Beyond the Native Integration: Why Now Is the Perfect Time to Upgrade Your Shopify-HubSpot Sync

When we put marketing automation in place for a small online retailer that has done little more than send out email newsletters in the past, the results can often-times be staggering. We started working with one particular client a few months ago. The project started with getting all of her historical data (customers, orders and products) out of her shopping cart and into Infusionsoft. In Part 2, I’ll explain how we then conducted an 80/20 analysis and put a reengagement campaign in place. For now, I’ll focus on our popup lead generation campaign. Our approach is to always go after the low-hanging fruit first. We want to put campaigns in place that will to bring cash into the company as quickly as possible. At the very least, we want the initial campaigns to pay for our implementation services, Infusionsoft and the Revenue Conduit integration between the shopping cart and Infusionsoft. Even more so, we want the initial campaigns to provide a quick ROI. For most small online retailers, there’s enough low-hanging fruit to bring in enough cash to move the needle and be meaningful. Popups - love ‘em or hate ‘em, but they actually work.

Do you remember that email I sent you a bit more than a week ago? The one asking for your help - for your vote? Well, all I can say is thank you! Among 41 apps that were submitted, Revenue Conduit was named the #1 Kick Apps Champion in the Infusionsoft 2014 Battle of the Apps competition. Winning is a huge honor. It’s validation for why we exist - to help you, the small business online retailer, connect your online store to your marketing so you can market like the Amazons of the world on a small business budget with some semblance of a work-life balance. It is hard to find words to describe ICON14, the annual Infusionsoft conference. More than 3,000 small business entrepreneurs descended upon the Phoenix Convention Center. The energy was intense. It was exhilarating, contagious and ultimately exhausting. On the flight home, with adrenaline and exhaustion fighting the final fight, my fellow co-founder Parag and I reflected on where we are now and on how this all began... A few years back, my wife and I were running an online store selling jewelry. We were using Magento for our store and Mailchimp for our marketing. We wanted to automatically market to our prospects and our customers based on where they came from, what they were interested in and how engaged they were. We wanted our online store to be deeply connected to our marketing. Mailchimp was not cutting it. Infusionsoft showed up in a google search and my uncle also happened to be using it. So, we signed up, went through the Kickstart program and partnered with long-time friend and colleague, Parag, to build the first version of Revenue Conduit simply to scratch our own itch.

Automating lifecycle marketing takes time. It takes effort. You will never be done because it’s a journey and there will always be room for improvement. Dramatic improvement at first and then incremental improvements over time. To fully automate your lifecycle marketing, you have to create lead magnets, and write content for emails, landing pages and thank you pages. You have to write emails that will welcome your new customers and start building a relationship with them. You will need to write content that reengages your customers when they stop buying. And you will need to write other emails for countless other lifecycle marketing opportunities. The promise of lifecycle marketing is that you can deliver the right message to the right person at the right time, automatically. And guess what? You just don’t know what will work until you try and test.

You spoke. We listened and delivered. We’re pleased to announce that Revenue Conduit now supports customer group and newsletter syncing! Before explaining these new features, I would also like to announce that we’ll be hosting a webinar to demo these features and answer your questions about these new features or any other aspect of Revenue Conduit. Based on your feedback, we may make this webinar a monthly ritual, providing you with demos of features, ideas on how to fully leverage Revenue Conduit and Infusionsoft, and answer any questions you have. The webinar will be held on March 26th at 3pm CT. Click here to register! Now on to the new features...

I spent a few hours reviewing the 2014 Revenue Conduit Action Plan this weekend, taking a look at our goals and the initiatives we planned in order to reach them. Goals are powerful things. I have found that once you write a goal down, the universe immediately begins to conspire and help you reach it. You meet people. Opportunities present themselves. Strange things happen.

Remarketing to your prospects and customers has never been easier or more powerful. You should start by building remarketing segments using your homepage, landing pages, landing page thank you pages, category pages, individual product pages and post-purchase thank you page. But if you want to take it a step further, you can use data from your CRM to build even more targeted remarketing segments based on customer purchase behavior. Revenue Conduit makes it easy for you to segment your eCommerce customers based on the last time they bought, how many times they bought and how much they have spent with you over their lifetime as your customer. When Revenue Conduit syncs data from your shopping cart (Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce or Volusion) to Infusionsoft, we calculate a number of data points that are stored in Infusionsoft custom fields.

In Part 1, we talked about the results of a recent 80/20 Analysis we conducted for a Revenue Conduit customer. We found a number of customer segments that were all but invisible prior to the 80/20 analysis. One big revelation was that only 10% of their customers accounted for 50% of revenues. Another big revelation was that a full 85% of customers had only bought once. When conducting 80/20 analysis, we always look for "low-hanging fruit" campaigns - campaigns that offer a relatively easy and immediate source of revenue and profit. Campaigns that not only pay for your initial investment in Infusionsoft, Revenue Conduit and consulting but also provide an immediate ROI that can be further invested in even more profit-generating campaigns. The biggest "low-hanging fruit" campaign was to get a second purchase from the customers that had only bought once. Knowing that the customers that had only bought once also differed based on the data of their last purchase, we also decided to further segment them into three groups - customers that last bought more than six months ago, customers that last bought between four to six months ago and customers that last bought within the last four months.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - running an online store is hard and getting harder. The cost of PPC is going up. Google can change their algorithm and you can lose half your traffic overnight (which actually happened to one of our clients recently). If your product can be sold on Amazon, chances are it’s already there and being sold for less money than you care to admit. To succeed in online retail as a small business, you need to stand on something other than price. You need a unique selling proposition. You need something that Amazon cannot do. Something that WOWS your customers during every interaction.

One of the best ways to grow your online store is by sending traffic to a landing page and capturing leads.

We're excited to announce that Revenue Conduit now integrates Shopify POS with Infusionsoft! This integration will be great if you have ever wanted to do Lifecycle Marketing with your in-store customers, and drive them to also purchase online. We'll have a more complete rundown of everything you can do shortly. For now, we wanted to give you a taste.