Yes, extremely. We get just as many leads through our website’s live chat feature as we do from phone calls. It also seems that the visitors who chat with us are further into the buying process for whatever reason.

Live chat offers a number of advantages over the phone for us:

• It’s really nice being able to think through what you are going to say. “Delete” just isn’t possible over the phone and being able to read through a response before hitting “submit” is sometimes priceless.
• You can still multitask. Talking on the phone requires more attention. Prospects on our live chat can ask questions as needed and we are free to work on other things in the meantime.
• We can offer after hours support without being at the office. The particular live chat client we use, Alive Chat, can send chat notifications to our mobile phones. In fact, I’ve had a number of chats on my iPhone. One of the major reasons we went with Alive Chat over its many competitors is that it has a great Mac app.
• The chat history is saved and becomes part of the clients file. We are collecting information that stay with the client throughout the buying process and after. Notes taken during phone calls on paper tend not to make it that far.
• Auto compilation of frequently asked questions. Our chat history gives us data on what information we need to better integrate or highlight on our website.

I recommend putting a live chat on your website to all our clients – especially if your site has a medium to low volume of visitors. You’ll connect with prospects you otherwise wouldn’t.

Related posts:

1. Discover Exactly What Matters to Your Prospects
2. Testing out Squidoo

After signing up with Infusionsoft, a combination CRM, shoppingcart, autoresponder, email marketing service, I did my (backward) due diligence by seeking out some reviews on the company. I was quite excited about the service and expected to hear great things. I was shocked to find how many negative reviews there were. Complaints ranged from it being a complete scam to it being so buggy it was useless and almost impossibly confusing to set up. There were whole forum threads with people complaining back and forth about how much Infusionsoft sucks.

After using it for about two months now, I’m more than a little perplexed by the negative reviews and commentary. I don’t know if that was a much earlier release or experiences with a much younger company but, overall, I’ve got great things to say about Infusionsoft so far.

I do have two small complaints. First, the salespeople will cross lines to get you to sign up. Case in point, I asked if Infusionsoft could allow someone to have access to my calendar and book appointments with me through our website (something I am currently using BookFresh for – also a great service). My salesperson said, “Yes, I’ve seen it do that.” It doesn’t do that. What he should have said was, “Yes, you can do this but you will have to pay a programmer to add the capability using the API.”

The second is them doing away with their (rather large) upfront fees two weeks after I signed up and then not doing anything for me but that goes for any technology – I’ve had similar “screwed by not waiting two weeks” experiences with purchasing laptops and phones too so it would silly to begrudge them that. The pricing is now $199 to $399 per month depending on the package you choose. They also offer a 15 day free trial.

Now on to the positive – what’s so great about Infusionsoft?

It rolls your CRM, shopping cart, and email marketing into one integrated system so that they can communicate with one another and automate many updates and tasks that would normally need to be done manually. Most of this is done using “tags” and “action sets.”

When someone enters our sales funnel by requesting the free report from our website, they can be tagged with anything – “Free report requester,” “Receiving follow-up sequence,” and “Prospect,” for instance. Then, an autoresponder will continuously follow up with them. Nothing crazy new so far – that’s what autoresponders do. I can also create an “action set” to create a task so that when someone signs up, I get an action item automatically assigned to me, “Email prospect to ask if they have any questions.” pop up after three days. Rather than having to run a report from my autoresponder to see who signed up three days ago, a to-do is automatically generated. That’s the kind of slick automation that defines Infusionsoft.

ANALYTICS USING TAGS:

If this prospect goes on to sign up with us I can then have Infusionsoft automatically remove the “Prospect” tag and apply the “Client” tag. By looking at the tags I have a way of knowing how each client came to be a client. Did they request the free report from our website? On which page of our website did they opt-in? After which autoresponder message did they sign up? These are questions I can answer *by client* using tags. It’s true that an analytics package could tell me the paths certain visitors took through our site but they are anonymous. With Infusionsoft I can look at our best group of clients and say, “The clients we want tend to do these things while they are on our website.” That’s pretty good to know.

TASK ASSIGNMENT:

I can have Infusionsoft create tasks based on any event. When a new client signs up for our service, there are a few things we need to take care of: we need to get their client area set up, we need to create and send an NDA, etc. These tasks are automatically created, assigned, and the person responsible is notified via email and then has to check off the task when it is complete. Very handy.

NO ADDITIONAL FEES:

Their shopping cart does not have any fees – monthly or per transaction. Of course, your paying dearly for the service itself but it is nice to do away with the separate fees we were paying.

AFFILIATE SOFTWARE:

To be honest, I have not tested their affiliate software yet so I cannot speak to it’s accuracy at tracking sales. However, assuming it is up to par, having this be part of the same system is quite convenient. More than I am interested in it for rolling out an affiliate program, it can also be used to encourage and track sales from referrals. A new client can automatically become an “affiliate” and be emailed a tracking link that they can use to get referrals.

“ALL-IN-ONE,” INTEGRATED SYSTEM:

By far the biggest benefit of using Infusionsoft is doing away with the many services I was using before. I had my autoresponder, shopping cart, CRM, and email client. None of them talked to each other so I was spending time forcing them to stay on the same page. A new client signing up meant that I had to manually remove them from our marketing follow-up so that they didn’t keep getting sales material. I also had to manually go into my CRM and change them from prospect to client. And so on. To keep these disparate systems communicating was something time-consuming and tedious enough that, admittedly, I just didn’t stay on top of it which is a shame. By having all of these rolled into one, Infusionsoft can do all the work and do it automatically. They even offer a very useful Outlook plug-in. Not being a Windows user, I only tested it. I hope they come out with something comparable for us Mac users soon because it is very cool.

EDUCATION AND COACHING:

One thing that Infusionsoft does really well is push you into actually using and implementing the features once you’ve signed up. It’s obvious that they want you to use their software and this is a strong indication they believe in it which I like. After you sign up, you’ll get plenty of ideas about how to use their software to increase your sales. They are big on affiliate programs, referral programs, lead collection, and consistent follow-up. You’ll get an education on each of these and tips on how to get Infusionsoft to automate the processes as much as possible.

CONCLUSION:

It’s really something you need to use before you can see how it would benefit you. I don’t know if the sales staff there is still offering over-the-phone demos but I’d recommend getting one if you aren’t thrilled with your current CRM, autoresponder, or shopping cart. I feel strongly enough about it that I’ll be encouraging any client that can afford it to sign up with them. Once you see what it is like, your mind will probably be swimming with ideas for things it could do for you. What I’ve found is that you’ve really got to invest a lot of time getting things set up and running at the beginning. Later on, you just won’t be as motivated and months will go by without fully implementing it.

If nothing else, I recommend that you download their free report, “The Edge of Success” and see if you agree with their philosophy and approach to marketing and increasing your sales.

*** Yes, I’m an affiliate of Infusionsoft and if you sign up after clicking on a link in this article, I will get a commission. For the record, I’m only involved with two affiliate programs – Infusionsoft and Basecamp – so it’s not like I will promote anything willy nilly. This is a product I believe in.

Related posts:

1. Discover Exactly What Matters to Your Prospects

For small business owners with a lot to do, is blogging worth the time spent? Can a company blog significantly contribute to the bottomline of a small business?

Let me say upfront that I have never had a successful blog or tried to use a blog to market a business. So, I can’t answer that question for you… yet.

But, I’m going to hypothesize that, yes, blogging can significantly contribute to the bottom line of most businesses. I have enough supporting evidence that I will be devoting a significant amount of my time to building a successful blog – and that’s a big risk considering the opportunity costs. One thing I do know, blogging is time-consuming!

The way I see it, a blog can exist:

1. to support itself and it’s contributers (draw and monetize enough traffic to make it worthwhile),
2. as a hobby (doesn’t matter whether it makes money),
3. to bring in more money for a business (somehow redirect traffic from the blog into the company sales funnel resulting in conversions).

I am going to pursue the latter. My intent is to create a terrific productivity blog targeted toward micro and small businesses as this is the target market for my company, LongerDays.com Virtual Assistance. My hope is that such a blog will widen the net of keywords and phrases that can potentially bring someone to our website, that once they here on the blog they will become curious about our company, and finally that they will end up signing up for our virtual assistance service.

I will be building our blog up from nothing and I’m going to do it right before your eyes. Every week I will post an update on our traffic stats, rss subscribers, post frequency, referred sales, and probably some lessons learned along the way.

Where we are now:

Traffic: Less than 100 hits a week

RSS: 6 subscribers

Post frequency: Less than 1 a week

Sales referred: 0

If you have suggestions on other key metrics that I should be paying attention to, or you would find interesting, please let me know.

It may end up never creating a penny for us and if that’s the case, I’ll go back to posting on it only when I’m bored. My understanding is that it can take quite a while to build traffic so I’m not going to throw in the towel unnecessarily early…

UPDATE: 03/10/09

Traffic: Less than 100 hits a week

RSS: 2 subscribers!

Post frequency: About two a week

Sales referred: 0

Notes: I made a serious error this week – I changed my Feedburner URL When I realized this would break all my subscribers feeds and tried to change it back I got an error message that the URL was taken! So, we lost the majority of our subscribers which is frustrating but in the grand scheme of things, 4 is not many.

UPDATE: 11/24/09

Traffic: ~ 150 visitors a week

RSS subscribers: 9

Post frequency: 1 every 3 weeks

Sales referred: 0

Inbound links: 3

Notes: My failure to follow through on my blogging plans is instructive in itself. Blogging is time-consuming and, in the midst of trying to run a company, it is probably the first thing that will get pushed till tomorrow when it is still an unproven and under-performing method of generating leads.

I have noticed that the blog posts that bring in the most traffic are ones that review other services. My refined strategy is to focus on review posts to build traffic and intersperse other content only occasionally.

I don’t foresee the frequency of posts increasing any time soon – other things are just higher priority at the moment but, by not giving up, I hope to see traffic continue to increase gradually over time. After the traffic increases to a certain point – perhaps 100 visitors a day – I can see trying to monetize the traffic.

At the moment, there is no lead capture mechanism on the blog and there are no sales messages for our company. At this point, I just don’t feel the traffic justifies the time expense to set these things up especially when I don’t feel that the traffic we are getting are people interested in the service we offer.

We have gotten a few of deep links out of it and so far I count those as the only major benefit of the blogging I’ve done so far.

Update: 02/20/10:

Traffic: ~ 90 visitors / week

RSS: 14

Post frequency: Once monthly

Sales referred: 0 to company. $200 of affiliate commissions.

Inbound links: 6

Notes: Our traffic was growing steadily and then dropped off suddenly for some reason… probably something I did wrong to the backend of WordPress or perhaps due to a poorly executed server move. It’s coming back, slowly.

Update: 07/13/10

Traffic: ~ 160 visitors / week

RSS: 15

Post frequency: Twice monthly

Sales referred: 0 (directly) to company though one client did mention reading our blog before signing up for our service.

Inbound links: 2

Notes: While our traffic and RSS numbers are kind of discouraging considering our blog is almost two years old now, these pictures show an upward trend in spite of infrequent posts:

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2. Test and Review of PRWeb Press Release (updated)

Every business owner wishes they could get inside the head of their prospect and learn exactly what specific benefits of their product or service their target market is truly interested in. 

Knowing this information, they could tailor their sales copy to center on those benefits and they could improve and build upon those aspects of their product and service creating value where it matters. 

Years ago, when I was still in high school, I hit upon a pretty neat, cheap, low-tech way to do this that I’ve hardly shared with anyone and I haven’t seen anyone really using which is surprising to me given how revealing it can be. It’s pretty simple…

You create 3-5 free reports, each centered around one of the major benefits of your product or service. You offer these free reports to visitors to your website at the same time and keep track of how many times each was downloaded. 

By looking at how often each report was downloaded, you get statistical information about just how interesting and important each of these benefits are to your prospects. 

For example, if you have an internet marketing company your 5 free reports could be:

“How to get more traffic to your website.”

“How to create a blog that generates money for your business.”

“How to increase your rankings on Google.”

“How to convert more visitors to paying customers.”

“How to get more people to opt-in to your list.”

After 30-60 days you can look at the data and extract a lot of useful information. For instance, let’s say your data looked like this:

“How to get more traffic to your website.” 
DOWNLOADS = 352 

“How to create a blog that generates money for your business.”
DOWNLOADS = 230 

“How to increase your rankings on Google.”
DOWNLOADS = 562 

“How to convert more visitors to paying customers.”
DOWNLOADS = 411 

“How to get more people to opt-in to your list.”
DOWNLOADS = 120 

Well, this is a very clear indication that you should be focusing your sales copy around Google rankings, conversion, and getting more traffic in general. You may also want to minimize how much you promote your ability to build an opt-in list as this seems much less important.

In addition, it means you should tailor your product to overdeliver on those promises as those are the ones that seem to be of interest. 

Now, obviously, some people are going to download more than one report but that doesn’t diminish the value of the data in the least. If someone downloads them all, they effectively negate their “vote” and if they download the majority but not all that means the report they didn’t download was of no interest to them at all. In other words, multiple votes are just as good as a single vote. 

What I would suggest is getting rid of the report with the fewest downloads and trying a different one to see how it fairs. 

Personally, I find this data to be of even more use than simply asking your target market “What interests you most about my service?” People generally don’t know what they want. Sure, they’ll make something up and it will sound good but to get truthful information from them, you’ve got to put them in a situation where they don’t know that you are trying to learn about what they want. And this does just that.

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