Infusionsoft Review

Infusing an edge with customers – with Infusionsoft CRM

Tools of technology today give the much needed competitive edge to companies – large, medium as well as small. Technology has brought with it tools such as ERP, Sales Force Automation and CRM that has added great advantage and manageability to businesses. Until some time back these applications remained at the behest of large businesses whose scale as well as purchasing ability supported implementation of these applications.

However, today, there are customized products that bring tools like CRM to the utility of even very small businesses. With service delivery models like SaaS (software as a service), smaller firms can now pay as per their usage and scale up without incurring steep implementation or licensing fees.

In this CRM review we have a look at InfusionSoft, a direct marketing and CRM tool that promises a difference in customer acquisition and retention for small and medium businesses, with costs well within reach of most small business budgets.

About InfusionSoft

InfusionSoft offers what it claims to be a complete package for creating direct marketing and email campaigns, acquiring leads, and managing them as converted customers over many sales cycles.

Broadly speaking the tools offered by InfusionSoft allow you to:

• Conduct direct marketing (primarily email) campaigns to a list of subscribed users or leads
• Collate and respond to inquiries in a timely manner
• Maintain a customer interaction log and database for each lead, to aid future sales and service.

The tool brings together a combination of a potent list management tool, a lead management system, and a sales force automation application.

Getting started with InfusionSoft

All the features of InfusionSoft are available on a pay-as-per-use model on a monthly billing system. The monthly tariff varies from USD 199 a month for the Basic Plan to USD 499 per month for the Pro account. There are slabs in between the two plans that are priced according the number of leads to be managed and the number of users.

There is also a free demo available with all the functions of the service, for a period of 15 days for a single user, with 250 emails and 500 contacts. Upon signing up for the service, you can immediately start with campaigns and managing customer interaction, without any implementation time required. There is no software to be installed at the customer premises, and the service is always live.

The first impression
We reviewed each of the modules within InfusionSoft through a demo account. The moment we login we see a customizable dashboard in which various modules can be arranged with simple drag and drop functionality. This is helpful since a user may want to access different modules based on the priority of the activity that he is doing at that point in time.

There is also a quick links menu that is normally hidden, and can be called by hovering mouse over the arrow icon located on the left of the screen. The quick links menu is very intuitively designed for easy access to some of the most likely functions the user would need from the home page.

The quick links tab has four prominent buttons :

Email – allows you to manage your own mailbox that contains mails exchanged between customers and you. The interface of the mailbox very closely resembles Microsoft Outlook or any other popular mail client, which makes it very convenient for you to manage and track emails
Calendar – The InfusionSoft calendar feature is also very easy to use, with an interface similar to the popular e-calendars like the one in Microsoft Outlook. Appointments can be entered at a click and can be tracked and mapped to include all concerned representatives and customers.
Files – Sales and customer fulfillment involves standard documentation like Sales Brochures, Application Forms, Purchase order formats, and Presentations. A standard and approved set of these documents can be made centrally for all company representatives and even affiliates through the files module. The interface allows smooth and easy upload and updation of files.
“Tasks” list – One of the most important features of InfusionSoft is the interactive and multiuser Tasks list. On clicking “Tasks” you can see all the tasks that are self-assigned or tagged to you by some other user. You may add tasks through the “Add Task” button that opens up a form similar to the one shown below:

Further functionalities of InfusionSoft are neatly organized and made available through tabs located on the top menu. Let’s have a look at these –

“People” Tab
The People tab helps you enter details of existing customers as well as prospects. This includes all contact information and details of recent interaction with the client.

Details of People can be entered primarily through a form which is shown below:

The form has two options a detailed option named “Standard Add-New-Person Form” and a “Quick Add-New-Person Form”. The latter option is designed for quick entry of essential details of a customer.

The People tab also has an option to directly import a large database of investors through a single click. The Import option allows a variety of popularly used CRM databases, including Microsoft Outlook format.
Send a broadcast
One of the most potent features of InfusionSoft is being able to send instant communication to either a selected group or the complete database of your clients.

As seen in the screenshot above, InfusionSoft allows you to initiate customer campaigns in a matter of clicks. Apart from email campaigns, the application also allows you to create personalized letters through conventional mail, and even fax notes. The responses to these can be tracked, and the effectiveness of each campaign can be gauged easily.

As a precursor to CRM and sales management, the tool allows you to manage prospect lists and convert them to loyal customers through a well planned campaign. Through this module prospective customers can be made aware of your products and service and inquiries may be solicited.

Managing Affiliates
Beyond managing sales from your own channel, we found a facility in InfusionSoft that helps you track sales generated by an affiliate. New affiliates can be added to the system through the add affiliate function that opens a form with basic details asked, as shown in the screenshot below:

Managing channel sales apart from direct sales, is a great feature given the reality that sales today happens through various intermediaries, whose performance needs to be monitored on a regular basis.

Tracking opportunities
The sales cycle begins with tracking of opportunities from various media. Opportunities may arise because of references, request for proposals, or even market tip-offs. The details of these can form as great pre-sales market intelligence, and can be entered into the system through a simple form (screenshot below)

Order tracking and fulfillment
We found the facility to track Orders as well as Subscriptions, within the system, quite interesting. An order may pertain to a one time sale and invoicing, whereas a subscription can apply to recurring and periodic delivery and billing.

The system provides a facility to simplify recurring billing and tracking for subscriptions. The status of subscription and delivery, which is mapped to each customer contact, can be also easily accessed by front end customer care, or client servicing team, to help address client inquiries.

Reporting and analytics:
The secret of successful sales campaign today is analytics, which is powered by updated business reports that give insights into the state of
activities happening live in the organization. Within InfusionSoft we found a wide array of reports organized across Sales, Marketing, Order fulfillment, Affiliate tracking and Administration.

For the sales function, management can have an idea of the sales pipeline where number of clients and opportunities at every stage of sales can be visualized. For the marketing team, effectiveness of campaigns and response reports can be easily generated and corrective action toward future campaigns can be done.

Logistics team can access order fulfillment reports to trace the efficiency of the supply chain and improve on their delivery. There is a benefit for virtually every function that we see in the reports. Best is that you can give selective access to authorized members of the concerned functions.

Conclusion: With benefits of SaaS and pay per use model, InfusionSoft CRM brings along a great benefit for small and medium organizations. The size of permissible databases in each of the packages too indicate that it is well suited for small and medium scale sales activities. The time to go live for a small company is virtually zero, and the system can go live the moment a client subscribes and gets his
user access.

With its powerful combined CRM, email campaign management, affiliate management and order tracking capabilities, we feel there is tremendous value InfusionSoft can add to the overall sales and marketing functions of an organization.