Keap

Avantages

I guess their support is fast to answer. But that is about it

Inconvénients

Missing basic features for marketing like:
- automatic UTMs on emails
- being able to organize opt ins easily
- just overall clunky
- some support people give wrong information and then argue with you about it

Avantages

It was easy enough to adapt to, however some elements take some time to learn. Will take time to onboard your staff, but may be worth it.

Inconvénients

Not an intuitive design. There are cleaner alternatives.

Avantages

Automated marketing user interface is easy to use.

Inconvénients

Outlook integration, R&D, customer support, can't handle projects with multiple companies on a project.

Avantages

Not sure. It has lots of functionality but most everything is clunky. Only comes with 99 custom fields and you can't modify the home screen. When you click around it always defaults you to a place you don't want to be. If you look up a contact it insists on defaulting you to first name and it has a nasty delay. So if you want to search by company you will start typing and then after the delay it will switch you to first name. You can't choose the view to do your lookups and it defaults to the record view, which I never use. So every time I do a search that turns up multiple records I have to click on the list view. Another infuriating thing is that if you want to sort by a field in list view it defaults to zto a instead of a to z. They will never fix anything even if it is a 2 minute fix.

Inconvénients

It uses a flat database that is terrible for business to business. No primary fields or tags so if you add a company contact there is no way to tag or have company related field data updated to the new contact without expensive api coding from your website. They added linkedin, facebook and twitter years agobut didn't include the fields in the mass update section. What does this mean? When linkedin changed their url format I was stuck with over 3000 records with bad url's. So with any of their other fields you lookup the filled fields and then you choose mass update contacts and click on the allow blank fields to remove existing data. Well they didn't include the fields here so you can't do it. Maybe just export the records and replace the filled fields with empty into a csv file and import to remove the data. That doesn't work either. Blank field data won't replace filled data in a modify existing records merge. If you try chat support you will more than likely get a foreign support person (mine was from the Phillipines) who will act like he or she has never heard of this problems and make you explain it over and over and ask you to do a million unnecessary tests. I finally became so frustrated that I called support, got someone who at least admitted that it was impossible to fix. All the while I had the chat person on still instructing me to do more tests. The phone support person kept trying to get me to drop chat but I made her see how ridiculous it was.

Avantages

I liked what this product was many years ago. Not so much in recent times.

Inconvénients

Infusionsoft is broken for a few reasons. The first is that all out emails to Yahoo and Telus are bouncing. This is a problem that Infusionsoft has and knows about and has been working on for well over a month. As a result, expect days where some of your emails to Yahoo to go through, and days where none go through at all. For Canadians, that means all Rogers emails will bounce.

The second issues is the lack of knowledge from Infusionsoft's customer service. Expect the person on the other end to have a very small amount of knowledge, and expect that they will go away and ask someone for an answer. If you speak to someone else 5 mins later then expect a completely different answer.

Expect bugs. Lots of bugs. For example, sometimes contact field merging just doesn't work at all. Their workaround solution was to not mention the customers name in the email. "Hello John" should be replaced with "Hello".

Another problem is merchant integration. Infusionsoft (now known as Keap) have slowly but surely been removing 3rd party merchants from working with Infusionsoft. If you use Keap payments which is their own merchanting, then you should be alright. If you use another merchant service then expect things to fail for you. As an example we used Beanstream as our payment gateway until one day we got a message saying that Infusionsoft hasn't been working correctly with Beanstream for a few weeks. I guess having their own merchant inhouse means they can have full control.

Avantages

The campaign builder is easy to learn and easy to use, as well as the email builder. It will get all your basics taken care of there, and being able to preview an desktop AND mobile was a huge pro.

Inconvénients

It is very difficult to navigate to what you need, even with adequate training. Nothing is intuitive, and all of the reports are just lists of contacts filtered for something.
Most importantly, this tool is not adequate if you're wanting to integrate at all. Even they say that you may need to hire an InfusionSoft partner to manage your tool for you to use it to the best of its capability. I would argue that if you need to hire a specialist to use your SaaS for you, your SaaS is not a good tool.

Avantages

Simple to learn and use. Navigation was ok, capable of making some good looking emails, email campaign system was pretty cool and easy to do with some limitations of what it could do.

Inconvénients

Databases not linked, meaning if you make an email in their marketing area, you cannot save it and use it in your individual emails. Templates are not transferable, so you have to send individual emails by creating a tag of the customer name, apply the tag to the customer, then send a broadcast email for ONE email in order to use the template.

They SELL you on their ability to take email lists and mail to potential customers (say, from a trade show). But then they give you a HUGE legal disclaimer that won't allow you to actually DO this. They will charge you $250 per email which gets a complaint (I got zero, but I did not send to a generic list).

When you call to ask to do something, 50% of the time they are NOT available, or you have to wait up to about an hour on hold. There seems to be only ONE guy who knows the database and if you point out something like the incongruity of the databases, he will simply tell you "we can put this on our list of fixes" and then do nothing about it.

They spend an inordinate amount of time to help you buy or use free marketing setups in their "marketplace," but meanwhile they have so many glitches that they simply refuse to fix.

Avantages

I thought it was going to manage all of my CRM, Email Marketing and Reporting...but in order to interface with the Infusionsoft/Keap platform I needed to continually hire experts who tried charging me $3,500 per month on top of what I was paying Keap.

Inconvénients

Way too complicated. When you sign up, included in your set up is the cost for an expert -- who you think is working for Keap...but they're an independent contractor who is being paid a cut rate to get you up and running. After your set up, they will charge you THOUSANDS to fix and adjust your account.

Avantages

I was oversold on Keap. I didn't need it for the size of my business at the time and was sold into it by the saleswoman saying "THIS is what you'll need once you get to the growth level you want."

Inconvénients

Customer service failed me in a very big way. Keap mistakenly shut down my online shop and my account, leaving me unable to receive payments, sell products, and even deposit the money already in my account through their software. It took them almost 3 months to resolve the issue and then they were unapologetic and offered virtually no compensation once my account was open again.

Avantages

Can track things in a very deep way with tagging.

Inconvénients

VERY EXPENSIVE! also, there is no way I can use this myself so in addition to the outrageous cost for the monthly fees, I have to pay others to do everything for me. As a result, I feel very disconnected from my data and can't make great decisions because they don't know what I need and I don't know what to ask them.

Also because you do very complex tracking, it is very cumbersome and confusing and difficult to use for basic funnels.

Avantages

I started using it back in 2009 and it was the only alternative that I could find to Salesforce for small business. I have never really liked it.

Inconvénients

The functionality is terrible. The access to files and photos and emails is so limited and difficult and time wasting that I scream at it every time I use it. I hate this product and have for a while. I will be switching as soon as I can.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Keap

Avantages

It's very quick to get started. Easy as well.

Inconvénients

The ads were a bit too much. And random calls at all times.

Avantages

Well, it's really hard to pick something I liked, as I didn't like much of anything. I guess the only thing I can think of, is that they have a cool marketing approach that get's you to buy the product.

Inconvénients

I have a list! Not intuitive at all. Support is awful, they'll keep referring you around in loops until you just give up in frustration. Nothing is as easy as it seems, the straight path is never available and this ends up being useless for the most part.

Avantages

It has the majority of what you need as in contacts, forms, email builder, automation and tasks, and integration with G Suite.

Inconvénients

Doesn't integrate with outlook, you can't create lists (only tag people), the automation is complicated and then the screen is just ugly, the forms look terrible and have to design in HTML/CSS yourself, and we saw a huge increase of spam when we switched to Keap.

Alternatives envisagées 

Logiciel antérieur 

Pourquoi passer à Keap

Avantages

I like the user interface of the campaign builder. It makes it easy to see the flow of your campaign, although it could still be a lot more robust.

Inconvénients

A lot of the features are only half developed. I have lost count of how many times we go down the road of setting up a process that seems like it should work but hit a roadblock because the feature doesn't exist or more likely that the system has been arbitrarily coded to only allow a specific event to happen. As one example, the system only recognizes a sale if a payment was processed through Infusionsoft. If you accept payments through check, cash, COD, or anything other than having their system process the payment, it will not recognize the sale and the system won't move them onto the next stage, effectively breaking your campaign sequence. I now have a programmer on staff that spends almost half his time creating workarounds to get Infusionsoft to do what we need.

Avantages

Powerful platform in the hands of developers/code experts.
Can do a lot of meaningful, intricate campaigns based on series of conditions that results in a nearly unlimited email marketing platform.
Has a marketplace for campaigns.

Inconvénients

Marketed as a Small Business Service, it fails to be simple enough to be helpful.
Expensive, costly.
Marketing strategy for company is cheap. Hire people to be affiliates, have them write endless blogs on why it's perfect for your SMB,
Then, abandon the end user once they don't want to pay you any more.

Extremely disorienting tool, with no easy way to clear up the clutter of all the different tabs and features.

Lots of custom set up required, just like any other large CRM platform that promises to do it all.

Avantages

Building campaigns is relatively straight forward

Inconvénients

Managing almost 80 users has been a frustrating experience. Saved searches don't update on other users dashboards when changed. You have to set user permission for users one at a time, users are not alphabetically organized in dropdowns, the system randomly changes users emails to others when I update their user groups, and on and on.

Avantages

It was actually pretty simple to use. I will give it that.

Inconvénients

This software was just a total mess. All the fields that we populated for it were not consistent or helpful. It was hard to build process in it. It made you change your password every 6 weeks. Overall, it was just frustrating

Avantages

I did not like anything about this program. Very happy we moved away from Keap.

Inconvénients

Not user friendly, too many screens to click through to find something. Had to add the same info in multiple places to do the same thing. Slow loading, unknowledgeable tech support. Automations were a pain to set up. Not very up-to-date in functionality. Clunky.

Avantages

Really nothing. I found it horrible in every way.

Inconvénients

Training was expensive and very time consuming. It is expensive. There are much better, much easier and way simpler products that do essentially the same thing. And when it is time to cancel - good luck! I am still jumping through hoops trying to cancel. About to report them to the BBB.

Avantages

YOU can customize it. Although its massively time consuming to customize and operate.

Inconvénients

So time consuming and the Keeps customer service solution was to outsource to a Keep Partner making the software beyond expensive for what we wanted. The on-boarding training never got us to a stage that we could receive any benefit back from the software so after a period of we cancelled.

Avantages

Ability to do account maintenance and contracts.

Inconvénients

We were told we could handle our ad inventory through this system. Not true. Ended up using an excel spreadsheet.

Avantages

It was just my hope that Infusionsoft will be a good software. I was absolutely wrong about it.

Inconvénients

They don't respond to emails once the product is sold.
They give you a setup help from a Success Manager after a wait of at least 15-20 days once you have paid. This wait time is on YOUR money.
They keep charging your card even if they don't respond to your emails and resolve any problems you face and are unable to use their software.
DO NOT COMMIT TO ANY FIXED TENURE WITH THESE CON MASTERS.

Avantages

The Keap mobile app, while not full-featured, is handy.

Inconvénients

- Clunky (every time I logged in, it would log me out then back in again)
- Slow
- Not suitable for Australian businesses (billing/accounting features are geared toward US users)
- Frustrating customer service when attempting to cancel

Avantages

The people and trainers are great. The support is top of the line.

Inconvénients

The product requires extensive setup so be ready to hire a resource to setup or be ready to dedicate a good bit of time over 90 days. Sales assured me they integrated with my CRM but once I signed up I discovered that none existed.