Infusionsoft (now called Keap Max) has been the “gold standard” of marketing automation for years. Competitors like HubSpot, Marketo and ActiveCampaign have made big strides in their offerings. But Infusionsoft still has the largest subscriber base and most sophisticated capabilities for small- and mid-sized businesses.
Here at FunnelProfit we get great results with Infusionsoft marketing automation due to its flexibility and maturity as a product. We have 10+ years using it ourselves and implementing it for clients large and small.
Still, there are a few fairly painful challenges with Infusionsoft / Keap that can make things challenging.
#1 Complexity of Infusionsoft
Infusionsoft’s amazing marketing automation capabilities and wide array of integrations can dazzle new adopters. It can be daunting to become fluent with Infusionsoft, so the company makes every new subscriber take 3 weeks of remote training. If you don’t come to that training prepared with clear goals and a good idea of how marketing automation works, you can end up learning just enough to be dangerous.
The only real solution to get to grips with Infusionsoft is to dive in and get your hands dirty. The best way to do this is to invent campaigns and automation workflows, then see if you can build them in test mode. This takes time and dedication.
Once you understand the platform you can build just about any marketing automation workflow your heart desires. The downside of all this sophistication and granularity is that you need to test your campaigns a lot.
#2 Testing Infusionsoft Campaigns
Infusionsoft / Keap allows you to commit marketing hara-kiri by failing to test complex campaign automation workflows enough. Even the simplest of Infusionsoft campaigns require a LOT of end user testing.
This issue has been addressed with a campaign-checking process that kicks off when you click “publish” on your campaign. This will throw general alerts when something is awry.
However, the campaign tester in Infusionsoft only flags obvious technical issues with a campaign, like not having a node set up or published.
As a result, you still need to test your automation campaigns in Infusionsoft like crazy.
Here’s an example:
We’ve integrated Infusionsoft with EasyWebinar multiple times. Our first campaign involved several sequences that relied on tags being set via the Infusionsoft API. If somebody registered for a webinar but didn’t watch it, for example, the registrant would get a “webinar replay available” email series from Infusionsoft.
Unfortunately, we neglected to pass the EasyWebinar date/time as a parameter to Infusionsoft, and thus everybody who didn’t have the “watched webinar” tag got the “replay available” email series immediately after signing up! Luckily we caught it after only 2 prospects had gotten the errant emails, but this example shows you need a solid testing process in place before publishing your campaigns to the world.
#3 Infusionsoft E-Commerce Module
Infusionsoft has simplified the payment and shopping cart integration process with Infusionsoft Payments. It can integrate with Stripe, WePay (Chase), Paypal and many other payment providers. This is now a legitimate all-in-one payment solution for digital products, physical products and recurring subscription offerings.
But Infusionsoft’s shopping cart has a bit of a “one size fits all” feel to it. Sure, you can change the different sections, add images and text, modify the CSS, etc. but it’s a bit clunky to put together. We use it for one-time and recurring payments using different shopping cart skins.
Where Infusionsoft’s e-commerce offering falls down is the integrations with other popular shopping carts, particularly Shopify. This is important for one-click upsells and behavior-based pre- and post-purchase campaigns. In Infusionsoft you can do this with Action Sets and the Infusionsoft cart. However, it’s much more involved to integrate these dynamic features with third-party platforms like WooCommerce, Shopify, Recurly, etc.
Are These Pains a “Deal Killer”?
Infusionsoft (Keep Max) is not the most sophisticated e-commerce platform out there, but then again it was never intended for huge stores with thousands of SKUs. If you’re looking for dynamic pages, customer reviews and the like in your e-commerce platform, there are better ones in the market.
Every marketing automation platform it seems has its own complexities. Infusionsoft isn’t alone in that respect. It’s probably overkill for basic email newsletter campaigns (the base Keap offerings are better), but for full-fledged behavioral campaigns it’s great. As with any software, skill and familiarity can overcome complexity.
You have to thoroughly test your campaign outputs in a variety of scenarios to catch things the campaign tester missed. Our advice is to create a test plan with lots of odd scenarios, run through all the tests as an end user, and be prepared to fix some things in your campaigns you didn’t expect.
Overall, we’re very happy with Infusionsoft (Keep Max) functionality. The platform is stable and most of the bugs have been worked out, so you can focus on automating and running your business.