Google recently made a few enhancements to their Spam folder in Gmail, providing end-users with information on why messages land there. As an email marketer, you want to know not only if your messages make it to the spam folder, but also most importantly, why they got there and what you can do about it.

Google has cranked up the anti-spam dial, which can affect legitimate email senders.

Ask any person who uses Gmail about the spam emails they receive in their inbox and they will likely reply, “What spam?” However, there’s another side to that story that Gmail users aren’t usually aware of – the otherwise good messages that land in their spam folder, often silently and undetected.

Email marketing pro, DJ Waldow, points out that legitimate senders are being placed in the spam folder and shares a helpful tip for marketers to inspect their Gmail spam folder carefully for clues to improve their inbox placement.

Google’s Gmail product now includes short note explaining why affected messages were delivered to the Spam folder a link to recommended solutions. I won’t be the first to admit that the reasons included aren’t quite as technical as email marketers would prefer, but it’s important nonetheless. The explanations offer action-oriented advice to improve deliverability. You can learn more about this enhancement to Gmail on their blog.

If you go to your Gmail folder, select one lucky message, you’ll see a notice located at the top of it:

To see what Google thinks of your messages, add your Gmail address to your email marketing database. Then carefully monitor where your messages land. If it lands in the Spam folder, read the advice that Google provides to fix it.

A good idea to improve your Gmail inbox placement is to politely ask your recipients on transactional emails, post-purchase or initial double-opt-in email messages to click “Always show images from [you].” This will allow future emails from you to be delivered and raises the level of engagement they have by showing images and improves open-rate tracking.

With so many great capabilities delivered in CRM 2011, as a customer, it can be challenging to know what capabilities can be best combined to address the user’s needs. I came across one such situation last week when discussing a feature suggestion that came through our Connect feedback site.

Scenario

Here’s the high level scenario: There are often situations where two or more sales reps need to collaborate on an opportunity, sometimes referred to as the pursuit team. To accomplish this, there are a few challenges to work through:

1) How do I denote who are the salespeople working on the opportunity?
2) How can I make it easy for them to view the opportunities that they are working on?

There are several possible approaches that you might take here depending on what makes the most sense for your organization.
One simple way would be to add fields to the opportunity form to identify team members that are working on the opportunity. For example, in addition to Owner, you might have fields for “Sales Lead” and “Industry Lead” and so forth. If your requirements are static, this works. However, it’s not very flexible if the number of people that you might have working a deal varies from opportunity to opportunity.

Using Connections
Here’s where the strength of the Connections capability that was introduced in CRM 2011 comes into play. Connections allow you relate records together of all types – in a way it’s like an “any to any” relationship, with an added ability to annotate the relationship with the meaning of the relationship, or other notes. For example, you can use it to identify a contact as your “Colleague” or express the roles of the various contacts that are associated to an opportunity such as “Influencer” or “Decision Maker”.

Let’s take a look at how to address each of our questions using Connections:

Identifying the Sales Team
For our scenario, the simplest thing to do is to add Connections for each sales rep that will be working on the deal.

From the opportunity, click the Connect button
 

Fill in the desired user for the “Name” field:

That’s all that’s required. Save and Close.

These will appear in the Connections area for the opportunity:

 
 
Note: You may want to customize the Opportunity form to add Connections as a sub-grid, to make viewing this data inline easier.

You may even want to go a step further and define Connection Roles to express what role each sales person is playing with respect to the Pursuit Team: “Sales Lead”, “Industry Lead”, and so forth.

From Settings -> Administration -> Connection Roles, you can add new Connection Roles:

 
Back on the Opportunity, here are the roles used for the Connections to further clarify the meaning of the relationship to the users identified in the Connections:

Creating a Public View for My Opportunities

Now that you’ve denoted the sales reps that will be working on this opportunity and ensured that they have appropriate access, the next step is to ensure that there is a Public view that includes these opportunities.

Here’s where I ran into a bit of a snag. I had intended to just modify the “My Open Opportunities” Public View to add an OR clause such that it would show effectively “Owner Equals Current User OR Connected to Current User”. Of course, the problem is that the filter criteria doesn’t allow creating OR expressions across entities, so I couldn’t add the clauses to include Connections.

That’s ok though. What it means is that in this model, we’ll drive the view fully off Connections only, not Owner. Taking this approach does require that each sales person will need to be identified with a Connection, including the Owner of the opportunity, so you will want to automate this with a simple workflow or plug-in that creates a Connection for the Owner automatically.

Let’s start with the View creation first. 

Creating the Public View

So, here’s what I did to create the view to enable the user to see opportunities that they are working on.
1. As the system customizer, go to Settings -> Customizations -> Customize the System, select the Opportunity entity.
2. I ...

I’ve been using Infusionsoft for nearly 15% of my entire life. I first started using it during graduate school for a business that still uses the software. Needless to say, being able to visualize everything from a high-level strategy down to the granular clicks within an email comes naturally. However, getting to that point where those thought processes are naturally ingrained took plenty of trial and error and, more importantly, implementation of ideas.

When I joined the Success Coach team last July, one of the hardest challenges I faced was helping get my new coaching students aligned with the general thought processes and concepts needed to effectively learn and leverage the all in one sales and marketing tool. There are so many moving parts and such potential, where do you even start?! When trying to flesh out a Marketing Automation Plan on the first coaching call, it is sometimes challenging if the person doesn’t have a basic understanding of what the system can do.

To combat this knowledge gap (because that’s all it really is!), I developed a Prezi presentation that goes through the high level ideas all the way down to the ground floor, while incorporating the Perfect Customer Lifecycle. With the advent of the new visual Campaign Builder, it’s becoming much easier to get new students aligned with the overarching concepts and focus on implementing immediate goals. However, this presentation should give you a complete soup-to-nuts overview of how you can use Infusionsoft effectively in your business.

Trust me, if my parents who know nothing about Infusionsoft (and aren’t business-oriented) can understand the system after this presentation, you are going to be just fine.

Note: Use the arrows at the bottom to progress through the presentation

So what do you think of this Infusionsoft Crash Course? Does this give a clear overview of how Infusionsoft helps small businesses succeed? Leave a comment below and let me know!

Want to see how Infusionsoft can help your business? Sign up for a personalized demo!

We’ve released a troubleshooting wizard to help you help yourself resolve errors configuring the Dynamics CRM Outlook Client. Give it a whirl:

 http://rc.crm.dynamics.com/rc/2011/en-us/online/5.0/outlook-troubleshooting.aspx

 Why did we create this wizard?

There are several reasons that you might receive an error attempting to configure the CRM Outlook Client.  The most likely solutions can be different depending on the error and other factors such as whether you’re using Dynamics CRM Online or On Premise.  Instead of having to search KB’s and possibly find articles that do not apply to your scenario, the wizard can help guide your to the most likely solution based on your symptoms. 

The wizard was created by CRM Outlook Client subject matter experts.  We can continually improve this wizard as we identify additional solutions so please provide feedback. 

I’m happy to announce the new Infusionsoft Marketplace for our users so they can discover new apps and partners that helps their businesses succeed. The new Marketplace provides convenient access to community-rated listings of Certified Consultants and third-party apps that make their Infusionsoft experience even better.

CEO and Co-founder, Clate Mask, declared at InfusionCon 2012, “Easy is the new norm at Infusionsoft!” Our partner team has taken this to heart; we are laser-focused on making it a reality for our customers to connect with partners safely and easily. The Infusionsoft Marketplace features more than 50 third-party apps that integrate Infusionsoft with other popular business tools. The Marketplace also makes it easy for customers to find and connect with nearly 100 Infusionsoft Certified Consultants.

“The Infusionsoft community is taking a life of its own, we’re seeing a true Infusionsoft ecosystem emerge,” says Greg Head, CMO of Infusionsoft. “This Marketplace means we have that many more service providers and add-on applications to help our customers flourish. It also is important to us that our Certified Partners are an extension of the Infusionsoft core values, culture, and our commitment to helping small businesses succeed.”

Whether getting started with Infusionsoft for the first time or trying to maximize the Spring 2012 Release, the Infusionsoft Marketplace will help  customers  find specific solutions and support they can rely on to help their business succeed.

Users can find a diverse, growing set of apps designed to work beautifully with Infusionsoft. They will find solutions such as text messaging, payment systems, mobile apps, data integrations and membership sites. The Marketplace offers a user-friendly ability to search by solution category, description or name. Users can also read and write reviews on over 50 of these apps and integrations that are available right now!

In addition to discovering powerful apps with Infusionsoft, they can find an Infusionsoft Certified Consultant who helps ensure they get the most value from Infusionsoft. These experts can help with implementation, content development, sales and marketing strategy, and much more. All our Certified Consultants have passed our grueling exam, rigorous training course and created integrated marketing and sales programs to ensure their expertise in the Infusionsoft software. Customers can search for consultants by specialty or location and can read reviews. Find a Certified Consultant today.

Consultants and developers interested in joining the Infusionsoft Marketplace can learn about the program at infusionsoft.com/partners.

It’s not everyday that a software update from a cool software company drops the jaws of analysts, instills riot-like demand to receive the update and truly underscores the purpose of that company. The Spring 2012 Release is that moment for Infusionsoft as it redefines the way people use our sales and marketing software and talk about it to their friends.

The road to this release was paved with hard work, innovation and focus. It was also made possible by countless amounts of Panda Express, Jimmy John’s, Cafe Rio, Barro’s Pizza and Joe’s Real BBQ being delivered to our software development team fueling them as they burn the midnight oil to deliver a world-class sales and marketing product to thousands of small businesses.

As you can tell, we are incredibly proud of the new features, refinements and improvements found in our Spring 2012 Release. But, what’s even better? Hearing the comments from the users who will benefit from it and earning rave-reviews from the press!

During InfusionCon 2012, we launched this update to hundreds of select attendees. As you can imagine, we had a little trepidation before flipping the switch on that Monday night wondering what users will think the next morning. The next day those users were thrilled to get their hands on the new user interface, visual Campaign Builder, industry-leading lead generation features, hot new lead scoring capabilities and new shopping themes and layouts. These features amount to the fact they could easily and successfully build their next sales and marketing campaign for their business.

Here are some of the amazing comments customers have said about the Spring 2012 Release:

If you have comments on the Spring 2012 Release, we’re listening!
Post a note on our Facebook Wall or shoot a Tweet to @Infusionsoft.

In addition to wowing our users, we earned several great mentions in the press about this update to our all-in-one sales and marketing solution. You should check them out:

• Infusionsoft Revamps Its Interface, Adds New Campaign Builder, Web Analytics and Lead Scoring  –David Raab, Customer Experience Matrix
• Infusionsoft becoming the local success story we all seek –Francine Hardaway, Phoenix Business Journal Blog
• Infusionsoft Releases Latest Sales/Marketing Services for Small Businesses –Brian LaRue, Adotas
• Infusionsoft Unveils Major Update To Its Small-Business Sales And Marketing Suite –DemandGen Report
• Why “Pretty” Design and Ease Of Use Are The New Competitive Selling Points –Ramon Ray, SmallBizTechnology.com
• Infusionsoft Reveals Its Spring 2012 Release –DestinationCRM
• Infusionsoft Gets A Spring Refreshment: Marketing Automation Made Easier –Ramon Ray, SmallBizTechnology.com

After tonight, all 8500+ small businesses and 31,000 users will be updated to the Spring 2012 Release. We would love to hear your feedback on how the new features and enhancements help your business. When you get the update, spend a few moments to get familiar with new look, soak up all the free support resources and come tell us what you think on Facebook or Twitter.

We want to let everyone know our blog site will be combined with the overall Microsoft Dynamics Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crm/  We will keep our past blogs up for existing linked resources for a while, however for upcoming news and updates please go to http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crm/. 

We greatly appreciate your interest in our blogs and comments!

The new Infusionsoft Campaign Builder has been a multi-year undertaking full of fun, learning, and if we are being completely transparent, some long nights and crazy hard work. I want to talk to you about how we arrived at the present-day visual Campaign Builder, lessons learned and how you can be involved to make it even better.

From There to Here: Two Major Insights

We went through multiple iterations of our Campaign Builder and learned a lot from hundreds of users on what was good and what was not so good. We observed how you work in the software and more importantly, how you think about marketing as it relates to your business. We also had many thoughtful discussions with our Success Coaches whose sole responsibility is to ensure our customers are successful with their Infusionsoft implementation. We had two major insights.

1. Campaigns are easiest to understand when they are visualized.
As we observed users building their marketing campaigns, one of the most interesting insights wasn’t even from the software. When talking about their campaigns, users would often show us their campaign maps. Usually mapped on a whiteboard, in a mind-map or if you worked with a Success Coach, captured in a Marketing Automation Plan (MAP). It became clear that many of you think visually and that the context provided by these visual maps was invaluable.

2. People don’t naturally “speak” marketing automation.
Once we saw how people were mapping their campaigns, we got really clear on the path from the model that had been created to implementation in the software. We learned that there is a “Translation” into Infusionsoft. My favorite quote from a customer was, “I know my business and what I want to do. I just don’t speak Infusionsoft.” You could reasonably expand this beyond Infusionsoft to “I don’t speak marketing automation.”

Where We Are Today: Version One

These two insights led us down a road that created the new Campaign Builder. Here are some of the key features that we built to solve for our users’ business needs.

Centralized
The Campaign Builder centralizes everything about a campaign into one place. This means no more clicking around to different areas of the software to find all the pieces of your campaign. Everything is just a double-click away.

Visual
The Campaign Builder uses the same simple drag-and-drop interface as many of our other tools. Making it easy to layout a campaign just like you would on a piece of paper or a whiteboard. This visual view lets you quickly build campaigns that anyone can understand and work with.

Goal-Oriented
The Campaign Builder uses goals as the framing for a campaign turning the conversation away from the technical and focusing it on the more important question of  “What are you trying to get the person to do?”. This helps you keep your eye on what really counts by allowing you to talk naturally about what you want your customers to do instead of getting mired down in how it all works.

Segmenting
Segmenting your leads based on data they provide is an important practice in marketing. With Campaign Builder, we made segmenting based on form submission data easy by allowing you to drag out two sequences and then by clicking on the decision icon select which options send the person down each path.

Flexible Scheduling
You can now schedule marketing pieces with much greater granularity, including the time of day that you want a piece to go out. You can also include days of the week you want to allow something to go out and the time-frame. Want to only send out automated emails from sales reps between 8 AM and 5PM on a weekday after a 15 minutes delay? You can do that.

These are just a few of the features found in the Campaign Builder. There are many more hidden gems that you’ll discover as you use it.

How to Get Involved

We didn’t build Campaign Builder alone — we partnered with customers like you who were willing to take time and help us get clear on the top-level benefits they were seeking. This is different from your standard feature request because ...

I can honestly say that I’ve never been more excited for a new version of Infusionsoft than I am for this latest release. The Spring 2012 Release brings with it an amazing arsenal of weapons for small businesses to mobilize and use to strategically attack their target market. The Infusionsoft Training Team has delivered many new resources to help you succeed with the new release.

The new interface is easier than ever to navigate (and it’s pretty pleasing on the eyes too). The Drag and Drop Campaign Builder makes it easy to plan, implement and execute your brilliant marketing strategies. The Lead Scoring features make it easy to identify and prioritize your inbound leads. The new e-commerce enhancements make it easier than ever to convert your prospects into customers. My personal favorite new weapons are the Web Analytics and Lead Generation features. Because of their complexity and difficulty of implementation, these features have been previously limited to major enterprises with enormous marketing budgets. We’ve made it simple to implement and easy to understand for entrepreneurs. We’ve essentially made it possible for every successful small business to have their own Tomahawk Cruise Missile with a Laser Guidance System.

Like everything else though, these new weapons won’t do you any good unless you know how to use them. This is where the Training Team steps in. They put together a large array of helpful content for you to learn how to mobilize your internal troops and best put these new weapons to use.

We’ve got you covered for getting comfortable with the new Spring 2012 Release. Here’s a list of all of the helpful resources you have available:

• Old Timer’s Guide to the New Infusionsoft – If you’ve used Infusionsoft for a while, you’re probably familiar with how to get around. The first and most obvious thing you’ll notice is that the layout has completely changed. The Old Timer’s Guide shows you how to get to where you’re trying to go with the new navigation. Simply navigate the way you are used to, and we’ll show you how to get there with the new navigation. To get to it, simply go to the Help menu in the top and choose the Old-New Guide.
• Webinar Marathon – The Webinar Marathon is a series of 16 live webinars we are doing to highlight the new features and answer your questions. We started the Webinar Marathon last week for those of you that have the Spring Release already. There are three live training webinars that will be presented twice this week and two all-day question and answer webinars. For more details and the schedule, click here.
• User Guide – Our Documentation Specialist, Dee Allomong, has been as busy as a Dee (get it ) to make sure that everything in the new release has been documented. She’s written hundreds of articles, taken thousands of screenshots and compiled it all together for you. To check it out, visit the new Help Center, click on Help and click on User Guide.
• Video Library – If you’re a visual learner the Video Library is your new best friend. Our Video Guy, Mike Bast, has gone through over 13 sets of batteries for his Bose noise cancelling headphones while he’s redone every video in the Infusionsoft Video Library. The Video Library has videos for everyone. Whether you’re just getting started or are looking for some specific details on a new feature the Video Library has you covered. To watch all the new videos, go to the new Help Center, click on Help and choose Video Library.
• Mastermind Webinars – Each week I host the Infusionsoft Mastermind Webinars. We talk about anything and everything that has to do with marketing, sales and Infusionsoft. For the past three weeks, we’ve discussed some of the major features in the new release. All of the webinars are recorded and are posted online. To sign up for the weekly webinar or to watch previously-recorded ones, visit the new Help Center, click on Training then click Mastermind Webinars.

There you have it – an amazing set of new weapons and all the training you need to enable you and your troops ...

Infusionsoft continues to build upon the e-commerce platform for the Spring 2012 Release by adding new, beautifully themed shopping cart templates. Users now have the ability to use three new shopping cart themes and customize them to their needs.

For e-commerce, we went after one major benefit statement in the Spring 2012 Release:

“I want my customers’ shopping experience to blend seamlessly with my website to inspire confidence and generate more sales.”

We created three new shopping cart themes that you may use and customize to suit your branding.  Right now, we have three themes, but we will be adding more in the future.

In addition, you may choose between two different layouts:

• One Column – Optimized for a small product offering with product descriptions on the storefront.
• Two Column – Optimized for those with 10-50 products with additional branding on the storefront.

Both layouts contain a header, footer and product category navigation. Uncategorized products display on the storefront.

Also, we’ve updated the CSS styles and have included detailed comments for web developers and opened up several labels for greater personalization. I’m happy to say that now our Infusionsoft Shopping Cart looks updated and more professional to help you convert sales and build confidence.

It’s not just the look and feel that matters. It’s the ability to track marketing and sales effectiveness throughout the entire sales process. Our new Web Analytics feature is included on our Shopping Cart Pages, Order Forms and Storefronts. This allows you to gather deep intelligence on your e-commerce and marketing campaigns so you can increase conversions and the overall experience for customers.

Finally, we’ve also made our product and subscriptions even more flexible. This means that you can offer multiple options for your products and charge the right amount at the right time.

What do you think of these e-commerce improvements? Let me know in the comments below!

Throughout the past year, the Product Management team interviewed hundreds of customers and a compelling story began to emerge of a need for efficiency. We heard it expressed differently by customers, but the theme was consistent to implement the new ability to perform Lead Scoring.

“I don’t know who I should talk to”
“I want to stop wasting time figuring out which prospects I should be speaking with, and instead spend my time on the phone with the right prospects”
“Help me identify who the hottest leads are”
“I want to know who is showing interest in my marketing efforts, so I can use my sales team effectively”
“I want Infusionsoft to easily make the cream rise to the surface”

If you can’t relate to any of the above don’t worry – you’re not crazy. For the Spring 2012 Release, we identified and chose to solve for the Sales-Functioning CRM target user – this is typically a company that has a sales team involved with the selling process of their product or service. Having target users in mind when we develop new features of the software allows us to stay focused and effective, making it far more likely that what we develop will provide a compelling benefit to our users.

We condensed the above statements into a simple benefit statement that we used to drive our designs forward:

“I can easily identify and focus my sales efforts on the hottest leads.”

This benefit statement clearly teed up the need for users to be able to do two things: The ability to tell Infusionsoft which prospect behaviors matter most to me, and for Infusionsoft to then serve those prospects up to me based on which most closely resemble my ideal lead.

Create a Lead Score

Creating the lead score is easy and composed of only a few moving parts:

Naming the Score – This allows you to customize the name. While this was designed for scoring leads, we understand there are many powerful uses with it.

Adding the Rules – This is where you literally adjust the value your tags have on contacts. We chose tags as a great starting point for scoring because it’s a data point you can apply and access from almost anywhere within the application. Once you pick a tag that matters to you, you then tell Infusionsoft what it’s worth to you, with a range of -10 to +10 as your options. For example: if someone signs up for my newsletter, I want them to get +1 point, however if they read my whitepaper on the cost savings of switching to CFL light bulbs, I want them to receive a whopping +4 points, because reading that whitepaper represents a significant stage of my sales process, whereas the Newsletter is of less consequence.

Defining your Ideal Score – This is where you can tell the system how many points it takes to equal a ‘hot’ lead. Depending on how many data points you are feeding into the scoring engine, five points might equal five flames, however if you have dozens of data points that feed into the overall health of a lead, an ideal score of 50, or even 100 may be appropriate.

Identify the Hottest Leads

Now that we’ve dealt with telling Infusionsoft what information is valuable, it’s time to get some return on that investment, aka let me feel the heat!

To accomplish this, we created a new lead score column to your contact searches and contact records that quickly lets you visualize how hot a given person is, or a whole list of people, based on a range of 0-5 flames. In a large list of prospects, this is hugely valuable because you can easily sort based on which lead most closely matches the criteria that is important to you, and allows you to work your way down from highest to lowest priority prospects. Combined with the Interactive List View, you have the potential to stay on a single screen for maximized efficiency and workflow.

The vision for lead scoring is one where all of the data that is relevant to your sales process is feeding into determining the score so that it can become ...

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM User Research group is looking for people who would be interested in providing us with information about your experiences with Dynamics CRM, including the Resource Center.  We are looking for people who are (1) CRM Developers and/or Microsoft Partners OR (2) users of CRM Dynamics.  We would like to interview you in person (if located in Seattle area) or by phone.  The interview will take about 2 hours of your time.  We know how important your time is and appreciate it.  We will reimburse you with a Microsoft software gratuity (you can choose  a Microsoft Application from a list of MS Applications).

If you are interested or have any other questions, please contact mlalomia@microsoft.com or carolak@microsoft.com. 

Regards,
Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Project Manager
Carola Klass