Infusionsoft Tips

Novak Solutions has created these tips as part of our weekly Tuesday’s Tip newsletter. Each week we give a new, absolutely free tip that you can use to get more out of your Infusionsoft app.

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Tuesday’s Tip: Recover from failed recurring billings in Infusionsoft

If you sell products or services with recurring billing then you’ve likely run into the common issue of expired or rejected credit cards. This isn’t the sort of problem that resolves itself. You have to proactively get new payment information from your customer so you can continue billing. Luckily for us, Infusionsoft has provided a free campaign template for this exact situation. To set up a campaign to automatically help with recovering failed recurring billings, check out the Infusionsoft Marketplace: log into Infusionsoft, go to the Campaign Builder, and click the Marketplace button. Look for the Collect All Recurring Billings campaign, and click the Install button. This will copy the campaign template and configuration instructions to your app and redirect you to your Campaign Builder page. Next, click on the Collect All Recurring Billings campaign. You should see instructions for setting it up, including how to configure a trigger when an autocharge attempt fails. Setup is incredibly easy, and the campaign walks you through it step-by-step. This campaign is easy to customize for your own needs. For example, you could combine this campaign with our Profile and Payments automation to allow your customers to update their payment information on their own. Have an idea for a tip? Let us...

Tuesday’s Tips: Creating post-sale upsell chains for Infusionsoft

We’ve had a lot of interest in our Infusionsoft One-click Upsell plugin for WordPress. Thanks to feedback from our visitors we have improved the plugin to work with both shopping carts and order forms, and we’ve improved the documentation. An upsell chain is where one upsell leads to another. For example, your customer buys product A, and you offer an upsell for product B on your “thank you” page. The customer buys the upsell. Great! Now you offer them product C, and then product D, and so on until the customer stops buying your products. Upsell chains can be a powerful way to earn more per customer. The barrier to purchase is already low and it takes just a single click for them to complete the additional purchase. Creating upsell chains with Infusionsoft One-click Upsell is incredibly easy. The first step is to create your initial upsell button using the upsell shortcode. It could look something like this: [[upsell product_id="12" button_text="Order Product B" success_url="http://example.com/product-b-thank-you/"]] This will display a button with the text “Order Product B”. If the customer clicks it, they’ll receive product #12 and then they’ll be directed to http://example.com/product-b-thank-you/. The next step is to add another upsell button on the Product B Thank You page. It might look something like this: [[upsell product_id="13" button_text="Order Product C" success_url="http://example.com/product-c-thank-you/"]] And so on and so on, with as many upsells as you think makes sense for your business model. You also have the opportunity to downsell. For example, if they didn’t bite on Product B you could offer them Product D instead, which might be a lower-priced version of the product. To...

Tuesday’s Tip: Let your Infusionsoft contacts update their own information

Using the a web form and an email broadcast, you can easily let your Infusionsoft contacts update their own information. This tip doesn’t require any custom code, just a bit of setup inside of your Infusionsoft app. First, create a web form. You can use a legacy web form or create one within a campaign. Create a hidden field for the email address. Add any fields you’d like the contact to be able to update, such as name, address, or a custom field. These fields should be visible so your contact can see them. Go to the Publish tab and copy the URL for the hosted web form. Next, create an email broadcast. This email should ask the contact to click a link to update their information. Add a link to the URL for the hosted web form. Before clicking the Insert/Update button for the link, click Other options… and select Place the person’s details at the end of the URL (for techies). This will add the contact’s details to the URL, which will auto-fill the hidden email address form. When your contact receives the email and clicks the link, they’ll arrive at your web form. They can update their details and submit the form, and your Infusionsoft app will be instantly updated with the new...

Tuesday’s Tip: Understanding Infusionsoft invoices and fractions of cents

The Infusionsoft API is powerful, but it occasionally lets you do things that you really shouldn’t do. For this tip I’m going to talk about creating invoices that include fractions of cents. This situation most often occurs when calculating discounts or adding sales tax in your own code, and then creating the invoice via the API. For example, you may have a product that retails for $99.99. If you discount this amount by 25%, then the product will cost $74.9925. The Infusionsoft API allows you to create an invoice for this amount, even though it contains fractions of cents that you won’t be able to collect. In Infusionsoft the order would look like this: If you use the API’s calculateAmountOwed method, you’ll find out that Infusionsoft is expecting a payment of $74.99. If you take a payment for $74.99, the order will look like this in Infusionsoft: Looks good, right? The invoice has a $0.00 balance. There isn’t any red text indicating an unpaid balance. If you use the API’s calculateAmountOwed method, Infusionsoft will tell you that $0.00 is owed. But what if you pull the invoice up in Infusionsoft? The Pay Status shows UNPAID in Infusionsoft. Pulling up the invoice via the API also shows a PayStatus of 0, which indicates that the invoice isn’t paid even though TotalDue (74.99) – TotalPaid (74.99) = 0! The moral of the story is never create invoices with fractions of cents. You should always round the invoice amount to the nearest cent before saving the invoice to...

Tuesday’s Tip: Get your Infusionsoft merchant account ID via the API

The Infusionsoft API makes it possible to place orders and charge credit cards without your customer ever visiting a single Infusionsoft page. To do this, you’ll need to know your merchant account ID. Infusionsoft doesn’t provide a way to get this via the API. You can get it through your Infusionsoft app, but this involves clicking through to the right screen and then dissecting a page’s URL. An easier solution, especially if you are building software for clients, is to try to find this information by looking at recent transactions. By looking at recent transactions in the CCharge table, you can find the merchant account ID with a fairly high level of confidence. It is still a good idea to confirm your merchant account ID by looking in Infusionsoft but this helps you know you are looking in the right place. This code assumes you are using the free Novak Solutions Infusionsoft PHP SDK and you have a config.php with your app name and API key. <?php // Include the SDK require_once('Infusionsoft/infusionsoft.php'); // Query for recently used merchant IDs $charges = Infusionsoft_DataService::queryWithOrderBy(new Infusionsoft_CCharge(), array('Id' => '%'), 'Id', false, 100, 0, array('MerchantId')); // Loop through $m = array(); foreach($charges as $charge) { if(!isset($m[$charge->MerchantId])) { $m[$charge->MerchantId] = 1; } else { $m[$charge->MerchantId]++; } } if(!empty($m)){ // Find the most used merchant ID $max = array_keys($m, max($m)); $merchantId = $max[0]; } else { $merchantId = false; } // $merchantId = the most used merchant ID from the most recent 100 transactions We use this code in the free Infusionsoft One-click Upsell plugin for WordPress to make it easier to find your merchant account...

Tuesday’s Tip: Add Facebook comments to your Infusionsoft web forms

Adding Facebook comments to your web form can increase your conversions dramatically. For example, you might have a web form to sign people up for a webinar. Having a Facebook comment box gives your visitors the chance to leave positive comments about past webinars they’ve attended, or to express their excitement over the upcoming webinar. This social proof can provide the extra push that some visitors need to convince them to provide their personal information. Unfortunately, you can’t just copy and paste the Facebook comments code into your web form. Infusionsoft sanitizes any HTML or JavaScript that you put on a web form, rendering the pasted code useless. Luckily for you we’ve come up with a workaround. The first step is to create a Facebook app if you don’t already have one. It is common to name the app after your business or organization. For example, our app is named Novak Solutions. You’ll also need to go to settings and add a platform. Choose website. Enter your organization’s domain name for the site URL, and your Infusionsoft app URL for the mobile site URL. Then add both domains to the App Domains box. Click Save Changes. This will give you permission to use Facebook comments on your website and on hosted web forms. Finally, go to the Status & Review page and click the button to make your app available to the public. Next, we need to add some code to our web form. Add an HTML snippet with the following contents: <script src="//s3.amazonaws.com/novaksolutions/free/facebook-comments.js"></script> <script> jQuery(document).ready(function(){ addFacebookComments('277515279073217', 'https://joey.infusionsoft.com/app/form/fa967baed77e42caecdf30e7c389a92d', 5, 'light'); }); </script> There are a few parameters: 277515279073217 — Replace...