Streamlining Personal Communication in Infusionsoft

A week or two ago one of my OG members, Steve, had a question about streamlining personal communication through Keap.

He was trying to trigger a template to an individual contact, and he ran into an issue where Keap wasn’t behaving as expected, and I couldn’t really solve that specific problem, but it occurred to me that there might be an easier way to get the same result.

So, I recorded a quick video for him demonstrating the solution. I wanted to share it here in case it helps you too.

Scenario:

Sometimes you want to send a personal email to a contact, but you want to send it from INSIDE your Keap database.

This might be because you want to trigger actions when they click links, or because you want a record of the email, or maybe you just want to know if they opened it; but there are a handful of ways to send a personal one-off email from the contact record.

Unfortunately most of them are just a little bit clunky.

(Worth mentioning that depending on your needs, the Gmail or Outlook Sync might do the trick for you.)

So, here’s my proposed solution: Instead of creating a template, and grabbing that template from the contact record every time you want to use it, and then personalizing that template and sending it out.

Instead, let’s create an internal form that captures your message, use that internal form to trigger an email and merge in the message you just wrote. Bing, bang, boom.

Here are the steps:

1. Create a custom field (Text Area Type) for your “One Off Email Message”.
2. Create a new campaign, titled “One Off Email Campaign”.
3. Add an internal form goal to the campaign, and add the custom field from step one to this form.
4. Add a sequence after the internal form, titled “One Off Email Delivery”.
5. Add an email inside that sequence, and configure the body of the email to look however you like, adding the merge field for the “One Off Message” wherever you need it to go. (I recommend after the salutation, and before your signature/sign-off.)
6. Set all items to ready, and publish.

If you’re the type of person who prefers your information be delivered via in 10-minute video modules, well, buckle up, because you’ve come to the right place:

Here’s a blog post on how you can use the old builder to create a template that LOOKS like a plain text personal email. But to be honest, that’s mostly obsolete now because the new email builder has a default template for this so you can just grab and go:

Now, at the end of my video I mentioned a ninja trick for customizing this even further – if that piqued your interest and you’d like to see what else I’ve got in my bag of tricks, here ya go:

So, the above instructions basically walk you through sending an email where the entire email is custom. But sometimes you don’t want to start from scratch. Sometimes you want to grab an existing email that already has all of the information you need, and you just want to slap a different intro paragraph on it, right?

Well, all you need to do is build a handful of sequences, each holding an email with a different topic (pricing, hours, membership program, etc). And then add a radio option to the internal form so that the user can select which of your pre-crafted masterpieces to send out.

The workflow is nearly identical, but the distinction is that this new method allows you to pair your custom paragraph with one of your pre-written (and proofread, tested, refined…) templates.

That’s it for today, hope you found this useful. Leave a comment below if you made it this far!