Infusionsoft Users Area

[Charley Mann]

For Infusionsoft Questions

[Charley Mann]

It seems that there has been trouble with the Letters function in Infusionsoft - I've been looking into it a little, but anyone who has any experience with it should weigh in.

The problem occurs when creating a letter using the Campaign Builder.  The formatting is apparently wonky.  Ashley (of Breyers' office), can you post up some screenshots or a copy of one of the letters that has been generated with Infusionsoft so we can review it?

[Kasey Richardson (KCAIA)]

I believe there is an Infusionsoft users forum (through infusionsoft). Has anyone tried this outlet to get a solution to the letter generation problems? Just a thought that popped into my head. 

[ashley]

I have attended a user forum locally, but these usually occur after hours and this is something that really needs some one-on-one diagnosis.  I've found the forums to be more big picture, "this is how I was successful using infusionsoft" type of meetings.  I will post screenshots as soon as I get a moment.

[Charley Mann]

I looked over the online user forum, and it was just as Ashley said: it is big picture on there.

We can do a Google Hangout (for screen-sharing purposes), if we want to pool our knowledge to figure things out.  Anyone up for that?

[ashley]

I'm up for it.  Here is a screen shot of my issue.  This is what a letter looks like when I preview it in a Word Doc after creating it within my campaign.  As you can see, infusion now exports letter templates into a table format in word, which we all know spells death to user friendliness.  This would not really be an issue except that it looks like the letter now has 3 inch margins, which just looks dumb.  We also add a background on as letterhead, this looks fine still.  My concern is the appearance of the margins, which now increases the likelihood that our letters will be longer than one page.  Please help!

[emily]

i could do a hangout sometime this morning.

[courtney.shumard]

I would definitely be interested in doing a hangout/call about this. We've never used the letter features but some of our campaigns that we're currently working on were going include that feature. I set them up, but have not published them yet, so I'd definitely be interested in discussing.

[Charley Mann]

Hey Courtney,

We did a hangout on Wednesday about the Letter issue (the formatting is wonky when it gets exported).  We're trying to figure out a workaround solution, since Infusionsoft doesn't have a fix for it right now.

One workaround is to create an Action Set that builds the letter, then insert that Action Set into the sequence.

The other one that I'm working on, which will hopefully bear fruit, is to create a fulfillment job that merges the contact info with a form letter that you've uploaded (designed in Word, rather than on Infusion).

We'll hopefully have something to report.  If you have any extra questions post them up here.  If you want to do a quick Hangout with me for clarity, let me know, and I'll make that happen.

Charley

[courtney.shumard]

Oh, no worries on the hangout! This week has been crazy, so it took me a little bit to get in here and figure it out. 

I will work on creating an Action Set instead of through the campaign builder. I'll let you know if I can't figure that out. Let me know if the fulfillment job is a better solution, but until then, I'll keep you updated if I find anything that works.

Basically since we were just going to start using the letter feature, it's not really a hinder to us, so I am just working on the best way to get it working. Until now we have just used the task features to mail out the letters as they come up in the follow up sequences. I didn't like this method because the letters weren't personalized with the receiver's name.

Also, I had mentioned this on our most recent call, but I don't think Emily was able to make it on that one, and I know at V&B you guys send out a good amount of email newsletters/broadcasts. Emily, do you have any tips for lowering the chances of your emails bouncing back as a result of too many spam complaints? We have the issue of our broadcast stopping about 1/4th of the way through for that reason, and that means not very many people on our list are receiving our email blasts.

[Ashley Romao]

Hey Charley, any progress on the fulfillment work around?  I'm going to start the action set way pretty soon and just wanted to check with you to see if you found anything out on that, or if you talked to Infusion and gave them our demands?  Haha

[Charley Mann]

No luck.  I've tried making a couple of edits to the process, tried seeing if it just needed some processing time, but no luck.  The action set does work, so you can use that.

I have also talked with Infusion, and they don't have any kind of workaround that I didn't think of...the guy I talked to was quite surprised that there wasn't one.

So, stick with Action Sets for now!

[Ashley Romao]

Oh gosh. The action sets I need to use to build my new campaigns are so old that they won't even pull in as an option from the drop down list when I try to do it.  And I can't create new action sets. FAIL. 

Just a warning to those of you who used a lot of action sets in the past and were planning on pulling them in to your new campaigns as a work around to the crap that they call a new letter template.  If they are too old, they aren't an option.

*hits head against brick wall*

[emily]

I know we don't send letters in the quantities you do, Ashley, but I'm doing the time-intensive version: 

Assigning myself a task in the campaign to send a letter. The task simply says "send letter xyz to ~contact~" The letter is saved in a folder as a master version, and i go in and do the name and address changes and mail it out that way. SUCKS. but it does work. Charley, do you have any leads on why the infusion guys dropped the ball on this?

[Charley Mann]

Ashley - Why can't you create new Action Sets?  For me, you just go to the big Infusionsoft tab at the top, scroll over it, and select "Settings" from under the Marketing column.  You should see Action Sets in the left-hand column after clicking that, and you can add new sets through there.  Is that not an option for you?  If not, you may not have a complete set of user permissions in your application.

Emily - All I can tell you is that there is a report submitted with them about the issue.  I don't why it happened the way that it did.  If you want to do something, contact Infusion's help chat and discuss the issue with them - then ask them to file a request about the function.  The more of those requests we make, the more likely we get a quick fix.

Another overall fix would be to redesign your letters to compensate for the altered margins.  I know it's not the same, but it would allow for a more seamless process.  I guess it's weighing the look and feel versus the efficiency.  I'm not making a value judgement for anyone - after all, we're still mostly doing Letters manually on our end (basically with Emily's workaround).  But if you're doing heavy volume, it might be worth just building a new letter and accept the increased margins.

[Ashley Romao]

@ Charley....omg thank you!  I didn't know it was there, I was going to the logical place, god forbid, when creating a campaign haha!

I'll create another ticket but move forward with the action sets.  Hurray!  At least I can get something going now.

[Ashley Romao]

Hey all, I posted about our issue in the Infusion Forum, could you please go on there and voice your agreement?  Trying to be the squeaky wheel here so it gets fixed.  Here are the links to the threads:

http://community.infusionsoft.com/showthread.php/4932-Unfriendly-letters?p=17479#post17479

http://community.infusionsoft.com/showthread.php/4933-Unfriendly-letters?p=17480#post17480

Squeaky squeaky squeaky!!!