I run into people on a daily basis who have been sucked into the trap of believing they need a whole bunch of miscellaneous tools to make their online business work. They’re paying hundreds in extra monthly service fees to keep all these things running, and it’s just not necessary.
Here are just a few things you probably don’t need to be paying for if you have Infusionsoft:
This is probably the most common. Let’s face it. Infusionsoft forms are ugly out of the box. And although the new landing page builder is responsive, it’s not amazing.
But, for $50-$100, you can get someone of Fiverr.com to build a custom page template in your WordPress theme that does exactly what you want and styles your Infusionsoft web forms to look GREAT!
If you build the CSS styles into your theme, you can copy the unstyled form code from Infusionsoft, pop it into your website, and have great looking forms in seconds. I wrote a post on how to get your web forms looking good here.
There’s a nasty rumor going on out there that the Infusionsoft shopping cart is no good. And it’s just not true. Let me set the record straight….
If you’re running an e-commerce site with a large catalog of products, the Infusionsoft e-commerce solution may not be for you. Why? Because there’s not an easy way to manage products in bulk and the storefront may be somewhat limited in what you can do and how you can display products.
But, if you’re a business that sells a few things, either through a shopping cart or order forms, Infusionsoft is a GREAT solution. Here are the benefits:
- Affiliate tracking works out of the box
- Promo codes, discounts, and free trials work out of the box
- In-cart upsells work out of the box
- One-click upsells post-purchase work easily with a tool like Fix Your Funnel
- You don’t have to pay any extra for another solution, for integration software, or for a consultant to help you put it together.
When you use a 3rd party shopping cart, you may lose some of the above functionality only to gain little features that aren’t as important. Make sure you look at the options well and don’t take others’ words as gospel when they say the Infusionsoft cart is no good.
Also, some of the opinions about the Infusionsoft cart are likely tied to the legacy shopping cart. The old cart was much harder to style and make look good. Now, the cart is fully styleable. Pay someone a few bucks on Fiverr to style it the way you want, make it look like your website, and make it responsive. That one-time cost will be cheaper than paying monthly for the other services you’ll need.
I often see people get frustrated with deliverability issues. Look, I get it. You want your emails to end up in the inbox. I’m with you 100%.
But, what you may not realize, is that every other email service provider is fighting the same battle Infusionsoft is fighting. I’ve run head-to-head split tests and found Infusionsoft to be no better or no worse than services like Aweber, iContact, and MailChimp at getting into the inbox.
Nowadays it’s very easy and cheap to start up a new email marketing service. And those people prey on frustrated senders who are using other systems: “Emails not getting to the inbox? We can help!” Often they can tout better deliverability because they haven’t really been tested. Once they start sending high volume, they’re likely to be the same as all the rest.
We recently helped a client integrate another email marketing service with Infusionsoft, against my advice, only for the client to realize that the service couldn’t quite handle what he was trying to do. So, weeks later, and thousands of dollars later, he relented and went back to Infusionsoft. Don’t cause yourself the same pain.
Again, misunderstandings about Infusionsoft’s billing abilities has led some people to engage other services. Almost always this is a mistake. Infusionsoft’s system natively works smoothly with all your campaigns. Don’t get suckered into believing that another service will solve your problems. Find an Infusionsoft consultant that can help you navigate all of this correctly.
The only time it makes sense to me to use a 3rd party billing service is if you’re needing to bundle subscription payments. A service like Zuora is better equipped for that.
Tracking your lead sources is one of the most important things you can be using Infusionsoft for. You need to know how your marketing and advertising expenses are performing over the long-term. Infusionsoft can tell you that. But not out of the box.
There are paid services out there that help you track lead sources better. But 90% or more of small businesses don’t need the extra data or analysis they come with. They need basic lead source tracking.
You can get that for free with our ROI Tracker tool.
Are you familiar with Snap by Infusionsoft? It’s a great app for your smartphone that allows you to take a picture of a business card and have it automatically transcribed and passed into Infusionsoft.
But here’s the GREAT thing about Snap: The photo gets sent to real people who manually transcribe it. That means you don’t have to be restricted to business cards. I often “snap” photos of pieces of paper where I’ve written down a person’s name and contact info, order forms, things like that.
Save yourself the time and money. Anytime there’s written contact information that needs to get into Infusionsoft, use Snap. They’ll let you capture up to 250 contacts via Snap each month for each Infusionsoft user, for free!
Those are just a few.
What else are you paying for that you think Infusionsoft might be able to handle for you? Let’s see if we can save you a few more bucks. Go ahead and comment below and we’ll help you out.