Have you ever wanted a link to “expire” after a certain number of days or weeks? Maybe you wanted to give someone two weeks and then the offer goes away? Here’s an example…
Someone signs up to receive your 10 Greatest Vacation Spots. And you give them a special bonus that’s only good for seven days. They have the email and the link to the bonus. So how do you have it expire in seven days? You can’t take that page down because new people are continually coming into your funnel, right?
Well, here’s the trick: Use a merge field for the link in the email. And here are the steps to do this:
- Create a custom field for the URL you want to drive
traffic to. This will be a text field. - Create your two landing pages (one for active and one for expired). This can be done on your website or can be done using the Infusionsoft landing pages.
- Create a legacy action set that sets a contact field to a specific value. The field will be the custom field you created and the value will be the active link to the bonus.
- Create another legacy action set that sets a contact field to a specific value. The field will still be the custom field you created, but this time the value will be the expired link.
- Build your campaign.
- The step before sending the email with the bonus link will be a process to “apply action set”. You’ll choose the legacy action set that sets your URL custom field to the active link.
- Set up the rest of your emails.
- At the point in the campaign that the bonus expires (let’s say ten days), you’ll do another “apply action set” and this time choose the action set that sets your URL custom field to the inactive link.
- Within the email, the text that you want to link will actually be the merge code for the field with the link.
So if your contact clicks the link at any point before the time it expires, it will go to the bonus page. If they click the link after the action has been applied to change the link in the custom field, they’ll then go to the expired page. Using this set up, it doesn’t matter if the contact clicks on the link three months later, they’ll get the expired link because it’s reading that information from the custom field that was created.
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This is genius! Thanks for the write-up. So you happen to have a video/screenshot of this? I think I understand what to do, but having some trouble with the first few steps. I think it would be really helpful if you did a screencast/walkthrough
Hi, Jeff. Ask and you shall receive! Here’s a video I just did to show step by step how to create the expiring links. http://youtu.be/yKAVsmU-ZV0
This was so helpful. Thank you for going above and beyond.
Just implemented now and checking to make sure it works. I’ve been really struggling with Infusionsoft lately, but this is finally one of those things that no competitor (that I know of) has. Thanks for the pick me up!
Jeff
Awesome, Jeff!! Keep me posted on how it’s going!