Hi All,
I wanted to share my experience with attempting to create a mostly automated system for receiving and responding to leads through the Wix Marketplace. The goal of this is to highlight what I wanted to do, what I was able to achieve, and room for improvement with Ascend.
The Goal:
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Automatically reply to leads when they come in
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Automatically follow up with leads
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Automatically move leads through a workflow based on project status changes (in discussion, in progress), times contacted and if the lead responds
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Automatically archive workflow cards
TLDR:
For those of you who may not want to read everything here is a summary of what was possible.
✓ Automatically reply to leads when they come in
X Automatically follow up with leads
This was not possible and a workaround with workflows was needed
✓ X Automatically move leads through a workflow based on project status changes (in discussion, in progress), times contacted and if the lead responds
This was partially possible but issues were encountered and manual intervention was required
X Automatically archive workflow cards
This was not possible.
The basic flow was the following:
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Lead comes in and is automatically contacted.
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Lead is manually moved through a workflow that automatically sends email follow-ups.
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If lead becomes a client they are manually moved to an in progress status in the workflow and the project is manually changed to in progress.
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If the project is canceled the lead is automatically moved to a canceled step in the workflow and will be manually achieved later.
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Once a project is completed the card in the workflow is automatically moved to the completed step.
Automations:
I ran into a ton of issues with automations. Below are expand sections that show what I wasn’t able to achieve and how I solved the issue.
Automatically follow up with lead and stop additional follow ups from being sent if they responded.
I ended up mixing automation with manual work. When the lead comes in, an automated email is sent. I then need to manually check each lead every day to see if they responded. If they haven’t responded, I move the card to the next follow-up status (3 total) for an automated email to be sent.
Ideally, it would work similarly to how HubSpot works. We should be able to enroll our leads in a flow that they are automatically removed from if they respond. We could pair this with the workflow section so they would have a card or status that represents where they are in the flow and then once they responded, they can be moved to a card outside of the email flow.
Automatically move a card to a step if the project is marked as in progress. We can only do this if the client marks it as in progress.
There really isn’t a solution to this. Manual intervention is required until the ability is added in automation.
If a project is canceled, we are unable to automatically archive the card in a workflow.
This is another situation without a solution. This request needs to implemented for this to be solved.
Unable to do anything if a project is marked as in discussion.
This is a huge miss. We have multiple people looking at clients and where they are in the funnel and not being able to automatically move cards in a workflow or do any sort of action if the project is marked as in discussion makes managing leads for teams much more difficult.
Workflows:
We had to utilize workflows to do most of the automated work. This would be fine if it didn’t require manual actions for the automations to run. By now you probably have a good idea how the workflow works but below is an image of it and suggestions.
Suggestions:
You can expand each suggestion for more details.
Add card colors
The board can be a bit of a mess. If we could color code the top piece of the step it would be very helpful
Add multiple completed steps
At a minimum, there should be two: completed and canceled. When a project is canceled, it remains on the board, and in our case, we had to make a step called canceled but that’s not considered a completed step.
Auto archive cards
I mentioned this above but this should really be an individual board setting as well as an optional automation. Cards should auto-archive based on time in a completed step. This should be an optional setting and as mentioned above, implemented in automations for more granular control.
Allow bulk editing
I currently have 772 cards in a step. I do not want to manually go through all 772 and archive them. We need the ability to bulk edit. I would like to see this come to the marketplace leads as well.
Emails:
I have mentioned this in other posts about email marketing but there is a lot of room for improvement. The biggest suggestion I have is to come up with an extension like Hubspot’s Gmail extension that allows all emails to be automatically connected to that contact, open receipts (times opened), and the ability to enroll in flows and more. Below are some problems I faced creating quality emails.
Unable to remove header in email automation
You can set the header to a font of 10 and a style of a small paragraph with no text but this leaves a white space at the top.
Unable to add rich text in the inbox
Almost all text editors allow this so the inbox function for Ascend should as well.
Unable to add attachments to a single email
When you add an attachment it sends as its own email and then you have to send what you were going to send with it. This means 2 or more emails need to be sent from the inbox and this is why I avoid using it.
Unable to properly remove the footer in email automation
Same situation as the header. You can remove all the options but a white space is left at the bottom.
Using automations the way I am, emails are not sent in a thread
This one isn’t really a suggestion but when the email flow function is eventually implemented this should be addressed so emails are sent in a thread rather than individually.
Wix Marketplace:
Lately, the quality of leads has been down and I have a few suggestions based on other systems that I think would work well.
Require Phone Numbers
This is so important. Not providing a phone number makes contact difficult and in my opinion, brings down the quality of the lead. If you are serious about a project, leaving your number should not be a big deal.
Verify Phone Numbers
I have seen some systems that verify phone numbers. It’s not a required step but it’s great to know when you are contacting someone that not only is the number real but the lead is as well.
Allow more granular control over what leads are sent
We should have the ability to filter leads by the fields they fill out. Budget used to be a question and if it came back it would be great to not get leads under a certain budget or in a specific location. It would also be great if we could enable services like graphic design but specify only 10% of all received leads for the month should be in that category.
Conclusion :
Overall I would rate what I created a 3/10. Sure, some of it is automated and I have a better way to manage a large volume of leads but the way it had to be done are workaround solutions that barely work. The biggest thing missing from Ascend for partners is customer email flows and true automation capability. Only being able to automate a quarter of the process isn’t very efficient and causes the need for workarounds like these.
If anyone actually read this whole thing and has any questions or suggestions for me, please let me know. If you want to add your own problems to this post please do and Wix, I would love to hear from you on this.
Thanks!