Marcu Taylor's Blog, page 28

A Beginner’s Guide to Starting an Email Newsletter & Building a Mailing List

It may seem like every man and his dog now has a newsletter, but for good reason; email newsletters are one of the most effective digital marketing channels. If you’re not convinced, consider this…

Why would you want to run a newsletter?

The reason for setting up a newsletter is simple; it’s a scalable and effective method of communicating with your audience. It’s a powerful tool for spreading your message, selling your products, and staying on the tip of your audience’s tongue.

When you post a message on your Facebook page, you’re lucky if 5% of your audience sees it. When you tweet, you’re lucky if 1% of your followers are online. However, with email it’s not unusual to receive a 30-50% open rate if you know what you’re doing. On top of that, emails drive business…

Last year, 44% of email recipients made at least one purchase last year based on a promotional email. For every $1 spent on email marketing, $44.25 is the average return on email marketing investment. It’s no surprise, then, that email marketing budgets have been increasing by 10% year on year.

While these stats may inspire hope and confidence, there is a dark side to email marketing that we’d be naive not to acknowledge.

Over 84% of emails are marked as spam, which means that consumers are increasingly weary over how they filter their emails and what they sign up to. With services like Unroll.me, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get inbox real estate, unless you truly earn it.

In this post I want to walk through how to set up a newsletter in a way that ensures that you not only dodge the spam folder, but that offers incredible value to your customers and generates a huge return on investment for your project or business.

As I wanted to make this post a really comprehensive guide for anyone starting a newsletter, i’ve broken it up into three parts, which you can skip between if you like (click the links below to skip to the most relevant part):

How to start your email newsletter
How to collect email addresses and build your mailing list
How to create & send your first newsletter

How to start your email newsletter

When starting a newsletter, we need to go through a few simple steps, which i’ve illustrated in the following graphic. This whole process should take less than 15 minutes when using this guide.

While these steps are all quite intuitive, i’ve talked through each one individually below in-case you’re not sure about anything.

Step 1. Sign up for an email marketing service

To begin creating a newsletter, we need a piece of software that will manage our email list, allow us to build newsletters, and provide us with the insights to see what is or isn’t working.

I recommend using GetResponse.

Over the past six years or so, I’ve played around with dozens of email marketing services, from Aweber to Infusionsoft and GetResponse. Out of all them, GetResponse is my overall favourite. Why?

It’s extremely affordable (starting at $15/month), while incredibly powerful and easy to use. I also find that GetResponse have some of the best newsletter template designs around. Aweber is another good call, but I find their user interface a bit outdated and clunky (plus, their pricing starts at $19/month – not a big deal, but considering they’re not quite as good as GetResponse IMO this pushes the needle in favour of GetResponse even more).

If you want to weigh up the different options in more detail, i’ve written a comprehensive comparison of email marketing software providers here, but to cut a long story short – GetResponse are probably your best option unless you need a complex behaviour-triggered email marketing service.

Step 2. Add your contacts

If you’re using GetResponse, the first step is to add any contacts you already have to your default list. Don’t worry if you don’t have anyone to add yet (you can just skip this step), but if you have a database of customers or readers, this is where you can add them.

From the main dashboard, click the big button that says ‘add contacts’ and you’ll be forwarded to a page that looks like this. You can then either add your existing contacts by importing them from a CSV file, or copying and pasting their email addresses into the import box.

This will automatically start building your default list.

Step 3. Create a web form

The next step is to begin building our web form, which will likely be our main method of collecting new mailing list subscribers.

To do this, click the large red button that says ‘create web form’ and choose a template to begin editing from the row of default web forms.

You can then customise the web form so that it fits your website’s colour scheme and layout. Here you can also add images and extra text. Also, if you know a bit of HTML and CSS, you can hack around with the code to change how the form is displayed. However, this is not entirely necessary, as their drag and drop editor is pretty decent.

Once you’re happy with your web form, it’s time to create your thankyou page. This is the page that your subscribers will see once they’ve entered your email in your web form and confirmed their email address.

Step 4. Set your thankyou page (optional)

While GetResponse does have a default thankyou page that’s absolutely fine to use, I would recommend creating your own customised thankyou page, either now or in the future.

Why? Well, this is a great opportunity to promote an offer to your customers or direct them to something that may be of interest on your website. It also looks a little bit unprofessional leaving it as a blank page with the standard GetResponse branding.

To create your own customised thankyou page, you’ll need to create a page on your website with the information that you want.

Step 5. Install your web form on your website

Once you’re happy with the way your web form and thankyou page looks, it’s time to install your web form on your website.

The easiest way to do this is to just copy and paste the HTML embed code that’s provided under the ‘publish’ tab into where you want your web form to appear on your website. However, if you’re not comfortable doing this, you can always click the option ‘my web designer will install this form’, which will allow you to email a link to your code to your web designer.

Once this is done you should be able to test your web form live on your website to make sure that it’s working as it should.

And that’s all there is to it. You have the foundations of a newsletter all up and running. All that’s left to do is start building your list and begin building your newsletters.

Collecting email addresses and building your list

When it comes to creating a newsletter, getting set up is the easy bit. The real challenge is building up your mailing list of engaged recipients. So, how can we do this in a way that ensures we get the right people on our mailing list?

The first thing to realise is that people don’t sign up to mailing lists for no reason. In fact, most people actively do the opposite, which means we need to think about the following question from your audience’s perspective:

What’s in it for me?

We all visit hundreds of websites every day, and there are very few sites that don’t want us to hand over our personal information, so how can you stand out from the crowd?

By offering more value than everyone else.

That may mean writing incredible content so that people want to be updated as soon as you write a new post. It may mean having to create something like an eBook or free guide to give away in return for their email address.

There are hundreds of great blog posts written about building your mailing list, so I won’t cover this in too much depth here, but I will share a few good examples from mailing lists that i’ve subscribed to.

#1 Using ‘Hello Bar’ to drive subscribers

Hellobar is a powerful free widget that appears at the top of every page on your website once installed. You can customise the message and call to action, as well as A/B testing different messages to optimise your conversion rate.

For driving mailing list subscribers this is a great opportunity to attract attention with an incentive such as a free eBook or entry to win a prize in return for an email address.

#2 Using Pop-ups effectively

Pop ups are a controversial tactic for driving subscribers, as many people find them extremely annoying. Despite this, many marketers have found that they’re extremely effective at driving newsletter subscriptions.

If you plan to go down this route, I’d recommend using something like BounceExchange, which only triggers a pop up when a user is about to leave your website.

#3 Adding email captures at the end of your blog posts

One of the most common methods of building a mailing list is through blogging. We’ve written about this in more depth here, but here’s a great example of it being used in action on the KISSmetrics blog.

At the end of every post on KISSmetrics’ blog, they link to a white paper or free eBook, in which a reader must offer their email address for to download.

Creating your first newsletter

To begin building our first newsletter we’ll need to go back into GetResponse and click the green ‘create a newsletter’ button on the dashboard. That should bring you to a page that looks something like this:

From here, click on the left ‘new email creator’ button and then follow through the step-by-step editor. One of the first things you’ll need to do is decide on your subject.

How to write a subject line than stands out

Many of your recipients will receive tens or perhaps even hundreds of emails every day. Your subject line has to catch their attention and convince them that reading your email will be valuable to them. Here are a few pointers to consider:

Keep it short – while most email clients display up to 60 characters in the subject line, many mobile browsers only show 25-30 characters. Make sure to convey what your email’s about in the first 30 characters.
Don’t use filler words – with so few characters available, don’t waste them on words like ‘hi’, ‘hello’, or ‘thanks’.
Be clear about the contents of the email – before trying to maximise interest and appeal, your subject line must be specific about the contents of your email. Remember, a high open rate is pointless if it annoys recipients and leads to a low engagement rate.
Use urgency and scarcity – where relevant, it pays to use urgency and scarcity in your subject lines. For example, you might start the subject line with [Urgent] or ’3 Days Remaining’. This conveys that they must not procrastinate on opening your email.
Personalise it – this is the oldest trick in the book with email marketing. A subject line that includes the recipient’s name is virtually guaranteed to have a higher open rate than one that doesn’t.
A/B Test – One of the benefits of using GetResponse is that you can split test your subject lines i.e. send 25% of your mailing list a version of your newsletter with one subject line and 25% a version with another subject line. You can then compare which subject line is more effective and send the remaining 50% of your list the best performing version.

When you’ve written a subject line that you’re happy with, you can then click next and begin choosing your newsletter template. After choosing one that you like the look of you’ll end up in the newsletter designer window, which looks something like this.

Using the drag and drop editor, you should be able to easily customise your newsletter so that it fits with the branding and design of your business. Once you’ve designed your first newsletter and have written what you want to say, it’s time to send it out to your list!

And that’s all there is to it! From here, you should find time every month or perhaps every two weeks to create a newsletter to send out to your followers. Each time, you will hopefully have more subscribers to send your newsletter out to.

In summary

Starting a newsletter and building up your mailing list can be incredibly rewarding when done right, so stick with it. As with many great things, it will take time.

However, to maximise your chances of seeing great results, constantly experiment with what works and keep improving all aspects of your email marketing.

I hope the recommendations in this post have been useful. I’m aware that we’ve tried to cover a huge range of things in one post, so don’t be discouraged if it seems overwhelming! At the end of the day, it all comes down to building your list and writing a newsletter that your audience enjoys.

If you have any questions about starting an email newsletter, building a mailing list, or anything email marketing related, feel free to post them in the comments below and i’ll be sure to respond.

The post A Beginner’s Guide to Starting an Email Newsletter & Building a Mailing List appeared first on Venture Harbour.

Infusionsoft Review: Our Experience After Using it for 4 Months

About four months ago, one of our clients bit the bullet with InfusionSoft. In this post, I want to share their situation, why they chose InfusionSoft, and what’s happened since they became a customer.

So what caused the decision to migrate to InfusionSoft?

Our client had spent months trying to create weird and wonderful auto responder workarounds. They wanted to automate their transactional emails and personalised emails.

But they weren’t using the right tool for the job. It was a mess.

Their CRM was in Salesforce. Their transactional emails were with SendGrid. Their newsletter was in Aweber. Their affiliate system with Get Ambassador. You can imagine how much of a nightmare it was getting everything to play along.

After weighing up a few other options like Pardot and Ontraport, they decided to give InfusionSoft a shot.

It’s been four months since they made that decision. While it’s still early days, I think it’s fair to say that they’re pleased with the software. And it’s certainly made our job of improving the performance of their website a lot easier.

However, among the ups there have been a few downs. Like all software, Infusionsoft is not without its flaws, and we did have to swallow a few tough pills along the way. So let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way…

Infusionsoft is extremely expensive… until you look at ROI

Infusionsoft is often compared in reviews to CRM systems like Salesforce, or email marketing services like Aweber. When you do this, it’s no wonder to be surprised at how much Infusionsoft charges.

Their software starts at $199/month, although that’s for their basic version with a CRM system and marketing automation. As soon as you want to add in eCommerce functionality and sales automation, you’ll be look at either their $299/month or $379/month packages.

On top of this, there is a mandatory kickstarter coaching package, which is a one-off cost of $1,999. We were incredibly reluctant to pay this, and it was the one aspect that almost convinced us away from Infusionsoft.

After all, what software charges you to learn how to use their system. More importantly, what software charges you $2,000!

This made us think that Infusionsoft must be an incredibly complicated piece of software to cost what is effectively two weeks of the average salary i.e. 80 hours of a person’s time, to educate us (advanced digital marketers) on how to implement and use their software.

We were half right. The cost is ludicrous, and the software is complex. But the kickstarter package is extremely valuable. I wasn’t actually present on the kickstarter calls, but after speaking with the client, it was clearly enormously beneficial for them to be walked through how to set things up and have someone that they can ask questions.

For us, the $2,000 was also a huge psychological factor. When you pay that much money for a piece of software, you are going to put in the effort to make it work.

Given that Infusionsoft has so much potential to transform online businesses, I think there’s a lot of benefit to putting your money on the line as an incentive to make it work.

So, there’s no getting around the cost. Infusionsoft is expensive, but only when you look at it in relative terms. As soon as you begin to look at the price tag in terms of ROI, it’s a different picture.

The average ROI of email marketing in the US is 44%, which is damn good.

Now, add on top of that a CRM system that keeps a record of all of your interactions with customers. On top of that, add an automation platform that automatically keeps in touch with those customers based on their behaviour.

I don’t know what the exact average ROI is for Infusionsoft customers, but it doesn’t surprise me that there are so many case studies of people reporting 310% increases in profit, to growing revenue by 832% while tripling their number of vacation days.

I don’t think our client has reached these sorts of ROI figures yet, but the impact that Infusionsoft has had on their business has definitely at least paid for itself already.

Phase #1 The Purchasing & Setup Process

Infusionsoft’s purchasing and setup process could be a lot better, and that’s putting it politely. Unlike virtually every other SAAS (software as a service) company in existence, Infusionsoft doesn’t allow you to sign up to become a customer from their website.

Instead, you have to jump through a series of hoops by arranging a demo or calling them up to express your interest. Basically, they want to make sure that you talk to a human being.

As someone who likes to do their homework without being badgered by sales people, this is definitely not my idea of an optimal sign up process, but I can see the benefit of doing it this way.

Most people will at least have some objections before spending a few grand on a new piece of software for their business, so it makes sense to have a person help them put their objections into context.

The initial calls are fine, but just a bit of an inconvenience in my opinion. After the call, you will be able to go ahead and setup your payment, and then it’s time to arrange your first kickstarter session.

Phase #2 The Kickstarter Session

As mentioned, I was quite apprehensive about my client investing $2,000 to be told how to use a piece of software that was already costing them north of $200/month. But we went for it, as well… we didn’t really have much choice.

It turned out to be a great motivator, and it certainly took the load off of my shoulders to figure out the software and then explain it to the client. I also realised that Infusionsoft’s perspective is that it isn’t right for a customer to spend so much money on a piece of software to then have to figure it out themselves.

While Infusionsoft could certainly make their software more intuitive, there’s no getting around the fact that a piece of software as powerful as theirs is inherently complex.

Don’t confuse complexity with inferior user experience. Their UX isn’t bad, it’s just kind of like trying to design an aircraft cockpit; it’s as simple as something inherently complicated can be.

Anyway, InfusionSoft offered two variations of their kickstart package; the Marketing Blueprint Kickstart, and the Automate and Scale Kickstart. Our client went for the latter, which included a series of one-on-one coaching sessions over the first month, as well as a 90-day plan, and help automating a series of the client’s manual processes.

The nice thing about these coaching sessions is that it meant that we didn’t have to think too hard about integrating the software with our website, or worry about how all the pieces were going to fit together. While we did do virtually all of the work, it was mostly us being told what to do, which relieved the usual stress of trying to migrate a CRM or payment processing system.

Overall, the client was really happy with the initial kickstarter training. While I personally would say that the price is a bit steep, it definitely helps you cement the software into your business.

Phase #3 Setting up your automated marketing campaigns

While you’ll begin setting up marketing campaigns in phase 2, you’ll likely want to play around and make adjustments to your campaigns long after the initial kickstarter sessions.

So how does automated marketing work? In essence, they’re a combination of email marketing campaigns and landing pages that are triggered by certain actions or behaviours.

For example, you might set a campaign that sends an email reminder to customers who have added items to their shopping cart but are yet to complete checkout.

Infusionsoft have a pretty awesome library of pre-defined automatic marketing campaigns that you can ‘drag and drop’ into your campaign dashboard – from sending out birthday offers, to re-activating lapsed customers with new offers.

Because Infusionsoft is also a CRM system, every customer is positioned along a ‘sequence’. Every time a marketing campaign is sent out to a customer, they are moved along the sequence. This means that at any time, you can look at a customer’s information and see where they are along different marketing sequences that you’ve set up, and what actions they’ve taken on your website.

When setting up your campaigns, there’s a lot of flexibility over when and how you send out different campaigns. You can either choose a specific date and time, or choose relative dates, such as ‘X days before their birthday’ or ’2 months after purchasing their first item’.

Finally, all of your landing pages and emails can be designed in HTML/CSS or in a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, comparable to services like Mailchimp, Aweber, and GetResponse.

From here it’s just much of the same; tweaking, building new campaigns, testing, and increasing your customer database. Now, I want to summarise what we liked and disliked about Infusionsoft after being a customer for about four months.

What I like about InfusionSoft

There’s a lot of things that I like about Infusionsoft, but here are some of the things that really stood out for me.

Awesome campaign builder – I’m a huge fan of Infusionsoft’s ‘flowchart’ style campaign builder. It makes building email campaigns funner than you might imagine, and it’s incredibly satisfying to know that on any given day thousands of customers are all being interacted with in a personalised way, while you focus on more important matters.
The CRM is great – I’ve gone through a lot of CRM systems over the years. Pipedrive, Salesforce, Zoho, and SugarCRM to name a few. I don’t know what it is about them, but I just find them impossibly hard to like. Infusionsoft has been different – their CRM system is actually really good. The thing that I particularly like about it is their lead scoring, which while nothing innovative, I feel they do a much better job at than other CRM platforms.
Good customer service – I haven’t actually dealt directly with our account manager at Infusionsoft, but from what i’ve heard from our client, they sound borderline exceptional. They’ve gone to great lengths to ensure that we’ve had a good experience and while all relatively minor issues, they’ve been able to correct everything for us very quickly.
It does what it says on the tin – Infusionsoft is massively hyped, and so it’s perfectly normal to be a little bit skeptical when you’re weighing up whether to become a customer or not. Our experience has certainly lived up to expectations, and despite a few glitches and the occasional feature not working as expected, the overall impact on our client’s business has been impressive. In a nutshell, it does exactly what it promises – it gets you to build more systems that allow you to scale your business and focus on more important things.

What I don’t like about InfusionSoft

And here are the con’s. While this may seem like a pretty harsh list, they’re all quite minor issues in the grand scheme of things, and even collectively it hasn’t been enough to deter us away from using Infusionsoft.

No A/B testing – This is pretty insane. For a service that is so heavily focused around optimising online marketing through emails and landing pages, it’s surprising that Infusionsoft has no formal ability to run split tests. You could of course create two variations of an email or landing page and send each variation out to different segments, but I doubt many small business owners would think to do this.

The only workaround is if you already use a service like Visual Website Optimizer or Unbounce, in which case their are ways to integrate the services together, but it seems like it wouldn’t be too difficult for Infusionsoft to simply add some basic split testing functionality.
No recurring PayPal payments – Weirdly, Infusionsoft doesn’t enable support for recurring PayPal payments, which was a huge pain for our client who relied on recurring payments for a handful of their subscription products.

Conveniently, InfusionSoft have a piece of software called CustomerHub, which we ended up paying for, which does enable membership payments. So, if you want to offer recurring subscriptions, be aware that there’s likely to be an extra cost involved.
Great data. Bad reporting – I have a love hate relationship with Infusionsoft’s reporting. On the one hand, the data they display is incredible. There are virtually no vanity metrics, and everything is actionable. However, on the other hand, this data is really badly displayed. Hardly anything is visualised, so you have to constantly crunch the data in your head to come to your own conclusions.

To be fair, I would rather have great data that was poorly displayed than have crappy data beautifully displayed, so at least Infusionsoft have their priorities the right way around!
It gets expensive – While you will probably start off on their $199 / month package, it’s likely that you’ll eventually end up on their $379 / month package. This is a good thing, as it means that your business must be growing, which is the whole purpose of investing in a piece of software like this. Just be aware that Infusionsoft works on the basis that they grow their business as you grow yours. They offer a myriad of optional extras and pricing tiers, which will become increasingly compelling over time.

Mediocre email templates – This may be because i’m used to GetResponse, who have really slick email templates, but InfusionSoft’s email designs are pretty average. It’s not a huge deal, but it wouldn’t hurt for them to get a designer in to spruce these up a little.
The kickstarter package – As emphasised throughout this post, there’s something that just doesn’t sit well with me in the current structure they have with the mandatory training system. While it was extremely valuable, it just doesn’t feel right to charge a customer two grand to learn how to use a piece of software. I’m hoping that in time Infusionsoft will either eliminate / reduce this cost, or offer a ‘pay per consultation’ model that allows more experienced customers to pay for less sessions than those who need more hand holding.


In Summary: Our Experience With Infusionsoft

With a piece of software like Infusionsoft it’s hard to give a plain answer as to whether I would or wouldn’t recommend it, because so much depends on the context of your business’ situation. In our case, the client’s needs and our ROI calculation tipped the needle in favour of InfusionSoft.

That said, none of my other clients use Infusionsoft, and I can’t see myself using Infusionsoft for Venture Harbour any time soon. It just wouldn’t be a good fit us based on how we grow our business.

So, that brings us to an interesting question – who is Infusionsoft right for, and who is it not right for?

Who is InfusionSoft for (and who isn’t it for)?

InfusionSoft isn’t for everyone. For most clients I usually recommend just using GetResponse for their email marketing, Unbounce for their landing pages, and Salesforce as their CRM system. However, that’s because we work with a lot of new startups and companies that offer bricks and mortar services. Infusionsoft doesn’t really work for those types of businesses.

In my opinion, and based on who i’ve heard love and loathe Infusionsoft, I’d say that Infusionsoft is for businesses that are already turning over at least $150,000 per year from selling products online.

That’s because the magic with Infusionsoft lies in the integration between the CRM, eCommerce system, and marketing automation. You’d be silly to buy Infusionsoft just for their CRM, or just to sell products online. But when you combine all of those things in one, you can do some really smart things.

I hope this review and case study has helped you learn more about Infusionsoft and decide whether it’s right for you. If you’re interested in giving it a try, you can arrange a free demo of the software here:

Book a free demo of Infusionsoft

Rating of Infusionsoft by Marcus on 2014-06-26: 4.5

Video review of Infusionsoft

The post Infusionsoft Review: Our Experience After Using it for 4 Months appeared first on Venture Harbour.

Infusionsoft Review: What We Love & Loathe About Infusionsoft

About four months ago, one of our clients bit the bullet with InfusionSoft. In this post, I want to share their situation, why they chose InfusionSoft, and what’s happened since they became a customer.

So what caused the decision to migrate to InfusionSoft?

Our client had spent months trying to create weird and wonderful auto responder workarounds. They wanted to automate their transactional emails and personalised emails.

But they weren’t using the right tool for the job. It was a mess.

Their CRM was in Salesforce. Their transactional emails were with SendGrid. Their newsletter was in Aweber. Their affiliate system with Get Ambassador. You can imagine how much of a nightmare it was getting everything to play along.

After weighing up a few other options like Pardot and Ontraport, they decided to give InfusionSoft a shot.

It’s been four months since they made that decision. While it’s still early days, I think it’s fair to say that they’re pleased with the software. And it’s certainly made our job of improving the performance of their website a lot easier.

However, among the ups there have been a few downs. Like all software, Infusionsoft is not without its flaws, and we did have to swallow a few tough pills along the way. So let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way…

Infusionsoft is extremely expensive… until you look at ROI

Infusionsoft is often compared in reviews to CRM systems like Salesforce, or email marketing services like Aweber. When you do this, it’s no wonder to be surprised at how much Infusionsoft charges.

Their software starts at $199/month, although that’s for their basic version with a CRM system and marketing automation. As soon as you want to add in eCommerce functionality and sales automation, you’ll be look at either their $299/month or $379/month packages.

On top of this, there is a mandatory kickstarter coaching package, which is a one-off cost of $1,999. We were incredibly reluctant to pay this, and it was the one aspect that almost convinced us away from Infusionsoft.

After all, what software charges you to learn how to use their system. More importantly, what software charges you $2,000!

This made us think that Infusionsoft must be an incredibly complicated piece of software to cost what is effectively two weeks of the average salary i.e. 80 hours of a person’s time, to educate us (advanced digital marketers) on how to implement and use their software.

We were half right. The cost is ludicrous, and the software is complex. But the kickstarter package is extremely valuable. I wasn’t actually present on the kickstarter calls, but after speaking with the client, it was clearly enormously beneficial for them to be walked through how to set things up and have someone that they can ask questions.

For us, the $2,000 was also a huge psychological factor. When you pay that much money for a piece of software, you are going to put in the effort to make it work.

Given that Infusionsoft has so much potential to transform online businesses, I think there’s a lot of benefit to putting your money on the line as an incentive to make it work.

So, there’s no getting around the cost. Infusionsoft is expensive, but only when you look at it in relative terms. As soon as you begin to look at the price tag in terms of ROI, it’s a different picture.

The average ROI of email marketing in the US is 44%, which is damn good.

Now, add on top of that a CRM system that keeps a record of all of your interactions with customers. On top of that, add an automation platform that automatically keeps in touch with those customers based on their behaviour.

I don’t know what the exact average ROI is for Infusionsoft customers, but it doesn’t surprise me that there are so many case studies of people reporting 310% increases in profit, to growing revenue by 832% while tripling their number of vacation days.

I don’t think our client has reached these sorts of ROI figures yet, but the impact that Infusionsoft has had on their business has definitely at least paid for itself already.

Phase #1 The Purchasing & Setup Process

Infusionsoft’s purchasing and setup process could be a lot better, and that’s putting it politely. Unlike virtually every other SAAS (software as a service) company in existence, Infusionsoft doesn’t allow you to sign up to become a customer from their website.

Instead, you have to jump through a series of hoops by arranging a demo or calling them up to express your interest. Basically, they want to make sure that you talk to a human being.

As someone who likes to do their homework without being badgered by sales people, this is definitely not my idea of an optimal sign up process, but I can see the benefit of doing it this way.

Most people will at least have some objections before spending a few grand on a new piece of software for their business, so it makes sense to have a person help them put their objections into context.

The initial calls are fine, but just a bit of an inconvenience in my opinion. After the call, you will be able to go ahead and setup your payment, and then it’s time to arrange your first kickstarter session.

Phase #2 The Kickstarter Session

As mentioned, I was quite apprehensive about my client investing $2,000 to be told how to use a piece of software that was already costing them north of $200/month. But we went for it, as well… we didn’t really have much choice.

It turned out to be a great motivator, and it certainly took the load off of my shoulders to figure out the software and then explain it to the client. I also realised that Infusionsoft’s perspective is that it isn’t right for a customer to spend so much money on a piece of software to then have to figure it out themselves.

While Infusionsoft could certainly make their software more intuitive, there’s no getting around the fact that a piece of software as powerful as theirs is inherently complex.

Don’t confuse complexity with inferior user experience. Their UX isn’t bad, it’s just kind of like trying to design an aircraft cockpit; it’s as simple as something inherently complicated can be.

Anyway, InfusionSoft offered two variations of their kickstart package; the Marketing Blueprint Kickstart, and the Automate and Scale Kickstart. Our client went for the latter, which included a series of one-on-one coaching sessions over the first month, as well as a 90-day plan, and help automating a series of the client’s manual processes.

The nice thing about these coaching sessions is that it meant that we didn’t have to think too hard about integrating the software with our website, or worry about how all the pieces were going to fit together. While we did do virtually all of the work, it was mostly us being told what to do, which relieved the usual stress of trying to migrate a CRM or payment processing system.

Overall, the client was really happy with the initial kickstarter training. While I personally would say that the price is a bit steep, it definitely helps you cement the software into your business.

Phase #3 Setting up your automated marketing campaigns

While you’ll begin setting up marketing campaigns in phase 2, you’ll likely want to play around and make adjustments to your campaigns long after the initial kickstarter sessions.

So how does automated marketing work? In essence, they’re a combination of email marketing campaigns and landing pages that are triggered by certain actions or behaviours.

For example, you might set a campaign that sends an email reminder to customers who have added items to their shopping cart but are yet to complete checkout.

Infusionsoft have a pretty awesome library of pre-defined automatic marketing campaigns that you can ‘drag and drop’ into your campaign dashboard – from sending out birthday offers, to re-activating lapsed customers with new offers.

Because Infusionsoft is also a CRM system, every customer is positioned along a ‘sequence’. Every time a marketing campaign is sent out to a customer, they are moved along the sequence. This means that at any time, you can look at a customer’s information and see where they are along different marketing sequences that you’ve set up, and what actions they’ve taken on your website.

When setting up your campaigns, there’s a lot of flexibility over when and how you send out different campaigns. You can either choose a specific date and time, or choose relative dates, such as ‘X days before their birthday’ or ’2 months after purchasing their first item’.

Finally, all of your landing pages and emails can be designed in HTML/CSS or in a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, comparable to services like Mailchimp, Aweber, and GetResponse.

From here it’s just much of the same; tweaking, building new campaigns, testing, and increasing your customer database. Now, I want to summarise what we liked and disliked about Infusionsoft after being a customer for about four months.

What I like about InfusionSoft

There’s a lot of things that I like about Infusionsoft, but here are some of the things that really stood out for me.

Awesome campaign builder – I’m a huge fan of Infusionsoft’s ‘flowchart’ style campaign builder. It makes building email campaigns funner than you might imagine, and it’s incredibly satisfying to know that on any given day thousands of customers are all being interacted with in a personalised way, while you focus on more important matters.
The CRM is great – I’ve gone through a lot of CRM systems over the years. Pipedrive, Salesforce, Zoho, and SugarCRM to name a few. I don’t know what it is about them, but I just find them impossibly hard to like. Infusionsoft has been different – their CRM system is actually really good. The thing that I particularly like about it is their lead scoring, which while nothing innovative, I feel they do a much better job at than other CRM platforms.
Good customer service – I haven’t actually dealt directly with our account manager at Infusionsoft, but from what i’ve heard from our client, they sound borderline exceptional. They’ve gone to great lengths to ensure that we’ve had a good experience and while all relatively minor issues, they’ve been able to correct everything for us very quickly.
It does what it says on the tin – Infusionsoft is massively hyped, and so it’s perfectly normal to be a little bit skeptical when you’re weighing up whether to become a customer or not. Our experience has certainly lived up to expectations, and despite a few glitches and the occasional feature not working as expected, the overall impact on our client’s business has been impressive. In a nutshell, it does exactly what it promises – it gets you to build more systems that allow you to scale your business and focus on more important things.

What I don’t like about InfusionSoft

And here are the con’s. While this may seem like a pretty harsh list, they’re all quite minor issues in the grand scheme of things, and even collectively it hasn’t been enough to deter us away from using Infusionsoft.

No A/B testing – This is pretty insane. For a service that is so heavily focused around optimising online marketing through emails and landing pages, it’s surprising that Infusionsoft has no formal ability to run split tests. You could of course create two variations of an email or landing page and send each variation out to different segments, but I doubt many small business owners would think to do this.

The only workaround is if you already use a service like Visual Website Optimizer or Unbounce, in which case their are ways to integrate the services together, but it seems like it wouldn’t be too difficult for Infusionsoft to simply add some basic split testing functionality.
No recurring PayPal payments – Weirdly, Infusionsoft doesn’t enable support for recurring PayPal payments, which was a huge pain for our client who relied on recurring payments for a handful of their subscription products.

Conveniently, InfusionSoft have a piece of software called CustomerHub, which we ended up paying for, which does enable membership payments. So, if you want to offer recurring subscriptions, be aware that there’s likely to be an extra cost involved.
Great data. Bad reporting – I have a love hate relationship with Infusionsoft’s reporting. On the one hand, the data they display is incredible. There are virtually no vanity metrics, and everything is actionable. However, on the other hand, this data is really badly displayed. Hardly anything is visualised, so you have to constantly crunch the data in your head to come to your own conclusions.

To be fair, I would rather have great data that was poorly displayed than have crappy data beautifully displayed, so at least Infusionsoft have their priorities the right way around!
It gets expensive – While you will probably start off on their $199 / month package, it’s likely that you’ll eventually end up on their $379 / month package. This is a good thing, as it means that your business must be growing, which is the whole purpose of investing in a piece of software like this. Just be aware that Infusionsoft works on the basis that they grow their business as you grow yours. They offer a myriad of optional extras and pricing tiers, which will become increasingly compelling over time.

Mediocre email templates – This may be because i’m used to GetResponse, who have really slick email templates, but InfusionSoft’s email designs are pretty average. It’s not a huge deal, but it wouldn’t hurt for them to get a designer in to spruce these up a little.
The kickstarter package – As emphasised throughout this post, there’s something that just doesn’t sit well with me in the current structure they have with the mandatory training system. While it was extremely valuable, it just doesn’t feel right to charge a customer two grand to learn how to use a piece of software. I’m hoping that in time Infusionsoft will either eliminate / reduce this cost, or offer a ‘pay per consultation’ model that allows more experienced customers to pay for less sessions than those who need more hand holding.


In Summary: Our Experience With Infusionsoft

With a piece of software like Infusionsoft it’s hard to give a plain answer as to whether I would or wouldn’t recommend it, because so much depends on the context of your business’ situation. In our case, the client’s needs and our ROI calculation tipped the needle in favour of InfusionSoft.

That said, none of my other clients use Infusionsoft, and I can’t see myself using Infusionsoft for Venture Harbour any time soon. It just wouldn’t be a good fit us based on how we grow our business.

So, that brings us to an interesting question – who is Infusionsoft right for, and who is it not right for?

Who is InfusionSoft for (and who isn’t it for)?

InfusionSoft isn’t for everyone. For most clients I usually recommend just using GetResponse for their email marketing, Unbounce for their landing pages, and Salesforce as their CRM system. However, that’s because we work with a lot of new startups and companies that offer bricks and mortar services. Infusionsoft doesn’t really work for those types of businesses.

In my opinion, and based on who i’ve heard love and loathe Infusionsoft, I’d say that Infusionsoft is for businesses that are already turning over at least $150,000 per year from selling products online.

That’s because the magic with Infusionsoft lies in the integration between the CRM, eCommerce system, and marketing automation. You’d be silly to buy Infusionsoft just for their CRM, or just to sell products online. But when you combine all of those things in one, you can do some really smart things.

I hope this review and case study has helped you learn more about Infusionsoft and decide whether it’s right for you. If you’re interested in giving it a try, you can arrange a free demo of the software here:

Book a free demo of Infusionsoft

Rating of Infusionsoft by Marcus on 2014-06-26: 4.5

Video review of Infusionsoft

The post Infusionsoft Review: What We Love & Loathe About Infusionsoft appeared first on Venture Harbour.

Infusionsoft Review: Their Pricing, Features, and Benefits

About four months ago, one of our clients bit the bullet with InfusionSoft. In this post, I want to share their situation, why they chose InfusionSoft, and what’s happened since they became a customer.

So what caused the decision to migrate to InfusionSoft?

Our client had spent months trying to create weird and wonderful auto responder workarounds. They wanted to automate their transactional emails and personalised emails.

But they weren’t using the right tool for the job. It was a mess.

Their CRM was in Salesforce. Their transactional emails were with SendGrid. Their newsletter was in Aweber. Their affiliate system with Get Ambassador. You can imagine how much of a nightmare it was getting everything to play along.

After weighing up a few other options like Pardot and Ontraport, they decided to give InfusionSoft a shot.

It’s been four months since they made that decision. While it’s still early days, I think it’s fair to say that they’re pleased with the software. And it’s certainly made our job of improving the performance of their website a lot easier.

However, among the ups there have been a few downs. Like all software, Infusionsoft is not without its flaws, and we did have to swallow a few tough pills along the way. So let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way…

Infusionsoft is extremely expensive… until you look at ROI

Infusionsoft is often compared in reviews to CRM systems like Salesforce, or email marketing services like Aweber. When you do this, it’s no wonder to be surprised at how much Infusionsoft charges.

Their software starts at $199/month, although that’s for their basic version with a CRM system and marketing automation. As soon as you want to add in eCommerce functionality and sales automation, you’ll be look at either their $299/month or $379/month packages.

On top of this, there is a mandatory kickstarter coaching package, which is a one-off cost of $1,999. We were incredibly reluctant to pay this, and it was the one aspect that almost convinced us away from Infusionsoft.

After all, what software charges you to learn how to use their system. More importantly, what software charges you $2,000!

This made us think that Infusionsoft must be an incredibly complicated piece of software to cost what is effectively two weeks of the average salary i.e. 80 hours of a person’s time, to educate us (advanced digital marketers) on how to implement and use their software.

We were half right. The cost is ludicrous, and the software is complex. But the kickstarter package is extremely valuable. I wasn’t actually present on the kickstarter calls, but after speaking with the client, it was clearly enormously beneficial for them to be walked through how to set things up and have someone that they can ask questions.

For us, the $2,000 was also a huge psychological factor. When you pay that much money for a piece of software, you are going to put in the effort to make it work.

Given that Infusionsoft has so much potential to transform online businesses, I think there’s a lot of benefit to putting your money on the line as an incentive to make it work.

So, there’s no getting around the cost. Infusionsoft is expensive, but only when you look at it in relative terms. As soon as you begin to look at the price tag in terms of ROI, it’s a different picture.

The average ROI of email marketing in the US is 44%, which is damn good.

Now, add on top of that a CRM system that keeps a record of all of your interactions with customers. On top of that, add an automation platform that automatically keeps in touch with those customers based on their behaviour.

I don’t know what the exact average ROI is for Infusionsoft customers, but it doesn’t surprise me that there are so many case studies of people reporting 310% increases in profit, to growing revenue by 832% while tripling their number of vacation days.

I don’t think our client has reached these sorts of ROI figures yet, but the impact that Infusionsoft has had on their business has definitely at least paid for itself already.

Phase #1 The Purchasing & Setup Process

Infusionsoft’s purchasing and setup process could be a lot better, and that’s putting it politely. Unlike virtually every other SAAS (software as a service) company in existence, Infusionsoft doesn’t allow you to sign up to become a customer from their website.

Instead, you have to jump through a series of hoops by arranging a demo or calling them up to express your interest. Basically, they want to make sure that you talk to a human being.

As someone who likes to do their homework without being badgered by sales people, this is definitely not my idea of an optimal sign up process, but I can see the benefit of doing it this way.

Most people will at least have some objections before spending a few grand on a new piece of software for their business, so it makes sense to have a person help them put their objections into context.

The initial calls are fine, but just a bit of an inconvenience in my opinion. After the call, you will be able to go ahead and setup your payment, and then it’s time to arrange your first kickstarter session.

Phase #2 The Kickstarter Session

As mentioned, I was quite apprehensive about my client investing $2,000 to be told how to use a piece of software that was already costing them north of $200/month. But we went for it, as well… we didn’t really have much choice.

It turned out to be a great motivator, and it certainly took the load off of my shoulders to figure out the software and then explain it to the client. I also realised that Infusionsoft’s perspective is that it isn’t right for a customer to spend so much money on a piece of software to then have to figure it out themselves.

While Infusionsoft could certainly make their software more intuitive, there’s no getting around the fact that a piece of software as powerful as theirs is inherently complex.

Don’t confuse complexity with inferior user experience. Their UX isn’t bad, it’s just kind of like trying to design an aircraft cockpit; it’s as simple as something inherently complicated can be.

Anyway, InfusionSoft offered two variations of their kickstart package; the Marketing Blueprint Kickstart, and the Automate and Scale Kickstart. Our client went for the latter, which included a series of one-on-one coaching sessions over the first month, as well as a 90-day plan, and help automating a series of the client’s manual processes.

The nice thing about these coaching sessions is that it meant that we didn’t have to think too hard about integrating the software with our website, or worry about how all the pieces were going to fit together. While we did do virtually all of the work, it was mostly us being told what to do, which relieved the usual stress of trying to migrate a CRM or payment processing system.

Overall, the client was really happy with the initial kickstarter training. While I personally would say that the price is a bit steep, it definitely helps you cement the software into your business.

Phase #3 Setting up your automated marketing campaigns

While you’ll begin setting up marketing campaigns in phase 2, you’ll likely want to play around and make adjustments to your campaigns long after the initial kickstarter sessions.

So how does automated marketing work? In essence, they’re a combination of email marketing campaigns and landing pages that are triggered by certain actions or behaviours.

For example, you might set a campaign that sends an email reminder to customers who have added items to their shopping cart but are yet to complete checkout.

Infusionsoft have a pretty awesome library of pre-defined automatic marketing campaigns that you can ‘drag and drop’ into your campaign dashboard – from sending out birthday offers, to re-activating lapsed customers with new offers.

Because Infusionsoft is also a CRM system, every customer is positioned along a ‘sequence’. Every time a marketing campaign is sent out to a customer, they are moved along the sequence. This means that at any time, you can look at a customer’s information and see where they are along different marketing sequences that you’ve set up, and what actions they’ve taken on your website.

When setting up your campaigns, there’s a lot of flexibility over when and how you send out different campaigns. You can either choose a specific date and time, or choose relative dates, such as ‘X days before their birthday’ or ’2 months after purchasing their first item’.

Finally, all of your landing pages and emails can be designed in HTML/CSS or in a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, comparable to services like Mailchimp, Aweber, and GetResponse.

From here it’s just much of the same; tweaking, building new campaigns, testing, and increasing your customer database. Now, I want to summarise what we liked and disliked about Infusionsoft after being a customer for about four months.

What I like about InfusionSoft

There’s a lot of things that I like about Infusionsoft, but here are some of the things that really stood out for me.

Awesome campaign builder – I’m a huge fan of Infusionsoft’s ‘flowchart’ style campaign builder. It makes building email campaigns funner than you might imagine, and it’s incredibly satisfying to know that on any given day thousands of customers are all being interacted with in a personalised way, while you focus on more important matters.
The CRM is great – I’ve gone through a lot of CRM systems over the years. Pipedrive, Salesforce, Zoho, and SugarCRM to name a few. I don’t know what it is about them, but I just find them impossibly hard to like. Infusionsoft has been different – their CRM system is actually really good. The thing that I particularly like about it is their lead scoring, which while nothing innovative, I feel they do a much better job at than other CRM platforms.
Good customer service – I haven’t actually dealt directly with our account manager at Infusionsoft, but from what i’ve heard from our client, they sound borderline exceptional. They’ve gone to great lengths to ensure that we’ve had a good experience and while all relatively minor issues, they’ve been able to correct everything for us very quickly.
It does what it says on the tin – Infusionsoft is massively hyped, and so it’s perfectly normal to be a little bit skeptical when you’re weighing up whether to become a customer or not. Our experience has certainly lived up to expectations, and despite a few glitches and the occasional feature not working as expected, the overall impact on our client’s business has been impressive. In a nutshell, it does exactly what it promises – it gets you to build more systems that allow you to scale your business and focus on more important things.

What I don’t like about InfusionSoft

And here are the con’s. While this may seem like a pretty harsh list, they’re all quite minor issues in the grand scheme of things, and even collectively it hasn’t been enough to deter us away from using Infusionsoft.

No A/B testing – This is pretty insane. For a service that is so heavily focused around optimising online marketing through emails and landing pages, it’s surprising that Infusionsoft has no formal ability to run split tests. You could of course create two variations of an email or landing page and send each variation out to different segments, but I doubt many small business owners would think to do this.

The only workaround is if you already use a service like Visual Website Optimizer or Unbounce, in which case their are ways to integrate the services together, but it seems like it wouldn’t be too difficult for Infusionsoft to simply add some basic split testing functionality.
No recurring PayPal payments – Weirdly, Infusionsoft doesn’t enable support for recurring PayPal payments, which was a huge pain for our client who relied on recurring payments for a handful of their subscription products.

Conveniently, InfusionSoft have a piece of software called CustomerHub, which we ended up paying for, which does enable membership payments. So, if you want to offer recurring subscriptions, be aware that there’s likely to be an extra cost involved.
Great data. Bad reporting – I have a love hate relationship with Infusionsoft’s reporting. On the one hand, the data they display is incredible. There are virtually no vanity metrics, and everything is actionable. However, on the other hand, this data is really badly displayed. Hardly anything is visualised, so you have to constantly crunch the data in your head to come to your own conclusions.

To be fair, I would rather have great data that was poorly displayed than have crappy data beautifully displayed, so at least Infusionsoft have their priorities the right way around!
It gets expensive – While you will probably start off on their $199 / month package, it’s likely that you’ll eventually end up on their $379 / month package. This is a good thing, as it means that your business must be growing, which is the whole purpose of investing in a piece of software like this. Just be aware that Infusionsoft works on the basis that they grow their business as you grow yours. They offer a myriad of optional extras and pricing tiers, which will become increasingly compelling over time.

Mediocre email templates – This may be because i’m used to GetResponse, who have really slick email templates, but InfusionSoft’s email designs are pretty average. It’s not a huge deal, but it wouldn’t hurt for them to get a designer in to spruce these up a little.
The kickstarter package – As emphasised throughout this post, there’s something that just doesn’t sit well with me in the current structure they have with the mandatory training system. While it was extremely valuable, it just doesn’t feel right to charge a customer two grand to learn how to use a piece of software. I’m hoping that in time Infusionsoft will either eliminate / reduce this cost, or offer a ‘pay per consultation’ model that allows more experienced customers to pay for less sessions than those who need more hand holding.


In Summary: Our Experience With Infusionsoft

With a piece of software like Infusionsoft it’s hard to give a plain answer as to whether I would or wouldn’t recommend it, because so much depends on the context of your business’ situation. In our case, the client’s needs and our ROI calculation tipped the needle in favour of InfusionSoft.

That said, none of my other clients use Infusionsoft, and I can’t see myself using Infusionsoft for Venture Harbour any time soon. It just wouldn’t be a good fit us based on how we grow our business.

So, that brings us to an interesting question – who is Infusionsoft right for, and who is it not right for?

Who is InfusionSoft for (and who isn’t it for)?

InfusionSoft isn’t for everyone. For most clients I usually recommend just using GetResponse for their email marketing, Unbounce for their landing pages, and Salesforce as their CRM system. However, that’s because we work with a lot of new startups and companies that offer bricks and mortar services. Infusionsoft doesn’t really work for those types of businesses.

In my opinion, and based on who i’ve heard love and loathe Infusionsoft, I’d say that Infusionsoft is for businesses that are already turning over at least $150,000 per year from selling products online.

That’s because the magic with Infusionsoft lies in the integration between the CRM, eCommerce system, and marketing automation. You’d be silly to buy Infusionsoft just for their CRM, or just to sell products online. But when you combine all of those things in one, you can do some really smart things.

I hope this review and case study has helped you learn more about Infusionsoft and decide whether it’s right for you. If you’re interested in giving it a try, you can arrange a free demo of the software here:

Book a free demo of Infusionsoft

Rating of Infusionsoft by Marcus on 2014-06-26: 4.5

Video review of Infusionsoft

The post Infusionsoft Review: Their Pricing, Features, and Benefits appeared first on Venture Harbour.

An Infusionsoft Review: Their Pricing, Features, and Benefits

About four months ago, one of our clients bit the bullet with InfusionSoft. In this post, I want to share their situation, why they chose InfusionSoft, and what’s happened since they became a customer.

So what caused the decision to migrate to InfusionSoft?

Our client had spent months trying to create weird and wonderful auto responder workarounds. They wanted to automate their transactional emails and personalised emails.

But they weren’t using the right tool for the job. It was a mess.

Their CRM was in Salesforce. Their transactional emails were with SendGrid. Their newsletter was in Aweber. Their affiliate system with Get Ambassador. You can imagine how much of a nightmare it was getting everything to play along.

After weighing up a few other options like Pardot and Ontraport, they decided to give InfusionSoft a shot.

It’s been four months since they made that decision. While it’s still early days, I think it’s fair to say that they’re pleased with the software. And it’s certainly made our job of improving the performance of their website a lot easier.

However, among the ups there have been a few downs. Like all software, Infusionsoft is not without its flaws, and we did have to swallow a few tough pills along the way. So let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way…

Infusionsoft is extremely expensive… until you look at ROI

Infusionsoft is often compared in reviews to CRM systems like Salesforce, or email marketing services like Aweber. When you do this, it’s no wonder to be surprised at how much Infusionsoft charges.

Their software starts at $199/month, although that’s for their basic version with a CRM system and marketing automation. As soon as you want to add in eCommerce functionality and sales automation, you’ll be look at either their $299/month or $379/month packages.

On top of this, there is a mandatory kickstarter coaching package, which is a one-off cost of $1,999. We were incredibly reluctant to pay this, and it was the one aspect that almost convinced us away from Infusionsoft.

After all, what software charges you to learn how to use their system. More importantly, what software charges you $2,000!

This made us think that Infusionsoft must be an incredibly complicated piece of software to cost what is effectively two weeks of the average salary i.e. 80 hours of a person’s time, to educate us (advanced digital marketers) on how to implement and use their software.

We were half right. The cost is ludicrous, and the software is complex. But the kickstarter package is extremely valuable. I wasn’t actually present on the kickstarter calls, but after speaking with the client, it was clearly enormously beneficial for them to be walked through how to set things up and have someone that they can ask questions.

For us, the $2,000 was also a huge psychological factor. When you pay that much money for a piece of software, you are going to put in the effort to make it work.

Given that Infusionsoft has so much potential to transform online businesses, I think there’s a lot of benefit to putting your money on the line as an incentive to make it work.

So, there’s no getting around the cost. Infusionsoft is expensive, but only when you look at it in relative terms. As soon as you begin to look at the price tag in terms of ROI, it’s a different picture.

The average ROI of email marketing in the US is 44%, which is damn good.

Now, add on top of that a CRM system that keeps a record of all of your interactions with customers. On top of that, add an automation platform that automatically keeps in touch with those customers based on their behaviour.

I don’t know what the exact average ROI is for Infusionsoft customers, but it doesn’t surprise me that there are so many case studies of people reporting 310% increases in profit, to growing revenue by 832% while tripling their number of vacation days.

I don’t think our client has reached these sorts of ROI figures yet, but the impact that Infusionsoft has had on their business has definitely at least paid for itself already.

Phase #1 The Purchasing & Setup Process

Infusionsoft’s purchasing and setup process could be a lot better, and that’s putting it politely. Unlike virtually every other SAAS (software as a service) company in existence, Infusionsoft doesn’t allow you to sign up to become a customer from their website.

Instead, you have to jump through a series of hoops by arranging a demo or calling them up to express your interest. Basically, they want to make sure that you talk to a human being.

As someone who likes to do their homework without being badgered by sales people, this is definitely not my idea of an optimal sign up process, but I can see the benefit of doing it this way.

Most people will at least have some objections before spending a few grand on a new piece of software for their business, so it makes sense to have a person help them put their objections into context.

The initial calls are fine, but just a bit of an inconvenience in my opinion. After the call, you will be able to go ahead and setup your payment, and then it’s time to arrange your first kickstarter session.

Phase #2 The Kickstarter Session

As mentioned, I was quite apprehensive about my client investing $2,000 to be told how to use a piece of software that was already costing them north of $200/month. But we went for it, as well… we didn’t really have much choice.

It turned out to be a great motivator, and it certainly took the load off of my shoulders to figure out the software and then explain it to the client. I also realised that Infusionsoft’s perspective is that it isn’t right for a customer to spend so much money on a piece of software to then have to figure it out themselves.

While Infusionsoft could certainly make their software more intuitive, there’s no getting around the fact that a piece of software as powerful as theirs is inherently complex.

Don’t confuse complexity with inferior user experience. Their UX isn’t bad, it’s just kind of like trying to design an aircraft cockpit; it’s as simple as something inherently complicated can be.

Anyway, InfusionSoft offered two variations of their kickstart package; the Marketing Blueprint Kickstart, and the Automate and Scale Kickstart. Our client went for the latter, which included a series of one-on-one coaching sessions over the first month, as well as a 90-day plan, and help automating a series of the client’s manual processes.

The nice thing about these coaching sessions is that it meant that we didn’t have to think too hard about integrating the software with our website, or worry about how all the pieces were going to fit together. While we did do virtually all of the work, it was mostly us being told what to do, which relieved the usual stress of trying to migrate a CRM or payment processing system.

Overall, the client was really happy with the initial kickstarter training. While I personally would say that the price is a bit steep, it definitely helps you cement the software into your business.

Phase #3 Setting up your automated marketing campaigns

While you’ll begin setting up marketing campaigns in phase 2, you’ll likely want to play around and make adjustments to your campaigns long after the initial kickstarter sessions.

So how does automated marketing work? In essence, they’re a combination of email marketing campaigns and landing pages that are triggered by certain actions or behaviours.

For example, you might set a campaign that sends an email reminder to customers who have added items to their shopping cart but are yet to complete checkout.

Infusionsoft have a pretty awesome library of pre-defined automatic marketing campaigns that you can ‘drag and drop’ into your campaign dashboard – from sending out birthday offers, to re-activating lapsed customers with new offers.

Because Infusionsoft is also a CRM system, every customer is positioned along a ‘sequence’. Every time a marketing campaign is sent out to a customer, they are moved along the sequence. This means that at any time, you can look at a customer’s information and see where they are along different marketing sequences that you’ve set up, and what actions they’ve taken on your website.

When setting up your campaigns, there’s a lot of flexibility over when and how you send out different campaigns. You can either choose a specific date and time, or choose relative dates, such as ‘X days before their birthday’ or ’2 months after purchasing their first item’.

Finally, all of your landing pages and emails can be designed in HTML/CSS or in a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, comparable to services like Mailchimp, Aweber, and GetResponse.

From here it’s just much of the same; tweaking, building new campaigns, testing, and increasing your customer database. Now, I want to summarise what we liked and disliked about Infusionsoft after being a customer for about four months.

What I like about InfusionSoft

There’s a lot of things that I like about Infusionsoft, but here are some of the things that really stood out for me.

Awesome campaign builder – I’m a huge fan of Infusionsoft’s ‘flowchart’ style campaign builder. It makes building email campaigns funner than you might imagine, and it’s incredibly satisfying to know that on any given day thousands of customers are all being interacted with in a personalised way, while you focus on more important matters.
The CRM is great – I’ve gone through a lot of CRM systems over the years. Pipedrive, Salesforce, Zoho, and SugarCRM to name a few. I don’t know what it is about them, but I just find them impossibly hard to like. Infusionsoft has been different – their CRM system is actually really good. The thing that I particularly like about it is their lead scoring, which while nothing innovative, I feel they do a much better job at than other CRM platforms.
Good customer service – I haven’t actually dealt directly with our account manager at Infusionsoft, but from what i’ve heard from our client, they sound borderline exceptional. They’ve gone to great lengths to ensure that we’ve had a good experience and while all relatively minor issues, they’ve been able to correct everything for us very quickly.
It does what it says on the tin – Infusionsoft is massively hyped, and so it’s perfectly normal to be a little bit skeptical when you’re weighing up whether to become a customer or not. Our experience has certainly lived up to expectations, and despite a few glitches and the occasional feature not working as expected, the overall impact on our client’s business has been impressive. In a nutshell, it does exactly what it promises – it gets you to build more systems that allow you to scale your business and focus on more important things.

What I don’t like about InfusionSoft

And here are the con’s. While this may seem like a pretty harsh list, they’re all quite minor issues in the grand scheme of things, and even collectively it hasn’t been enough to deter us away from using Infusionsoft.

No A/B testing – This is pretty insane. For a service that is so heavily focused around optimising online marketing through emails and landing pages, it’s surprising that Infusionsoft has no formal ability to run split tests. You could of course create two variations of an email or landing page and send each variation out to different segments, but I doubt many small business owners would think to do this.

The only workaround is if you already use a service like Visual Website Optimizer or Unbounce, in which case their are ways to integrate the services together, but it seems like it wouldn’t be too difficult for Infusionsoft to simply add some basic split testing functionality.
No recurring PayPal payments – Weirdly, Infusionsoft doesn’t enable support for recurring PayPal payments, which was a huge pain for our client who relied on recurring payments for a handful of their subscription products.

Conveniently, InfusionSoft have a piece of software called CustomerHub, which we ended up paying for, which does enable membership payments. So, if you want to offer recurring subscriptions, be aware that there’s likely to be an extra cost involved.
Great data. Bad reporting – I have a love hate relationship with Infusionsoft’s reporting. On the one hand, the data they display is incredible. There are virtually no vanity metrics, and everything is actionable. However, on the other hand, this data is really badly displayed. Hardly anything is visualised, so you have to constantly crunch the data in your head to come to your own conclusions.

To be fair, I would rather have great data that was poorly displayed than have crappy data beautifully displayed, so at least Infusionsoft have their priorities the right way around!
It gets expensive – While you will probably start off on their $199 / month package, it’s likely that you’ll eventually end up on their $379 / month package. This is a good thing, as it means that your business must be growing, which is the whole purpose of investing in a piece of software like this. Just be aware that Infusionsoft works on the basis that they grow their business as you grow yours. They offer a myriad of optional extras and pricing tiers, which will become increasingly compelling over time.

Mediocre email templates – This may be because i’m used to GetResponse, who have really slick email templates, but InfusionSoft’s email designs are pretty average. It’s not a huge deal, but it wouldn’t hurt for them to get a designer in to spruce these up a little.
The kickstarter package – As emphasised throughout this post, there’s something that just doesn’t sit well with me in the current structure they have with the mandatory training system. While it was extremely valuable, it just doesn’t feel right to charge a customer two grand to learn how to use a piece of software. I’m hoping that in time Infusionsoft will either eliminate / reduce this cost, or offer a ‘pay per consultation’ model that allows more experienced customers to pay for less sessions than those who need more hand holding.


In Summary: Our Experience With Infusionsoft

With a piece of software like Infusionsoft it’s hard to give a plain answer as to whether I would or wouldn’t recommend it, because so much depends on the context of your business’ situation. In our case, the client’s needs and our ROI calculation tipped the needle in favour of InfusionSoft.

That said, none of my other clients use Infusionsoft, and I can’t see myself using Infusionsoft for Venture Harbour any time soon. It just wouldn’t be a good fit us based on how we grow our business.

So, that brings us to an interesting question – who is Infusionsoft right for, and who is it not right for?

Who is InfusionSoft for (and who isn’t it for)?

InfusionSoft isn’t for everyone. For most clients I usually recommend just using GetResponse for their email marketing, Unbounce for their landing pages, and Salesforce as their CRM system. However, that’s because we work with a lot of new startups and companies that offer bricks and mortar services. Infusionsoft doesn’t really work for those types of businesses.

In my opinion, and based on who i’ve heard love and loathe Infusionsoft, I’d say that Infusionsoft is for businesses that are already turning over at least $150,000 per year from selling products online.

That’s because the magic with Infusionsoft lies in the integration between the CRM, eCommerce system, and marketing automation. You’d be silly to buy Infusionsoft just for their CRM, or just to sell products online. But when you combine all of those things in one, you can do some really smart things.

I hope this review and case study has helped you learn more about Infusionsoft and decide whether it’s right for you. If you’re interested in giving it a try, you can arrange a free demo of the software here:

Book a free demo of Infusionsoft

Rating of Infusionsoft by Marcus on 2014-06-26: 4.5

Video review of Infusionsoft

The post An Infusionsoft Review: Their Pricing, Features, and Benefits appeared first on Venture Harbour.

How to Get 10x More Twitter Followers in 30 Days

Getting more Twitter followers is simple; It’s a matter of knowing which methods work, and which ones don’t. That, however, isn’t always the simplest of tasks.

I’ve created this 30 day guide to give you a range of different tactics and strategies for boosting your Twitter following. Each day has its own task to perform taking anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour. Follow this guide, and I assure you that your Twitter tribe will multiply several times over.

Day 1: Define your Twitter goals.

No, it isn’t the most exciting task in the world, but it’s nevertheless something that you need to do. Define your Twitter goals: what do you want to get out of your Twitter marketing campaign? More traffic? More revenue/sales/customers?

Make sure that your goals are measurable and time-sensitive. E.g. I want to drive 1000 visitors to my website via Twitter in 3 months. 

Day 2: Make your Twitter profile compelling

How you setup your Twitter account is crucial to your success on the platform. Your Twitter profile picture, cover & background images, and description say a lot about your brand. Make sure you go for a profile picture that stands out so that your tweets will be easily visible in your followers’ news feed.

Your cover & background images should define what you do: your work in the industry, your value proposition, etc.

Day 3: Find & follow 100+ active, popular accounts in your niche.

Most social media gurus are fully against following people just so that they’ll follow you back, and I entirely agree. The result of that technique is a bunch of followers who are just “paying” you back and really aren’t interested in your tweets.

However, you need to have valuable content to retweet to your followers. To find that sort of content, you need to follow people who tweet it.

Day 4: Create a Twitter landing page.

A Twitter landing page is basically a webpage you direct your Twitter followers to. Landing pages custom-made just for your Twitter profile is a beneficial, yet often overlooked tactic to grow your following.

Setup a page that talks specifically about your brand with relevance to your Twitter profile. It should say why people should follow you, what you tweet about, etc. And remember to keep it short & punchy — people used to digesting info in 140 characters or less won’t take too kindly to 1500 words of boring self-promotion.

Day 5: Find out the best time to tweet to your followers with Social Bro.

Just like with blogging, your timing is in important factor in the exposure and reach of your content. You need to make sure you’re getting the biggest bank for your content — for that, use Social Bro.

Social Bro is a premium Twitter management tool, and one of its many impressive features is its ability to research your audience and gauge the perfect time for you to send out your tweets. This feature comes integrated with both HootSuite and Buffer.

Day 6: Setup Buffer and Swayy and start scheduling tweets.

Buffer & Swayy are my two favorite auto-tweeting tools. Buffer is pretty much a standard tweet scheduling service (as already mentioned, it comes integrated with Social Bro’s best time to tweet feature).

Swayy is a Tweet curation platform: based on your followers and who you follow, Swayy researches your industry to find trending content on the web that you can then schedule and share to your followers (like Buffer, it isn’t limited to just Twitter either).

Day 7: Research trending hashtags with Hashtagify.

The hashtag phenomenon that revolutionized Twitter way back in ’09 can be a great visibility booster when exploited correctly.

When you add hashtags to your tweets, you need to make sure that they are relevant to your audience, up-to-date, and trending. In short, you need to do some serious research.

Hashtagify.me is one tool that takes most of legwork out of that process. You can search one popular hashtag in your industry (e.g. #seo), and Hashtagify will display a number of relevant popular tags.

Day 8: Use Social Crawlytics to find your competitors’ most popular content.

Social Crawlytics is a neat tool that will analyze a website’s most popular content (social media wise) and show it to you. It’s a great way to find content that is currently trending in your niche — content that will resonate well with your followers when you tweet it out.

Analyze 2-3 of your top competitors, create a list of their most popular content, and steal their ideas to create similar content.

Day 9: Create the content.

Use the information you gathered in day 8 and build your content around similar topics. Create the content and schedule it for publishing.

Once it’s live on the interwebs, share it to your Twitter account. But hold on — don’t put it away, because we’re not done with it yet by any means.

Day 10: Ask 10 people to share the content.

Go back to your Social Crawlytics report of your competitors’ most shared content (that you “stole”). Next, find the people who shared that blog post, then reach out to them and ask them to share it with their audience.

Here’s how: Google the following keyword: site:twitter.com [insert-url-of-competitor-content-here]

If you did it correctly, you should have a listing of tweets people sent out containing that link. Reach out to 10 tweeps in that selection with the largest audiences, tell them about your new, up-to-date content (preferably via email or another private medium), and ask them to share it.

This process is way too tedious and will be counter productive if you try to reach out to every single profile that tweeted the link, so make sure you’re only concentrating on the big fish and you’ve got a template email to use.

Lastly, remember to make sure that they include a “via @yourhandle” in their tweet. Otherwise, your actual profile won’t increase in follower count, although your posts will in social signal count.

Day 11: Ask your allies to share the content.

Email friends in the industry, or people who’ve posted on a similar topic to you and tell them and ask them if they’d like to share your content.

Often, since they’re likely to be on the lookout for quality content to tweet, they’ll share it without thinking twice, which increases your Twitter profile’s visibility. Again, make sure you’re using a template email.

Day 12: Get other popular bloggers to share it.

Same story – we’re still sharing the same content.

After reaching out to your allies and their followers, it’s time to reach out to other popular bloggers about your (soon-to-be) popular content. Tell them that you’ve got content on XYZ topicc that’s relevant to their audience, and ask them if they’d like to share it. Email at least 20 bloggers in your niche (use templates), and watch your follower count increase.

Hint: It never hurts to namedrop. If you’ve already got one big-name brand/blog to share it, include that in your email as social proof.

Day 13: Gather a list of 20 current events to tweet about.

One of the ways you stay on top of the Twitter game is by being current and up to date. If you’re sharing content from 2007 all the time, you’re doing something wrong. Very wrong.

Gather 20 pieces of current content in your industry, and schedule them (preferably spaced out to 1-2 per day) for tweeting.

Day 14: Hold a contest.

There’s nothing like an incentive to get more people to do something. Up till now, you’ve been asking people to do something for you … but there’s really very little in it for them.

Hold a contest, and that will change.

Give people a chance to win something valuable in exchange for a tweet, and you could easily be watching your Twitter account go viral.

Day 15: Personally thank everybody who has so far retweeted you.

You won’t have enough time for this once you have hundreds of thousands of followers and numerous retweets per tweet, but for now, this is a great technique to build relationships with your followers.

Just tweet a “thank you for sharing” back to their retweet. Not only does it make them feel warm and fuzzy inside, but it also makes them more likely to retweet your content again, increasing your profile’s exposure to their audience.

Day 16: Setup automated direct messaging.

Are direct messages sometimes annoying? Yes, they are.

Does that mean you should rule them out completely as a Twitter marketing strategy? Of course not.

Signup to Twitter DMer (100% free), and setup an automatic direct message that links to your squeeze page. You’ve only got 140 characters, so make it count: don’t make it over salesy. Try to be a little personal.

Day 17: Find 10 popular blogs with huge Twitter accounts and regularly favorite/retweet their tweets.

Get together a list of popular blogs in your industry (preferably solo-owned) with very active, very popular Twitter accounts. Favorite or retweet their tweets regularly — you should be retweeting or favoriting at least one of their tweets daily.

This gets them thinking about you — they notice you because you stand out of the crowd because of your consistency (and besides — you’re flattering them immensely). When you create a tweet, there’s a chance that they’ll retweet it out to their followers.

And then magic happens.

Day 18: Use Trendsmap to find real-time local Twitter trends.

Another fantastically useful Twitter marketing tool, Trendsmap helps you find trends on Twitter according to your location — quite a helpful tool if you run a brick-and-mortar business and you’re looking to stay on top of things in your location.

Unfortunately, Trendsmap doesn’t dig too deep location-wise (as of right now), so you’ll have to settle for trends according to state or major city.

Day 19: Embed your Twitter handle & profile link in company email signatures.

When you email someone (or when someone emails you), that means that you two know each other. You might not be besties, but you are acquainted.

Trust me — converting acquaintances into Twitter followers is a whole lot easier than converting those who had no idea that you existed until three seconds ago.

Embed a link to your Twitter profile in each of your company’s email signatures. Those annoying support tickets are now finally good for something. :)

Day 20: Create and/or curate images for tweeting.

It’s official: tweets with images get way more retweets than tweets without. Often twice as many (Scion Social).

Get your graphics team to create a few images for some of the tweets you send out. Obviously, if you create an image for every tweet, this can get pretty expensive pretty quickly, so the alternative is to curate images … which can also get a bit finicky with the various image licenses.

Debra Eckerling at Social Media Examiner has a great post on 15 resources that talk about finding images for social media posts.

Day 21: Hang up promotional banners in your office.

That’s right. Twitter marketing doesn’t just have to be online you know — you can even take it to your company office and see some pretty decent results.

Hang up posters/banners for example in waiting rooms, offices, etc. that showcase your Twitter handle (include your profile URL as well).

Day 22: Promote your Twitter account at speaking conferences.

Snagged a speaking gig at Tedx (or anywhere else, for that matter)? Use it to your Twitter advantage!

When you close your speech, drop in a line about your Twitter account. You might be able to get some leaders in your industry to follow and eventually retweet you.

Day 23: Leverage your existing relationships.

Everybody knows somebody. Ever chatted on Skype with someone who has a popular Twitter account in your niche? Maybe exchanged a few emails, or even a phone call?

Leverage that existing relationship, and get them to share your content to their audience. This technique is grounded in the principle we discussed about how people who know you are more likely to be interactive with you on Twitter.

Day 24: Repost your most popular tweets.

Thus far, you should have been able to send a hundred plus tweets out, and you should have been able to see at least some interaction.

Find the tweets that were most popular with your audience — highest retweets & favs — and then retweet them to your Twitter account word for word.

Make sure you post them at a different time than when your original tweet was sent out so that those who saw it the first time aren’t very likely to see it again.

Day 25: Promote your Twitter account on your blog.

Hopefully by now, you have several hundred (or even a thousand if you’ve been hard ad it) followers. Nothing big, but at least there are some there.

Now that you have a start of a Twitter tribe, you can safely promote your Twitter account on your blog without getting ridiculed for having only 7 followers. Try dedicating an entire blog post to “hey, we’re on social media, come follow us!”, and list all your active social profiles, not necessarily just your Twitter.

In your post, give readers a reason to follow you on social media; an incentive. “Staying up-to-date on current events in ” is a good incentive, just like “curation of the best blog posts on ”.

Day 26: Use SumoMe to create tweetable tips in blog posts.

The brainchild of Noah Kagan, SumoMe is a free suite of Internet marketing tools. One such tool is Highlighter (formerly called Twilighter), and it’s a great way to increase your share count on blog posts and, therefore, your Twitter account’s exposure.

Basically, what the tool does is highlight a specific sentence/phrase in your blog post and show a little icon next to it than when clicked by a reader opens a new tab in their browser where they can tweet the exact phrase (with a link back to the post). Neat, huh?

Here’s what it looks like:

Incidentally, Noah was employee #30 at Facebook, and is responsible for a lot of cool stuff that’s on there; including the revolutionary status update.

Day 27: Auto tweet old blog posts with Tweet Old Post.

Tweet Old Post is a nifty free WordPress plugin that (no prizes for guessing) automatically tweets your old blog posts.

Normally, when you publish a blog post, there’s a buzz around it for a couple days (or even a couple weeks, depending on how often you publish posts). But once a couple others have been published after it, the post sinks into the nefarious state of forgottenness. People just don’t see it any more.

Tweet Old Post will change that, ensuring that your evergreen posts get the visibility they deserve.

Day 28: Reply to tweets about your competition.

People often let off steam on Twitter — particularly about certain companies/businesses that they didn’t enjoy dealing with.

Find people who are unhappy with your competition and have tweeted about it, then reply to that those tweets as a helpful Good Samaritan, offering your advice (for free) on anything that went wrong during their experience as a customer with your competition.

Not only is it a great way to gain a few loyal Twitter followers, but the tweep you replied to might even end up becoming a valuable customer of yours.

Day 29: Reply to popular tweets from the biggest Twitter accounts in your industry.

Try to find 10-20 of the biggest Twitter accounts in your niche — ones that command millions of followers and hundreds of favorites & retweets with each tweet they send out.

Then, reply to one tweet from each account. Since each tweet is so popular and viewed by thousands of people, your profile too gets an incredible amount of exposure … for absolutely free!

Day 30: Survey your followers.

The final step in this 30-day serious is to survey your followers. By now, you should enough followers to be able to generate a bit of interest around a survey.

Create a survey with Google Forms that asks your Twitter followers a few simple questions like:

What times are you active on Twitter?
What content topics do you like to retweet?
Which Twitter profiles do you think tweet the most interesting content?

You can use answers from the survey to tailor your Twitter account to make it as appealing to your target audience as possible. To get people to take it, you might have to popularize it on your blog or even offer a small incentive for completing it.

Wrapping Up

Getting more Twitter followers really isn’t an incredibly different puzzle to solve. When you boil it down, the most important things to remember is that you have to tweet content people are actually interested in and you have to do your best to build relationships and really connect with them.

Now go out there, implement this guide in your Twitter marketing campaign, and start getting more followers!

*Featured image courtesy Rosaura Ochoa via Flickr.

The post How to Get 10x More Twitter Followers in 30 Days appeared first on Venture Harbour.

How to Get More Twitter Followers: 30 Tips for 30 Days

Getting more Twitter followers is simple; It’s a matter of knowing which methods work, and which ones don’t. That, however, isn’t always the simplest of tasks.

I’ve created this 30 day guide to give you a range of different tactics and strategies for boosting your Twitter following. Each day has its own task to perform taking anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour. Follow this guide, and I assure you that your Twitter tribe will multiply several times over.

Day 1: Define your Twitter goals.

No, it isn’t the most exciting task in the world, but it’s nevertheless something that you need to do. Define your Twitter goals: what do you want to get out of your Twitter marketing campaign? More traffic? More revenue/sales/customers?

Make sure that your goals are measurable and time-sensitive. E.g. I want to drive 1000 visitors to my website via Twitter in 3 months. 

Day 2: Make your Twitter profile compelling

How you setup your Twitter account is crucial to your success on the platform. Your Twitter profile picture, cover & background images, and description say a lot about your brand. Make sure you go for a profile picture that stands out so that your tweets will be easily visible in your followers’ news feed.

Your cover & background images should define what you do: your work in the industry, your value proposition, etc.

Day 3: Find & follow 100+ active, popular accounts in your niche.

Most social media gurus are fully against following people just so that they’ll follow you back, and I entirely agree. The result of that technique is a bunch of followers who are just “paying” you back and really aren’t interested in your tweets.

However, you need to have valuable content to retweet to your followers. To find that sort of content, you need to follow people who tweet it.

Day 4: Create a Twitter landing page.

A Twitter landing page is basically a webpage you direct your Twitter followers to. Landing pages custom-made just for your Twitter profile is a beneficial, yet often overlooked tactic to grow your following.

Setup a page that talks specifically about your brand with relevance to your Twitter profile. It should say why people should follow you, what you tweet about, etc. And remember to keep it short & punchy — people used to digesting info in 140 characters or less won’t take too kindly to 1500 words of boring self-promotion.

Day 5: Find out the best time to tweet to your followers with Social Bro.

Just like with blogging, your timing is in important factor in the exposure and reach of your content. You need to make sure you’re getting the biggest bank for your content — for that, use Social Bro.

Social Bro is a premium Twitter management tool, and one of its many impressive features is its ability to research your audience and gauge the perfect time for you to send out your tweets. This feature comes integrated with both HootSuite and Buffer.

Day 6: Setup Buffer and Swayy and start scheduling tweets.

Buffer & Swayy are my two favorite auto-tweeting tools. Buffer is pretty much a standard tweet scheduling service (as already mentioned, it comes integrated with Social Bro’s best time to tweet feature).

Swayy is a Tweet curation platform: based on your followers and who you follow, Swayy researches your industry to find trending content on the web that you can then schedule and share to your followers (like Buffer, it isn’t limited to just Twitter either).

Day 7: Research trending hashtags with Hashtagify.

The hashtag phenomenon that revolutionized Twitter way back in ’09 can be a great visibility booster when exploited correctly.

When you add hashtags to your tweets, you need to make sure that they are relevant to your audience, up-to-date, and trending. In short, you need to do some serious research.

Hashtagify.me is one tool that takes most of legwork out of that process. You can search one popular hashtag in your industry (e.g. #seo), and Hashtagify will display a number of relevant popular tags.

Day 8: Use Social Crawlytics to find your competitors’ most popular content.

Social Crawlytics is a neat tool that will analyze a website’s most popular content (social media wise) and show it to you. It’s a great way to find content that is currently trending in your niche — content that will resonate well with your followers when you tweet it out.

Analyze 2-3 of your top competitors, create a list of their most popular content, and steal their ideas to create similar content.

Day 9: Create the content.

Use the information you gathered in day 8 and build your content around similar topics. Create the content and schedule it for publishing.

Once it’s live on the interwebs, share it to your Twitter account. But hold on — don’t put it away, because we’re not done with it yet by any means.

Day 10: Ask 10 people to share the content.

Go back to your Social Crawlytics report of your competitors’ most shared content (that you “stole”). Next, find the people who shared that blog post, then reach out to them and ask them to share it with their audience.

Here’s how: Google the following keyword: site:twitter.com [insert-url-of-competitor-content-here]

If you did it correctly, you should have a listing of tweets people sent out containing that link. Reach out to 10 tweeps in that selection with the largest audiences, tell them about your new, up-to-date content (preferably via email or another private medium), and ask them to share it.

This process is way too tedious and will be counter productive if you try to reach out to every single profile that tweeted the link, so make sure you’re only concentrating on the big fish and you’ve got a template email to use.

Lastly, remember to make sure that they include a “via @yourhandle” in their tweet. Otherwise, your actual profile won’t increase in follower count, although your posts will in social signal count.

Day 11: Ask your allies to share the content.

Email friends in the industry, or people who’ve posted on a similar topic to you and tell them and ask them if they’d like to share your content.

Often, since they’re likely to be on the lookout for quality content to tweet, they’ll share it without thinking twice, which increases your Twitter profile’s visibility. Again, make sure you’re using a template email.

Day 12: Get other popular bloggers to share it.

Same story – we’re still sharing the same content.

After reaching out to your allies and their followers, it’s time to reach out to other popular bloggers about your (soon-to-be) popular content. Tell them that you’ve got content on XYZ topicc that’s relevant to their audience, and ask them if they’d like to share it. Email at least 20 bloggers in your niche (use templates), and watch your follower count increase.

Hint: It never hurts to namedrop. If you’ve already got one big-name brand/blog to share it, include that in your email as social proof.

Day 13: Gather a list of 20 current events to tweet about.

One of the ways you stay on top of the Twitter game is by being current and up to date. If you’re sharing content from 2007 all the time, you’re doing something wrong. Very wrong.

Gather 20 pieces of current content in your industry, and schedule them (preferably spaced out to 1-2 per day) for tweeting.

Day 14: Hold a contest.

There’s nothing like an incentive to get more people to do something. Up till now, you’ve been asking people to do something for you … but there’s really very little in it for them.

Hold a contest, and that will change.

Give people a chance to win something valuable in exchange for a tweet, and you could easily be watching your Twitter account go viral.

Day 15: Personally thank everybody who has so far retweeted you.

You won’t have enough time for this once you have hundreds of thousands of followers and numerous retweets per tweet, but for now, this is a great technique to build relationships with your followers.

Just tweet a “thank you for sharing” back to their retweet. Not only does it make them feel warm and fuzzy inside, but it also makes them more likely to retweet your content again, increasing your profile’s exposure to their audience.

Day 16: Setup automated direct messaging.

Are direct messages sometimes annoying? Yes, they are.

Does that mean you should rule them out completely as a Twitter marketing strategy? Of course not.

Signup to Twitter DMer (100% free), and setup an automatic direct message that links to your squeeze page. You’ve only got 140 characters, so make it count: don’t make it over salesy. Try to be a little personal.

Day 17: Find 10 popular blogs with huge Twitter accounts and regularly favorite/retweet their tweets.

Get together a list of popular blogs in your industry (preferably solo-owned) with very active, very popular Twitter accounts. Favorite or retweet their tweets regularly — you should be retweeting or favoriting at least one of their tweets daily.

This gets them thinking about you — they notice you because you stand out of the crowd because of your consistency (and besides — you’re flattering them immensely). When you create a tweet, there’s a chance that they’ll retweet it out to their followers.

And then magic happens.

Day 18: Use Trendsmap to find real-time local Twitter trends.

Another fantastically useful Twitter marketing tool, Trendsmap helps you find trends on Twitter according to your location — quite a helpful tool if you run a brick-and-mortar business and you’re looking to stay on top of things in your location.

Unfortunately, Trendsmap doesn’t dig too deep location-wise (as of right now), so you’ll have to settle for trends according to state or major city.

Day 19: Embed your Twitter handle & profile link in company email signatures.

When you email someone (or when someone emails you), that means that you two know each other. You might not be besties, but you are acquainted.

Trust me — converting acquaintances into Twitter followers is a whole lot easier than converting those who had no idea that you existed until three seconds ago.

Embed a link to your Twitter profile in each of your company’s email signatures. Those annoying support tickets are now finally good for something. :)

Day 20: Create and/or curate images for tweeting.

It’s official: tweets with images get way more retweets than tweets without. Often twice as many (Scion Social).

Get your graphics team to create a few images for some of the tweets you send out. Obviously, if you create an image for every tweet, this can get pretty expensive pretty quickly, so the alternative is to curate images … which can also get a bit finicky with the various image licenses.

Debra Eckerling at Social Media Examiner has a great post on 15 resources that talk about finding images for social media posts.

Day 21: Hang up promotional banners in your office.

That’s right. Twitter marketing doesn’t just have to be online you know — you can even take it to your company office and see some pretty decent results.

Hang up posters/banners for example in waiting rooms, offices, etc. that showcase your Twitter handle (include your profile URL as well).

Day 22: Promote your Twitter account at speaking conferences.

Snagged a speaking gig at Tedx (or anywhere else, for that matter)? Use it to your Twitter advantage!

When you close your speech, drop in a line about your Twitter account. You might be able to get some leaders in your industry to follow and eventually retweet you.

Day 23: Leverage your existing relationships.

Everybody knows somebody. Ever chatted on Skype with someone who has a popular Twitter account in your niche? Maybe exchanged a few emails, or even a phone call?

Leverage that existing relationship, and get them to share your content to their audience. This technique is grounded in the principle we discussed about how people who know you are more likely to be interactive with you on Twitter.

Day 24: Repost your most popular tweets.

Thus far, you should have been able to send a hundred plus tweets out, and you should have been able to see at least some interaction.

Find the tweets that were most popular with your audience — highest retweets & favs — and then retweet them to your Twitter account word for word.

Make sure you post them at a different time than when your original tweet was sent out so that those who saw it the first time aren’t very likely to see it again.

Day 25: Promote your Twitter account on your blog.

Hopefully by now, you have several hundred (or even a thousand if you’ve been hard ad it) followers. Nothing big, but at least there are some there.

Now that you have a start of a Twitter tribe, you can safely promote your Twitter account on your blog without getting ridiculed for having only 7 followers. Try dedicating an entire blog post to “hey, we’re on social media, come follow us!”, and list all your active social profiles, not necessarily just your Twitter.

In your post, give readers a reason to follow you on social media; an incentive. “Staying up-to-date on current events in ” is a good incentive, just like “curation of the best blog posts on ”.

Day 26: Use SumoMe to create tweetable tips in blog posts.

The brainchild of Noah Kagan, SumoMe is a free suite of Internet marketing tools. One such tool is Highlighter (formerly called Twilighter), and it’s a great way to increase your share count on blog posts and, therefore, your Twitter account’s exposure.

Basically, what the tool does is highlight a specific sentence/phrase in your blog post and show a little icon next to it than when clicked by a reader opens a new tab in their browser where they can tweet the exact phrase (with a link back to the post). Neat, huh?

Here’s what it looks like:

Incidentally, Noah was employee #30 at Facebook, and is responsible for a lot of cool stuff that’s on there; including the revolutionary status update.

Day 27: Auto tweet old blog posts with Tweet Old Post.

Tweet Old Post is a nifty free WordPress plugin that (no prizes for guessing) automatically tweets your old blog posts.

Normally, when you publish a blog post, there’s a buzz around it for a couple days (or even a couple weeks, depending on how often you publish posts). But once a couple others have been published after it, the post sinks into the nefarious state of forgottenness. People just don’t see it any more.

Tweet Old Post will change that, ensuring that your evergreen posts get the visibility they deserve.

Day 28: Reply to tweets about your competition.

People often let off steam on Twitter — particularly about certain companies/businesses that they didn’t enjoy dealing with.

Find people who are unhappy with your competition and have tweeted about it, then reply to that those tweets as a helpful Good Samaritan, offering your advice (for free) on anything that went wrong during their experience as a customer with your competition.

Not only is it a great way to gain a few loyal Twitter followers, but the tweep you replied to might even end up becoming a valuable customer of yours.

Day 29: Reply to popular tweets from the biggest Twitter accounts in your industry.

Try to find 10-20 of the biggest Twitter accounts in your niche — ones that command millions of followers and hundreds of favorites & retweets with each tweet they send out.

Then, reply to one tweet from each account. Since each tweet is so popular and viewed by thousands of people, your profile too gets an incredible amount of exposure … for absolutely free!

Day 30: Survey your followers.

The final step in this 30-day serious is to survey your followers. By now, you should enough followers to be able to generate a bit of interest around a survey.

Create a survey with Google Forms that asks your Twitter followers a few simple questions like:

What times are you active on Twitter?
What content topics do you like to retweet?
Which Twitter profiles do you think tweet the most interesting content?

You can use answers from the survey to tailor your Twitter account to make it as appealing to your target audience as possible. To get people to take it, you might have to popularize it on your blog or even offer a small incentive for completing it.

Wrapping Up

Getting more Twitter followers really isn’t an incredibly different puzzle to solve. When you boil it down, the most important things to remember is that you have to tweet content people are actually interested in and you have to do your best to build relationships and really connect with them.

Now go out there, implement this guide in your Twitter marketing campaign, and start getting more followers!

*Featured image courtesy Rosaura Ochoa via Flickr.

The post How to Get More Twitter Followers: 30 Tips for 30 Days appeared first on Venture Harbour.

47 Beautiful Responsive Magento Themes

Magento is the mostly widely used eCommerce CMS with over 204,000 sites using it. After shining the spotlight on some of the most stunning responsive WordPress and Drupal themes, I thought it was time that we look at some of the best responsive Magento themes.

In no particular order, here are 47 beautiful responsive Magento themes.

1. Ultimo – $99 (demo)

Ultimo is the best selling Magento theme ever created, and has been used over 8,000 times with an average rating of 4.77 out of 5; not bad.

It’s fully responsive, and easily customised with unlimited colours and styles. For product pages it has lightbox and cloud zoom functionality, and the ability to show the brand logo for each product. This theme takes two minutes to install and has over 190 pages of documentation to help you get the most out of it.

Whatever type of store you’re creating, Ultimo will give you an awesome foundation to build on.

2. Shopper – $85 (demo)

Shopper is a fully responsive and Retina ready Magento theme that includes the revolution slider plugin. It has a fully customisable product grid, and enables custom colours for different category pages. Other useful features include an Ajax price slider, customisable product image size, and a flexible fluid slideshow.

3. Fortis – $97 (demo)

Fortis is a premium Magento theme with a fully responsive layout, unlimited colours, and a fluid grid system. The home page includes a slideshow, the option to choose between a 1, 2, or 3 column layout, and sliders for new or featured products. This is one of the better coded Magento themes, and has been optimised for fast page loading times.

4. Blanco – $85 (demo)

Blanco is a minimal Magento theme with Ajax add to cart functionality, various menu designs, social network integration, and sliders for new and sale products.

5. Acumen – $90 (demo)

Acumen is a best-selling grid-based Magento theme designed to fit a wide range of online stores. It’s fully compatible with the latest version of Magento (1.9.0.1 as of writing), and contains a huge variety of features including sliders, language translation, and web fonts.

6. BuyShop – $80 (demo)

BuyShop is a retina ready Magento theme based on the Bootstrap framework and coded in HTML5 and CSS3. It has a range of predefined layouts, and includes premium ticket support, and a handful of Magento connect extensions.

7. Milano – $90 (demo)

Milano is an ideal Magento theme for fashion and clothing stores. It includes a countdown timer, a Pinterest-style blog, and Ajax infinite scrolling functionality.

8. Celebrity – $85 (demo)

Celebrity is a one-click install Magento theme with unlimited colour variations and light and dark skins. It includes a full width and boxed layout style skin, and has well structured code.

9. Dresscode – $80 (demo)

Dresscode is a fully responsive theme with a powerful admin panel, unlimited colours, and an exclusive slider / banner. It integrates with social networks, and includes a custom dropdown menu.

10. Venedor – $85 (demo)

Venedor is a responsive and retina ready Magento theme with one page checkout, four homepage sliders, and easy to install sample content.

11. MT Studio – $85 (demo)

MT Studio is a fluid responsive Magento theme that’s easy to install and configure with powerful admin modules. It can be used for any type of eCommerce store, and comes with plenty of features such as mega menu, brand slider, one page checkout, and Ajax cart.

12. Classy Shop – $70 (demo)

Classyshop is a HTML5 and CSS3 theme with a fluid product grid style and modules for displaying featured and best selling products. The theme is relatively minimal, making it a good choice for any store that requires a clean look and feel.

13. Accessories Car Store – $63 (demo)

Despite the name, Car Store is a good theme for virtually any store, but is focused around an automative style. It includes eight different coloured skins and is fully responsive.

14. Bear Store – $80 (demo)

Bear Store is a responsive Magento theme with a one-click installer, Ajax plugins, and Facebook connect integration. This theme looks amazing on mobile and tablet devices, and is extremely well coded with speed and SEO in mind.

15. Simple Great – $80 (demo)

Simple Great is a responsive theme with touch support, meaning that not only does the website ‘shrink’ to fit the screen of mobile and tablet devices, but sliders and interactive elements also work perfectly when used on smaller screens. It has unlimited colour themes and is easy to customise.

16. Perfectum – $80 (demo)

Perfectum is a universal Magento theme designed for any online store to use. It’s well coded in HTML5 and CSS3, and is fully compatible with the latest versions of Magento (as well as versions as old as 1.6.0.0).

17. Organic – $97 (demo)

Organic is basic responsive theme for Magento that includes a template for the home page, category pages, product pages, register and sign in pages, my account page, shopping cart, checkout, and content pages. It’s relatively no-frills, but with the right images looks great.

18. Chocolate – $85 (demo)

Chocolate is another elegant Magento theme with lots of static CMS blocks, cloud zoom integration, and a fully customisable slideshow.

19. Crisp and Clean – $97 (demo)

Crisp and Clean is another popular Magento theme that changes the layout when opened on a smaller screen. The beauty of this theme is its simplicity and clean user interface.

20. Go Market – $85 (demo)

GoMarket is a customisable Magento theme with an easy to use drag and drop layout builder. It uses a CSS grid system and has widgets for highlight featured, sale-off, and best selling products.

21. DecoStore – $70 (demo)

DecoStore includes social network integration, new product sliders, Ajax add to cart, and multiple menu styles. It’s best designed for clothing stores and fashions stores.

22. Electroneus Market – $85 (demo)

Admittedly, the colours used on their demo are a bit 1999, but the Electroneus Magento theme is a popular choice with lots of different styles and customisation options.

23. Colinus – $80 (demo)

Colinus is an attractive theme with three preset styles (red, orange, blue) and unlimited customisation options. It has a drop down shopping cart in the header, and supports Ajax add to cart.

24. Magma – $80 (demo)

Magma is a popular Magento theme that uses Ajax virtually everywhere, and includes a few unique functions, such as the ability to login using your social media accounts, and integrate videos from YouTube into product pages.

25. Santana Fashion Store – $75 (demo)

Santana Fashion is a clean fashion store theme with jQuery product sliders, custom drop down menus, product zooms, and an easy to use shopping cart.

26. Black & White – $85 (demo)

Black and White is a retina ready Magento theme suitable for all stores. It includes Onepage checkout, blog extension, Ajax add to cart, and many other useful add ons for eCommerce platforms.

27. Fresh – $85 (demo)

Fresh is a popular Magento theme that’s Retina ready, responsive, and easy to customise. The team at Meigee also offer free installation and configuration.

28. Response – $75 (demo)

Response is a responsive Magento theme optimised for SEO and page loading speed. The theme is coded in HTML5 and is based on the 16 column GetSkeleton grid. While very simple, it’s a great starting point for any Magento store that doesn’t need lots of bells and whistles.

29. Zonda – $85 (demo)

Zonda is a stunning responsive Magento theme that’s Retina ready out of the box and includes five separate home page layouts. The theme includes Revolution slider and iOS slider (worth $30 together), over 25 PSD files for editing, and is highly mobile optimised with touch optimised sliders.

30. Metros – $80 (demo)

Metros is a minimalist responsive Magento theme that uses Ajax everywhere (navigation, shopping cart etc.) reducing the need for page refreshing. It has a powerful backend, and enables unlimited colours and customisation.

31. Vigo Shop – $85 (demo)

Vigo Shop is an award winning responsive Magento theme that offers a free installation for Magento newbies. This theme enables square or rectangle product images, grid or list view product displays, and a huge range of customisation options.

32. Medusa Luxury – $75 (demo)

Exdress Medusa is an eye catching Magento theme with a huge range of customisation options and different ways of displaying products. It’s fully cross-browser compatible and mobile responsive.

33. Sportshop – $80 (demo)

Sportshop is a responsive designed Magento theme with 4 skin colours available, social network integration, and many handy eCommerce features such as cloud zoom, back to top, and brand logo sliders. While it could be customised to virtually anything it’d best suit sports stores, shoe stores, and clothing / fashion stores.

34. Jewellery Store – $75 (demo)

Jewellery is a responsive Magento theme that includes advanced Ajax search, the ability to show latest tweets in the footer, and a quick shopping cart view. Primarily designed with jewellery stores in mind, the design is very clean and minimal.

35. Gadget Magento Theme – $85 (demo)

Gadget is a versatile Magento theme that includes four different colours and child themes to customise. It’s fully compatible with stores that require products to be displayed in a variety of languages and currencies.

36. Beauty Shop – $80 (demo)

BeautyShop is a stylish responsive theme for any online store that requires a clean and well-coded Magento theme. It includes over 200+ pattern backgrounds, 500+ fonts, and a huge range of customisation options to play with.

37. MetroShop – $85 (demo)

Metroshop is a responsive theme optimised for SEO and site speed. It includes Google Maps, Quick shopping cart, banner slider, and product zoom functionality.

38. Furniture Magento Theme – $57 (demo)

While not the most beautiful theme, Furniture is a well designed Magento theme and well set up for furniture stores. The theme is very basic and would be easy to customise into something more visually compelling.

39. MT Computer – $85 (demo)

Computer is a fully responsive theme with a powerful admin panel and mega menu integration. It offers unlimited colours and skins, and includes Ajax page navigation, add to cart, compare, wish list, and search functions.

40. Ves Fashion – $85 (demo)

Ves Fashion is a perfect Magento theme for fashion shops, clothes stores, and shoe stores. It’s built on the latest Venus and Bootstrap frameworks, making it 100% responsive on all resolutions from mobile, to tablet and larger displays.

41. MT Belano – $85 (demo)

MT Belano is a responsive parallax theme with beautiful home page templates. It includes Ajax shop by price sliders, as well as a powerful product scroller. MT Belano is fully compatible with the latest version of Magento.

42. Ves Bigshop – $85 (demo)

Ves Bigshop is an elegant Magento theme built on the Bootstrap framework. It supports multiple stores and includes a huge range of modules, making customisation really easy.

43. Saggita – $80 (demo)

Sagitta is a relatively simple Magento theme with six available colours, category search functionality, vertical megamenus, and brand logo sliders.

44. MA Argona – $85 (demo)

MA Argona is a customisable responsive Magento theme with three preset stores; a bike theme, a watch theme, and a furniture theme. It includes a one-click install, and has all of the standard plugins, such as Ajax Add to Cart Pro and Layer Navigation.

45. Petsy Shop – $85 (demo)

Petsy Shop is, unsurprisingly, designed for stores that sell pet products! This fully responsive theme comes with six preset colours, and includes new product sliders, upsell product sliders, and featured product sliders.

46. MT Yoming – $85 (demo)

Yoming is a fully responsive theme compatible with the latest versions of Magento. This theme comes integrated with Revolution slider, and is easily customisable with unlimited colours.

47. Erida – $85 (demo)

Erida is a responsive Magento theme with 7 available skins, a mega menu, Ajax add to cart pro, and a product slider for upselling products.

The post 47 Beautiful Responsive Magento Themes appeared first on Venture Harbour.

Facebook Contest & Promotions Apps – Which One is the Best?

A couple of months ago, I ran a Facebook contest for a client of ours called FanDistro. In 7 days, we had driven 618 competition entries, and just over 500 people who entered the competition shared it with their friends (thanks to a sharing incentive we added).

All in all, we collected 618 email addresses of artists who might use their service, as well as driving about ~75 extra signups that month. The total cost? $37.

When setup correctly, Facebook contests are one of the fastest and most cost effective ways i’ve come across to grow your email list and Facebook engagement.

In this post, i’ll explain some pointers on how to get a good social contest setup, but let’s start off by looking at which Facebook contest app to use.

Out of a pool of maybe 50+ different social contest app services, there are five that I’d recommend considering; Wishpond (my favourite), Shortstack, AgoraPulse, Heyo, and WooBox. I’ll explain the pro’s and con’s of each in more detail below.

Wishpond

I first discovered Wishpond when I entered a video contest on the AwesomenessFest Facebook Page to speak at their conference. I was impressed by the app’s setup; the contest app asked for everything at the right moment, and made it incredibly easy to capture my data and make me share.

Impressed by their campaign’s results and Wishpond’s “keep it simple, stupid” approach, I decided to have a play around with their app.

My first impressions were good. Creating a campaign was really easy, and they had a decent (but not overwhelming) selection of different types of contest to choose from.

One aspect that I really like is that Wishpond give you a selection of well-designed templates to choose from for your Facebook contest. Previously, when I’ve used other platforms I’ve had to get my designer to whip something up in PhotoShop, so the visual editor made that step redundant.

Another pretty unique feature is that you can create Facebook, Google, and retargeting ads from within Wishpond to promote your Facebook contest.

Finally, as my motivation for running a Facebook contest is often lead generation based, I wanted to have a quick look at their reporting and analytics. This is where some of the social contest services i’ve previously used have fallen down, so I had my fingers crossed that Wishpond had this one nailed as well.

They had. Their reporting is a beautiful combination of simple yet powerful. I could import and export from Aweber, filter entrants by age, gender, location, and even see the top interests of people who’d entered my contest. Most importantly, I could easily segment and download the email addresses of all those who entered my contest.

So how much does it cost to run a Facebook contest with Wishpond? Like most of the services featured here, they offer a 14-day free trial on all of their plans, which start at $19/month.

Wishpond’s pricing tiers are featured-based i.e. as you pay more, you unlock premium features, such as the ability to use email automation and white-labelling.

While you get all of the important features at whatever price you pay, the thing that stands out for me is that the lead database is only unlocked when you pay for their Pro plan ($44/month). For me, the lead database would be an absolute necessity, so it’s a bit of a shame that I’d have to pay a higher rate just for this feature. That said, at $44/month it’s still an absolute steal when you consider the ROI that a tool like this can have on your mailing list growth and online engagement.

After trying all of the services in this post, Wishpond are the one that stands out the most for me. They’re who we now use for virtually all of our client’s social contests.

If you want to give Wishpond a try, they offer a 14-day free trial here.

Shortstack

Before I came across Wishpond, ShortStack was my go-to tool for running Facebook contests.

Shortstack is one of the most comprehensive Facebook app creators, with a huge variety of features to choose form. There’s a bit of a learning curve when it comes to creating apps on their platform, but once you’ve got the hang of their interface you have a lot of control over how your contest functions.

So let’s start off with creating a contest. Like Wishpond, they do have a selection of templates to use, but unless you want to create something that looks like it was designed in Microsoft Frontpage in 1999, you’ll probably want to design your own.

Once you’ve got your designs ready to go, creating and launching your contest app is relatively simple. While they do have a drag and drop visual editor, I find myself ducking into the CSS/Html quite a lot with ShortStack which is a handy feature if you prefer to design with code.

So why would you use Shortstack over Wishpond?

Well, in general Shortstack have more features. I like Wishpond due to their simplicity, but if you need to run a contest with maximum flexibility, or for whatever reason, you want to promote your contest with QR codes, or run campaigns that show different content to users in different countries, then Shortstack will most likely give you more control over your campaign.

Depending on the size of your Facebook audience, Shortstack may also work out a little bit cheaper for you.

Unlike Wishpond, Shortstack’s pricing is based on a (somewhat confusing) combination of features and audience size. For example, if you have 30,000 Facebook fans, you are not eligible for their $30/month package. You’d have to go for their $75/month ‘Full stack’ package.

In general, I was happy with Shortstack and they are a very good option for social contests, but their design and processes are just not quite as polished as Wishpond, in my opinion.

AgoraPulse

Admittedly, I had never heard of AgoraPulse until I began researching this post. Most of the spin-offs of services like Wishpond and Shortstack are just copycat platforms aiming to slightly undercut the competition, but not AgoraPulse.

While i’d love to hear from some of their users in the comments, the thing that strikes me as unique about AgoraPulse is the depth and intelligence of their reporting system.

As an avid Facebook advertiser, i’ve used plenty of Facebook analytics and management tools in the past, but none quite as intuitive and clever as AgoraPulse.

Their reporting seems to be focused around answering two of the most important questions that marketers need to ask; what is/isn’t working, and what’s profitable?

They have an ROI calculation dashboard, as well as deep insights into identifying the best times to post, the best mediums, and best subjects. In some ways this is not the most like-for-like comparison, as AgoraPulse is really a lot more than just a social contest app (they’re a full blown Facebook apps, CRM, and analytics suite), but the reporting looked too good not to feature here.

While I can’t say i’ve built a live app with them, their contest application builder is nice and intuitive, and has most of the options offered by the services above and below.

If you already have a Facebook management and analytics sorted, and are just looking for a solution that does Facebook contests really well, I’d go for Wishpond or Shortstack. However, if you want a central dashboard that brings everything into one place and enables you to setup Facebook contests, then AgoraPulse is worth taking a look at.

Pricing wise, AgoraPulse are very competitive. All of their packages are full-featured, and the different tiers are based on how many pages you want to manage / the size of your Facebook audience.

Considering you’re getting awesome reporting, moderation, CRM, and applications to run contests, you can’t really argue with $39/month for two pages and up to 50k fans.

Heyo

I’d heard good things about Heyo from a friend who uses them quite extensively to run group deals from his company’s Facebook page. In general, Heyo is very similar to the services we’ve already reviewed except for a few things.

Firstly, their contests look beautiful. Using flat design techniques, their contests are some of the best looking ones that i’ve seen. Secondly, they offer group deals – which enable you to bulk sell products through your Facebook page (kind of like running a Groupon deal).

Their platform is really simple and intuitive to use. The impression I get is that Hey’s mainly geared towards business owners who don’t want to be swamped in data, or have to face the steep learning curve of understanding what drives social engagement. If you run a business, and you simply want something that will help you drive more customers from Facebook, Heyo may be the option for you.

Their pricing is roughly the same as the others, starting at $25/month and going up to $50/month for use of their premium features. Given that Heyo is more focused around driving customers and social buying, the magnitude of ROI from this tool is likely to be a fair bit larger (or faster) than some of the other tools.

WooBox

Finally, we have WooBox. Despite being quite a popular option for running Facebook app contests, i’ve had mixed experiences with their platform. While the front-end (what you see on their website) is very slick, the backend feels half-done.

As far as I can see, there’s no way to change the date parameters in the reporting dashboard (making it impossible to see historical data beyond 30 days), entrant data is really limited, and creating an app is not particularly intuitive. In themselves, these are minor issues, but the cumulation of lots of minor issues is what’s deterred me from using them after the trial campaign I ran with them.

Of course, my experience is only one – and they couldn’t have reached two million users without doing something right, but the overall impression I get from them is that they’ve become a bit complacent with their position in the market.

So why am I including them here? Well, they get a lot of positive reviews and I want to give them the benefit of the doubt in case my experience was a one off. They have a good selection of different promotion types and like Wishpond you can create Facebook ads directly from within your WooBox account.

Pricing wise, they have the most complicated system which combines features, number of promotions you can run per month, Facebook audience size, and number of pages.

In summary

To answer the question posed by this article’s headline, I would say Wishpond are the best service for creating Facebook contest apps.

However, it’s clear that we will all have varying requirements and outcomes in mind when it comes to choosing a platform, which is why I think I don’t think there’s such a thing as a complete overall winner.

If you’ve used any other services that you highly recommend for running promotions on Facebook, I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments. Also, if you have any more views on the ones mentioned above I’d be equally interested in hearing about your results, thoughts, and which one you ended up using.

The post Facebook Contest & Promotions Apps – Which One is the Best? appeared first on Venture Harbour.

19 Implications of Google Glass & Wearable Tech on Marketing

Since 2009, investors have poured over half a billion dollars into wearable tech startups.

This isn’t surprising when you consider that wearable tech (including smart glasses, watches, and fitness bands) is still an early adopter market and already estimated to be worth $3 billion.

In 2016, estimates suggest that 100 million wearable tech devices will be shipped. That’s ten times the number of devices expected to ship in 2014.

So, how does this affect our jobs as marketers? What might we be doing differently in 2016 or 2020, if wearable technology reaches the level of adoption that’s expected?

Below are 19 implications that I believe wearable tech will have on digital marketing.

1. The winner takes all approach to SEO

SEO is currently a game of winner takes majority. While no-one can quite agree on the exact percentages, it’s evident that if you rank #1 for a search term on Google or any other major search engine, you will receive a disproportionate amount of the total clicks for that term.

However, while a majority, this top result usually receives 55-65% of the total search volume. The other 35-45% of traffic is distributed non-linearly between the rest of the pages ranking below the #1 result, as illustrated below.

If Google Glass gains mass adoption, SEO will become more of a winner takes all game. Why?

Google appear to be moving towards card-based search results, rather than page-based search results. What’s more, only one card is displayed at any one time.

If you currently search for ‘Seattle Mariners Tickets’ on Google Glass, this is what you see. Notice that there is no option to see the next result, or any list of ten blue links.

The motivation behind this card-based search result is pretty obvious; to support Google’s knowledge graph. Matt McGee wrote a great post on SearchEngineLand elaborating on this move towards card-based SERPs, and some of the pro’s and con’s.

2. Increasing voice search will influence keyword targeting

An obvious trend with wearable tech is that voice-based search will become the default method of searching for things. This has its challenges, and will likely have an impact on how we target keywords – particularly if those keywords are homophones or have multiple meanings.

In the post mentioned above, Matt gave a great example of how searching (via voice search) for the band ‘U2′ highlights the website YouToo.com as the #1 search result. After several attempts he finally got to to the band’s website by saying “Band U2″.

On Google’s end, this is a relatively minor issue that is easily solved with a “did you mean X or Y?” card. From a marketer’s perspectives, it’s significant enough that it will need to enter the keyword research process. If people begin to add more identifying nouns while searching, we will need to understand how best to target those nouns.

3. The consumer will be smarter than ever before

A spectrometer is a device used to understand the chemical make-up of anything.

Some of the first portable consumer spectrometers are being developed right now. That means that soon enough we will all have the technology to understand the exact contents of whatever we look at. How much MSG is in this chicken? Are the tablets the doctor gave you just placebos? A spectrometer knows.

I think it’s only a matter of time before Google, Apple, or some other wearable tech company buys up a spectrometer company to integrate into their products.

Imagine going into a store and looking at a cleaning product through a pair of Google Glasses. All of a sudden your Google Glasses (with a newly built-in spectrometer) tell you which harmful chemicals are contained in this bottle.

This could have radical impacts on the retail, food, and pharmaceutical industries where good marketing covers up a lot of nasty truths. It’s a pretty wild guess, but hopefully not too unrealistic.

The impact of this on marketing is fairly straight forward; peddling shit becomes an even less effective marketing strategy.

4. Websites with good microdata markup will have a competitive advantage

Similarly to above, but on a less extreme scale, it’s fairly well-established that Google Glass will enable you to see additional product information when you look at it.

In other words, if you were to walk into a bookshop with a pair of Google Glasses, and you picked up a copy of a good book, you could quickly read online reviews and also compare prices. You could even order a copy of the book to your door from the bookshop.

This is good news for eCommerce sites, and retailers who recognise this trend early on. Bad for retailers who don’t. With the natural advantage over price, selection, and geographical influence, more customers will be driven to eCommerce sites from real-World stores.

It’s beyond the scope of this post to suggest how retailers can respond to this, but for eCommerce sites the key here will likely be to have well marked-up products and reviews for Google to serve up when an image or product is recognised in the real World.

5. Hyper-local marketing based on context and location

We’ve yet to crack contextually and locally relevant marketing on a mass-scale. The closest we’ve come is probably with FourSquare’s push notification deals offering you a $1 discount on Starbucks as your walk past a Starbucks cafe.

Wearable technology has the power to understand context like never before; my Jawbone Up wristband knows more about my sleeping, movement, and eating habits than I do.

For example, it knows that I eat a lot of Sushi, when I eat lunch, and where I am. These three things provide the context for a local sushi joint to target me at the right place at the right time.

I can’t see Jawbone or FitBit doing this, but I can see Google doing it. Why? Well, they own AdWords, which would be the perfect platform to enable advertisers to target Glass users at the right place at the right time, which brings us neatly onto a patent that Google has filed…

6. Pay-Per Gaze Advertising

On August 13th 2013 Google were granted a patent for ‘pay per gaze advertising’.

As Google reduce the cost of their Glass headsets, this will likely become the primary monetisation method for Google Glass. It’s hard to imagine it not being insanely effective, due to the contextual and local relevance, so this will probably enable Google to massively reduce the cost of a headset in order to increase their ad revenues.

7. Social networking will become less ‘one size fits all’

The anthropologist, Robert Dunbar, proposed the widely adopted theory that there is a cognitive limit on the number of people we can maintain stable social relationships with at any time.

Dunbar’s number, as it’s often to referred to, is approximately 150. This is one of the fundamental flaws of social networking sites that enable us to befriend hundreds or even thousands of friends.

I have a feeling that Google Glass will encourage more one-on-one sharing with the friends who are closest with us. Similarly to the feel of Snapchat or SMS, you’ll share quick images and videos with close friends who understand the contextual relevance of what you’re sharing.

While ‘share with all’ will likely always be an option, I feel if widely adopted, Google Glass could be a great platform to center itself around relationship depth rather than breadth.

8. A new wave of Glassware app opportunities

One of the obvious ways that businesses will be able to tap into Google Glass is through Glassware (the Google Glass app platform). Several innovative companies, such as Reddit, MarketingLand, and Evernote are already building their glassware apps in anticipation of the rising trend.

9. The era of live streaming

One of the primary functions of Google Glass is the ability to live stream video and take first-person images.

While some creative app developers are using this as an opportunity to produce apps that enables you and your partner to experience multiple angles while having sex, I think the majority of us will opt for a tamer approach.

In theory, live streaming technology is not new – platforms like uStream, LiveStream, and StageIt has been around since 2007. However, it’s not seamless to host a streaming session. Google Glass on the other hand could be fired up in an instant and broadcasted to customers or fans.

This opens the door to more opportunities to produce behind the scenes content, offer better customer service with one-on-one remote demonstrations, and many other creative ways of using live streaming.

One thing’s for sure; this medium of content will grow in popularity as more and more brands and personalities adopt it to engage their audience.

10. Online shopping will be bigger, faster and more impulsive than ever

The Internet paved the way for near-instant gratification. Thanks to the global market and sites like Amazon, we can have virtually anything we want in a matter of days as soon as we can afford it, get to a computer, and stick an order in.

In the next few years, shipping will become stupidly fast using predictive technologies that ship items before you even buy them (yes, Amazon have filed that patent). They also appear to be replacing FedEx with shipping drones of some sort. So, what’s this got to do this wearable tech?

One of the conditions for buying something online is to be at a computer – with wearable tech, you’re always at a computer. You could argue that this is already the case with mobile devices, and I’d agree (as would Mcommerce stats).

However, the reduced friction of buying through a headset, combined with faster delivery, will make it even more compelling to order your groceries to your door while walking home from the gym.

11. The deluge of content is about to get out of hand

I tried a pair of Google Glasses on at a conference a few months ago. Once the novelty of pretending to be in a sci-fi film, and the realisation that you’re now a “glasshole” passes, you notice this: it’s insanely easy to create content.

Specifically, it’s very easy to create and share video and photo content. If you have any glasshole friends on Facebook or Twitter, you’ll probably have noticed an increasing number of strangely mediocre videos that they begin to post of themselves wearing Google Glass in public. It’s an odd phenomenon.

But here’s the thing, soon that novelty will die off and people will begin to use them to create good content. Customers and bloggers will use them to record video reviews just after using / buying a product. YouTube will explode with new content.

For marketers, this deluge means exactly what it meant before: only the most remarkable content will get discovered and remarked upon.

12. Creativity in online advertising will become vital

If you write a crappy AdWords advert today, you’ll get your 0.5% CTR and carry on with your day as usual. Besides wasting budget, little harm done.

With Pay-Per Gaze advertising, and one-card search results, you’re quite literally sticking an ad in someone’s face. Understandably, bad advertising won’t just under perform – it’ll aggravate potential customers.

Because of this, online advertisers will need to get very good at what they do. PPC (or PPG) will become an art that requires an analytical and statistical edge, as well as a creative one.

As such, we’ll see an increasing demand for creative types, with a knack for creating enjoyable ads, within digital agencies and online departments.

13. The content marketing arms race will be won by creativity x insight

I’m as tired of hearing gurus over-hype big data as you are, but I do believe that the content marketing arms race will be won by those with the best combination of creativity and insight.

Insight doesn’t necessarily mean big data. Insight could come in the form of a profound idea or opinion. But scientific data is a fertile breeding ground for good insights, and wearable tech will provide a tonne of new insights.

This will be a big opportunity for companies entering the Glassware App space. If your company can build a useful Glassware app that users are willing to share data with, that data could be turned into some great content – but only when you combine it with creativity.

14. Company-wide adoption of wearable tech will be a competitive advantage

FitBit’s CEO, James Park, mentioned in an interview at CES that the fastest growing part of their business is corporate clients. Wait, what?

Innovative companies will use wearable tech to streamline HR, distribution, customer service, and even R&D. Imagine being able to speed up shipping by using smart eyewear to identify where a product is in a warehouse. What about instantly connecting to a customer service rep via your Google Glass and live streaming what you can see with them.

How does this affect marketing? Well, it’s a massive advantage over the competition that can be marketed. Similarly to the first companies that fully adopted Twitter or Pinterest, I can see a few companies becoming famous for their innovative use of Glass.

15. Wearables will increase the importance of mobile marketing

The folks at Gartner believe that in the next few years, 50% of all app interaction will be driven by wearables. Given that Jawbone is the second most visited app on my iPhone, behind email, this doesn’t surprise me.

Maybe by 2025 wearable tech may replace mobile devices entirely, but for the next decade I think wearable tech and mobile devices will have a symbiotic relationship. Neither one being slave or master to the other, just symbiotic.

Given the likelihood of this and all mentioned above, it’s reasonable to assume that mobile (and non-device specific) marketing will become increasingly important.

So what does this mean for us marketers? Well, if your website doesn’t have responsive design yet, now’s the time to get the ball rolling. If people aren’t playing buzzword bingo on the word ‘mobile strategy’ in your boardroom discussions, time to get it on the agenda.

16. One last breath of life into Google+

Despite the departure of Vic Gundotra, Google+’s chief evangelist for almost 8 years, Google claims that they have no intention to change their strategy with Google+.

The word on the street is that Google are moving away from considering Google+ to be a product and more towards a platform. I think this makes sense, and Google Glass could potentially breathe one big last breath into turning it into an active and useful platform.

Until the hypothetical day that Google announce a recall of Google+, I think it’s sensible to invest some effort into building up your authority and presence on Google+. If nothing else, sites with a high number of +1s tend to rank higher in Google than those with a low number. It’s very unlikely that this is purely correlation, despite what Matt Cutts says.

17. An accurate way of measuring the ROI of offline marketing

The big challenge with offline marketing is that we don’t know if our website conversions were triggered by a customer driving past a billboard on Friday night, or whether he saw our advert in The New York Times on Saturday morning.

Google Glass could develop the technology that identifies whether a user has seen an offline advert, and then track their behaviour, in a very similar way to how we do online using tracking cookies. I can imagine this being integrated as a premium feature in Google Analytics in 2016 / 2017, if all goes to plan with Glass.

For the offline advertising industry, this could make or break a lot of their businesses. It would effectively enable marketers to allocate their budgets more effectively, so if the billboards really are driving sales, great. If not, we’ll be seeing a lot less billboards.

18. A wave of opportunity for wearable tech PR stunts

A friend of mine in the music space, Brittney from Songdrop, recently got a decent amount of publicity for developing a Google Glassware app that identifies famous music landmarks and displays information about them through Google Glass.

Over the next two years, we’ll see a wave of innovative folks jumping on the PR bandwagon with interesting apps and creative ways of using not only Google Glass, but other forms of new wearable tech.

19. Wearable tech will be great for savvy local businesses

One of the clear winners from smart eyewear will be the smart local businesses that embrace Google Local Listings and local review sites like Yelp, UrbanSpoon, and TripAdvisor.

As i’ve banged on about throughout this post, one of the big shifts that many smart folks are working on right now is figuring out context i.e. what are you doing / feeling / wanting right now. If we know that, we can be smarter with our marketing.

Interestingly, there are always a disproportionate amount of customers that go to the best reviewed place in an area. The best pizzeria in your town probably gets 80% of all the business from people who are hungry for pizza. This disparity will become even more extreme as more and more people turn to their Google Glasses for recommendations and directions to the nearest pizzeria.

So what should you do if you run a local business? Exactly what you should have been doing in 1999; improving your service, getting more positive reviews, and generating word of mouth. Become the best of whatever you do in your area – and make sure your online presence makes that clear.

The Future of Wearable Tech’s Influence on Marketing

The fundamentals of marketing will not change at all, just as they haven’t over the past few centuries. The technologies will change though, and that’s enough to influence our marketing strategies and make certain tactics become more effective than others.

At a macro-strategic level, wearable technology one particularly huge opportunity.

That is, we will finally have technology that’s designed to be with us at all times, and can understand context and location. It’s no overstatement to say that this is potentially a revolutionary advance for marketing if the privacy issue can be carefully overcome.

If history is any indication, then it will be overcome, and in the next decade we’ll see marketing reach a whole new level of personalisation and relevance.

What do you think? Will wearables radically change how we market products and services – or will we do much of what we’re already doing?

Image Credits: Justin Brown, Joakim Formo

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