It was almost a year ago that I first heard Frank Kern rave about InfusionSoft, the all-in-one solution that combined email marketing, ecommerce, affiliate marketing, and customer relationships, and shopping cart technology into one simple application. When I heard about it, the price tag was as much as $5000 to start and $497 a month, and it appeared to be just another system to learn, and I cast it aside as too steep a price and unnecessary for my business.

Over time, more and more internet “gurus” began to herald InfusionSoft as a robust, perfect solution for internet marketers, and the social proof began to get my attention. When my good friend Matthew Bredel gave it a try and spoke of its benefits, I gave in and decided to give it a try. The cost for the intermediate package: $3,500 to start and $299/month… no chump change by any stretch of the imagination.

Matt had warned me about the learning curve, and I was not keen on having to get comfortable with yet another piece of software that I thought would only complicate my life. But if it would increase my bottom line… yadda, yadda… you know the thought process.

After getting inside, I began to see why there was such a learning curve; after spending years with Aweber, I expected a user interface that was… well, rational. When I want to send an email to my list in Aweber, I choose the list and hit “Send Broadcast.” In InfusionSoft, you go to People > Send Broadcast > Email > Compose New > Compose Draft > Choose Recipients, and then you browse through your different tags to choose who you want to see the email, and then send.

Sheesh. Then you have to take a nap.

Similarly, in Aweber, if I want to see my open rate, then I login and scroll about an inch to see the stats from my latest broadcasts. In InfusionSoft, you would never find your reports unless somebody told you how, because you need to go to Reports > View All Reports > Marketing Reports > Broadcast Conversion > and then search by date and look for your specific email. Then, take nap #2.

Initially, InfusionSoft was such a headache that I spent more time learning the application that I actually spent running my business… and this was for something that was supposed to actually automate my business.

However, there was always one feature that stood out to me, and it immediately demonstrated it’s value even as I only began to scratch the surface. InfusionSoft has the ability to segment lists according to actions that they take, which no other email marketing system can claim to be able to do. In Aweber, if you want to put people into a new list, then you have to create a new list and get each member to confirm their email address again. In InfusionSoft, once a person has opted into your list, you can funnel them into different autoresponder series according to what they do. If they request “Report X,” then BAM! they go into a new autoresponder series. If they click on a link in Email 3, then BAM! they go into an autoresponder series that follows up with them on that action. If they buy a certain item, optin to a new list, or cancel their subscription… you get the idea.

It’s beautiful. One mastermind partner calls it a “life saver.” And it allows the list owner to completely segment their lists and deliver the most relevant content to their lists, and that results in more money from your lists… that is, if you can find your way around the application. And if you can get the emails delivered, too…

While the list segmentation was great for sending targeted emails to my subscribers, the email delivery rate was terrible. Immediately after going from Aweber to InfusionSoft, my broadcast open rates plummeted from a consistent 18% (or higher) to about 10%. That’s almost a 50% drop… and while I could assume that my subject lines flat-out sucked for the time that I was with InfusionSoft, I noticed that many of the emails went right to my spam box… even when I didn’t have any HTML or use any “spam words.”

There’s actually no way to be able to tell if your email is going to go to spam folders, because they have no “Spam-O-Meter.” In Aweber, they’ll analyze your emails to see if there are any red flags – no such technology in InfusionSoft, but my knowledge of email marketing has trained me to be very safe, yet they still went to spam folders.

At the same time, I can’t necessarily blame InfusionSoft… open rates are not really worth anything because they are hard to track, and my open rates did drop to about 11% after I ultimately switched back Aweber… although, that could be because half of my list was getting my emails in their spam folder from InfusionSoft mail drops, and after three months of not hearing from me, they didn’t have a clue who I was.

I was most annoyed, however, when I went over my monthly email limit. While getting used to the application, I forgot that InfusionSoft puts a limit on the number of emails that you can send out each month. You’d think that it would be high enough that you would never come near it, but that was not the case. One month, I decided to run a promotion as an affiliate, and I sent out a five-part email sequence, each one to about 10,000 people. I mean, 10k is not a huge list, so I didn’t think any of it, until I started to get hit with overage charges because I surpassed my monthly limit of emails. Granted, getting hit with $10 overage charges isn’t that big of a deal, but when you’re already paying $297 a month to a company that you’re already beginning to resent, it was most annoying.

So my first impressions were that delivery rates sucked, and that navigation through InfusionSoft sucked even worse. However, the ability to segment lists and automate follow up sequences is phenomenal. So let’s be favorable and call it a “wash” so far… but the story goes on…

When I had problems navigating through the user interface, there was ALWAYS someone willing to help. Let me be very, very clear: InfusionSoft had customer support that was so helpful that it scared me. Like, I felt as though I was taking advantage of them. I’m pretty sure that if I had asked them to get on a plane and come to my house to show me how to use the different features, they would have not only done so, but they would have also served me coffee, vacuumed my office, and set me up on a date with a supermodel, all with a smile on their faces. Without a doubt, it was the best customer service that I had encountered in my internet career.

For example, I once posted a job on a freelance site for some work to be done in my application, and within about 12 hours someone from InfusionSoft had called me and offered to do it himself for free. He also became my primary contact person for no apparent reason – if I had a question, he would either give me the answer or find it for me, even though I wasn’t assigned to his account. The dude floored me. Thanks, Michael Bast.

Not everyone was this responsive, though. I had a “success coach,” who was supposed to be assigned to my account and help me with whatever I needed. I found this to be quite ironic, because in my three or four attempts to contact him, he not only never called me back or acknowledged that I called, but it took him about three days to return an email, as well.

And while the people who helped me were enthusiastically willing to go the extra mile for me, no one seemed to have all the answers or be very familiar with the application. For example, I had heard it boasted (by “gurus”, not by IS themselves) that InfusionSoft had the ability to remail customers who had not opened previous broadcast emails – a feature that comes standard in Aweber. However, no one could tell me how to do this, and I ultimately found out that they did not have this feature at all. Furthermore, many of my questions got directed to different departments, and sometimes I did not get an answer at all. I never quite understood why the people there were only familiar with one aspect of their product instead of understanding how everything worked as a whole.

Overall, though, their customer service was unbelievably helpful and genuine in their desire to help. Even in my eventual decision to cancel, they offered to help me find an application that would be a better fit for me. Their customer service downright floored me, and it actually inspired me to provide better customer service in my own business.

None of them had a good explanation as to why my open rates were so low, though. One person told me that I should run a campaign to get my subscribers to “white list” me. Right. Welcome to 1999.

While I dove the deepest into the CRM and the email marketing, I barely scratched the surface of the affiliate program or the shopping cart. That’s because when I asked my programmer to integrate them into my website, he poked around for a few days and then said, “Ryan, this is the worst API that I have ever seen.” I actually burned through two programmers before throwing up my hands and giving up on any integration.

It was about this time that I began to Tweet about my frustrations with the interface and the overall use of InfusionSoft. As expected, the customer service would call and offer to help me out in any way possible, including looking at my campaigns, getting me in touch with the resident API expert, washing my clothes, answering my email, and even buying me a pizza and rubbing my shoulders as I watched The Big Lebowski. In fact, when I tweeted something negative about them, someone would call me within four minutes – I’m not joking.

But there was little that customer service could do to make my emails get delivered to inboxes instead of spam folders. And there was nothing that they could do to change the application interface so that it actually made sense to navigate through. And there was nothing that they could do to make their API actually functional.

The final straw was when I went to Austin to meet with my mastermind group, and one of the most respected members gave his InfusionSoft horror stories, including one about them double-billing his customers and a host of other entertaining, yet sad stories about their system. Unfortunately, no one had a solution for him, because there is not yet a shopping cart solution suitable for what internet marketers do. Problems with shopping carts are not exclusive to InfusionSoft.

Even with the best customer service I’ve ever seen and the best customer relationship manager that I’ve ever come across, the counter-intuitive, complicated user interface, the poor delivery rate, miserable API, and the horror stories that I have heard ultimately led me to cancel my subscription to InfusionSoft and switch back to Aweber and 1ShoppingCart…. well, at least ATTEMPT to cancel my subscription. As of right now, I have made three phone calls and written two emails, but I have been unsuccessful in canceling. In fact, I have actually spoken to two live people who have said that they would handle it, but I have yet to receive an update after about two weeks of waiting.

Because I never officially “used” my affiliate interface or my shopping cart (that is, no affiliates were added and no official orders were taken), I sent two emails to support outlining my experience, and I politely requested a refund for the services that were never used. To be fair, I was outside of my 30-day review window, but after thirty days with the application, I still barely could navigate through the thing. Both of my emails went unanswered.

In the end, my experience with InfusionSoft was a very expensive experiment… an experiment that cost me about $5,000 and about half of my regular readers. While I think the world of them as a company and of their list segmentation features, remember this: If your current systems ain’t broke, DON’T FIX ‘EM.

Let me be clear… I think InfusionSoft is an unbelievable piece of technology even with its flaws and kinks, and it will probably be amazing in the next few years. It’s perfect for small businesses and offline businesses that want to keep in touch with the customers. However, when it comes to internet marketing, it simply cannot handle the tasks that we in the industry need it to do.

And don’t expect cancellation to be an easy process… although I usually Tweet my blog posts, so I should be receiving a phone call here in about four minutes. ; )