Creating custom integrations between your many online services
"I thought I'd thought of everything!"
It can be so frustrating! You have a business plan. Your lead magnet is in place, your landing page is awesome! You're website is built and just waiting for your new subscribers to find you and realize that you're offering exactly what they need. You've chosen your CRM and have a fully worked out campaign that will convert through your pipeline like gangbusters! You've setup GA tag manager, setup your email authentication, paid the copy-writer for exceptional content. Your merchant account is connected and you have tracking and reporting for every stage in your process.
But then testing reveals that your lead magnet gets your prospects to the landing page, but isn't sending information along to it. Your leads are now having to re-enter their information twice! How many of them will drop off because it's too many steps?! Not only that, but from there, your landing page isn't sending the information into your CRM! Now you have to pay someone to go into the data stored for the form and manually enter those fields into the CRM to begin the followup drip marketing you spent days obsessing over it to get it "just right".
You, along with thousands every day, face the same dilemma. With so many products available to use, they can't all be aware of, and therefor play well together with, all the others. There's a limit to how many connections can be built by one company between so many multiple products and services.
Undaunted, you find services like Zapier and Integrately. These services have pre-made connectors that can be paired together to create the bridge you need. It's amazing how many systems there are to connect and how well they can connect them! But they can cost $200-$300/month. I've even had clients paying more than $1,300/month. It depends on what you use it for, but once you start to use them, there seems to be an abundance of great reasons to use them even more, and more, and more. That cost sneaks up there quickly, until it's breaking $5k or more annually. And sooner or later, there's a need for information that isn't supported by them or a method that they don't know how to handle. Of course, if they raise their prices in the future, you're stuck without any choice but to comply and pay it.
There are time restrictions as well. If you're needing to send a reminder to someone 15 minutes before a webinar, but it doesn't trigger until a couple of minutes prior, that isn't going to give you the desired result. It's 15 minutes prior for a reason. If any of your processes rely on their pre-made, one size fits all, connectors, you're left "hoping" that it doesn't delay "this time".