Chain It Helper

Hello and welcome to MyFusion Helper. In this short demo, I’m going to show you how to use the Chain It Helper. Now this is a really unique little helper, it’s so simple and yet it’s really very powerful and very clever.

I’m going to start out with a live demo and show you how it works and the ways to set it up and configuration options for it and then after that, I’m going to show you some examples and talk to you about, you know, when you might want to use it in your campaigns. So let’s jump in and take a look.

All right, as we are here in the app, we come down here and the easiest way is just type it in the words, we go to Chain It and let’s save the helper name. So, we’ll give it a Chain It and demo and there we’ve got something.

Now what the Chain It does is very simply, it allows you to combine multiple helpers and put them into one helper instead. And really, think of it like the old DOS batch commands, right. Where you just have a few lines that would execute other stuff, well that’s kind of what this is doing.

So let me show you a little bit inside of Infusionsoft, just kind of an example of the scenario we are trying to avoid. Let’s say that we have four or five different commands that we have to execute or helpers that we need to invoke and we have something that looks like this. And many times, this gets to be very cumbersome and it just feels like it’s, you know, a mess to try to follow the logic of what’s going on.

Well, when we use the Chain It, we can delete all of these and just simply combine all five of these actions, or these helpers, into just a single HTTP:// post, okay. So if we come in here and we could just combine a couple of these and do here, then we would come down here and add another one, and jump on here, then we could add another one down here and when this is all set-up, we have the options of doing a couple of different things.

Okay, sometimes the order of execution doesn’t matter at all and in that case, you can just say, ‘no, don’t add any delays and just let these run in parallel.’ So all three of these would execute at the same time and it’s no big deal.

But other times, it’s very important that they run sequentially; the first one, and then the second one, and then the third one. And if that’s the case, then we can select this option to, ‘yes, add a short delay between the helpers,’ okay. And that will automatically put a little one minute delay in between each helper to make sure that there’s time for the system to process and to handle them in a serial manner.

Now we can go ahead and create the helper like we normally would and the end result is the same thing that you’ve seen in all of the others, we are just going to have a link to copy and we’ll just copy that link and paste it in. The difference is now that instead of just evoking one helper, it’s going to run all four of those, or all three of those helpers as necessary. So we just come in here and paste in the link, like normal, and then set it to draft mode, we don’t need to change anything there, and we’re all set.

So now let’s talk about some examples of why you might want to do this. Well, as we’ve already said, it simplifies the campaign builder. Because we don’t have to put these whole series of HTTP:// posts snippets one after the next, and many times I’ve seen people they want to make sure and give it delays so they put a little one minute timer delay in between them all, it’s a very common practice. That just creates a lot of clutter inside of the campaign building and by consolidating all that craziness into a single, logical operation and just make one single HTTP:// post, we can really clean up the campaign builder.

Now, the second thing that we can do as an example, let me just kind of give you a specific example, and think of the very typical web opt-in form that has a first name and a last name and an email. Well, we could very easily format the first name with the helper to make sure that it’s proper cased, and then we could call another helper that would format the last name and make sure it’s in the proper case and then we could invoke a third helper to lower case the email. And then we could create a chain helper that would link all three of those together and so now, when we put it in the campaign builder, we can just have a single post and label it something like, ‘clean up first, last, and email.’ And you can see the simplicity of that from inside of the campaign builder and the benefits of consolidating them.

Okay, so that concludes our explanation of the Chain It Helper and it’s one of those fun little helpers that just makes everything else easier.