I first became involved in online marketing in 2009, previously I was a direct marketer – direct mail and printed catalogues. The first online venture I was involved with followed the course that most new and smaller business undoubtedly still follow.
A client of mine wanted to migrate from offline direct marketing to online marketing. We had a small email list – only 1,200 addresses. So using a simple and inexpensive email sending platform and PayPal “Buy Now” buttons off we set. Within days we were generating orders and all appeared rosy.
Then came the issue of fullfilling the orders which proved difficult when exporting raw data from PayPal and this also made customer service tricky and time consuming. And you could forget the thought of generating any meaningful reports. Then when we wanted to conduct targeted campaigns to new customers we found we could not because we now had two, separate and unlinked databases – one for orders and one for email addresses.
This is where I see many new and smaller businesses finding themselves. First they create an online shop, then they need to fulfil orders, then they want to use email marketing and maybe use affiliate marketing. But as I had quickly discovered, if you use separate systems and databases that do not “talk” to each other then you quickly get bogged down with IT issues. Often the business gets “stuck in the mud” with online marketing and any thoughts of online success soon disappear.
I quickly realised that having separate databases and systems was a recipe for future headaches which I did not want and so as a marketer I then looked to find a cost effective solution to automate online marketing activity and generate sales.
I found the solution by following and observing how the internet marketing gurus conducted their marketing – and this was with Keap / Infusionsoft.
Then with Keap / Infusionsoft at my disposal the world of internet marketing opened up to me. One central database and dashboard enabled me to control and automate the marketing program.
Below are just the headline benefits;
Email Marketing – highly targeted, automated sequences. Able to build sophisticated online campaigns that integrate with offline marketing.
Ecommerce – shopping cart, one page order forms, credit card and PayPal payments.
Affiliate Marketing module
Customer Service
Lead management
Opportunity identification
Continuity/ Subscription / Membership programs.
Digital and physical product fulfilment
As a result of acquiring Keap / Infusionsoft and deploying the email and affiliate marketing tools that I now had at my fingertips I took my client from zero online revenue to £500,000 within 5 months. In addition we generated an email list of over 300,000 records. My next step with Keap / Infusionsoft was to develop a subscription product which was marketed to the email list and this alone generated £100,000 revenue in the first year.
If you would like to learn more about my experiences with Keap / Infusionsoft please feel free to drop me a line.
Cheers
Julian
