Best Practices for a Successful Launch With Infusionsoft Campaign Builder

Review these best practices before launching your campaign. They will help you ensure a successful launch and serve as a guide or checklist to use when building campaigns using the Infusionsoft Campaign Builder.

1. We know that goals can start and stop a campaign sequence. But in order for the start or stop trigger to work successfully, it has to be applied to the contact record AFTER the campaign has been published.
2. The 5 most popular ways to get someone into your campaigns are:
   1. Have them complete an online web form
   2. A staff member completes an Internal form
   3. An online order form is submitted
   4. Manually or automatically apply a tag or note template to the record of an existing contact or to a list of contacts
   5. Manually add an individual contact or a list of contacts directly to a campaign sequence via the action drop down menu.
3. A goal cannot be directly connected to another goal. When you need sequential goals, place an empty sequence between 2 goals and set the sequence to Ready. Technically, you don’t need to do this, but a lot of people like to see everything connected and having the empty sequence between the two goals is a way to achieve that.
4. Remember that you can use several different types of timers in your campaign sequences, but they don’t play nicely with each other, so you cannot have two different types of timers in the same connected string. Here’s a description of the timers and when to use them:
   1. Start timer – should be placed at the beginning of any sequence string.
   2. Delay timer – used to set a delay using months/weeks/days/hours/minutes or set the delay to a specific day of the week or day of the month
   3. Date timer – used set the delay a specific date.
   4. Field timer – sets the delay to a specified number of days before or after the date in a custom field in the contact record.
5. Use the Email Confirmation sequence at every opportunity, but especially right after someone signs up for a free offer. It’s a best practice to have people confirm their request and double opt-in to your email list. When they do this, you’ll see their email status changed from Unconfirmed to Confirmed. Double opted in (or Confirmed) email addresses are emailed to on a separate and more trusted server than the Single opted in (also called Unconfirmed) email addresses. So take every opportunity to ask people to double opt-in. If they are already double opted in, the campaign sequence will not send them the email. So you don’t have to worry about people getting the email who shouldn’t.
6. Remember to set up your email signature and the signature of each user your campaign emails might be sent from. This allows you to use the signature snippet (which acts like a merge field) in the email builder and set it to the contact’s owner. The reason this is a best practice is that it allows you to update hundreds of email templates in the future by just updating one email signature.
7. Also remember to set up your Branding Center before adding any campaign emails or sending your first email broadcast. You can also add branding for Thank You Pages, Web Forms, and your Email Confirmation Email. Taking the time to set these up once will save you hundreds of hours over the lifetime of your application. It’s a huge time saver.

Note: This list is a work in progress and will be added to periodically in future blog posts. Be sure to subscribe to blog posts by email to receive regular updates. If you have a best practice you’d like to share, I’d love to hear from you! Submit your suggestions in the comments form below.

READY… SET… BUILD!

This is the fun part! Need a little help getting started? And wish there was a cool infographic to guide you? POOF… you can request the cool infographic here. It’s called How To Start Your Infusionsoft Campaign.

Also, be sure to check out 3 Steps To Starting Your Infusionsoft Campaign, where you’ll find explanations of the different types of icons used in the campaign builder. Begin building out your campaign infrastructure by dragging over icons from the toolbox on the right.

Here are some additional tips to remember. Most of them bear repeating, so you may have seem them before.

1. When needing to use two different types of timers in the same sequence, you can do so as long as you keep them in separate lanes and don’t try to connect them.
2. When adding additional lanes to campaign sequences, always start with a Start timer. Otherwise, your processes won’t ever start.
3. Remember that only the first goal in a campaign can be an entry point into the campaign. When using multiple goals in your campaign, you might want a subordinate goal to have the option of being an entry point. When this is so, remember to set the goal type to Add Any Contacts (who meet the goal) to the campaign. This is done by clicking on the little icon located at the bottom left of the goal.
4. All of your sequences, emails, process, etc., need to be named so they can be easily identified when viewed in a list.
5. New tags can be created on the fly in the campaign builder. But unfortunately, they can’t be categorized there. Remember to go to CRM > Settings > Tags and add a category to any newly created tags. 
6. Campaign Merge Fields allow you to update all the emails in your campaign automatically by making the update in just one place. An example of how this is helpful: Let’s say the emails in your campaign reference an event date and you need to update that date in the emails each month. Using an Event Date merge field in the emails allows you to change the date once to update the entire campaign. Be sure to publish to make your changes effective.
7. Remember to publish your campaign before applying the trigger tags to contact records. Published campaigns can only be triggered by a tag if the tag is applied in the future after the campaign is published and not before.
8. When adding web form code to your website, you’ll continue to see the starter form until you publish your campaign. After publishing¸ you should be able to see your custom-styled web form on our website.

TIME FOR TESTING

Before testing, you will need to Publish your campaign. But before publishing you’ll want to review everything to make sure each piece has been marked Ready.

Use these visual indicators when assessing readiness. They’re designed to help you quickly, at a glance, determine which parts of your campaigns and campaigns sequences are still in draft mode or are completed and ready to be published.

A BLACK goal, sequence, timer or process means that that particular item is still in Draft mode. Once it has been completed, change it from Draft to Ready and you’ll notice the color of the item change from BLACK to a LIGHT GREEN STRIPE.

LIGHT GREEN STRIPED items mean they have been marked Ready but have not been published.

Published campaign always open in Performance View. Additional edit can be made by using the Edit tab. Published items, when viewed from the Edit tab, appear DARK GREEN.

All DARK GREEN items have been marked Ready AND have been Published. This means they are live and operational and ready for you to test your campaign.
Here are several ways to test.

1. Minimal Testing:

This is done by testing each web form, landing page, and email template from within the campaign. This type of testing allows you to see what the contact will see and receive what the contact will receive if they take certain actions. If you’re been setting up your own campaigns for a while and feel comfortable with how everything works, minimal testing may be all you need to do ensure a successful campaign.

2. Full Process Experience Testing:

By creating a contact record for yourself and adding yourself to the campaign, can test all of your goals, communications and processes to ensure they are working as expected. You will be able to see your campaign progress via the Campaigns tab in your contact record, as well as via the Performance tab in the actual campaign.

This type of testing is thorough and will weed out anything that’s not working as you expect it to. Many of my clients will add themselves to a campaign a few days to a week before they launch the campaign just so they can stay ahead of everyone else in case some part of the process goes wrong.  With enough of a gap, there’s time to open the campaign and apply a patch before it affects your real contacts.

3. Full Process Testing Accelerated:

Sometimes you just want to add yourself to the campaign and accelerate the process instead of waiting out all of the timers. This can be done from the Campaigns tab in your contact record by going to the Upcoming Campaign Items section and clicking the buttons next to the next scheduled processes.

Additional Testing Reminders:

1. Choose at least one testing method above.
2. Send yourself a test of each email in the campaign and test all of the links in each email.,
3. Submit all web forms, landing page forms, and order forms to ensure they’re working properly.
4. Make sure all tags, notes, tasks and other processes are happening has they should.
5. Confirm that you are (or your designee is) receiving the notification emails as expected.

Launching your campaign and measuring success are topics for another article coming soon.

Not sure how to start your Infusionsoft Campaign?  Here’s a free infographic that will help you get started the right way: How To Start Your Infusionsoft Campaign

Also, be sure to check out my article on 3 Steps To Starting Your Infusionsoft Campaign, as an additional free resource.

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Vania Clark-Butler is an Infusionsoft Certified Consultant (ICC) and self-proclaimed power user since 2005. Process oriented, she shares Infusionsoft best practices to help you get set up the right way to optimize your software. For fun, she enjoys cooking, kundalini yoga, business podcasts, and spending time outdoors with her husband and their two exuberant boxers exploring the Arizona desert. - See more at: http://www.automatingsuccess.com.

Visit www.automatingsuccess.com/consultation to request a free 30-minute consultation with Vania to discuss your Infusionsoft strategy.

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