Based on data from a MIT Study conducted in 2007, the odds of contacting a lead in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop by 100 times. In fact, from just 5 minutes to 10 minutes the odds decrease by 5 times.

In 2010 the lead in the MIT study did a follow up study. The study confirmed that in 2010 conversion was 7 times more likely if you responded within 5 minutes.

As I was thinking about these facts I was wondering if there was a way with our FixYourFunnel.com SMS service to have a text message sent to a sales representative instantly when some action was taken on a website, in a trackable card, with a trackable link in an email, when a webform was completed, a phone call was received or any number of actions that can be tracked with InfusionSoft (and some help with services like FixYourFunnel.com).

InfusionSoft legacy follow up sequences (LFUS) are great, but there is no control over the http post and ‘immediate’ really means 10-30 minutes. So LFUS was out of the picture.

Tags on the other hand can and are be applied instantly. The new campaigns sniff for tags being applied and are really fast (think 30-60 seconds). So I wondered if I could use the customization features of the campaign builder sequence http post to send myself a text message with a contact’s information in the body of the SMS.

Well, it worked! So I created this video to show you how to use Fix Your Funnel’s SMS service to create instant notifications. This particular video shows how a SMS conversation interaction creates or updates a contact record, sets a tag and initiates the SMS to a member of my team so they can follow up. Watch to the very end to see me create an instant SMS notification in 3 minutes and 24 seconds (I speed it up so you don’t have to wait that long) and you get to try out the process LIVE!

This is really exciting stuff and we’re excited to see it available. However, http posts are not child’s play. Watch the entire video to learn what you need to do to incorporate Fix Your Funnel SMS and Direct Mail (both SOC and Trackable Cards) into the new Campaign Builder!

I mean, once you know how to attract a customer or even pursue a customer, it absolutely is true, but could it be #1 for every business owner?

I suppose if you absolutely can’t get ANYONE to buy what you are selling then it couldn’t be the #1 secret to success…but if you are selling ANYTHING then it isn’t only the #1 key but it is the ONLY key that will allow you stick around long enough to learn all the other keys to lasting success.

I remember when I was 22 and my Dad funded a smoothie shop that was going to be wildly successful, we made sales. We picked the WORST spot to put the smoothie shop. We built the most inhospitable smoothie shop. We literally had NO IDEA what we were doing, but we still made sales.

The problem was we had no idea how to increase initial customer value or life time value so that we could afford to learn all the lessons necessary to make the business a success.

Fast forward a number of years and my brother and bootstrap a training company for real estate agents. We quickly learned how to increase initial customer value and it allowed us to go from zero to 1.3 million in revenue while making a TON of mistakes.

Our ability to increase customer value gave us the freedom to fail our way to success. During the same time we were building that company we watched competition that never learned the lesson, out perform us in volume and yet crash because their margins couldn’t match ours.

Learn how to increase initial customer value; learn how to identify your most valuable customers in the process; learn how to take care of your most valuable customers in the way they want to be served and I can guarantee you’ll LOVE your business like never before.

I still had some work to do, so I pulled up the lap top and sat with them in the living room. Occasionally I’d stop and we’d just talk. Jacob would come snuggle up next to me and say, “I love you Dad!”

That’s what it’s all about for us here at Fix Your Funnel. I know Trent is the same way. In many of our videos for our Real Estate Agent training company as he’s talked about setting goals and getting clear on the WHY that drives us as individuals he is very clear that his results in his professional life have jumped as he got married, and with the addition of each child.

He says that with each child he felt even more driven to provide for them.

I know that when I get home from a rough day it’s my family that infuses me with greater passion for life and makes it all worth while.

My personal philosophy is that we are here on this earth to become all that we can. Not just in business, but in our relationships with others, in our giving to others who haven’t learned what we’ve learned and as a result don’t enjoy what we enjoy.

I feel fortunate that we at Fix Your Funnel have the unique opportunity to have as customers some of the top marketers and entrepreneurs in the world. It is an honor and a pleasure to speak with each of you.

May you find all the success in life you desire and may we help you get there quicker and easier.

If you haven’t already picked up the report “21 Ways to Use Mobile Marketing Today“, then take a minute to text the word SMS to (760) 621-8199 right now.

#19 on the list is: Send Multi-Media Information.

Use a keyword to prompt the delivery of a link in a SMS to a mobile optimized site with photos, video or audio.

In this video I demonstrate how to send a video using YouTube and Fix Your Funnel SMS. I show you how to send to a wordpress blog that has been optimized for mobile phones with WPTouch.

There are WAY too many business that use SMS/Text Message marketing like a toy, instead of a valuable business tool.  Of course, if you use it like a new toy, you probably aren’t getting the best results and what’s worse, most businesses aren’t even TRACKING their results from SMS Marketing!

Well, now with the power of Infusionsoft and FixYourFunnel.com you can harness the true power and capabilities of SMS Marketing WHILE tracking the effectiveness of your campaigns!

To learn the NEW RULES of mobile marketing, go here: http://fixyourfunnel.com/blog/text-messaging-for-infusionsoft-how-it-works/ or text the keyword SMS to 760-621-8199 and answer a few questions in the automated text conversation to get a copy of the report “21 Ways You Can Be Using SMS”

If you have more questions, call us, we like to talk on the phone too! 760-621-8199

First, you should know that my brother and I started a business in 2007 with Infusionsoft as the ‘backbone’ to all of our customer interactions, sales and billing.  We started a real estate training company and using Infusionsoft we went from $0 to $1.3M in revenue in 12 months and only had 6 people on the team at the one year mark.

I share this so that you know 1) we use and love Infusionsoft in our other businesses (we have an Infusionsoft App for each business) and 2) we know the limitations that it has and have developed tools to EXPAND those limitations to work for our own businesses.  We are entrepreneurs, so of course when we solve our problems, we offer the solution to other business owners through FixYourFunnel.com

As you know, Infusionsoft is awesome when it comes to email marketing and managing interactions with your database and recurring, but out of the box, you can’t tie in your phone system and send or receive text messages through Infusionsoft.

Well, what we did was create a way for you to overcome this limitation WITHOUT having to resort to using a “short code” where you either have to pay thousands a month to have your own short code, or join a shared short code (which is most common) and be limited to only a few keywords.  When we set out to make it so you could use SMS (text messaging) for lead capture or for follow up with existing leads and clients in your Infusionsoft app, here are the things that we wanted:

1- an affordable phone number (not a short code) that we own for just a few bucks a month and one that isn’t “shared” with other businesses

2- ability to have an automated “conversation” via text message (not just a single inbound or outbound text, but a back and forth conversation with pre-written responses)

3- no limitation on keywords for starting a “conversation” (others use a “short code” that is shared with hundreds of other businesses and the keywords you may want are probably already taken)

4- the ability to receive phone calls to that number that could be tracked, recorded and added to the contact record in Infusionsoft

5- easy setup and interaction with a simple interface to be able to send out text message broadcasts within seconds

Well, we are happy to share that we set all of this up for our businesses and a few months ago, decided to start “sharing” this with other marketers so they to could leverage Infusionsoft’s power with this new media, SMS conversations and broadcasts.

To find out more and to start sending text messages through your Infusionsoft account today, go here:  http://fixyourfunnel.com/blog/text-messaging-for-infusionsoft-how-it-works/ or you can call our office at: (760) 621-8199

I wish that all this wasn’t necessary, but for the time being it is. Since each WordPress blog can have a different theme, this is the current way to adapt your theme to work with the OCUS script.

Jermaine Griggs

Jermaine captured InfusionSoft’s Marketer of the Year award last year at InfusionCon, and it was well deserved. It doesn’t take long to see that he LOVES his customers, and based on how they buy his products, they must love what he does too!

One of the things he does is thank his customers with little gifts. But he’s also smart about it. He uses SendOutCards integration with InfusionSoft to send a card and goodie to his customers at key points.

During one of the breaks I was talking with Jermaine about what he does and he said he spends about $5,000 each month thanking his customers through SendOutCards. Now, I have no idea what his sales are, but the loyalty of his customers is noteworthy.

Gary Vaynerchuk

Interestingly enough, last year, after meeting for dinner with some of our customers from our Short Sale Genius business (Dinner at a Brazilian Churrascaria, my favorite places to dine), I bought the Crush It! audio on iTunes and listened to it on the drive back from Arizona. The audiobook I listened to was very PG, but I knew that Gary likes to ‘spice’ up his language from the stage.

The book was great, but knowing Clate and Scott as well as I do, I was surprised that they were inviting the salty V to speak on their stage. I supposed his draw was worth the risk, as apparently they asked him to at least tone down the ‘F-Bombs’. Trent counted 9.

But I digress…

Gary V did an excellent job of illustrating two big concepts.

First, we’re just in the beginning of this internet thing. I believe him. There are a lot of folks who like to claim to be pioneers and therefore own the internet, and their mountains ought to be climbed to, hands and knees, to seek their wisdom, but, we’re still in the beginning stages. He put it this way, “We’re in the beginning of the National Anthem of a 19 inning baseball game.”

Second, the real secret of social media isn’t actually any feature of technology. It’s not a script that will create 20 tweets an hour, or schedule your facebook status updates, or follow a bazillion people.

The real secret of social media is that it allows you to know your customer at a much deeper level than was ever possible before. Why? Because everyone and their dog is putting out more details about what they think of EVERYTHING, where they’re going and have been and who they are doing it all with.

The Thank You Economy

Confession time. I haven’t even read the book yet, but the title and Gary’s keynote just about paint the picture for me.

Everyone is so self absorbed these days it’s almost impossible to break through.

As we were leaving Phoenix we stopped at Chipotle, which it turns out has out performed Apple in the stock market, and there was a kid in line ahead of us. He had his macbook pro on the ledge watching Star Wars with some big head phones on. He was charging his iPhone 4 with his macbook and was periodically checking facebook on the phone, then he switched over to some music artists website on the macbook (I guess he was tethering too). So he’s riding this mary-go-round for the 9 min it takes to get to the point were he could order and he closes up the macbook and walks out of the place.

I know it’s extreme, but it paints the picture of what your customers and mine are doing and what we have to cut through.

Selling alone won’t do it.

Extreme offers won’t do it.

We have to build relationship and the best way to start it is with a real, meaningful and unique thank you.

You could do it like Jermaine. You could do it like Gary V. You could do it in your own way. But by all means do it!