Infusionsoft Email Marketing – Keeping It Clean
We talk a lot in the marketing world about growing your audience and building your list using Infusionsoft Email Marketing.
BUT, building your list has a dark side. Some contacts on your list simply won’t engage with your stuff. Some will opt-in using invalid or throw-away contact information, to try to grab your freebies without receiving your marketing. So if you are serious about using Infusionsoft email marketing is probably one of the first things you will want to focus on.
Some contacts can also be spam traps from the different ISP’s (Internet Service Providers). ISP’s like Yahoo! will maintain ‘dead’ email addresses, just to see if you’re still emailing them.
Why is this a problem?
It’s important you delete unengaged contacts because sending to these addresses tarnishes your sender reputation.
If you are using Infusionsoft Email Marketing Deliverability is your responsibility, too
When I talk to people about Infusionsoft, many people say “oh, but Infusionsoft has poor deliverability.”
Infusionsoft Email Marketing
Quite simply, it isn’t true.
Infusionsoft has excellent deliverability. Infusionsoft will deliver your email to the recipient’s server almost 100% of the time. What prevents your email from hitting your recipient’s inbox after that is your sender reputation.
Most modern email clients such as Gmail or Outlook now monitor which emails you engage with. If you send you an email and your recipient:
- May Open the email
- Click on links within the email
- Or hit “Reply”
This sends a message to Gmail or Outlook that your messages are important. Your emails are then more likely to reach the inbox, and less likely to appear under the Gmail ‘Promotions’ tab.
What’s Your Sender Reputation?
Your sender reputation isn’t just built up with individual contacts; your reputation as a whole is taken into consideration. Which is why unengaged contacts should be purged from your list.
Yes, growing your email list is important. But purging your list is just as important too. Infusionsoft Email Marketing has huge advantages over other CRM and email platforms – namely…..it’s amazing automation capabilities.
Besides, a bigger list means a bigger bill from Infusionsoft. Every time you add an additional 5,000 contacts to your database, Infusionsoft send you a bigger monthly invoice. You should only be happy to pay more if the additional contacts are regularly engaging with your marketing.
So, how can you measure engagement?
Infusionsoft has a contact status called ‘Unengaged Marketable’. A contact is marked as ‘Unengaged Marketable’ when they haven’t opened any of your emails in the last four months.
To see a report of ‘Unengaged Marketable’ contacts, run the Email Status Search report (in Marketing > Reports), and set Unengaged Marketable as the search criteria.
The problem with cleaning your list this way is it isn’t automatic. You have to manually run the report, and decide what to do with the contacts. At scale, this often isn’t practical.
The Automated Alternative…
An automated alternative is to use My Fusion Helper’s Engagement Tracker campaign. The Engagement Tracker works by running an API call and applying various tags depending on a contact’s engagement status.
The Best Part?
This engagement tracker runs automatically in the background. It’s a true ‘set and forget’ solution.
Of course, you still need to delete contacts who never engage with you, but the process of identifying those contacts runs seamlessly in the background.
Troy Broussard of My Fusion Helper has an overview video of the campaign at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvBit0h6ioM. In addition to Troy’s video, this is what you need to know:
Let’s Get Started…
1. Once the Engagement Tracker campaign has been imported into your app (email support@damianqualter.com to arrange this), you need to apply the tag ‘STOP Engagement Tracker’ when a contact unsubscribes. This removes opted out contacts from the campaign.
In Infusionsoft, go to Marketing > Settings, and select ‘Email Defaults’ from the left-hand menu. Select the ‘Actions’ button next to ‘When Somebody Opts Out…’
Create an action to apply the tag STOP Engagement Tracker, and click on save.
The action should now appear under the action set info:
- Configure your My Fusion Helper. In your My Fusion Helper account, select the green button to ‘Create New Helper’. Select ‘Email engagement triggers’ as the helper type, and name the helper ‘Engagement trigger.
After you’ve done this, select the email field you use to store a contact’s email address (normally this should be ‘Email’). Select ‘no’ to not extend the triggers past 90 days.
Now, copy the URL of your helper by clicking the blue ‘copy’ button.
- Back in Infusionsoft, paste the helper URL into the engagement trigger. The HTTP posts you’ll need to edit are in the ‘Activate Engagement Triggers’ sequence and the ‘Error Trap’ sequence (three in total).
Nearly Done…
Next….Set both the HTTP posts and sequences to active.
- Set the ‘Marketing List’ tag goal as the tag you apply when new contacts enter your marketing funnel. Go ahead and publish your campaign.
- Finally, apply the tag ‘LOOP Engagement Tracker’ to all existing contacts in your database.
- To do this, go to CRM > Contacts. Click ‘search’ without specifying any criteria. Then check the box to select all contacts, and go to actions > apply the tag.
IMPORTANT:
If you have more than 9,000 contacts in your database, you’ll need to complete this step in blocks of 9,000.
Troy Broussard has an article explaining how to do this at http://myfusionhelper.com/how-to-split-up-a-large-list/.
And that’s it! You can then use your Engagement Tracker campaign to trigger tasks, sequences and Facebook ads based on a contact’s engagement status.
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