Paul Sokol, Data Scientist, Infusionsoft

We’ve got another guest post this week, from another extremely smart friend of mine, Paul Sokol.  For the past few years he’s been popularly known as the Campaign Builder Mad Scientist, and has been building free campaigns for Infusionsoft users to access. He’s one of the elite campaign builder experts in the world, no question. In fact, Paul is on the short list of people I reach out to with exciting and puzzling campaign conundrums.  At any rate, I’ve asked him to share his top few choices from the marketplace campaign library that he has developed. In summary, Paul’s great. Listen up. So, lets get to it:

Campaign Builder Mad Scientist’s Favorite Free Campaigns

-Paul Sokol, Data Scientist, Infusionsoft

Hello Monkeypodders!

I’m Paul Sokol, one of Greg Jenkins’ good friends and former coworker at Infusionsoft. He has graciously asked me to pen a guest post or two for your enjoyment and, hopefully, to favorably impact your business.

But before we get to the meat and potatoes of this thing, I wanted to briefly share about Infusionsoft’s free campaign Marketplace and how we even got to this post you are reading.

Back in April of 2012, the visual Campaign Builder was released upon the world and, being the huge nerd that I am, I immediately dove in on a quest to become the universally recognized authority on the tool.

In the spring of 2013, they developed another tool to push pre-built campaign templates into any Infusionsoft application using the (then) new Marketplace and they asked me to build an initial batch of 20 for the launch. Shortly thereafter, we had the idea to create a “Campaign of the Month” which is exactly what it sounds like.

I am proud to say that, as of this post, we have nearly 70 free campaigns for all our Infusionsoft users to leverage.

And that’s how we get to today’s post.

The main question a new user has is “Which campaigns should I use?“. Which is a totally valid inquiry considering how many of them are out there.

Greg has asked me to share my favorite free campaigns and give a little insight into why they are so powerful. While I love every campaign, there are definitely a few that I feel every single business could use regardless of industry.

Favorite Campaign #1: Hard Bounce Recovery

This first campaign is a textbook example of a “set it and forget it” type business process. When sending emails, occasionally the email address stops working. This can happen for a variety of reasons. People change jobs and their email address is removed. People start new companies and change brands. People will even delete their personal emails on services like Gmail and Yahoo for any number of reasons.

This can be a problem, especially if your primary channel of communication is email. When you send an email to someone and the receiving email server rejects it because the address doesn’t exist anymore, it is known as a “hard bounce”. Think of it like a “return to sender” when you try to send something in the mail to an address that doesn’t exist.

When the email address of a customer hard bounces, this can have even more of a negative impact if we don’t do something to recover a working email.

Hard bounces can also throw off your reporting too. Think about it. If you have 1,000 on an email list, but 200 of them are hard bounces, you REALLY only have a list of 800 people.

Unfortunately, with all the different things we have to do as small business owners, reconciling hard bounces is a very low priority item with minimal ROI. However, when an email hard bounces, there is a silver lining to the situation: it provides a perfect excuse to reach out to the person and reinforce the relationship.

Keeping a clean database is very important to drive the business results you are trying to achieve. For the savvier business owners, they may actually be reconciling hard bounces periodically. The thing that most people overlook is that a relationship is between individuals, and thus you want to handle hard bounces as they occur. The faster you are able to respond and recover a working email, the less collateral damage will occur.

That’s why I love the Hard Bounce Recovery campaign! Once you’ve set it up, which takes about five minutes, every time an email has a hard bounce, you’ll get a task to contact that person and recover a good email address. Again, by doing this as it happens, you reinforce how important the relationship is to that person.

Now, sometimes you won’t have a phone number to call the person, but that doesn’t mean you should give up. There are many other channels you can use to reach out. Depending on the value of each customer, you may want to send a simple letter if you have addresses on file. You can also track people down on the different social channels. In fact, I did this just this past week. I sent my inner circle newsletter and there was a hard bounce for a guy I only had an email for. However, I was friends with him on Facebook so I sent him a message and got a new email for him and was able to deliver the newsletter as he was expecting. This definitely reinforced how important he was to me 🙂

To learn more about the Hard Bounce Recovery campaign, go here: https://marketplace.infusionsoft.com/campaign/hard-bounce-recovery

You can check out the 2nd and 3rd recommendations right now!