Paul Sokol's Official Infusionsoft Cookbook (Keap Compatible)
The Authoritative Sales & Marketing Automation Cookbook
Paul Sokol has been using Keap since it was called Infusionsoft back in 2008. He even worked for Infusionsoft directly for five years: first as a Success Coach (launching over 200 new customers on the software) and then as a Product Manager. This book is a potent distillation of automation fundamentals that Paul has discovered through his tens of thousands of hours of in-the-trenches implementation.
More often than not, when one campaign ends or reaches a certain point, another separate campaign has to respond accordingly.
A master builder not only has a clear strategy to chain campaigns together, they also leave plenty of breadcrumbs for others to follow and understand what is occurring.
There are many reasons to create a multistep web form experience. As a conversion optimization tactic, progressively collecting information can help you identify the hottest leads while the automation handles those who drop off.
Some of the recipes in the following chapters can be implemented faster by using the prebuilt campaign templates as a starting point for the strategy’s framework.
Not everything can be automated. There are certain activities that are too precise or too costly to automate. For example, making an outbound phone call to a new lead or adding a new customer to a third-party membership site. In these cases, an Infusionsoft user can be assigned a task. A task is a key tactic in the human-machine interaction within Infusionsoft. When the automation cannot go any further and needs human intervention, empowering the end user to quickly take action and tell the automation machine to continue is a key skill towards designing productive automated experiences.
An internal form is just like a normal web form, but it can only be submitted by a user inside Infusionsoft. While creating process workflows, especially task-based workflows, a well-placed internal form can create a time-saving experience for the Infusionsoft user, thus improving productivity. Many of the recipes in this book leverage internal forms, so understanding the experience of submitting one is a key to building a great workflow. A note template is like a big red AUTOMATION button. Any time we need to automate or track something and we aren’t sure how to do it, we can create a note template. Applying a note template can trigger an e-mail, a task, the application of a tag, and so on. Many of the recipes in this book leverage note templates, so understanding the experience of applying one to a contact record is a key to building a great workflow.
The more targeted and relevant our marketing is, the more effective it will be. In order to segment the database so we can be targeted and relevant, Infusionsoft uses tags. A tag can be thought of as a specific list or specific segment of people within your database. We can apply or remove a tag manually from an individual or a group of individuals. A campaign can automatically apply or remove a tag as well. Besides segmentation, a tag can route automation logic or filter a search/report. They can also be used as a goal within a campaign to start or stop it. In short, understanding how to create a tag is a critical skill for automated experience design.
Quite often in a marketing, e-mail we will set the same URL multiple times, sometimes across multiple e-mails too. A campaign link is the tool we can leverage for these kinds of links to ensure easy maintenance and reusability. This recipe has two parts: creating the campaign link and inserting it into an e-mail.
Sometimes, there is information that needs to be merged into a communication or process that is the same for all contacts that flow through a campaign. The date and location of an event is an example of this kind of information because that information is fixed for all contacts flowing through the campaign. A campaign merge field is the tool we can leverage for this kind of data.
Merging contact information into an automated communication can be an extremely powerful tool to create a relevant, personal experience for the recipient. It can also ruin the customer experience if not properly implemented. As a tool itself, it thrives on context and so merge fields always need to be used strategically. While this recipe specifically covers how to insert a merge field into an e-mail, the concept extends to any object with merging capabilities (tasks, letters, and so on).
At its core, Infusionsoft is a CRM (short for Customer Relationship Management) system. In other words, it is a database of humans that contains information about their interactions with a business. In this database, there are common pieces of information that all businesses would need to know about an individual: first/last name, addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and so on. There are even more interesting pieces of data as well, such as the person’s birthday or their spouse’s name. However, there are pieces of data a business might need to collect that don’t exist out of the box. Take a dog trainer for example. They might want to store a dog’s name on the dog owner’s contact record. This recipe will show you how to create a custom data field on a contact record. A custom field can be merged into a communication or a task, submitted on a form, used as a search/report filter, and used to route automation logic.
