I recently was paying some affiliates through a client’s Infusionsoft when I discovered something very strange.  I could not find two affiliates’ contact records.  I called Infusionsoft support, and those records had been deleted.  Fortunately, support was able to restore the deleted records for me, so all the information on those affiliates (like what email address to pay them through PayPal) was not lost.

Then several days later I was contacted by another affiliate stating that several weeks ago he had three sales in January and now the system is only showing one.

This particular client has someone else who also works in his Infusionsoft account, so I had to do some digging and found out that anyone who had opted out of email marketing had been deleted.  What?!  The client was concerned about people receiving emails when they had opted out and reporting them as spam.  I’m not really sure why the decision was made to delete anyone who had opted out.  But that decision has caused some serious problems.

First, if someone has opted out of email marketing in Infusionsoft, they will not receive emails through a broadcast or follow-up sequences.  You can only send them an individual email through Infusionsoft, similar to sending them an email message through Outlook.  So there’s no chance of them still receiving emails they don’t want, and, therefore, no chance of them reporting you as a spammer.

Second, by deleting anyone who has opted out (including customers), those records are gone from the Infusionsoft system, and, therefore, are skewing the affiliate’s records.  Some ledgers are showing we’ve overpaid, some are missing sales (like in the case of the affiliate who contacted me).

I can certainly understand wanting to clean up your database now and then, but do not ever delete customer records.  There’s a better way.  If you don’t want those opt-outs showing in your “ezine list” you can simply search for your opt-outs and then change their tags so they’re not included in marketing emails, but they remain in the system, only tagged as an opt-out.

If you have questions about organizing and cleaning up your Infusionsoft system, please feel free to let me know!