Think it's not possible to get an email notification of tasks created manually? Think again. But think differently.

If you’re like many business owners, you find it frustrating when you try to simplify and automate certain processes only to discover that what you want to do can’t be done.

The sad thing is… often you can still achieve the same result by simply looking at the problem – and the solution – from a different angle. But most people give up before realising this.

Here's a classic example. Many people think it’s not possible to get an email notification of tasks due from a manually created task in Keap (previously Infusionsoft). This is a common problem when the task is a manually created one.

Many Keap users will tell you it can't be done.

BUT... they're just not thinking the right way. This is where, by thinking outside the box with our marketing automation platform, a simple task can be made automated with a bit of ingenuity.

In this video training Jason Buckner shows exactly how you can create it all automatically... the task and the reminder.

This could be just the beginning for you! 

What other solutions can you implement when you start looking at things a little differently? We love finding work-arounds for things that, at first, don't seem possible.

If you'd like help setting this up in your business or have any other questions about using Keap (previously Infusionsoft) within your business, we may be able to help.  

Simply book a free, no obligation call with us today.

Did you know that the average email open rate is 15%-30%? And did you know that the average open rate for an SMS is a whopping 98%! 

When you do this well, you see your profits increase too.

So doesn't it make sense then for you to be using SMS within your business?

Watch this short, content-filled video below to discover the hows, whens and what NOT to do when sending SMSes to your database:

Hey it's Jason Buckner here from Automation Made Easy. I just wanted to talk with you a little bit today about SMS. About why we should use it, when we should use it and the pitfalls in using it that we've really got to look out for so that we don't do ourselves a disservice. When I say that, I mean a financial disservice as well.

Why it's important to use SMS... properly:

Not only can using SMS badly in your business cost you a bit of money from your marketing results, it can also cost you a huge amount of money if you abuse the system and if you get caught. As a known SMS spammer you can literally get fines, as a small business, in the 10 and 20 thousands of dollars… which we don't want to do.

We want to avoid that sort of thing at all costs but get the best possible returns.

So let’s dive right in to SMS and why we should, and when we should, and how we should as well.

The Why, When and How:

Firstly, email is our traditional method of marketing or communicating with our customers. But email open rates on average are between 15% to up to about 30%. 30% is the higher side of average and in fact you should be striving to get higher than that. And we can use SMS to do that.

So 15% to 30% on average, but SMS open rates on average are around 98% and 90% of those on average are opened within the first 3 seconds. So not only are we not waiting but we are getting instant results – or almost instant results. But we need to be very careful with what we send when we do that.

We absolutely should be sending SMS.

Now, when should we be sending it though, to get the best possible results from it?

Firstly when someone buys from you or signs up for something or gets something from you. That's a great time to use SMS to get an instant connection, but also instant gratification for our customer or potential customer.

So definitely, when someone buys or signs up for something.

We should definitely use it for event reminders. If you run an event, absolutely use SMS in there to remind people to go back to the email.

And we should absolutely use SMS when someone is booking an appointment. We can increase our show rates on appointments by up to 37% by including SMS reminders in that process. So 100% we need to get those reminders in there.

Now the next really cool time that we can use SMS is in our marketing

You know a lot of the times when we market to our database we just send emails and we're getting a particular result. The first time that you send an SMS to your database you’re going to get a huge result because people aren't expecting that from you and it's going to be great. It's not going to be like that all the time though and you've got to follow a few procedures to make sure you're not doing yourself a disservice, okay?

The first one is:

• Don't do it too often. If you're going to send a marketing message, don't do it too often.

Now if you send SMS reminders about an event or if you send SMSes about something someone signed up for, that's a little bit different. What I'm talking about here is a direct SMS out to your database that is all about marketing a product or marketing an event or marketing a webinar or something like that. If you're going to send an SMS out you've got to be very careful.

Don't do them too often otherwise you'll abuse your database and you'll get not-so-good results.

In the USA, SMS has been abused dramatically and the results from SMS marketing is much lower than it is for us here in Australia so long as we don't abuse it.

So number one: don't abuse it. Don't do it too often.

• There’s one really important thing you have to do in marketing SMS. Those SMSes where someone has signed up for something we don't have to do this. But in a marketing SMS we've got to have some sort of system where someone can automatically opt out. This is super super important. You must have an opt out system on a marketing SMS.

If you don't have that then you could be considered spamming if you're sending a marketing message out without that

So it's super important to make sure that's on there. We've got to have that opt out process - you know… “Reply STOP to opt out” or “Click here to unsubscribe” or something like that. So long as that's in the system and it happens automatically. Again, don't abuse it.

If you're going to send marketing messages on SMS, the first one is going to be brilliant. You’re going to get these huge results. Don't expect every one of them to if you're sending an SMS every single time.

The other really cool thing I like to do is I like to use SMS to promote people engaging with our emails. So we send an SMS to say, “Your link is on its way. Check you inbox for it right now.”

That sort of thing is really cool to get people engaging back with our emails, from the SMS that’s being opened much more frequently.

So make sure we don't abuse and be clever with the way we use our SMS.

What software should you use?

Now the main software that I like to use is called Fix Your Funnel.

The reason why I like to use Fix Your Funnel is the SMSes coming in come into like a support desk kind of system so you have this whole engagement process and it's integrated and goes directly to Keap. We have the whole conversation history within Keap and the whole conversation history is inside Fix Your Funnel as well.

So when we reply we can see all of the automated messages that have gone out as well as any of those replies that have come back in. It's super cool.

But it is a bit higher end cost, so that’s for if you're serious about your business and there's a big need for it.

If you just want to send a few SMSes as event reminders and to start getting some sort of process in there, some sort of engagement with your customers, higher engagement... maybe want to send a few marketing messages here and there – then I recommend something called SMS Broadcast if you’re in Australia.

They have a really cool first sign up process where there’s a discount of – I think it's up to 40%. If you sign up for a big amount it becomes very, very economical for you for the first period.

The first time we used SMS was many, many years ago. But we signed up and ended up getting about 4 years of SMS credits because of the discount that you can get when you sign up. So that’s very good as well.

So… Fix Your Funnel if you're highly integrated and you want a fully integrated system and SMS Broadcast if you don't want that and are based in Australia.

Now SMS sending from the campaign builder is a little on the complex side but not too complex. So we do what we call http post within our campaigns whenever we want to send an SMS and there's some formula and format to do that.

But we can absolutely help you with that if you need. Just comment below or send us a message if you would like help with that.

So just to recap:

98% open rate and 90% in the first 3 seconds. So it’s super, super important to be using SMS not just for marketing… not just for engagement.. but also to encourage engagement with our emails.

Number 2 thing: When are we going to use it? When someone signs up for something, whether they buy or opt in or something like that, get higher engagement using SMS.

When you're sending appointment reminders – it’s super, super important.

When you're doing event reminders – it’s super important.

And last but not least, when you’re marketing. But not too frequently within the marketing process.

How much is too much?

Try it once a month and then go less than that, then go more than that and see how your database responds.

Next thing – this is super, super important – you must have an opt-out process and absolutely don't abuse this process.

Any questions, let me know. But absolutely get in there and start using SMS. It's super cool!

Looking for help in setting this up in your business? No problem. 

Simply book a free, no obligation call with us to see how we can help you.

We know it's so important to send follow up emails. Last week we looked at one option to send follow up emails only to those who don’t click the link in Keap. This week, we're looking at another way you can do this.

This alternate method is great for when you want to automate the process of sending follow up emails, but only to those who didn't take the desired action in the previous email.

We recorded this video when asked about how to do this by one of our amazing clients on a recent Q&A call. Best of all, this client is only too happy for us to share this recording.

IMPORTANT: If you haven’t yet seen our last post with Part 1 of this topic, please do so first. That way this video with Part 2 will make much more sense.

CLIENT’S QUESTION:
“I was sending out an email broadcast to the entire database, which I did last week, so I didn't actually follow up again. And then I wanted to know, how do I automate another follow up email to the same list? Because we added a tag to say, ‘if you clicked on the link, then remove them from the next batch of email’. And I didn't know how to set up that as a sequence.”

How do you do this as a campaign? And so you don't have to continually schedule new emails?

What you do is this:

You could go to Automation and we do it as an Advanced Automation.

I'll give it a name like…

CLIENT:
“Just say email automation… email sequence or something. So that I know I can go and get this template.”

I’ll call it email sequence showing Tzara, yeah? So, you know it's the one we were showing you.

You can have a trigger tag, but you don't have to have a trigger tag to start this.

And what's the trigger tag to start? Basically it’s the tag we use to put the people in. So that’s the tag we created previously, in our last video, with today's date.

And then you could have a Sequence. And then in the Sequence you can have an Email Message and then you could have a Delay Timer of two days, and then you could have another Email Message.

Then what I'm going to do in here is – and I'm going to use this one as an example – I'm going to choose my templates because it's how I get this one, which I've just saved.

So the first email would be this, and it should have the link. I'm just going to check what it is…  “clicked for confidence”. I'll save that back in.

I mark that as Ready. I’ll just make sure that's coming from you. Yes, it is. And I take out the “RE” because this would be the first email.

I’ll name this “First email book download – clicked for confidence tag” because I like to put the name of the tag there.

And then, say you waited three days or maybe you'll wait two days, on a weekday and maybe at a different time to the other one. Well, this would go straight away as soon as you did it, so you might put a delay timer in there as well. You can choose the time there.

We’ll name this one “RE: emails - clicked for confidence tag”.

Click View and Edit and then inside here we can go and grab that template and finalise that email. Then we could mark that from Draft to Ready. Then we’ll call this “Emails for book download”.

Next we would have this tag applied here and they could only get this tag from clicking through on one of these emails. And so the tag was ”clicked for confidence”.

Now what happens, whether we have a start or not – we don't have to have a start tag when someone gets email one:

1. If they click on the click for confidence link, they get pulled out of the campaign. And so if they get pulled out of the campaign, they won't get that email.
2. If they don't click on the link, then they'll get the “RE:” email that goes out two days later.

CLIENT:
“So say they clicked on the link, do we do something else then or not?”

Oh, you could absolutely. You know, you could do something like if they've clicked on the link and downloaded then they would go into the other campaign though. [NOTE: Another follow up campaign has already been set up for those who have downloaded this eBook.]

But if they clicked and didn't download, so if they didn't opt-in, then you could have a filter like this. And I'll show you what that is. We'll build out that component for you as well. Let me just go into that other campaign.

CLIENT:
“Because if they click and they download, they go in the confidence ebook automation sequence.”

Yeah. I just want to see what that confidence ebook tag is. I could probably just type in confidence ebook, but let's have a look and see what it is. So when they go into here, in the Welcome email, they get one tag which is Lead Magnet > Confidence eBook.

So in here, in the Rules for: Clicked and downloaded, if they clicked and downloaded it means they've got the tag Lead Magnet > Confidence eBook. In the rules we say that if the Contact’s Tags contains Lead Magnet > Confidence eBook.

Or Rules for: Clicked and didn’t download, if the Contact’s Tags DOESN’T Contain Lead Magnet > Confidence eBook.

So then basically if they've clicked and downloaded, they've got the tag already, because they've opted in. If they've clicked and didn't download, they don't have the tag.

And so then in the clicked and downloaded, there’s nothing to do in there. That's fine if they have clicked and downloaded.

If they have clicked and didn't download, then you can do another series of emails, getting them… saying like, “What are you doing? Why didn't you download it?” and follow up with them in that manner.

This won't go green. You can't publish this without this going green and this being complete, otherwise nothing will actually happen. Nothing is connected here at the moment. Even if I published that right now, see that? See it's not connected? That decision diamond isn't complete. And the only way that will complete, even though we've done the stuff in there, is this process would have to be green and published.

See, now that's gone green because this is green, okay? But in actual fact that's not complete, nothing's going to happen inside there at the moment.

CLIENT:
“Okay. And so let's say that decision isn't green, right… it's not working. If they've clicked for it, they're in that tag. They're automatically going to go into the other campaign anyway. So I don't necessarily need to have anything on the end there.”

Correct. Absolutely correct. This is just a next step because you said, “What if we can send to them after.”

Sure, sure, sure. Okay. Awesome sauce! Thank you. That was really good.

Want to learn more about how we can help simplify and automate your business processes? Great! 

Take the next step in growing your business today and book a free, no obligation call with us.

It's super-important to send follow up emails. What if you want to send a follow up email to your list, but only to those who didn't take the desired action, such as clicking the link in your previous email. 

This is a question we were asked on a recent Q&A call with one of our clients.

Luckily for you we recorded that call. We're very grateful that the client in this call has happily agreed for us to share it here so it can help others too. 

This is a really cool strategy to know, so watch this short video now so you can do the same:

CLIENT’S QUESTION:
“I was sending out an email broadcast to the entire database, which I did last week, so I didn't actually follow up again. And then I wanted to know, how do I automate another follow up email to the same list? Because we added a tag to say, ‘if you clicked on the link, then remove them from the next batch of email’. And I didn't know how to set up that as a sequence.”

So if we go into the broadcast, you can see here delivered to 895 people. You could, one… just select those 895 and send another email.

You could, two… 22 people have clicked so you want to avoid those people there, but do you want to send like a “RE:…” kind of email? “Did you get this?” sort of thing is, I think, what we discussed, wasn't it?

CLIENT:
“Yeah, you said ‘Don't just send the one email, send out a load’, and when I set this up, I was thinking, ‘Oh, if I could automate it to set up for the next few days…”

So what we can do is we can just send to the people that did not open it.

CLIENT:
“I think they've been tagged, I created a tag in the email.”

We created a tag for the people that clicked, yeah. So we could go to the whole group of people – 895. I can edit the criteria here and I can say Miscellaneous Criteria > First Clicked > Not Clicked. So actually doing it without the tag. So we can say everyone who didn't click. It should be about 22 people less than 895. What is that? 873.

And so then we can select those people. We can't send a broadcast from here which is a little annoying. So we're going to click Apply/Remove Tag… we're going to Create a new Tag, which is the tag for today.

Just today's date… 13-7-22. Actually I like to do it the other way around 22-7-13… because then it puts it in chronological order.

Then I save that process. So the tag is there, we've saved it in, we process the action – 873 people. Now I'm going to show you the tricky bit, the fun bit. Okay. I'll let that process, because if you don't wait and you go and select those people, it will only select the people that have been tagged so far. So we let that process.

I'm just going to go back. What we can do now is we can go and we can do another broadcast, Create Email Broadcast.

I'm going to go to the Legacy Builder > Text and Graphics.

First I'm going go to Previously Sent > go to the previous broadcast and click Use as Draft.

I'm going to go to the top here, to the Subject Line field, and I'm going add “RE:” before the subject.

And then I'm going go to the Recipients field and select the tag we created just before with today’s date – 22-7-13.

Then in the body section we can bring a divider in and then we can bring another text block in.  I'll say:

“Hi [Merge >  Contact Fields (most common) > First Name],

Just double checking did you see the below?

These confidence hacks…”

What's a benefit? Give me a benefit?

CLIENT:
“How to rock confidence like a pro.”

No. Benefit. I don't want to rock confidence. How's it going to make me feel if I'm, you know, what is the paradise that I'm going to get to or the hell that I’m going to get away from?

CLIENT:
“Remove all the internal dialogue, doubt, all the judgment, the self-judgment. Have no more self judgment. So what would you have if you had no more self-judgment? You would feel like you're on a state… Okay, but that's talking to what they're not going to have. So stated in the positive…”

How about this:

“These confidence hacks are going to help you remove all that self-judgment and self doubt and make you feel like your own person again.” Yeah? Something like that?

CLIENT:
“Yeah. I, I can rework that.”

In Keap, you can’t see someone else's draft. So what I'm going to do is this…

In this video, I'm actually going save this as a template. Because my client won't be able to come in and pick this up. I'll save this as a template…

But for you, you’ll continue to finish writing this broadcast and send it, as usual.

So that’s the first way you can send follow up emails to a broadcast, so it’s only sent to those who DID NOT click on the link in the previous broadcast email.

Next week, I’ll share another method of doing this, where you can automate the process when you have several follow up emails.

Want to learn more about how we can help simplify and automate your business processes? Great! 

Take the next step in growing your business today and book a free, no obligation call with us.

You may be wondering why you need to know how to clean your database.

Often times business owners think they're doing the right thing by building a database - or a list - and they put so much effort into it. There's sometimes a 'bigger is better' mentality around this.

Now don't get me wrong... I'm so pleased to see these business owners building a database. And if they're looking after it and emailing their subscribers and customers regularly, that's great! That's definitely what I like to see. 

But bigger isn't always better. It's much better to focus on the QUALITY of your database rather than the QUANTITY of people on it.

In fact, your database quality is essential if your business sends emails.

And cleaning your database regularly is one of the ways that you can focus on your database quality.

In this video below I share with you not only HOW to clean your database, but also WHY it's essential to clean your database regularly.

Hey picture this. (I feel a little bit like Sophia Petrillo. I don't know if you remember the Golden Girls. She used to come out with these stories all the time.)

Anyway, picture this…

You've run an event. And you get to the day after your event, and you're about to send out some marketing for all the people that attended and didn't book in for a call. Or all those people that attended and didn't buy. Or even all those people that didn't attend at all, to follow up with them and get them to take the action we want them to take.

Then you get this email from your database provider, whether it be Keap or anyone else. And they say to you, “Your email ability has been canceled.” Or “Your email ability has been held because you've been sending emails to bad email addresses and spam traps and your engagement rate is low.”

Now we've got a few videos on email engagement and email deliverability, but what we need to think about now is actually cleaning up our database. It's super important.

You clean your office probably once a week. You clean your home maybe once a week or once a fortnight. But we are not necessarily naturally cleaning up our database.

Why Cleaning Your Database Is So Important:

There are a few reasons why this is so super important.

#1: Firstly, spam traps. They opt in automatically to people's databases. And you think that you won't get hit by them, but you might get hit by them. Googles and Yahoos and Hotmails… if there's a lot of activity on your domain, they'll probably opt in to see what's going on there. That’s number one.

#2: Dud email addresses.

#3: There are so many different reasons why an email address can be problematic for your email deliverability.

So we've got to clean up our database and we've got to do it on a regular basis. One of our customers just this week had a problem with her email send-ability straight after an event because the database wasn't cleaned up on a regular basis. And so we had to implement something.

And so you've got to make sure you do a database cleanup about every three to six months – it’s super important.

How To Clean Your Database:

Now we use a system called Klean13 – that's K L E A N 13.

You take your database out of Keap you upload it into Klean13. And then it gives you a report on which email addresses are spam traps (get rid of those!), which email addresses are undeliverable (get rid of those too!). And then which email addresses could be problematic in your business. You get rid of those as well so you're just emailing to a clean database.

That’s the number one thing you've got to think about.

The number two thing, of course – and I know I've harped on about this in quite a lot of videos – you've got to email just the engaged people.

I want you emailing people that are engaged in the last four months. You can do a report inside Keap – an email engagement tracker – and you just want to do the last four months. Grab all of those people. They're the ones you email to, okay?

So we're going to clean up our database every three to six months and we are going to email only the people that have engaged in the last four months.

This is super, super important to make sure your deliverability stays up high and your reputation with all of those email clients like Yahoo, Hotmail, Bing, Gmail and whoever else they might be. So your reputation stays good and strong. Did I mention that this is super, super important?

Want to learn more about how we can help simplify and automate your business processes? Great! 

Take the next step in growing your business today and book a free, no obligation call with us.

This may sound confusing, but it’s not uncommon to see that saving money can cost a lot more.

When you have a small business, sometimes the expenses can be overwhelming. There are the costs for your stock, supplies and possibly manufacturing, licenses and permits, legal and accounting fees, staff and contractor fees, office equipment, advertising and marketing, website and internet costs, taxes and superannuation expenses… the list goes on and on.

Often many small business owners operate on a tight budget and aim to keep costs affordable for their customers too. This is especially so with the current increasing cost of living and, well, increasing cost of almost everything.

So it’s not surprising then that so many small business owners look for free or low-cost options when it comes to software and tools to help them manage their business. Sometimes this can be worthwhile. Cutting back on expenses during tough times in particular can be necessary.

Why pay hefty monthly subscription for access to software if there’s something that does just as good a job for free?

But other times this sort of thinking ends up costing your business more. Maybe much more!

Consider more than just the financial cost:

Therefore it’s essential that you consider what you use in your business, not just from a software perspective. Look closely at the benefits of investing in the best tools, education, people, and products for your business, rather than looking for the cheapest (perhaps free) options.

A good example that we see weekly, if not daily, is in the database management and marketing software that a small business uses.

It’s no secret that we love, use and recommend Keap (previously Infusionsoft). Keap includes a powerful CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) and sales and marketing automation. This helps your business to collect more leads, convert them into clients, and then turn those clients into repeat clients who recommend you to others too.

But we often see small business owners using other systems simply because they’re cheaper.

Now, if their software of choice can do as good a job as Keap, great! We’re happy for them to use whatever works best for them.

However, they often complain that their system is limited in what it can do and sometimes unreliable. Or other times the tool they’ve chosen to use can kind of do some of the things Keap can, but it doesn’t automate a lot of the processes.

So let me ask you… are you really saving money if you can get the full results you would like? Or if you’re spending more time on the processes? Or if you can’t actually get all the benefits that a higher investment could give you?

What to consider:

As part of your assessment as to the best software for a specific process in your business, make sure you consider all of the costs, not just the monetary costs.

• Can this tool do everything you need it to do?
• Does it have limitations that you can pay to ‘unlock’?
• Will this tool take up more of your time or save you time?
• Is this tool likely to improve your business’ efficiency?
• Does this tool integrate smoothly with other tools or systems you may want it to sync with?
• If it doesn’t integrate directly with other relevant systems or tools, can you do this via a third-party tool such as Zapier?
• Will this tool help you to keep up with your competitors? Or better still, will it help you to stand out above your competition?
  
• Can this tool help increase your profits?
  
• Can this tool help decrease other expenses?
• Will this tool help your customers?
• By using this tool, will your staff be able to perform their work easier, quicker or with less stress?
  

Once you’ve weighed up all of the costs and all of the savings – not just the financial costs or savings – you’ll find the tool that suits your business best. Not surprisingly to us, we usually see that this isn’t necessarily the cheapest tool.

And after looking at all the costs, you'll most likely agree that sometimes, just focusing on saving money can cost a lot more!

But the benefits are well worth the extra financial investment and it generally pays for itself in improved efficiencies, productivity, customer relations and increased sales.

If you’re interested in learning more about how we can help automate your business processes, book a free, no obligation call with us.