to be inspired by Michael again. He was a keynote speaker last year too. I have also had the great personal benefit and pleasure of having attended an In the Dreaming Room session with Michael early last year held in Napa Valley, California. Listening to Michael again at the conference reminded me of many of the things I learned in the Dreaming Room. The experience literally changed my life. I attended the Dreaming Room with Scott Martineau, the founder of Infusion and our Vice President of Product Management and David William Lee, our Vice President of Marketing. Michael introduced us to the concept of “intentional dreaming” and he startled me out of my state of relative sleep to see things completely diferently. I actually “woke up” from my day-to-day state of “waking sleep” to really, intentionally dream and discover the meaning of what I am doing personally, and what we are doing at Infusion. Michael’s Dreaming Room changed Infusion also. Scott, Dave and I came back from the Dreaming Room with our minds blown. We felt like we were in a different universe with regard to thinking bigger and with more meaning than we ever had before. We returned to the office with a new sense of purpose. A few months after the three of us went to the Dreaming Room, our President Clate Mask and Sam Blackham our Director of Finance attended an In the Dreaming Room session with Michael. Same result! As the leaders of Infusion we all put our heads together and re-tooled our company, particurally with regard to the meaning of why were building Infusion to serve small businesses. Clate later created our Dream, Vision, Purpose and Mission as follows: Dream: Vision: Purpose: Mission: It is not hard to see our focus and commitment to small business. We sometimes say that we are “stubbornly small business.” Michael taught us how to intentionally dream and it has made a tremendous difference, both for me personally and for Infusion. I can’t recommend the Dreaming Room highly enough. Thanks, Michael. Consider the following concept: feature suggestions, defects and change requests are really just like sales leads. Right now I’m sitting-in on the inaugural Infusion ICC (Infusion Certified Consultant) training course. It is the charter class for ICCs and every seat is full (over 50 in all)! It is a 5 day course and it is going great! Tons of great CRM and contact manager information being exchanged by the group. After all, almost everyone doing the ICC course is a CRM or contact manager expert. Anyway, as the ICC course is proceeding everyone is encouraged to put feature suggestions and change requests on post-it notes. We put them into a basket and we later enter them into our ticketing system. We are getting some FANTASTIC suggestions listed on the post-it notes that we put in the basket! Well, during one of the breaks a few of the course attendees and I were chatting and I was asked if I was cringing at all the post-it notes in the basket. To their surprise, I answered ABSOULTLY NOT! Fact is I LOVE all the suggestions on how to make the software better. I explained that all the post-it notes are just like sales leads to me. I consider all of the suggestions to be written on gold! Make no mistake, I’m very proud of our product and all the functionality it offers our customers.’ Nevertheless, we have a great opportunity to get feedback from all the ICCs to make us even better and stronger. I’m going to take every “lead” and chase it down and close it. A few months ago our VP of Marketing David William Lee suggested the concept of bugs = leads, and I thank him for the idea. We are working every day here at Infusion to make the product better and I want to thank all the ICCs for giving me such great “leads” to work with. Okay, I know I have blogged about Apple products a lot lately (1st post, 2nd post). I just have to write one more blog about Apple and my new Mac Mini. Over Christmas I got a Mac Mini to use with my home theater system as a media center computer. I have been using my D-Link DSM-520 with mixed results as my media center device/extender to listen to mp3s, watch video (limited) and view my photos on my main home theater system. The DSM-520 is an okay product. The latest firmware update makes it noticeably faster. Nevertheless, it is a little difficult to use. I have been planning on replacing it with a true media center PC for a while and as it turns out the Mac Mini is the perfect platform, well, almost - more on this in a bit. Here is my Mac Mini setup:
I installed the 4GB of RAM aftermarket. The Apple website does not specifically state that the Mac Mini will support 4GB RAM, but it works perfectly and shows up as 4GB in the Mac operating system. One word of caution, when I upgraded the RAM, I forgot to replace the tiny cable harness that connects the thermal sensor that is used to determine the unit’s fan speed. As a result, when I put it all back together the unit’s fan ran at full speed and was kind of loud. I took it apart again and reconnected the cable and now the variable speed fan works perfectly, and quietly. I first used Apple Front Row as my media center platform. I both liked it and hated it at the same time. Front Row looks beautiful on my Samsung 61″ 1080P DLP screen. I guess you would expect nothing less than visual beauty from Apple. It connected with my local iTunes libraries and streamed any type of media, as long as the media type works in iTunes. This was one of the biggest problems - I can’t configure Front Row to connect with my networked non-iTunes folders and media to monitor for content. Front Row is also very limited in what types of media formats it supports. Essentially, if a media type works in iTunes it will work in Front Row. The problem is I have a lot of media content that won’t work in iTunes, and therefore does not work in Front Row. This is why I say the Mac Mini is the perfect media center platform - almost. My solution was to use Boot Camp and I installed Windows Vista Ultimate which includes Windows Media Center. Windows Media Center also looks great on my DLP screen. However, one problem with the Windows approach is that the Windows OS only recognizes about 3.2GB of the 4GB of installed RAM. This is a known limitation of the 32bit version of Windows. Anyway, I also use the Windows Media Center remote control that comes with a USB infrared receiver base unit. It works great! With Windows Vista Ultimate I can easily connect to other media sources on my home network; like my home PC and my D-Link DSN-323 that has 1.5 Terabytes of storage space. (I’m always surprised how space much 1080P content takes up!) Even if Windows Media Center didn’t support a lot more media formats than Front Row, the Media Center Remote is so much better than the little Front Row Remote Control that it makes the choice a no brainer. Now I stream my mp3s, photos and HD video to my home theater system over speedy GB Ethernet using Windows Media Center. Oh, another great feature of the Mac Mini is the built-in S/PDIF digital output and input that I use to connect with my Denon AVR receiver for true digital multi-channel audio reproduction. One small gripe with the Mac Mini is that it only comes with DVI video output instead of a HDMI port. I know I can get a DVI-to-HDMI converter, but it would be nice to have native HDMI support. I’ve been using the Mac Mini with Windows Media Center for about a week now and I love it! My wife, Deanna loves it too. That’s always nice! Great job, again, Apple! The development team is growing! This last quarter we expanded our office space and the development department moved into our new development room. The team is loving it! To give you an example of what we were up against before, we worked in a back office that had little air-conditioning with a constant beeping noises from the alarm system. Our only window looked into the server room here at our office. Don’t get me wrong, it was a great view of our servers, but the new room has many large windows to the outside. Also, our team shared multiple offices and some cubicles so we were all spread out. Our new room is awesome! It is one large open room with an extra office that we use as a conference room. We bought new furniture and decided not to use cubicles. Why, you may ask? Because we’re a team delivering an awesome product, so we wanted to make sure communication and team atmosphere screamed from our office. The team was excited to finally get all together in the office. In addition, the QA and Systems teams now join with the Software Engineers to allow for a quicker process for getting things done. Instead of just sending emails, we yell out at other to get things done. Talk about line-of-sight reporting. When others in the company walk into our room they don’t want to leave. In fact, we’re considering charging for people hanging out in our department. As we bring others in our new office space, like business partners, recruiting candidates and our customers visiting our office they all remark what a great development room we have. We love our office and take pride in it! It is already clear that with this new space the efforts between the several teams within my department are more synchronized. Our team is stronger and our moral is great. Infusion Software rocks and it is the best place to work. We look forward to telling more about the dev room adventures. « Older Posts |
