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Track end of support or upgrade period by adding time to purchase date

Scenario:

Infusionsoft Delay Timer Your product or service includes support for six months after purchase. You want to record the support expiration date for each product purchased and send the customer emails to get them to renew the support agreement prior to expiration.

CAMPAIGN BUILDER CHALLENGES:

  1. How do you put a date, six months from purchase, in a custom date field?
  2. How do you format the date so that it looks nice in emails?
  3. What if they buy more than one product? What if they buy 20? How do you keep from using up all your custom fields?

SOLUTION:

Use the Pocket Developer Any Date, Any Format, Anywhere plug-in to add the term of your support agreement to the date of purchase. Put it in a custom field so you can merge it into emails and other communications.

Get the bonus videoExclusive Bonus – Read to the end to get the video of the private training I did for a client on this process with step-by-step set-up and in depth explanation of Pocket Developer superpowers.

HOW TO SET IT UP (THE Custom Field Burning WAY):

You can set this up two ways. The easiest way is to put the end of support date in a custom field in the contact record. This way, it is easily accessible as a merge field and also can be seen easily by sales or support reps.

1. Install and configure Any Date, Any Format, Anywhere and Custom Delay Timer

2. In Campaign Builder, set up a sequence triggered by a Purchase Goal

3. Add two Any Date HTTP POST snippets, which add the support agreement term to today’s date

  • Use format “l, F j” to format text version as “Monday, September 22” for emails
  • Use format “Y-m-dTH:i:s” to put the date in an Infusionsoft Date field so you can use it in a Field Timer

4. Add a Custom Delay Timer, to the end of the sequence, with a delay of 30 seconds. This gives the posts time to complete before sending the email with the details of your support agreement

5. Add a Field Timer, using your date field, from Step #3, to begin sending renewal notices prior to expiration.

HOW TO SET IT UP (THE POWER USER WAY):

The problem with the above is it burns two of your 100 custom fields in the contact record. It is also not a viable solution if the customer buys more than one product at different times.

You could, instead, use Any Date, Any Format, Anywhere, to put the expiration date in a custom date field in the order itself.

Then, use our Advanced Merge Field Notation, with the Universal Delay Timer plug-in, to run actions off the date in the order instead of from the Contact record.

When it comes time to use those dates for an email, you use Any Date to temporarily “stash” the date in the contact record. Once your email sequence is complete, use Any Text Anywhere to set your stash fields back to blank to be reused.

This method is a bit more work to set up. But, if custom fields are an issue, this technique can be applied in many different scenarios to save custom fields.

1. Install and configure Any Date Anywhere, Any Text Anywhere, Custom Delay Timer, and Universal Delay Timer

2. In Campaign Builder, set up a sequence triggered by a Purchase Goal

3. Add an Any Date HTTP POST snippet, which adds the support agreement term to today’s date and puts it in a custom date field in the order just placed.

  • Use “today” for the date and time parameters
  • Use format “Y-m-dTH:i:s” any time you are putting a date in an Infusionsoft Date or DateTime field. That is Infusionsoft’s required format.
  • Use an adjustment of +6 months
  • Use Order._demoCustomDateField.Newest as the saveTo parameter. Replace _demoCustomDateField with your custom field.

4. If you want to send an email immediately, use Any Date to temporarily stash a pretty date in a contact field, as in step 3 in the Easy Setup. Then use Any Text Anywhere to set that field to blank, after the email has been sent.

  • To set a text field to blank, leave the textToSave value blank
  • Add a Custom Delay Timer, to the end of the sequence, with a delay of 30 seconds. This gives the posts time to complete before sending the email with the details of your support agreement

5. Set up the Universal Delay Timer to restart the campaign a few weeks prior to the expiration date

  • Use “Order._demoCustomDateField.Newest” for the date parameter (replace _demoCustomDateField with the field name you used)
  • This assumes a time of midnight Eastern Time in the US. Use a date parameter if you want it to send at a specific time.
  • Use format “Y-m-dTH:i:s” any time you are putting a date in an Infusionsoft Date or DateTime field. That is Infusionsoft’s required format.
  • Use an adjustment of -3 weeks (that means the campaign will resume three weeks before the date you stored in the order)
  • Put a unique value in the callName. This is the API goal call name you will trigger to resume the campaign

6. Create an API Goal with the same callName as the previous step.

7. To send an email using the expiration date as a merge field, temporarily stash a pretty version of the expiration date in the contact record, as in Step #4 above. Set back to blank when email is complete.

8. Rinse and repeat as many times as needed for your renewal nag sequence to complete.

Get the bonus videoExclusive Bonus – Get the video of the private training I did for a client on this process with step-by-step set-up and in depth explanation of Pocket Developer superpowers.

You can read more about Any Date, Any Format, Anywhere and see more examples of its usage in the QuickStart Guide.

Any Text Anywhere, Custom Delay Timer and Universal Delay Timer also have Quickstart Guides.

You can read more about Advanced Merge Field Notation and see more examples of its usage in the Learning Center.

To browse the entire catalog and purchase Pocket Developer plug-ins, visit our plug-in store.

time-64x100Don’t want to set this up yourself? Let one of our concierges do it for you. Just purchase all the necessary blocks. Then email concierge@theapiguys.com. We will have it all set up for you in a jif.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:

Q. Where do I find the table and field names for Advanced Merge Field Notation?

A. You can find the names of Infusionsoft tables and fields in the Infusionsoft Developer Resource Section under Table Documentation.

You can find the names of your custom fields by going to Infusionsoft Admin Settings -> Add Custom Field -> Record Type -> Show Database Name

Where to find custom field names in Infusionsoft

How To Set A Custom Field To A Date

1) Open your favorite text editing program

2)  Copy and paste the following PHP code into the blank text editor file:

NOTE: Lines beginning with “//” denote comments explaining what the subsequent chunk of code does. They also sometimes point out things you can change or customize in the code. Reading through them will help you get a judo grip on the code and its nuances and let you cater the code to your needs.

<?php
   //Connects to the Infusionsoft API. This is a standard way to start any script that uses the Infusionsoft API. No tweaks necessary here!
   require("isdk.php");
   $app = new iSDK;
   $app->cfgCon("connectionName");

   //The variable (dateFieldName) stores the name of the custom Infusionsoft field where the date will be posted (NameOfYourDateField in this case).
   // Custom fields in Infusionsoft always have an underscore before their name when being referenced by a script.
   $dateFieldName = '_NameOfYourDateField';

   //Get post data for Contact ID.
   $contactId = $_POST['Id'];

   //Stores today's date in YearMonthDate format.
   $currentDate = date("YmdTH:i:s");

   //Grabs the data from Infusionsoft for your custom field.
   $returnFields = array($dateFieldName);

   //dsLoad is an Infusionsoft API method that grabs data from the specified field in Infusionsoft.
   $contacts = $app->dsLoad("Contact", $contactId, $returnFields);

   //If NameOfYourDateField is currently empty/unset, then set it to today's date. If it's already set, add one year to the date
   if (isset ($contacts['_NameOfYourDateField']) == FALSE) {
      $conDat = array($dateFieldName => $currentDate);
   } else {
      $classOf = strtotime($contacts['_NameOfYourDateField']);
      $yrPlusOne = date("YmdTH:i:s", strtotime('+1 year', $classOf));
      $conDat = array($dateFieldName => $yrPlusOne);
   }

   //Another API method that updates a given contact with the data in the second variable passed.
   $conID = $app->updateCon($contactId, $conDat);
?>

3) Now that you’ve got the code in your text editor, it’s time to edit it to suit your needs/wants/whimsies. Most of the script should work just fine as-is, but it does need a few customizations here and there. First, let’s look at this line:

 $dateFieldName = '_NameOfYourDateField';

As the comment says, dateFieldName is a variable that will represent the custom field where you want to put the date in Infusionsoft. You need to change ‘_NameOfYourDateField’ to ‘_WhateverYourCustomFieldIsActuallyCalled’. For instance, if you wanted to put the date in a custom Infusionsoft field called MyCustomDate, you would put ‘_MyCustomDate’. You also need to change this anywhere else the code references ‘_NameOfYourDateField’, so in your text editor use the Find-and-Replace function to change all instances of ‘_NameOfYourDateField’ to ‘_MyCustomDate’ or whatever you named your field.

4) Jump down to the line

$currentDate = date("YmdTH:i:s");

Right now, this bit of PHP will store the current date in a variable aptly named currentDate in the format YYYYMMDD followed by the time-zone abbreviation followed by the time in 24-hour/military time format. So if it was 3:19 PM on September 20th, 2013 in Eastern Standard Time, the script would format the date as 20130920EST15:19:00. This is handled in the code by the part in quotes that looks like a cat ran across the keyboard (“YmdTH:i:s”) and you can change it around however you want. This is how it presently breaks down:

Y – The 4-digit year

m – The 2-digit month with leading zeroes (

d – The 2-digit day with leading zeroes.

T – Time-zone abbreviation

H – The hour using a 24-hour clock

i – Minutes

s – seconds

You could re-arrange it to (“m d Y H:i:s T”) and the script would then format the date as 09 20 2013 15:19:00 EST. You can also change how the date appears by switching the letters you use.  For instance, changing the ‘m’ to ‘F’ would make the month in the date appear as “September” instead of “09.” For a full list of all possible formatting options, refer to the PHP manual here : http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php.

5) The last line you might want to tweak is:

  $yrPlusOne = date("YmdTH:i:s", strtotime('+1 year', $classOf));

Currently, this script will add one year to the contact’s custom date field every time you run this script. So if you initially set the contact’s date to 09/20/2013 (formatted however you chose, obviously), the next time you run the script that date will be updated to 09/20/2014. You can change ‘+1 year’ to ‘+1 month’ or ‘+1 day’ depending on what increment you want. Go ahead, try it! It’s like magic. Internet magic.

And that’s it! Congratulations, you have a custom date in a custom field that goes up by a custom increment every time you run this script. It’s so custom that “custom” probably doesn’t sound like a real word to you anymore!

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