Archives for September 2017
CRM Maintenance in Infusionsoft | Duplicate records and unique identifiers
While teaching, coaching, and educating Infusionsoft users and subscribers voluntarily four times per month in four different cities, I have come to appreciate the problems, misunderstandings, and implementation challenges entrepreneurs and small business owners have getting Infusionsoft to do what they want it to do. The software is incredibly powerful however, that power brings with it a need for structure, strategy, and discipline – just like your accounting software, just like your WordPress site and our daily lives and commitments to others.
Recently, I wrote an article called “What Infusionsoft Can't Do“. This article brought to light what many of us as small business owners know but do not like to admit publicly. Our organizational struggles migrate themselves into the modern tools we use today. That can mean that Infusionsoft performs as well as our strategy and treatment of our contact records.
The purpose of this article is to dig deeper into the bullet points contained in “What Infusionsoft Can't Do.” Let's talk about Infusionsoft unique identifiers, what creates duplicate records, how duplicate record merging can overwrite valuable data, and the value of educating not only your staff but also your customer and prospective client.
Infusionsoft is a great tool, but it is only a tool. In the end, you are responsible for how you choose to use it. It is not a mind reader, and it cannot derive or extrapolate implied information. As they say, “garbage in, garbage out.” When you use Infusionsoft, it’s up to you to educate your prospects, clients, and staff on how you can maintain a pristine, clean database.
Today's modern CRMs (Saas software systems), sales and marketing automation software, provide us with many tools. Among those are web forms and internal forms for data entry into our Infusionsoft CRM. Many of us use
those forms for lead generation, surveys, NPS (net promoter score), modification of known facts by internal team members, and e-commerce transactions to name a few. The fields available in our forms can range from the basic first name and primary email address to the more complex forms with hidden fields and probing questions for segmentation. The information we gather helps us deliver the content to the right person who seeks a solution to a specific need – automatically.
Infusionsoft is a contact-centric system. Communications, orders, opportunities, activity history, and more are attached to individual contact records. Each contact record stores the demographic, geographic, behavioral, and transactional information you need to segment contacts in your system into different groups in order to communicate with them appropriately. Contacts are added to Infusionsoft automatically through an import, web forms, online purchases, and API feeds from other systems. You are also able to add contacts to Infusionsoft manually.
Once that information is received into our CRM contact record, Infusionsoft attempts to match the new data coming into the system, with the contact record already in our CRM, if applicable. How does it do that? What factors do we need to understand? What happens to the old data when the new data arrives? How can we control the changes and mitigate the duplicate records and maintain a clean database?
- Primary email address as a unique identifier. The web form submission looks for a match with the email address used in the form, whether that form is a web form or an internal form. The duplicate checking process can be set to one of five factors for each web form. 1) Check for an existing record's email address in the primary email address field. 2) Check using the person's first OR last name AND their primary email address. 3) Check using the person's first OR last name AND their email address AND their company. 4) Check using a cookie AND the person;s first OR last name AND their primary email address. 5) Don't check for duplicates.What do we need to understand about each of these options?
- 1) Check for an existing record's email address in the primary email address field. This is the most common setting. Infusionsoft, in its native state, can handle three email addresses for each contact record. However only one is the primary and only the primary is checked upon form submission and during the maintenance procedure of duplicate record checking. Furthermore, people make human mistakes, one of those are typos, and if the email address submitted contains a typo, the system assumes it is a new record – let alone the fact that this email could bounce and now you may have a tagging problem – the later is a whole nother discussion.
- 2) Check using the person's first OR last name AND their primary email address. This can come in handy when you have a business where your customer shares an email address, such as husband and wife. Here, if the email address matches Bob Jones, but the form is submitted for Mary Smith – Jones, a new record will be created. Keep in mind the same is true if the form submission is for Robert Jones, or if your form asks for first name only and the contact puts Bob & Mary in the first name field. – it happens! Yes, if you have all three happen, you have three records for potentially the same person. Keep in mind, that if you desire this setting and allow this to happen, you then cannot merge records based upon a check for duplicate records by primary email address.
- 3) Check using the person's first OR last name AND their email address AND their company. Same factors as point #2, however here another variable is used for the company field. Take special notice of the use of the word OR and AND. Think of this as an if this, then that qualifier. Here is where your contact could enter Bob's Sports Bar LLC and the next time Bob's Sports Bar and we would not have a match. To mitigate problems with this feature you can use Infusionsoft java scripted forms and have them auto-populate with the data you have, assuming they are clicking on an Infusionsoft delivered email.
- 4) Check using a cookie AND the person's first OR last name AND their primary email address. Same factors as point #2, however here another variable is used for the existence of a cookie on the submitter's computer (assumes they have clicked on your content that carries the java tracking code previously).
- 5) Don't check for duplicates. The person using this setting let's it all come in and then runs the duplicate record check regularly.
Seasoned User Tip. There may be times you want to automatically add information to a person's field or change the information that is there. The set a contact field to a specific value action allows you to do this. This can be accomplished in the campaign builder using the hidden field function inside a web form or action set function inside a campaign sequence.
What happens to the old data when the new data arrives? If the incoming record finds a match, all fields previously containing data are overwritten.
How can we control the changes and mitigate the duplicate records and maintain a clean database?
- Go to Admin > Data Cleanup in the main navigation menu. Click on Check for Duplicate Contact Records.
- Establish internal policy, procedure, process for internal data entry. Have a standard protocol for all fields.
- Educate your customer that your clean records, their purchase history and much more is maintained by the consistent use of a single primary email address.
What options do I have when merging duplicate records in Infusionsoft?
- Automatically Merge Duplicate Contacts. Infusionsoft can automatically merge duplicate contacts once they've been identified. This is the most common option for a large database of contacts. When you automatically merge duplicates, you do not have a chance to review them prior to merging. The system automatically merges all identified duplicates at once. The auto-merge will take information from the newer contact record and use it to update the information in the older (original) contact record, based on the records' ID numbers. The merged record will contain all of the tags , history, notes, etc. from both records.
- Manually Merge Duplicate Contacts. Manually merge duplicate contacts if you want to maintain control over the merge process. When you do a manual merge, you are able to review duplicates and decide to merge or not to merge each record on an individual basis. You might choose to manually merge duplicates if you are not completely confident in the accuracy of the criteria you set when you checked for duplicates, your database is not too large, or you run frequent dup checks.
Quality records, maintained over time, can have a huge impact on the professional appearance of your organization. This is the foundational key to making sure your content is delivered properly by addressing the needs of your audience. You expect to generate revenue from your list and you should treat your data accordingly. All of us want to approach our contacts with respect. All of us need to deliver information appropriately. Doing so requires discipline.
Integrated Marketing Communication: What Exactly Is It?
Table of Contents
What is integrated marketing communication? Integrated marketing communication is a concept by which companies are able to carefully integrate and coordinate their multiple communications channels to deliver a single, unified, clear message. This concept is extremely important in branding, as an inconsistent brand message can create an inconsistent customer experience, which makes it harder to keep your customers coming back for more.
Perhaps the most well-known aspect of integrated marketing communication (IMC) is the Four “Cs” of IMC, which provide business owners and marketers with an outline for how marketing communication tools should be coordinated.
What are the four “Cs”?
- Coherence: All of your marketing communications should make sense when looked at as a whole entity. Every message you send out should fit into the “bigger picture” of your brand’s communication plan in terms of how it relates to other messages you have sent, as well as the primary themes of your marketing and sales.
- Consistency: All of your various communications should hit on the same messages. You should never have to worry about your customers becoming confused by contradictory messages. Instead, they should all be in line with your marketing and sales themes.
- Continuity: While marketing messages can evolve over time, there should always at least be an element of continuity to these messages. In addition to ensuring all of your tools and messages are consistent, you must carefully plan how you will evolve those messages throughout the sales cycle and as your business slowly matures and evolves itself.
- Complementary: How do all of your communication efforts come together in a single unit? Every aspect should complement the other to form a single synergistic communications entity.
Additional elements of IMC
In addition to the Four Cs, which have become the standard of any IMC focus, marketing experts often describe IMC as being customer-centric and data-focused.
This idea of IMC being centered on the customer essentially means that IMC should be fully in line with all your customers’ perceptions, behaviors, and attitudes so you can communicate with them in the most efficient and effective way possible. Marketers should regularly ask themselves how well each of their marketing communication efforts truly speak to the customers they are attempting to reach.
Do all communications focus primarily on the customer and his or her needs? Does marketing communication talk to customers in the kind of language they would actually use, and resolve issues they actually have? Furthermore, is there room for conversation and interaction between the customer and the brand? All of these are extremely important questions for marketers to keep in mind whenever performing any IMC work.
Data has also become more important than ever in the world of marketing, as technology continues to allow more and more ways to collect and analyze large amounts of data in an efficient manner.
Data is the best means companies have to get to know their customers and more effectively market to them. Data-driven IMC approaches are based on a significant amount of analysis and research that will help you understand what your customers think, how they act, and why they think and act in those ways. Questions marketers must ask include: Where do my customers live? What are the goals and concerns of my customers? What are the best ways of reaching my customers? What types of messages will resonate the most with my customers?
Integrated marketing communication must be a staple in the marketing strategies of all businesses looking to maximize their overall marketing success. For more information about IMC and the various strategies associated with it, contact us today at Viral Solutions.