Infusionsoft is an email marketing platform for small businesses

10-second breakdown:

Infusionsoft is an e-mail marketing and sales platform with with marketing automation features, customer lifecycle, lead capture features and also e-commerce tools. Recommended for smaller companies looking for an all-in-one email marketing hub.

Infusionsoft is used in small (0-50 employees) and medium companies (51-1,000 employees).

The good:

The campaign builder is easy to learn and use. The tool also has a reliable safety net so that you can edit drafts without being afraid that one wrong click might activate the campaign before it’s perfected.

The list segmentation feature is also very user friendly and can easily be customized.

The bad:

The software is a bit pricy, compared to other similar tools. Customer service is also a problem with this particular software solution.

The reporting function is not as advanced as expected, both website analytics and email analytics.

How it works:

As a marketing automation tool, Infusionsoft helps you build personalized email marketing campaigns but also track your website’s activity and customer acquisition processes. The software allows you to create custom email flows, using action triggers or user profile information, in a granular approach.

You can use Infusionsoft to track your website activity and discover all the steps your visitors are taking before they make an actual purchase. If you want to know where your leads are coming from, you can automatically assign a lead source to each website visitor. The software also enables you to identify individual browsing trends using visitor system information.

Create smart landing pages and custom forms to convert visitors into leads. InfusionSoft helps you capture user data, like name and email address, so you can connect with the people who visit your website with marketing materials later. They’re really easy to design, you can even customize them with your company’s branding and test them within the system.

The platform can be used together with GroSocial, a separate social media marketing tool by Infusionsoft. With GroSocial you can use customizable templates to run Facebook promotions and contests but you can also monitor and manage other social media networks. By linking the two, you can track how your fans and followers convert into leads and customers. (You can see more social media management tools here.)

For e-commerce businesses, email is one of the most powerful marketing strategies driving sales. Having the right software to reach potential customers and drive conversions is crucial. With Infusionsoft, you can create entire follow-up marketing campaigns, triggered by a single action, profile, or contact. You can design your own template or use one of the existing ones.

The software collects and analyzes data on every email you send, automatically.  You can see the number of emails that get delivered, opened, clicked or skipped by looking at your email statistics and broadcast. You can see campaign results in real-time and make corrections.

Infusionsoft helps streamline lead nurturing by automating lead capture and follow-up. You can trigger personalized communications based on email sends, opens, clicks, form submissions, and payment history, so you know messages will be timely and relevant to customers’ needs.

With the CRM function, you can collect data about your leads and organize them to improve your sales process. (More CRM software here.)

Existing contacts can be imported. Sort all your contacts using segmented lists based on demographics, lead score, and behaviors like email clicks, purchases, and payment history. This way you can build custom email campaigns for each segment of your audience, at different moments of their buying journey.

All leads are automatically assigned with a sales-readiness score based on behaviors, demographics and interactions. Automatic lead scoring is an objective way of assessing a prospect’s level of interest based on how engaged they are with your marketing, enabling you to focus on the people most likely to make a purchase.

Once enabled, the scoring process runs constantly in the background. When a tag is applied or removed, the score is updated in real time, adding and subtracting points from contact records based on the criteria you’ve defined. You can also choose to adjust the settings in your lead scoring process, to fit your needs.

Another useful sales management feature enables you to set up actions that trigger when a sales representative updates an opportunity record, giving you the green light to create strategic, automated follow-up sequences that are specific to the prospect’s stage of the buying cycle.

To keep your sales processes organized, you can use the software’s calendar and tasks management to manage appointments, create to-do lists, set reminders for tasks and streamline your workflows.

The Infusionsoft sidebar for Gmail and Outlook helps you be more efficient, offering immediate access to contact information, tags and appointment history, and enabling you add notes and trigger follow-up activity.

Last but not least, with Infusionsoft’s e-commerce tools, you can use customizable templates to sell your products, services or subscriptions online. You can use the tool’s storefront or build your own. If you have a holiday offer you’d like to send out for example, you can use order forms to create a unique check-out link and send your special offer only to specific groups on your list, with separate pricing and messaging.

As an email marketing and CRM platform, the software has a lot of potential but there are still many things to improve.

The solution is a bit complicated to learn and implement at first, but it ultimately depends on your business needs.

For complete rankings of all email marketing tools, go here.

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