Email Tools I Use in My Six-Figure Business
Last week I shared some of the tools I use to run and optimize my six-figure business. Today I’m going finish that list out with what I use to mail my lists – and my thoughts on “all-in-one” marketing software. Click Here to Read Part 1
Email Tracking
For email tracking the software that I like the best is GetResponse. For example, I’ve got a brand new campaign, and I’m going to put 7 emails in a campaign. And I want to find out the open rates, the click through rates, the conversion rates. I just want to see everything in one place. I can create a campaign and put it in GetResponse and run 1k visitors through it and see what happens. And I’ll be able to tell you, email 2 outperforms email 1. Email 7 outperforms email 5. Easily. Very, very easily.
It can still be done in Aweber, it can still be done in Infusionsoft. But for me I love the fact that that component is just really easy in GetResponse. It’s really EASY!
It’s almost intuitive. You just put it in, it does it.
Now, Infusionsoft does a much better job of being able to manage my entire business from a customer relationship perspective. I can look at a particular lead and I can tell you what emails they opened for the last 5 years. I can look at everything they’ve clicked on for the last 5 years or so. I don’t know exactly how far back it goes, but I’ve never had an opportunity to say I couldn’t figure out something that I needed. I can look into the Infusionsoft dashboard and it takes me 30 seconds to run something that will tell me how many items somebody bought. I can get a report that shows if 1k people buy product A, how many people will then buy product B? I can show this for over three years – read that entire report in just a glance. But that’s just one component of Infusionsoft that I use.
I like GetResponse better for that testing process.
What About a Central Dashboard
I really want to confuse things now. Maybe you’re asking “Well, have you ever heard of KissMetrics?” Yeah, well I have. And you say, “Did you know that it will do everything that you just said that Infusionsoft will do and Google Analytics will do and Visual Website Optimizer could do, and you can have it all in one dashboard?”
You’re absolutely right. I’ve tried it before. I don’t remember how long. I’m quite sure it was more than just the trial period. It might have been 2 or 3 months or something like that. We’ll come back to it in a minute.
First, just as I’ve talked about what Infusionsoft was GOOD for, and I haven’t told you what Infusionsoft is not necessarily so good for, except in comparison to GetResponse. I’ve said hey, GetResponse is really good at this, so you might be able to say that Infusionsoft isn’t really quite as good. Or I would maybe use it for that. In theory you could probably do the split testing in Infusionsoft.
In theory, remember we talked about that 7-day GetResponse campaign, you could do the split testing of the actual sales pages in GetResponse. But if I were to do that over multiple sales pages, over multiple campaigns, it would get really cumbersome in GetResponse. But it would be really simple in Visual Website Optimizer.
But to make Visual Website Optimizer do it for a 7-day campaign, that would be much more complex.
So I use the simple.
For simple split testing, I use Visual Website Optimizer.
For traffic, Google Analytics.
For split testing, evaluating a short term campaign, a new campaign, 7 to 10 days, whatever. GetResponse is phenomenal.
For being able to look at my entire business over time? Infusionsoft!
Let’s go back to KissMetrics. KissMetrics will do everything that we just talked about. It’ll do it really well. But for me it involves so much data for the tests, and it collects so much data, that it just takes too long. I run so many emails, and so many sales pages, and so much traffic, and you load all of that together. Asking KissMetrics to give me all the data that I need right now across the board might take hours. Is it all there in one place? Will it all be one payment? All in one place?
In theory, super simple.
But in reality, I can open up Visual Website Optimizer and in 30 seconds I know exactly what’s going on with conversion rates. In a couple of minutes, I can see exactly what’s going on in a new campaign in Infusionsoft. In a couple of minutes, I can run reports and know what my long term, 5-year, conversion rate is for a specific product if you bought something else. And I don’t care when you bought it! If you bought it 9 months ago, and you buy it today, you’re thrown into that conversion rate. I can see all of that in Infusionsoft. And I can do each of those things in 30 seconds, or at most, a few minutes apiece.
Then if I want to look at traffic, Google Analytics, same thing. KissMetrics will do everything for you, if you want it all in one place. KissMetrics is also good if you have a small campaign, and you want to test a funnel, and you want to test the impact of this item on the next piece in the funnel, on the next piece of the funnel, etc. for a finite period of time.
Again I prefer to use GetResponse combined with Visual Website Optimizer, and then throw in some Infusionsoft tracking, and I get all of it right there.
But, if you were starting out from scratch and you didn’t want to learn multiple programs… Well, KissMetrics might be a better fit for you.
A Summary of My 6-Figure IM Business Software
Okay folks, I think I’ve pretty much given you what I use in terms of the software that I use to get the metrics that I need to be able to run my business.
It’s Visual Website Optimizer for split testing.
It’s Google Analytics for traffic.
It’s GetResponse for optimizing campaigns.
Once the campaign is optimized it can be moved over to Infusionsoft, and run on auto-pilot. It works really well there, and then I can get all of my sales in one basket, and I know everything that’s going on.
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