Technology

There are a handful (a big handful) of features inside of Infusionsoft that many people are not aware of or they’re not sure how to use. One of those cool features is the ability to personalize your website based on the information you store about each person in Infusionsoft.

You’ve probably seen the settings to make this happen a hundred times and just didn’t know what to do with them. First, I’ll show you what they look like.  Check out the screenshots below and then I’ll explain what to do with them.

When setting up a Web Form, check the box that says “Pass Person’s info to ‘Thank You’ page url”

When setting up traditional Trackable links, check the box to pass the person’s details to the URL

When using the new Email Builder, show advanced options on automation links and check the box to “place the person’s details at the end of the URL”

When someone fills out a Web Form, an Order Form, or clicks a Trackable/Automation Link, you can “pass the person’s details to the URL” or success page. What this means is that Infusionsoft will append every field from the person’s contact record to the URL as a Query String.

What does that mean?

Let’s say you want to send people to http://www.mywebsite.com/success.php after they fill out a Web Form or click a link. If you check the box to pass their details, Infusionsoft will add their details to the URL in a format like this:

http://www.mywebsite.com/success.php?Id=1234&FirstName=Tyler&LastName=Garns&Email=tyler@emaildomain.com

Everything after the question mark in the URL is known as the Query String. It’s a list of all of the fields and their values from the person’s contact record.

Why is this cool and important?

Well, the fields that are in the query string are accessible to the page the person is on.  You can access these values in two different ways:

1. Client Side - This means that the person’s web browser accesses the values itself through Javascript.
2. Server Side - This means that the web server accesses the values as the page is loading.

I’ll give you some simple code to capture these value using Javascript (client-side) as well as PHP (server-side) and then I’ll show you some really cool stuff you can do with this data.

Here’s how you can do it with Javascript.

In the head section of your site, place this code:

<script>
function getQuerystring(key, default_)
{
if (default_==null) default_="";
key = key.replace(/[\[]/,"\\\[").replace(/[\]]/,"\\\]");
var regex = new RegExp("[\\?&]"+key+"=([^&#]*)");
var qs = regex.exec(window.location.href);
if(qs == null)
return default_;
else
return qs[1];
}
</script>

Next, place code like this in your HTML to insert the FirstName into the website content. Of course, you can replace “FirstName” with any of the other field names to pull in other contact fields.

<script>
var first = getQuerystring('FirstName');
document.write(first);
</script>

Pretty basic, right? It’s even easier with PHP. In PHP, all Query String values exist in an array called $_REQUEST.  To access the FirstName value, just use $_REQUEST['FirstName'], to access the Email, just use $_REQUEST['Email'].  Get the values onto the screen with code like this:

<?php echo $_REQUEST['FirstName']; ?>

So, pulling this data into a page can help you personalize the page for your visitors.  But, that’s not the most powerful part. Imagine a multi-step series of questions you’d like to ask prospects, like a survey.  We’ll now you can pre-fill all forms after the first form by using this feature. Or, when you send people to a form after they’ve already opted-in, you can pre-fill the information you already have.  This does two things: it makes the process of filling out forms easier for the prospects, and it also gives them an opportunity to correct any information that may not be right.

Also, one of the fields that is always passed is the ContactId. With the ContactId you can run actions and much more on the contact record using the API. I’m not going to go into the details of the API right now, but imagine being able to send emails, faxes, voice messages, start and stop follow-up sequences, tag, etc. when someone visits a website, or clicks a particular link on a site, or interacts with a site in any way.  That’s where it gets fun.

To wrap things up, here are a bunch of ideas you can do when you harness the power of the contact data being in the Query String from Infusionsoft:

1. Personalize the page by using the person’s name in the copy
2. Personalize the page by changing the copy based on what tags may or may not be present on the person’s contact record
3. Personalize the page by changing the copy based on the person’s geographic location or certain values in custom fields
4. Pre-fill webforms
5. Track website behavior and store in the contact record (know how many pages they visit, how long they stay, etc)
6. Display special offers for people tagged as customers and a standard offer for others
7. Use the info to do all kinds of awesome stuff with the API

These are just a few of the limitless ways you can use this feature. Comment below to let me know if you’ve come up with creative ways to use the data that can be passed.

[Image credit: ladydragonflyherworld]