Boosting Email Deliverability with One Easy Change…

Email deliverability is super important these days. As marketers, however, we go through all of this work to get someone on our email list, but much less effort is spent to actually engage them and keep them active. There are lots of clever things we can do to boost email deliverability, but this article isn’t about clever hacks — just simple, practical and easy to implement advice.

A few months ago, Infusionsoft added the ability to send out your emails in the local timezone of your contacts — this was a long awaited feature and was applauded when finally released. The only problem is, today, months later, very few Infusionsoft users are using it. And there’s one very big reason why…

Acquiring timezone data requires you to use the default Infusionsoft web forms — yeah, those ugly webforms no one uses! So while the feature of collecting the timezone data was much needed and anxiously awaited, in practicality, it’s almost useless to the average Infusionsoft user using Leadpages, Clickfunnels, Thrive Themes or any other 3rd party landing page builder.

A Better Approach to Collecting Timezone Data

Fortunately, at MyFusion Solutions, we’re very pragmatic about these things. Since we use our apps every day in three different businesses, we know and feel the pain of the average Infusionsoft user and aim to cure it.

So we created our own solution for getting, not only timezone data, but a ton of other geo data into Infusionsoft easily. When we designed this Helper, these were the things we were some of our design guidelines:

It needed to acquire not only Timezone data but IP Address, address and geo data, the Timzone numeric offset and even latitude and longitude data
It needed to work no matter what landing page builder software you used.

It also needed to work for your existing list. See, we know that you have invested (like us) a lot in building your existing list, so we wanted to make sure you could get Timezone and geo data for those contacts as well, not just new optins.

Our solution had to work with the default Infusionsoft system Timezone field

And so those are the exact criteria we used to create the IP Redirect Helper. Now, don’t be confused by the name, this does capture the Timezone data as well.

The Common Solution & Why You Don’t Want It…

The common approach to getting the Timezone and other geo data is to use a Javascript code and paste it onto your web forms. There are several free scripts out there that do this. So, sounds great, right?

Not so fast.

First off, this is a manual script-based solution that you will have to deploy on each and every webform and also support it later if things change or it breaks — across all of your webforms. To implement it, you’ll have to first hunt the all down and edit them on your website. While not terribly difficult, this does mean a lot of extra work and time.

Secondly, this does nothing to solve one of our requirements: that you be able to use the solution to acquire Timezone and geo data for your existing contacts. Because this Javascript based solution is implemented on the webforms at optin, it does nothing to help your already existing list.

So, while this is a “free” solution, it has it’s own costs — the cost of time and the cost of being only a partial solution.
What We Did Instead… and Recommend You Use Instead…

Our Helper — the IP Redirect Helper — works as a redirect instead of an on page Javascript. So, to implement it, all you have to do is paste it into the thank you page link of your webform and then specify where it redirects to.

So, It looks like this:

When you configure the Helper you basically have two settings to configure. First off, you select the various pieces of data that you want to acquire — the Timezone, the IP Address, Geo location data, Timezone numeric offset from GMT, and/or latitude and longitude. For each of these elements, you can choose to turn them off or on. So you don’t have to burn up a tone of custom fields, but you have full flexibility to get the data you need. And yes, for the Timezone, you can set it to the default Infusionsoft system timezone field.

The only other setting you really need to do is specify where to send the person after they are routed through this redirect — the destination URL.

Two Separate Use Cases for the IP Redirect Helper

The first use case, we already described — using the Helper as the thank you page, capturing the geo data and then redirecting to the original thank you page. This works great for any new leads coming onto your list.

The second use case, however, is even more powerful and. while simple, it is often overlooked. Since the Helper functions as a simple redirect script, you can use it in your emails as well — whether campaign emails or broadcasts.

So, let’s say that you’ve jut written a new blog post and are going to blast your list about it. Instead of linking straight to the blog post from the email, use the IP Redirect Helper instead. You simply create the Helper, set the data you want to capture, and set the destination URL to be the blog post.

Now when people click on the link to read your blog post, they are first routed through our Helper and we update all of that precious timezone and geo data before silently and immediately redirecting them right to the blog post you intended. To the user, the process is completely transparent and not even noticed. There’s just a slight 1-second delay as the redirect happens that is not even noticeable.

This approach is something that allows you to quickly and easily (as well as silently) capture all of the geo data and timezone data from all of your engaged contacts on your list. In just a few email blasts, using the Helper, you’ll have timezone data for the majority of your list and all of the active, engaged contacts.

Best Practices and Suggested Usage

When deploying this Helper, it is our suggestion that you do a 1-2 punch — using it both for new leads and for your existing list. The purpose of this approach is to get the Timezone data for the most amount of people we possibly can.

Obviously we want to use it for all new leads. This will keep them engaged from the very beginning. Also, because we just need to change the thank you page URL, we don’t actually have to edit anything on the website, just the webform within the Infusionsoft campaign. This makes deployment much easier.

So, while getting 100% of our new optins timezone data is great, that still leaves our list unresolved. For the list, we want to use IP Redirect Helpers for all our new emails for the next few weeks. This way, we can gradually migrate the vast majority of our list over as well.

Doing this 1-2 approach will give us the ability to migrate the most amount of our list over to local timezone emails. That is critical for having a real impact on our testing to focus on getting our email deliverability up!

I hope you enjoyed this Tuesday Tip! Subscribe below to make sure you get all of them — new and fresh, each and every Tuesday!

Nick Kulavic
 

Nick Kulavic is the Co-Founder of MyFusion Solutions and the Lead Developer. Basically he's the wizard behind the curtain of all things MyFusion! :-)

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