Increase your Marketing Reach with SMS for Infusionsoft

Infusionsoft has revolutionised the way we interact with our customers. Building marketing campaigns and nurturing funnels that interact and engage your customers and prospects has never been easier to implement and roll out.

The automation within Infusionsoft allows you to better target your prospects and to stay “front of mind” with your existing customers with little effort. As an Infusionsoft user, you will be familiar with all the different ways in which you can use the Campaign features in the Infusionsoft platform.

Infusionsoft has a sophisticated automation system and all you to better target your prospects to stay “front of mind” with little effort. On top of this, it can also help you to follow your customers and prospects through your sales funnel to identify strengths, weaknesses and opportunities.

Case Study

directSMS Uses SMS To Improve Infusionsoft Campaigns

The team at directSMS uses Infusionsoft extensively especially for online signups. The following case studies show how we were able to integrate SMS messaging into our existing campaigns to achieve some sizable improvements.

1. The First Campaign

We developed a campaign around our free trial offer – the goals were:

1. Help automate and manage the tasks the directSMS team need to perform when new leads signup for our 30-day free trial.
2. Systemise the “on boarding” process. This is the process of educating new clients or prospective clients in what our platform can do, and how to get the most benefit.
3. Ultimately, convert a higher percentage of these leads into paying customers.

The campaign kicks off when a lead registers for a new trial account by completing the registration form. The campaign uses the information entered into the form in order to lead the prospect through a number of email nurture sequences which are designed around the major uses of the directSMS platform.

Leads who sign up to use directSMS for marketing would receive a number of helpful emails about the use of SMS in a marketing context. Including solid “how to” articles on how to use the directSMS platform to send or receive bulk messaging and so on.

Leads who sign up to use directSMS for appointment reminders receive emails with detailed case studies on how other clients are using directSMS in a similar way. Followed up with a number of step-by-step implementation plans for appointment reminders.

And so on…following one of the cardinal rules of marketing – the content resonates with our audience to see results.

These email sequences are intertwined with call tasks where our sales and customer service teams are asked by Infusionsoft to personally engage with our leads in order to provide help or answer questions proactively. The main aim here is to not leave potential new clients to simply fend for themselves.

Once this new campaign was implemented in 2013, our conversion rate jumped from an average of 14-15% to a record 21%! It took months of testing the different content being sent and ultimately we were seeing a very healthy 1 in 5 conversion rate.

But in late 2014, we started seeing a steady decline in our email open rates. We were finding our sales and customer service teams were having to work extra hard to point leads at information that was already emailed to them automatically through the automation…people receive 100’s of emails each day and it’s very easy for your emails to get lost in this noise. Even when it is full of good targeted content.

This is when we decided to start using SMS.

By incorporating SMS at strategic points within this campaign, we are able to draw the prospects attention to the more valuable pieces of content we were sending.

The campaign also uses SMS to showcase what the directSMS platform can do for the client using automated demo messages. We thought, what good are we as an SMS services company if we could not use SMS to showcase our own services!

Further tweaking of this formula sees us currently converting 29% of new leads into paying customers.

An improvement of around 38% using the same amount of resources as before.

2. The “Stale Customer” Campaign

A sizable portion of directSMS’ customer base are on pre-paid accounts. These are pay as you go accounts where clients purchase “SMS Credits” up front to send SMS.

Some of these clients use directSMS for big marketing campaigns or sporadic applications and so their usage is not always predictable. These accounts often become unused or, stale. They are then transitioned to a “lost” phase and the customer is unlikely to come back.

Why was this happening?

1. The person who set up the account has left the organisation. Incoming staff did not know there was an account.
2. The project that this account was used for has been cancelled.
3. The organisation has sourced a new CRM system that may already be SMS-enabled

There was not a lot we can do about projects being cancelled or other systems being purchased. But there was plenty we could do about ensuring accounts did not die when the person behind them left an organisation.

And so, the main aims of this campaign are:

1. Reduce customer leakage on pre-paid accounts and ultimately keep hard won clients around.
2. By increasing average customer lifetime, we will increase the average customer lifetime value.
3. Maintain contact with customers and increase customer referrals

The “Stale Customer Campaign” was created.

Firstly, we built the campaign including automated emails and call tasks for the customer service team. We then set up Infusionsoft to trigger this sequence to run when an account had not been used in a set amount of time.

After a number of months of operation, we added SMS to the campaign to help the customer service team make appointments to catch up with these stale clients.

With the addition of SMS, we were able to reduce the amount of time our team was playing phone tag with clients by 14%.

The Step By Step Guide…

DON’T ALREADY HAVE DIRECT SMS? Sign up for a free trial NOW. Once you have an account, you will need to contact the support team in order to enable API access on your account. Once this is done, you are ready to start the more exciting (and profitable) work.

This simple step-by-step procedure will walk you through how to SMS enable your Infusionsoft marketing campaign.

1. Add An “SMS Sequence”

Log into your Infusionsoft account and go to the main navigation menu and select “Campaign Builder” under Marketing.

From here, select the campaign you wish to SMS enable or create a new campaign.

Step 1 – Campaign Builder

Campaigns in Infusionsoft are broken into sequences. Each sequence is then comprised of one or more components. Each component performs a specific task. You need to have either created a new sequence or edit a sequence in order to be able to send an SMS message during the execution of the campaign.

To create a new sequence, go to the Sequence section in the component widget and drag a new sequence on the campaign map. Then double click the sequence to add components within it.

2. Add Components (Steps)

Once you are inside the Sequence, go to the component widget and go to the process section and drag a Send HTTP Post component to the sequence map.

3. Add Parameters

Double click the Send HTTP Post component. From here we will be making an API call that will allow you to send an SMS from your Infusionsoft campaign. But first, let’s remove the name value pair fields that maybe there by default.

Click on the minus sign button (-) to remove the default name/value pair “~Contact.Id~”.

Enter the URL to the new Infusionsoft plugin into the POST URL field. The URL is:

http://my.directSMS.com.au/plugins/infusionsoft.php

The Infusionsoft plugin will clean up the request and then push the posted information to the send_message operation of the directSMS’ HTTP API.

username – Your directSMS account username. This is the same one you use to log onto the directSMS customer portal

password – Your directSMS account password.

type – Here you can set the value to “1-way” or “2-way“.

In this example, we are sending a 1-way SMS and changing the sender to MyCompany. This means recipients will not be able to reply back to the message. If you want to enable replies, set this value to 2-way.

senderid – The sender of the message.

On 1-way messages, you can replace the sending phone number with your own mobile phone, a dedicated inbound number or your brand name. In the above example, recipients will receive an SMS from “MyCompany”, blocking the recipients from replying back.

to – The phone number to send the message to.

For best results, it’s best to store all phone numbers in international format. E.g. 61411222333 or +61411222333. By default, Infusionsoft assumes all numbers are US local numbers. Our Infusionsoft plugin will do its best to try and cleanup any numbers thrown at it, but it’s best to start with clean information.

message – The message text.

You can merge contact and other Infusionsoft data into each message to personalise each message making sure “Dear valued customer” is never used again. Ever.

In this example, we’re sending a message that says “Hi Jane, this is a test SMS from Infusionsoft“.

max_segments – This will allow the directSMS platform to break any messages that exceed 160 characters into multiple SMS segments.

The destination phone will then link all segments and display the complete message to the user. In the above example, we are sending a maximum of 2 SMS. So if any message is longer than 2 SMS, it will be truncated at 2 SMS. This is really handy when we are merging lots of fields into your outgoing SMS.

debug – This is one of the most useful features the directSMS plugin offers.

If you include the debug flag in your list of parameters, the directSMS system will email the user (identified by the username parameter) whenever a failure is encountered. This can cut down development and configuration time dramatically.

For more information about the various options available, please see the Sending an SMS section of thedirectSMS HTTP API reference which will give you a comprehensive breakdown of all available functions.

Don’t forget to change the toggle switch at the top right from “Draft” to “Ready” to activate the sequence.

4. Remember to Test

You can now send a test message to see if this works. Go to the Send Test pull-down menu and select your user. This will send you a sample SMS to your phone if your contact details are set correctly.

Please note: this requires you to have your mobile phone number saved in your user profile under the Phone1 field.

5. Enable The SMS Sequence (If Needed)

If the sequence map toggle switch is set to “Draft”, then toggle it to “Ready”. If you don’t have a line joining the Start component (or the previous component to the Send HTTP Post component), then draw a line to this component. Once done, click on the “Back to Campaign” button.

6. Publish And Go

Finally, click the “Publish” button at the top right to publish the campaign changes you have made. Your campaign is now SMS enabled. Easy!