Marketing Automation – Nicole Munoz Consulting

Your Tech Stack Questions Answered!

One of the questions I get asked the most – is what tech platform should I build my site on! Since more and more businesses are going online there are more options for your website. Keeping up with the latest and greatest tool can be a bit overwhelming. After spending all day with yours eyes glued to your screen, scouring and reading multiple list of reviews, your bound to be fed up and end up picking the most basic and cheapest option.

I understand exactly where you’re right at, that’s why I’ve done this part for you! After more than 10 years in web automation here is a run down of the basics of what you need and our recommended platforms!

Your domain is the name of your website. For example, www.yoursite.com is the name of your domain. A domain costs about $12-15 per year depending on where you register it.

Your hosting is where you will store your files. It is like a virtual file cabinet for your website, images, videos. There are different plans based on how many sites you have.

A few platforms to register your domain are:

GoDaddy

Ionis by 1&1

A few platforms we like for hosting are:

Ionis by 1&1

Liquid Web

WordPress is our platform of choice to build a website. It has the most flexibility and there are a lot of plugins available to make it do anything you want.

Go to wordpress.org to grab the open source files that you can download and use to build your site.

WordPress is like the file cabinet. But you still need to organize the layout and design. You do this with a theme.

The theme we like and use right now is called “Elementor”. You can check it out here.

Your email platform is sometimes included with your hosting plan. This is the ability to send emails from your domain name ie [email protected].

We like and use GSuite Apps to handle our email. This has a little higher cost (about $6/user/mo), but since it also includes the ability to create and share documents on the cloud, we find it’s worth it.

What this means is that you can use your own domain with gmail to send and receive emails as opposed to having to login to your hosting account or having your hosting account forward your emails to a personal gmail for example so you can access them.

Having all documents on the cloud is also a huge advantage. Our team doesn’t have to worry about having 5 different versions of the same doc as we can collaborate on one doc and always see the most updated version in the cloud.

Email marketing is a tool that you can use to create different lists of emails and send a series of automated emails to your different lists. The prices for these tools range from $15-$199 per month

The one we use and recommend is Infusionsoft as it has Email Marketing, a CRM, and a Shopping Cart in one.

Other tools that work well are:

Active Campaign

MailChimp

Aweber

All three work very well. Active Campaign is a little more similar to Infusionsoft in that it has built in functionality to build campaigns in a visual layout. Mailchimp and Aweber are great if you are just getting started.

To take payments online you need 3 things.

Merchant Account
Gateway
Shopping Cart

You can either set up all 3 things separately or you can use tools that combine two or three of them together. Some examples of 3 in 1 are: Paypal and Stripe. Both paypal and stripe allow you to sign up with just their service and they provide you with buttons that you can put on your site so you can sell your products or services. They do charge a commission of around 3% per transaction as well as a transaction fee.

The most common method is to get all 3 services individually, like the following.

Merchant Account ($15/mo + 3%)

A merchant account is the ability to process credit card transactions. You can sign up for a merchant account directly with your bank. Be sure to request a “Cart Not Present” account! This is usually the cheapest way to process credit card transactions online.

Gateway ($20/mo)

A gateway is how you connect your merchant account to your shopping cart. The most common one is Authorize.net and when you set up your merchant account with your bank you can request an authorize.net account as well.

Shopping Cart (Varies)

A shopping cart is how you collect payments online. It is the tool you use to create order forms so that your customers can put in their credit card information online in a secure place. We use Infusionsoft as our shopping cart. Other shopping carts are also available. Some examples are SamCart, ClickFunnels, Kajabi. Before jumping out and getting a shopping cart, you will want to make sure it is compatible with your landing page builder (and many times it is included with your landing page builder.)

Landing pages are pages that are built to either capture leads, or sell your products or services. Since the look and feel of landing pages usually varies from the main site, these landing pages are sometimes built with landing page builders.

Some of the one’s we use are:

LeadPages

ClickFunnels

ThriveThemes

We usually install these on a subdomain of the main site. For example:

Go.yoursite.com
Start.yoursite.com
Launch.yoursite.com

The words “go”, “start”, “launch” are examples of subdomains.

If you are selling a course then you will need a members area to deliver your course content. An LMS stands for a Learning Management Software.

If you use Infusionsoft like we do, then Memberium is an easy to use membership software that you can set up on a subdomain of your site. For example: courses.yoursite.com or members.yoursite.com.

Another popular one that we recommend is LearnDash. Learndash can be used in conjunction with Memberium as well.

Learndash allows you to organize the content in your members area and also to roll out access to the content on a weekly or monthly basis. Another membership tool is Kajabi.

Live Webinars

For live webinars, we use Zoom. Most of us today have an account with Zoom for meetings. If you are going to hold a webinar, you can upgrade to have the functionality of a webinar. I love how they allow you to just upgrade to get webinars for one month and automatically cancel it for you after 30 days.

There is also a built-in functionality with Zoom that allows you to live stream directly to Facebook. This allows your audience to choose how they want to attend a live webinar. It can also allow you to have more people participate in a live webinar if you are at your capacity with your Zoom account. One of our clients recently used a combo of Zoom and FB Live to have a webinar with 16,000 attendees!

Automated Webinars

Once you have a few live webinars you are going to want to create what is called an “evergreen” campaign where people can watch your webinars at will. Our software of choice is EverWebinar. We’ve tried many and despite the limitations, still find that it meets most of our expectations. One of the cool things that you can do is to tag contacts based on which stage of the webinar they got to. For example, you can tag them based on registering, attended, stayed till the sales pitch, and so on. You can then customize your automated follow up email campaigns based on how far they got into the webinar!

Video Storage

For video storage the big three are Wistia, Vimeo, and Youtube. Most online tools out there will allow you to embed videos from one of these three locations.

We prefer Vimeo as it has advanced data and tracking capabilities and after the video stops playing, you don’t see ads to other videos – sometimes of your competitors!

If you are just getting started, you can use Youtube and set the videos to private so they are only seen on the pages you have them embedded.

Another option is also self-hosting your videos on Amazon S3. We do this for our church videos and then embed them on our site since we have so many! This is actually the cheapest option but requires a little bit of technical support to set up.

Have you ever seen how some people have it where after 3 days, the sales page automatically changes to a closed page? There are a couple of ways to do this.

If you have Infusionsoft, what you can do is instead of linking directly to the sales page from your email campaigns, you can use a custom field to insert the link to the sales page. Then after a certain number of days, change the link in the custom field to point to the closed waitlist page. Once this is done, even if the contact goes to a previous email, they will still see the closed sales page.

Another way to do this is using a tool called: Deadline Funnel. I don’t prefer this method because it breaks if the contact does not have a “cookie” on their device which can happen if they sign up for the information with one device, but later choose to click from an email to the sales page from a different device. Since no “cookie” is present, it shows the sales page as closed even though the email they just received says they have 2 days left to purchase for example!

The way it works is to set it up to automatically display a different url (usually the waitlist page) after a certain amount of time. There is a timer that displays at the top of the page letting people know how much time they have left to purchase. Once set up, anyone that visits the site for the first time, will have a certain amount of time to purchase before the sales page closes down.

Note: Most of the time when launches are done, the pages are closed manually by someone staying up till midnight on the night of the launch (or doing it first thing in the morning!)

Over the years, we’ve used a lot of appointment scheduling tools. The one I like best and we use now is Acuity Scheduler. Accuity works really well if you have a team of coaches that you need to set up with personal calendar links for your students as well!

Some Appointment Tools are:

Sometimes you will need to connect two tools together that do not have a direct integration. To do this we usually use Zapier or PlusThis (for Infusionsoft).

Zapier is a connector. It basically saves you the cost of hiring an API developer to build and maintain custom code to connect two online tools.

Recommended Tech Stack…

As you can see, the cost of running an online business can quickly add up and there are a lot of choices to make.

Here is my recommended tech stack for getting started that still allows you to have enough flexibility for growth:

Domain Registration

GoDaddy

Hosting

LiquidWeb

Website

WordPress with Elementor

Email

GSuite

CRM/Shopping Cart/Marketing Automation

Infusionsoft

Membership Site

Memberium + LearnDash

Landing Page Builder

LeadPages

Merchant Account

Bank + Authorize.Net (Cart Not Present)

Appointment Scheduler

Acuity Scheduler

Video Storage

Amazon S3

There you have it! So what does your tech stack look like?

Time Management Secrets from the Trenches!

by Nicole Munoz

One of the questions I get asked all of the time is – How in the world do you do it all?

And I get it. I’m a mom of 7 kids. I’m a pastor’s wife. I’m the director or our Christian School. And as a fractional COO for my VIP clients, I help manage the day to day operations and behind the scenes management of 6 and 7 figure launches. In fact, lately, my ninja team of marketing experts has been handling 2-3 launches simultaneously per WEEK!

So what’s the secret? Read on.

Time Management Tip #1: Live By Your Calendar

For over a decade I have lived religiously by my Google Calendar. Google calendars are awesome because it is always accessible whether I am on my phone or in front of my computer. It allows you to easily make recurring appointments. And you can have multiple calendars that you can use to schedule different types of activities or appointments.

Here is how I do it….

#1 Block off personal time and family time. This is the time for exercise, morning Bible study, and prayer, lunch, and dinner with the kids, etc.

#2 Block off time to go to church. Not only do I block off the times of the actual church service times but also the time it takes to get ready to go and drive there and back!

#3 Schedule time to work “on my business”. I block off 2 blocks of 90 minutes to work on content development and strategy for my own business first thing in the morning. After the first block of time, I have a quick check-in with my team, social media, and email to make sure no fires need to be put out and then go back to the 2nd block of time.

#4 Batch work. Mondays are for client meetings for my VIP clients. Tuesdays are for teaching. I schedule coaching calls for my students as well as the FB Lives I do in my groups for Tuesdays. Wednesday and Thursday are days to work on client work or internal projects. Fridays I try to wrap up by noon to take an early weekend and spend more time with the kids.

#5 Schedule everything. Every single time I need to do something, it immediately goes on the calendar when I plan to work on that item. If it does not go on the calendar, there is close to a zero chance that it will get done. This also helps me to see immediately that every time I say “yes” to something I am saying “no” to something else. For example, before committing to something, I can check my calendar and see where it can be fit in. Since family and church time is already blocked off, if there is not any more time left on the calendar to fit something in, I have a choice. I can move something around, I can spend less time with my family, or I can let the person know that it won’t be done till the next week. Pretty much everything can be scheduled.

Time Management Tip #2: Delegate Everything.

Anything that someone else can possibly do should be delegated. Clean the house? Delegate. Cook healthy lunches and dinners? Delegate. Iron clothes? Delegate. Before we had a Christian school I learned to delegate “homeschooling” of our 7 kids by hiring a private teacher.

What was never delegated… sitting on the floor and playing with my kids!

Delegation is not just asking someone else to do your job or to do a task. For business tasks, I have a 4 step process I follow.

Step 1: Do it myself

Step 2: Create a system

Step 3: Train someone to follow my system

Step 4: Delegate once my system is mastered

What most people do is skip to step #4 without doing steps 1-3! That almost never works!

Time Management Tip #3: Extreme Focus.

Block off 2-4 sets of blocks of time per day to do focused work. While you are working during that time, log out of all of your social media accounts, your communication channels, your task management, everything. Then focus on working for a straight block of time without getting distracted with anything else.

If just getting started, you might find you can only work for 20 minutes at a time before being overcome with the temptation to “check-in”. That’s fine. Work for 20 minutes, check-in for 5 minutes, then repeat 3-6 times a day.

After doing that for a while, work in 45-minute batches before checking-in. After mastering that level, increase it to 90 minutes.

After you work for 3-4 blocks of 90 minutes a day on your deep level content creation or strategy, you will find that you are getting more done in a week than you used to do in a month (or even months).

So what are your time management tips? Let me know by leaving a comment below!

How to identify spambots and kill them like the cockroaches they are

by Nicole Munoz

Recently the Infusionsoft community was disrupted by a spambot attack that put every single Infusionsoft user at risk of not having their emails delivered to their customers, to their prospects, or to any of the contacts in their database for that matter.

One of the benefits of using a hosted email provider such as Infusionsoft is that there should in theory be an increase in email deliverability. By email deliverability I mean – your emails get to the inboxes of your contacts. Guaranteed.

Remember the good ole’ days when the mailman had his route to hand deliver your mail to your mailbox. Wasn’t that much more direct? The post office had a saying:

That’s kind of like what we’re saying about email deliverability. No matter what, if you use our service we are going to make sure we have the right equipment and the right people to get the job done.

There are times when there is a disruption in service. Those times are usually under extreme circumstances such as natural disasters such as floods or fires. For example this past weekend, there was a an internet flood.

What happened was this

Over the last few months (or years) spambots have been quietly exploiting a vulnerability in the Infusionsoft webforms. They did not come in masses of thousands or tens of thousands – because that is something we would have noticed. They also did not come dressed as spambots – they made sure to cover their tracks by slipping into our databases quietly in small groups of 20-30 always making sure to have a few real and legitimate contacts with them so as not to be noticed.

These spam bots were actually quite smart – though not that smart as we will see in a moment.

These spam bots didn’t just enter through the front door of an Infusionsoft web form – they also made sure they got into the daily operations of top Internet Marketers by automatically clicking and confirming the email addresses used.

What that means is that even when you as the Infusionsoft user is doing everything you can do to prevent sending out emails to spambots by requiring all of your contacts to double opt-in – all of your efforts are undermined with the wicked plot of the spambots.

How were these spambots identified you ask? Well, in this case they all came in on the same IP address – making it drop dead easy to identify them. (Amateur hour move spambots!)

Which leads us to this. What can you, an ethical Internet Marketer, do to identify and kill the spambots like the cockroaches they are?

How to Identify Spambots

If your site normally gets less than a hundred opt-ins a month, the process can be quite simple. You can use custom notifications from Infusionsoft to be notified every time someone opts-in to one of your forms.

Set up a special filter for these notifications in your email inbox and each day check how many come in. Spot check them for spammy looking email addresses. The whole process should take a few minutes a day. Not ideal – but easy to implement and low cost for most business owners.

If your site normally gets a few hundred to up to a thousand opt-ins a month, the process is more difficult to identify. You will want to set-up checks to monitor:

Spikes in Confirmation Rates
Spikes in Links Clicked in Emails
Decrease in Conversion Rate of your Email Marketing Funnel

Measuring spikes in confirmation rates or links clicked is quite easy to do with tools such as Graphly.

You can use the automation links to apply a tag anytime someone confirms their email and set-up a report in Graphly to measure how many contacts get the tag applied over time.

Measuring a decrease in conversion rate is a little more difficult if you are not already measuring the conversion rate of your email marketing funnels! (We will save how to set up that tracking for another day!)

Suffice it to say, if you have a decrease in conversion rate, one of the first things to check is the source of your traffic. Export all of the contacts that entered your email marketing funnel over the time period of the drop and look at the emails. You should see a pattern. You should be able to quickly identify contacts that you suspect are spambots. Once you do this, you can check their history on their individual contact records to confirm your suspicions. If you are applying link clicked tags on all of the links in your emails (which you should be doing), you should quickly see that these contacts not only opened every single email, they also clicked on every single email. Jackpot!

Once you have verified that several of the emails are actually spambots you will notice patterns. You will see that they have a common domain in common. They might all be opting into the same webform. They might all be opting in a few minutes apart from each other.

This does take work – but there is not an easy way around it that I know of.

Once you have identified the spambots you can safely delete them from your Infusionsoft app. Use the domain blocking functionality of Infusionsoft to block any obvious domains.

How to Close the Door to Spambots

Now that you know how to identify the spambots – the next question is – but HOW can I stop them from ever entering in, in the first place?

I have found that by implementing two steps, the spambot issue is greatly reduced.

The first is by installing Cloudflare on your site.

Enable the Web Application Firewall

The second is by installing the Wordfence plug-in.

Use Rate Limiting Rules to throttle or block excess pageviews

Since I installed both of these on my sites I have not had any issues with spambots. (Not to say that I never will or this is the permanent fix!)

Another option (though not a reasonable option for most) is to create custom opt-in forms that add the contact info to the Infusionsoft database via the API and bypass the Infusionsoft webforms.

One of the reasons this issue happened in the first place was due to a vulnerability in the Infusionsoft webforms – a vulnerability they have tightened up by blocking the offending IP so that no spambots can enter through that IP again. This is great and exactly what should have happened but it will only be so long before the spambots find another door to enter.

Do you have questions on how to implement? Want help installing and configuring Cloudflare or Wordfence? Would you like my team to audit your app or set up a system so you can monitor your app to prevent this from happening to you? Please click here to schedule a free strategy session

The One Easy Automation That Helped Me Increase My Sales by 50%

by Nicole Munoz

As an inbound marketing agency, Start Ranking Now Inc. includes an incredible team of professionals that are assigned specific stats to support our sales and marketing initiatives.

Like any agency, while we have designers, copywriters, and project managers, we also have an assistant with one specific job; she schedules my free strategy sessions. These are the initial sales meetings with potential clients.

Each week, we would spend roughly 30 hours contacting potential clients, adding them to my calendar for a strategy session, and follow up with them to confirm appointments.

Some weeks, we also had to wait for emails to reschedule meetings, only to have the time slots taken by other meetings while she waited for a response. Can you imagine how frustrating that is?

Look at the Big Picture in Your Business at Least Once a Quarter

While we were conducting a quarterly review, it became apparent that the scheduling system needed a reboot.

Not only was it creating a push and pull on my calendar, but spending 30 man-hours a week on scheduling was costing the agency a tremendous amount of money just to get to the first stage of a sales meeting.

And that’s when we started using time-scheduling software. We chose Appointment Core (kindly note that we have no affiliation with their services) to eliminate the tedium of scheduling strategy sessions.

Appointment Core took the guesswork out of our calendaring. The program:

Let clients choose a time from the calendar
Sent a follow-up email reminder immediately
Allowed clients to reschedule themselves
Emailed the client the day of the meeting
Texted the client before the meeting

This simple automation meant more clients attended my strategy sessions – and helped me increase business by 50% in just a few months.

How Does Automation like Appointment Core Work to Increase Your Business?

When it becomes too frustrating, time-consuming, or tedious to do something, it’s time to automate. Also, when the cost is more significant than a digital solution, you need to change your strategy.

In this case, 30 man-hours/week meant almost any solution was better than having a team member try to book my sales appointments.

After all, we can calculate that 30 hours for even a $10/hour assistant would be $300 / week, so that the agency also saved quite a bit on salary costs.

How to Choose Scheduling Software for Your Business

Before you consider any automation for your company, you need to first focus on what type of pain you’re having. If you find yourself performing a task again and again, you will want to research how to automate that set of tasks.

In this case, using a program to schedule sales appointments accomplished three key things:

It lowed employee salary costs
It increased the rate of clients showing up to meetings
It made cancellations / reschedules easier

You should also not consider your budget as the first reason to choose a solution. As you see above, the man-hours that it takes you to accomplish a given set of tasks will quickly pay for the program once you assess an issue.

Need more automation strategy ideas? Contact us to schedule your free strategy session today.