Customer Relationship Management

It was this year that I have started to look into the area of Marketing. If you told me this 5 years ago, I would have said “No way”. Yeah, things change ;o) The main challenge I see is to automatize the whole procedure. I am not a copywriter, therefore I am delegating this part. Someone else can find the words for me.

When you look in different areas longer and in more details, you mostly find out that there is a lot to learn if you want to become an expert in this area. A bit frustrating for people like me, who are interested in too many things.

The most exciting thing I found out so far is email marketing. Auto-responder and follow-up email sequences are so power full tools. You write these emails once and they can go to thousands of people in your target market. There are plenty of web services who offer this kind of automatization. BigResponse, iVertical or aweber ... all well known and respected tools. The prices are reasonable, taking into account that once the email sequences are set up it all runs by itself.

But then we came along InfusionSoft. It is a monster tool and I mean it. At first it looks quite overwhelming, but as soon as you set up one feature, you want to use all of them. You can run a normal business with it. It is a complete customer relationship management including shopping cart, email client, sales management and affiliate program and so on. For our friends of Outlook, you can integrate InfusionSoft here as well.
The main reason, why I like InfusionSoft is the simple feature of tagging. As simple as it sounds, none of the other email marketing tools provide this feature. And tagging, just labeling things, is so powerful. You want to send an email to everyone who is in Australia, older than 18 and interested in red wine. When you have this information on your customers, you can filter them according their tags and you go ... It reminds me of the settings for an Ad in facebook, similar process.

I have written about customer service before, so I think InfusionSoft is one of the companies that “walk the talk”. I know there is other information in the net as well, but I speak here just for me. The information material is just awesome: nice brochures, manuals, webinars and help desk. Just recently I used Twitter to contact them ... got my DM in 2 minutes. We had a couple of telephone conferences in which we could ask questions and with go2meeting we could share a screen, so we could see things live. It was a one-on-one conversation. Very helpful.

For who is InfusionSoft? Although this tool looks professional and huge, I can recommend it to small businesses. Just for the reason, you will grow. They even guarantee it. If you are in business to make profit and keep a good relationship with your customers, InfusionSoft is the tool to use.

However, InfusionSoft didn’t start perfect and keeps growing and learning as well. I have read in some forums the critics on their API. There is not much I can say, as I haven’t used it yet. And yes, obviously the customer service seems to be not perfect either. I had only good experiences so far. And yes, you can’t use InfusionSoft in Safari, what a pain ;o) The world is turning to Mac anyway, so no real reason to worry about, hehe.

As I said, if you are serious about your business, I recommend you InfusionSoft. The investment in money and time is absolutely worth it.