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I’m happy to announce that our marketing team has launched a brand-new website that will (for many reasons) be far superior to what it’s been.

Click here to check it out:

-Scott

Yesterday, Kelly (our VP of Client Loyalty) sent me a link to an article where some “expert” was talking about the differences between Salesforce.com and NetSuite. He said something to the effect that NetSuite’s comprehensive solution might be more than what small businesses need. His rationale was, and I quote, “Small businesses only need Quickbooks and Excel to operate efficiently.”

What?! Are you serious?

If you think about it, that statement says a lot about the state of small businesses. This “expert” thinks all you need to run a successful small business is Excel and Quickbooks. And what’s sad is this: most small businesses have been lulled into submission, blindly tolerating the notion that Excel and Quickbooks (and maybe Act or Goldmine) are all they need.

How pathetic! No wonder so many small businesses are running in a state of near chaos. How can you segment your prospects and customers effectively with Excel and Quickbooks? How can you execute a marketing campaign when your customer information is spread out in those programs? How can you automatically communicate with prospects and customers effectively if you’re just using Excel and Quickbooks? And how can you automate your billing, collections and other business processes using these two garden-variety software programs? The answer, of course, is that you can’t. There’s no centralization, little organization and virtually no automation (unless you get real fancy with some Excel macros and pivot tables, but even then, there’s not much you can automate).

The fact is, trying to build and manage a small business for maximum profit and efficiency using Excel and Quickbooks is like digging a tunnel out of prison with a fork and spoon. Yeah, it might get the job done–eventually–but who wants the pain and frustration? And who has the time and patience for that?

The sad truth is that a bunch of small businesses out there have come to accept the “Excel and Quickbooks” illusion as reality. Pity. But you know what? That’s fine because right now, we’re not trying to acquire those small businesses as Infusion customers. They don’t get it yet. Besides, we’ll scoop them up a couple years down the road when we’re going after the late majority and when they’ve come to realize there is a better way. For now, we want the early majority. We want the marketers, entrepreneurs and successful small businesses that know there must be a better way. We want the folks who won’t tolerate such a pathetic patchwork quilt of a system. We want ambitious, hard-driving business builders who won’t settle for a fork and spoon to dig their way out of business inefficiency prison. We want the guy who’s looking for a jack hammer or a stick of dynamite, the lady who is so sick and tired of the blockades she and her staff are running into that she’s searching for something better, something that will enable her, empower her to build her business the way she wants.

Infusion Software is THE business-building software for marketers, entrepreneurs and successful small businesses that want to automate their sales marketing and customer management. It’s the must-have solution for those businesses that want to grow fast, push past the obstacles holding them back and take their businesses to higher levels. They know Excel and Quickbooks aren’t enough. They know Act and Goldmine can’t cut it for them anymore. And they know that any other hodge-podge, pieced-together, lame-excuse-of-a-system just can’t deliver the results they need because any such system lacks the centralization, organization and automation that will propel their business forward.

Bottom line: The guy who says Excel and Quickbooks are enough is blinded, relegated to the frustrating existence of slowly digging out of inefficient, small business prison, using nothing but a fork and spoon. Have fun, buddy! Meanwhile, for the aggressive entrepreneurs, marketers and small businesses out there, there is a better way. It’s called Infusion Software.

Recently, we released a new feature called “Trackable Link Action Sequences”. I call them “Action Links” and they have revolutionized our sales & marketing. We have success stories & ideas pouring in from customers on how they are using this crazy new feature.

In a nutshell, the feature allows you to insert a link within an e-mail & when the prospect or customer clicks on the e-mail, a series of back-end processes fire off automatically. What does that mean? Well, prospects & customers that are already on your list no longer have to re-register for events because you already have their info… the action link simply auto-registers them, sends them the event info, etc. For sales, since you have their credit card on file already, they never have to fill out a sales form again… just click the link & the charge happens & the product or service gets automatically fulfilled.

I recently tested this on our own teleseminar events. I sent a blast e-mail to our house list with the action link in the e-mail copy. Instead of sending existing list members/prospects to yet another web form to have them register for the teleseminar, all they had to do was click on the action link within the e-mail. The result? A 560% increase in teleseminar registrants and a 378% increase in attendance.

Another example (product sales): Using the traditional method of sending customers to a sales form to capture credit card info, etc., it took us 60 days to capture 58 orders. We introduced the ‘action link’ in the e-mail copy so that existing customers didn’t have to go to a sales form, fill it out, whip out their credit card (again), etc. The result? 83 orders in 9 days.

There are many more examples. Some of them are discussed in an ICC post by one of our customers, Victor Cheng and Scott Martineau’s response. I have included the post below:

******************START POST*************************

— In ic-members@yahoogroups.com, Victor Cheng

Hi Everyone,

Just a quick note to anyone out there using Infusion. I wanted to
point out a very important new feature that came out 4 days ago
that is a real serious break through in email marketing. I suspect most
Infusion customers missed it and frankly Infusion did not do a
great job in really promoting this amazing break through.

But first, let me explain why I’m writing this. I’ve been an
Infusion customer for a year or two now and at times I have been a
very tough, very vocal customer of the company. To Infusion’s
credit they have responded to every issue, challenge or concern I’ve
thrown their way. While I always wish they addressed all my concerns
“yesterday”, they have gotten to all of them over time (which sadly
is increasingly unusual in this day and age)
(Note: I’m not an affiliate for the company, don’t have a financial
interest in it or anything, I simply make my living off of what
Infusion does or does not enable me to do with my marketing)
I thought it only fair that I am equally vocal about when they
REALLY hit a home run… as they did 4 days ago. Funny thing is barely
anyone noticed it (including Infusion). I exchanged emails with
Perry 6 days ago and he definitely noticed it. I tested it 2 days
ago just to make sure this break through feature really works…
and it REALLY does work.

Here’s the feature…. I call this feature “Automated Sub Listing”
(Infusion calls it Trackable Link Action Sequences)
Here’s how it works. You can place a link inside your email and if
the user clicks on it… you can add that user to a sublist
AUTOMATICALLY without the user having to opt-in again.

Let me explain why this is a major break through.
Background
—————-
Dan Kennedy always talks about slicing and dicing your list… the
whole message to market match stuff. I had a rare opportunity to
watch Dan work on one of his own projects, spending his own money
on media… and I was startled by the EXTENT to which he segment his
offers to match the market. (Yes, not only does he practice what
he preaches about market to message match, he slices and dices so
finely when he’s spending his own money it borders on ridiculous).
I’ve always been wanting to do this online… particularly in
email. The idea is whenever any user clicks a link in an email, I
wanted to automatically put them on to a sublist so I could know
what that user was interested in… and market to them about their
specific interest Do they like high ticket products or low ticket
products? Are they into products for beginners or for experts? Is
their company big or small? Etc,…

I’ve been wanting to do this in a way that was both easy to
administer and seamless to the user. John Reese has been doing
this for yearsm but he does it using custom coded software. Paul Myers
does the same in the past, but has to host his own mail server to
do it.

I’ve outsourced 102 software projects offshore over the past 3
years, have probably some 40,000 lines of custom code written for my own
marketing systems, and have designed eCommerce software for
companies like kodak.com, nike.com, pg.com… and I deliberately did NOT
attempt to create this capability on my own. Why not? In a
nutshell, way to hard and way to expensive.

I looked for a commercially available email system to do this, but
could not find one meant for smaller companies and costing less
than $100k…. Then I was pleasantly surprised to discover the feature
appeared (for free) in my Infusion system 4 days ago.

How to Make Money With Automated Sublisting
———————————————————-
Here’s the idea. You take your big list and send the entire list a
link to free content. This could be an article you wrote,
something in the new york times, or anything. You use this automated sublist
feature and anyone who clicks on the link to the free article,
automatically gets added to a sublist. For example, you send a
link to an article about improving response rates… and everyone who
clicks on that link, gets added to a sublist (so anytime you want
to pitch a product using “improving response rates” as a benefit, you
now know who will respond to that hot button)

Now you know who’s interested in that topic… then you do follow
up marketing to just that sublist. And here’s the big secret and the
power of the feature… you email those people a LOT of follow up
emails. Not only does this boost response, but they actually
APPRECIATE it because they are very interested in the topic. The
automated sublisting allows you to crank up the frequency of emails
without fear of response and readership falling due to poor market
to message match.

Because you are ONLY mailing to the sublist… you are NOT mailing
to everyone else on your big list that is NOT interested in the topic.

Example:
if you’re an info marketer that teaches some “how to” skill. You
can send an article that’s obviously meant for beginners. Those that
click on the link are added to a sublist (Infusion calls this
“Contact Groups”) called “Newbies”. Then you send an article to
the whole list that’s obviously for experienced people… and add them
to a sublist called “Veterans”.

Then you mail the newbies offers meant for newbies… and the
veterans offers meant for veterans. The response is excellent and
nobody is being alienated with irrelevant content. Your response
rate is excellent because you’re targeting… and the more you
email such targeted content and such targeted offers, the more your list
reads and responds to your offers… because every email, every
offer passes Dan’s “Hey, this is just for me” test for a market to
message match. Readership and response goes up… and you never have to
burn through “relationship goodwill” by sending your list members
stuff they don’t care about.

Now compare this to when you don’t have this automated sublist
feature. If you mail a newbie offer to your whole list, you will
get responses from the newbies… but you are simultaneously irritating
the veterans. In fact, you’re teaching the veterans to learn to
ignore your emails because your emails are not revelant to them.

So after a week of mailing the whole list newbie offers, you switch
to send offers geared towards veterans. So you send your whole
list an offer for veterans… now you’re just irritating the
newbies. After repeating this cycle a few times, you’ve just
trained your whole list to ignore you most of the time… spam complaints
go away, readership goes way, way down… and of course response goes
down with it.

Infusion goes one step further. In addition to adding the user to
a sublist, you can automatically add them to a follow e-mail
campaign. Even better than that, you can add them to a multi-
channel follow up campaign that includes any combination of email, fax
broadcast, voice broadcast, direct mail and telemarketing… all
from the user clicking a link in an email (without them having to opt in
or anything after they click the link… this of course assumes
they opted in previously)

Usage Examples
————————
Examples #1
—————–
In addition to splitting your list between newbies and veterans,
you can segment male vs. female, solo entrepreneur vs. bigger company,
one office vs multi-office, franchisee vs. independently owned

Example #2
—————-
You can segment your prospects based on objection.

“Hi XXX, I noticed that you havent’ invest in my product yet. I
can only think of 3 reasons why you might not. I’m not going to try to
convince you to change your mind but I would appreciate your honest
feedback on why you didn’t buy. Just click one of the 3 reasons
below that best explains why you haven’t bought

Price (a clickable link)
Not sure I’ll succeed (a clickable link)
Skeptical (a clickable link)

Thanks!
-Victor”

Based on whichever link they click, I’ll send an entire email
follow up sequence designed to specifically tackle that objection.
Example #3
—————-
Hi XXXXX, I just saw a great article in Our Industry News. It’s
about XYZ topic which I know has been a very important issue for
all of us. I’ve included a link to this just in case you missed it.

Article in Our Industry News (clickable link)

Thanks!
-Victor”

2 days later, they get an email sequence on products, late breaking
(paid) teleseminar on XYZ topic, a pitch on buying ABC product
because it helps them deal with XYZ topic.

Final Thoughts
——————-
I wanted to point out this break through because frankly it is
ridiculously hard and expensive to create software that does
this… and MANUAL sub listing was the primary reason I invested in
Infusion over a year ago… MANUAL sublisting did not and does not exist in
other email systems (e.g., aweber, getresponse, 1shoppingcart,
etc…) designed for smaller business <$50M in sales. Not only
does it exist in Infusion, but now Infusion has AUTOMATED sublist
or “One Click Sublisting” and that’s a very, very big deal.

I’m hiring someone part-time just to help me segment one of my
lists 130,000 opt-ins and then send each segment targeted offers. I can
not tell you how frustrating it was before this to send a very
specific offer to an unsegmented or lightly segmented list. With
each offer I sent out, I could see how the people who weren’t
interested in that particular topic start to tune me out for not
being relevant anymore. I could have created a separate opt in
form for each sublist (and did for some big segments), but it’s an
administrative hassle to create a landing page for every email I
send out and user-experience hassle because nobody is going to opt in to
a new sublist everytime I send out an email… so frankly I just did
not segment nearly enough.

In any case, I know a few of you have asked me for my opinions on
Infusion over the past few months and at the Info Summit, so I
thought I update everyone on this recent information.

You can read Infusion’s official word on this new email marketing
break through. It was mentioned in an email sent out to all
customers on Dec 8th, regarding the upgrade that has since taken
place on Dec 14th. There were 12 features mentioned in that system
update email, the Automated Sublist feature was item #8 and named
“Trackable Link Action Sequences”. Here’s the official description
from that email:

Trackable Link Action Sequences

This feature allows you to create trackable links that trigger an
Action Sequence. You can now automate what happens when your
contacts click on a trackable link in an email in order to more effectively
market to your leads.

Thanks,
-Victor

From: ic-members@yahoogroups.com [mailto:ic-members@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Scott Martineau
Sent: Tuesday, December 19, 2006 8:53 AM
To: ic-members@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [ic] Re: Important News for Infusion Users
Victor,

Thank you for your insights about ‘auto sub-listing’!

I had an insane response over the past few days applying this new
feature in a different way… thought it would benefit the entire
group.

Jon McCulloch (a member of this forum) and I used this to sell our
event-in-a-box recently to our existing customers. We had already
promoted the event-in-a-box to our customers, and the results had
steadily fallen from great to almost nothing with each follow-up
piece. (Point is, our customers had stopped responding.)

We decided to try a new offer — a genuine free trial, where we pay
shipping both ways and the customer is not required to provide
payment up front (great call, Jon). Previously, we would have had to
send the promo by direct mail, including a return form that could be
faxed or returned by pre-paid mail/business reply.

This new feature (the ability to apply action sequences on a
trackable link) enabled us to combine the “pure” free trial method
(the way Robert Collier wrote about) with a new response mechanism
(i.e. an e-mail click) for an almost-irresistable offer.

The goal was to make the offer SO SEXY that it would be painfully
hard to resist and unusually simple to take advantage of. (”You mean,
all I do is click this link and you’ll send me the kit?”)

Here’s the general gist of the promotion:
——————————————-

Dear Existing Customer,

I want to send you a Christmas present… it’s a 100% free trial of
XYZ product. I’m so confident you’ll love it that I’ll pay to have it
sent to you, give you X days to try it out for free, and if you don’t
want it I’ll pay to have it shipped back to me. Either way, you have
nothing to risk.

And even better, I already have your mailing address on file, so all
you have to do is click the link below and I’ll have Rudolf get it
out to you right away! That’s right, you don’t have to do anything
else, just click this link!

<

<

More copy

<

——————————————-
Here’s the exact e-mail we sent:
http://misc.infusionsoft.com/ic/one_click_promo.htm

Since we were promoting to existing clients, we already had their
mailing address and billing (CC) information on file, so there was no
need to introduce the barrier of having them type it in again.

Just in case the client wanted the kit shipped to a different
address, we set up the action sequence to automatically e-mail them a
confirmation e-mail with the address we had on file merged into the e-
mail (with instructions on how to let us know if they wanted it sent
to an alternate mailing address). Here’s that e-mail:
http://misc.infusionsoft.com/ic/address_confirmation.htm

A few observations about results:

1) We’ve sent only two e-mails with this offer and our response has
already blown away the response from the previous promotion (that
promo included about 8 pieces, e-mail, fax, vb, etc.)

2) The first and second e-mails (about a week apart) got exactly the
same response.

3) In my opinion, the key was that all barriers to response were
eliminated. (Collier would roll over in his grave if he only knew how
easy this can be.) I plan to test this “pure” free trial model in
many other areas.

Fun stuff!

————-

Here are a few other ideas off the top of my head that this can be
used for:

*Easy teleseminar registrations for people who are already on your
list (All they do is click the link and they are registered –
the “confirmation sequence” to remind them of the call can be
initiated automatically)

*Introducing a new free report/demo/etc. to everyone who requested a
past free report (i.e., “Just click here to have the new free report
sent automatically”)

*Similar to Auto-Sublisting, you can also use this technology to
control the timing of your more powerful/aggressive follow-up
sequences. For example, you may include a special link in each of
your standard follow-up e-mails that, when clicked, initiates a time-
bound offer sequence.

We’ll find hundreds of ways to apply this as time goes on and as we
put our heads together!
————-

Hope this was helpful…

Best,

Scott Martineau
Founder of Infusion
http://infusioncrm.com

*******************END POST*************************