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.
Tuesday’s Tip: Use a lightbox to keep customers in your Infusionsoft cart
Update 7/1/2014: Infusionsoft has updated their version of jQuery to 1.10.2. This tip has been updated to accommodate this change. It is often helpful to provide links to external content in your shopping cart or order form, like the terms of a money back guarantee or a YouTube video. This extra content can help reassure your customers about their purchase or provide a demonstration of the product. But we all know that if a customer leaves your shopping cart, they might never come back! A solution to this is to show your content in a lightbox. Instead of leaving your cart, the link will open in a modal dialog within the shopping cart page. There are dozens of great jQuery plugins that provide lightbox functionality. Unfortunately, Infusionsoft uses an extremely outdated version of jQuery (v1.6.2 released June 30, 2011). It works great for DOM manipulation, but it isn’t compatible with the latest and greatest lightbox plugins. To get around this problem we modified a copy of jQuery v1.11.0 to work under a different name, jNew. We also modified an excellent lightbox plugin, Magnific Popup, to work with jNew instead of jQuery. We are hosting both of these modified libraries on a CDN that you are welcome to use. For this example I’m going to use an order form. You can easily use this code on a web form or shopping cart. First, you need to add the required libraries to your HTML custom header: <link rel="stylesheet" href="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/magnific-popup.js/0.9.9/magnific-popup.css"> <script src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/magnific-popup.js/0.9.9/jquery.magnific-popup.min.js"></script> Next you need to add your link to the page. You can put it anywhere you want. For this example, we...Tuesday’s Tip: Get more subscribers with exit intent popups
Everyone hates popups. They clutter your browser, jump up at the worst possible moment, and drive your visitors crazy. But what if you could get the converting power of a popup without annoying your visitors? To accomplish this we’ve created the free Infusionsoft Exit Optin plugin for WordPress. To get started, you’ll also need our free Infusionsoft SDK plugin that provides access to the Infusionsoft API. Infusionsoft Exit Optin works by showing a web form in an in-page popup but only when the visitor tries to leave the page. This is called “exit intent”. When their mouse leaves the main content area of the browser, the popup will appear. This isn’t annoying to the visitor because they are likely already leaving your page, and they aren’t forced to interact with the popup before they can leave. They can click anywhere on the page to close the popup, or hit escape, or click the X. Because the plugin uses web forms, you can easily use your popup with an Infusionsoft campaign. It is also easy to style your web form, add images, and change the text from within Infusionsoft. Your changes are instantly reflected on your website. The plugin’s configuration is very straightforward. This screenshot shows all of the available options: First you choose which web form you want to use for your popup. This list is automatically loaded from your Infusionsoft app via the API. Next, choose the minimum role your visitor must have in order to see the popup. This lets you hide the popup from visitors while you are configuring and testing it. Last, choose the width and height of the...Tuesday’s Tip: Add a custom QR code to an Infusionsoft email
Update 1/21/2015: This tip no longer works due to changes in the way Infusionsoft processes emails. Sorry! QR codes are an easy way to encode customer-specific data into a format that can be scanned using your phone or tablet. Adding a QR code to an Infusionsoft email is easy to do, and you can even make each QR code unique by adding the customer’s email address or other identifiable information. You can use the Infusionsoft API to look up customers, add tags, or perform other actions once their QR code is scanned. This works great for event registration systems. For this example we are going to use the QRicket API. This is a free, powerful API that allows you to regularly create up to 5,000 QR codes per day. If you need more than that, then you may need to load some free QR code generating software onto your server. Due to a bug in Infusionsoft’s image handler, it takes a bit of finagling to make this tip work. I’ll walk you through it step-by-step: First, you need to decide what URL the QR code is going to take the visitor to. For this example, we are just going to pre-populate a web form with the person’s name and email address. In real-life you’d probably have this go to a script on your own server that uses the API to check-in a customer for an event or add custom tags to the contact record. Our full URL would look something like this: https://joey.infusionsoft.com/app/form/fe9ab4b652f9a8de214c5846fcc02e58?FirstName=~Contact.FirstName~&Email=~Contact.Email~ Notice that we are using merge fields to put the contact’s name and email address in...Tuesday’s Tip: An easier Infusionsoft PHP SDK
This week I’ve created a screencast in addition to the normal write-up. It’s my first time screencasting, so please be gentle! If you want to do really powerful things with Infusionsoft then you’ll need to use the API. Infusionsoft provides a PHP SDK that is used by a lot of developers. It’s free, powerful, and has a fair amount of documentation. Unfortunately it also has a few issues that developers frequently encounter (such as random blank responses from the API or error messages), and has a bit of a learning curve. At Novak Solutions we’ve developed a new and improved Infusionsoft PHP SDK. It is completely free, and we use it for all of our products so you know it’ll be maintained in the future. It has a few features that we feel make it easy to use and better than the official SDK: No dependencies. If your server has PHP and cURL, then you are good to go! Code completion. We’ve added all the necessary PHPDoc comments so code completion will work in popular editors, like Eclipse and PhpStorm. Automatically retries. Automatically retries failed API calls when it is safe to do so (i.e., updates and deletes, but not inserts). Automatically handles XML-RPC. Your requests and responses are automatically encoded and decoded. We’ve included a custom version of the XML-RPC code that automatically works around a few bugs in the Infusionsoft API. Automatically picks the right method. Saving records is easier. The SDK will automatically pick whether to do an insert or an update based on whether you are working with a new or existing record. Future safe! The SDK...Tuesday’s Tip: Validate Infusionsoft forms BEFORE submission
Infusionsoft web forms are incredibly powerful. With a bit of dragging and dropping you can build an attractive page to collect whatever information you need from your customers and leads. Web forms aren’t perfect though. They are missing a crucial piece of any modern form: client-side validation. This type of validation occurs before your lead submits the form. For example, if you have a required email field but the user leaves it blank, the client-side validation would display an error message letting them know what is missing. This all happens without a page load and without clearing the form. You can even get more advanced, such as requiring a minimum number of characters to be entered in a field, or making sure they put a valid email address in the email field. Luckily for us, it isn’t too hard to add validation into your form. This is a bit more advanced than some of our other tips, but feel free to leave a comment or email us if you need help. For this tip we are going to use the extremely popular jQuery Validation plugin. It’s free and flexible, and works well with Infusionsoft web forms. You can validate just about anything, such as: postal codes, phone numbers, dates, URLs, and even VIN numbers. The documentation has a list of available validation methods. To get started, you’ll need to add an HTML snippet to your web form and add some code to it. This code will add the validation functionality to your form, turn it on, and set the validation rules. For example: <script src="https://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.validate/1.11.1/jquery.validate.min.js"></script> <script src="https://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.validate/1.11.1/additional-methods.min.js"></script> <script> jQuery(document).ready(function() {...Tuesday’s Tip
