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How To Do An Advanced Merge Field Notation

Summary:

In the About Advanced Merge Field Notation video, 2014 Infusionsoft Partner of the Year, Kim Snider, walks the audience through the various nuances associated with Advanced Merge Field Notations. During the video, Kim explains what AMFN is, how it can be used and what makes it the “secret sauce” of Pocket Developer.

Advanced Merge Field Notation:

Time Stamped Show Notes:

  • 00:05 – Introduction from Kim Snider
  • 00:18 – The video covers the definition of Advanced Merge Field Notation and explains what can be done with it
  • 00:23 – Within The API Guys website go to → Learning Center → Pocket Developer Documentation → Scroll to Advanced Merge Field Notation
  • 00:50 – Advanced Merge Field Notation is the “secret sauce” of Pocket Developer and what enables it to do so many things
    • 01:06 – Specifically it enables users to work with fields that are not normally available in the drop-down of Campaign Builder
    • 01:35 – It also allows users to work with those field in a contact other than the one going though the campaign
  • 02:16 – Advanced Merge Field Notation can be used in any of the core plug-ins from the API Guys
  • 02:52 – How to Use Advanced Merge Field Notation
  • 03:17 – 99% of API Guys plug-ins work via an HTTP Post
  • 03:26 – An example of Advanced Merge Field Notation
  • 04:12 – Example #2 of Advanced Merge Field Notation
  • 04:52 – Kim walks through Reference Notation
    • 04:55 – This allows the user to work with a specific opportunity that may or may not be connected with the contact going through the campaign
    • 05:19 – There are always two required parameters when working with a Reference Notation → table and field
  • 05:30 – Kim talks through some of the Valid Qualifiers
    • 05:44 – FilterBy → Allows for the performance of a query
    • 06:26 – Newest and Oldest → Only returns the newest (or oldest) record
    • 06:55 – Unpaid → Only supported for queries on Invoice Tables
    • 07:19 – IsEmpty → Returns all empty fields
    • 07:29 – GreaterThan
    • 08:05 – Before
    • 08:29 – OrderBy → Sort the results of a query by the specific field
    • 09:08 – Max → Returns maximum of all returned numeric values in the specific field
    • 09:14 – Count
    • 09:20 – Sum → Returns the sum total of all values returned by the Advanced Merge Field query
    • 09:39 – Global → Runs “global” queries for all contacts, not just the contact associated with the action or sequence
    • 10:09 – Combine → Takes the results of an Advanced Merge Field query into one string and applies a “glue” between each result set
    • 10:52 – All
  • 11:05 – Additional examples of Advanced Merge Field Notation
  • 11:14 – prefetch
  • 11:38 – FAQ
  • 12:14 – Kim’s contact information

How To Use Custom Delay Timer

Summary:

In the How to Use Custom Delay Timer video, 2014 Infusionsoft Partner of the Year, Kim Snider, provides the audience with a succinct and clear demonstration of how Custom Delay Timer can be used to delay a campaign from firing using seconds as the unit to determine the length of delay.

How to Use Custom Delay Timer:

Time Stamped Show Notes:

  • 00:07 – Video jumps right into the Campaign Builder demo
  • 00:16 – Infusionsoft users would use Custom Delay Timer if, for example, they wanted to build a delay into a sequence but required something shorter than what Campaign Builder naturally has built-in (which is a 15 minute delay)
  • 00:57 – Custom Delay Timer is an HTTP Post plug-in and it gets installed on YOUR server
  • 01:39 – There are two parameters to Custom Delay
    • 01:40 – How many seconds does the delay need to be (delayFor)?
    • 01:45 – A unique call name (callName)
  • 02:00 – Following every delay  there needs to be an API Goal
    • 02:17 – Looking at the Goal you can see the App Name (which is also in the URL) and the callName
    • 03:15 – Think of an API Goal as having a the same function as a tag; the only difference is that with a tag goal you must access the contact record to apply the tag
  • 03:38 – Kim demonstrates how this works in practice
  • 05:32 – The API Goal is particularly useful if you make a number of calls to external 3rd party integration
  • 06:07 – Checking to see if Custom Delay Timer worked properly

How To Email Anyone Anytime

Summary:

In the How to Email Anyone Anytime video, 2014 Infusionsoft Partner of the Year, Kim Snider, demonstrates how to properly use the Email Anyone, Anytime plug-in to send an email with multiple to, cc, bcc and merge fields from any contact record, with as much or as little frequency as necessary.

How To How To Email Anyone Anytime

Time Stamped Notes

  • 00:05 – Introduction of topic from Kim Snider
  • 00:38 – Like most Pocket Developer plug-ins from the API Guys, Email Anyone Anytime runs from a HTTP Post
  • 00:44 – In this video, the demo campaign is very straightforward; Email Anyone Anytime is triggered by a goal, nothing else
  • 00:55 – Looking at the HTTP Post, the domain in the URL will reflect the location of installation (typically your server)
  • 01:48 – When creating a new HTTP Post snippet, contactId and the merge field contact.ID will populate by default and should not be changed
  • 02:00 – Email Anyone, Anytime only has one other required field besides contactId and that field is templateId.
    • 02:13 – There are also five optional fields: from, to, cc, bcc and delete
  • 02:25 – templateId
    • 02:30 – Infusionsoft does send an Infusionsoft template so YOU need to tell it which template to send
  • 03:11 – from and to
    • 03:18 – If you chose to put something into the from and to fields, it will override whatever is in the template
    • 03:43 – Three different things can go into the from field: a hardcoded email address, a standard Infusionsoft merge field or an advanced merge field notation from The API Guys
    • 05:12 – The three options for the to field are the same as the three options for the from field
  • 09:55 – bcc
    • 10:05 – We can send this to the owner of the contact or hardcode something
    • 10:10 – There are challenges with using owner, outlined here
  • 11:05 – delete
    • 11:10 – This is a true or false field
    • 11:49 – The default for this field should be false
    • 12:30 – Why care about the delete field?—Because if you send a large volume of emails and they have various cc’s and bcc’s that do not exist (and you’re constantly deleting the cc’s and bcc’s, but sending the emails to the same people over and over), every time you recreate the email you’ll be incrementing your contactId really quickly
  • 13:25 – Talking about the Email Anyone Anytime sequence
  • 13:35 – Looking at the email template, there are a couple of things to know
    • 13:40 – Not only can we override the from and to fields, but we can also override the subject line (13:58) and body of the email (15:05) by using Standard Fields or Advanced Merge Field Notation
  • 17:31 – The delivered email
  • 18:38 – Kim’s contact information

How To Send Email to Staff But Link to Contact

Summary:

In the How to Send Email to Staff but Link to Contact video, 2014 Infusionsoft Partner of the Year Kim Snider provides a quick run-through of how users can overcome Infusionsoft email builder’s tendency to automatically populate form fields with the information of the email recipient as opposed to the information of the contact going through the campaign.

How To Send Email to Staff But Link to Contact

Time Stamped Show Notes:

  • 00:15 – Introduction of topic: How to send a hardcoded email to staff with a link containing the information for a contact going through a campaign
  • 00:42 – The start of Kim’s first example
  • 01:21 – The challenge of today’s assignment? – Infusionsoft email builder automatically attaches the contact information of the person the email is being sent to
    • 02:01 – What does not work when trying to accomplish this goal
    • 02:26 – The portion of the campaign used in Campaign Builder
  • 02:34 – Kim defines the scenario and the sequence-used in Campaign Builder
  • 03:12 – Form for scheduling with unpopulated fields
  • 03:30 – Do not create an automation link, that will not work
    • 04:14 – What happens if an automation link is used
  • 04:57 – Hard-coding the link will not work either
  • 06:12 – The HTML snippet is key to actually making this whole process work
    • 06:35 – The link that Kim creates
  • 07:05 – The URL to the scheduling form
  • 07:11 – Kim defines the query string within the HTML snippet and highlights the string values
  • 08:30 – What happens when the email is sent
    • 08:40 – The email address associated with the contact record will not receive the email
    • 09:05 – How the email is sent
  • 09:35 – The entire command sequence outlined in Campaign Builder
    • 09:55 – Application of the tag to fire the sequence
  • 10:12 – Delivered email
    • 10:45 – Query string Kim created has replaced merge fields with information from the contact’s record and pre-populated the form
    • 11:14 – Remember: If field information is not included in the query string, the field will remain unpopulated on the form
  • 11:23 – Inputting supplemental information into fields that did not pre-populate
  • 12:22 – Kim’s contact information

How To Prepend to Person Notes

Summary:

In the How to Prepend to Person Notes video, 2014 Infusionsoft Partner of the Year Kim Snider provides the audience with a quick demonstration of the proper technique behind prepending person notes in Campaign Builder.

How To Prepend to Person Notes

Time Stamped Show Notes:

  • 00:16 – Person Notes is a tab located within a given contact record in Campaign Builder; they contain a large area for collecting information
  • 00:25 – The objective here is to add additional information to the contact’s (Dritte Dawg is the contact in the demo video) Person Notes—essentially the aim is to create and keep a running, time-stamped log file in reverse chronological order of contact field changes
  • 00:50 – This is a great way to retain mission critical data being changed by a form or track changes in a sequence
  • 01:14 – Definition of prepend
    • 01:25 – Any Text Anywhere Pocket Developer plug-in is key to this process
  • 01:33 – Within Campaign Builder, go to the Pocket Developer demo/testing area à Click edit
  • 02:09– Within the Any Text Anywhere plug-in, Click the Prepend Contact Notes button
  • 02:20 – In any post, there is the URL and any number of Name/Value pairs
    • 03:05 – The definition of Prefetch Notation
  • 03:37 – Contact.ContactNotes is the merge field name for the Contact’s Person Notes
    • 03:52 – Contact.ContactNotes will be assigned to a name using the prefetch notation of [contactNotes]
    • 04:04 – Whatever is currently in Contact.ContactNotes (the existing Person Notes) is fetched using this prefetch notation
  • 04:08 – This demo also fetches whatever is in Contact.MiddleName using the prefetch notation of [middleName]
  • 05:25 – The saveTo field can never have tildes
  • 05:33 – textToSave notation sample defined and explained
    • 06:19 – Tying it back to the prefetch[middleName] notation
  • 06:33 – When working in Pocket Developer, everything is case sensitive!!!
  • 07:01 – The content pulled for textToSave will be saved to Contact.ContactNotes which (remember) is the Person Notes field within the contact record
  • 07:18 – The final product…what it should look like
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