Keap vs. Spokal

Keap is very good at contact management and automation creation but weaker at email campaign creation. I was particularly interested in a function where when manually entering a new contact, you are then able to email that contact using a premade HTML template. It will currently not do this. There is a workaround, but it is unnecessarily ponderous.

Incentivized

For current Wordpress users Spokal is outstanding and highly recommended. For clients who don't already have a Wordpress blog it's a bit tricky as I need to first sell the benefits of using Wordpress in order to get them on board, but in all honestly I would recommend Wordpress anyway, it just slows the process down having to design and install Wordpress before we can get started.

• Pricing: Keap Max Classic (formerly Infusionsoft) is affordable for nonprofits and small businesses and includes all the automation features we need!
• Customer Support: Our onboarding and success coaches have been so helpful, taking into account some unique processes we have and finding solutions.
• Updates: Keap is constantly providing more and better solutions!

Incentivized

• Content calendar - the ability to visually see blog posts in draft and scheduled to publish over the coming weeks and months was a key benefit. Tracking this in spreadsheets is too hard. we can even post blogs as topic idea, pre draft, draft and final and schedule in advance so we can visualise the messages we want to communicate. Creation of tweets and Linkedin posts is done for you automatically. Simply drag the blog post to the time slot, day, week or month. This is a lot quicker than Hootsuite
• Additional tweets can be composed and also dragged to the calendar, plus the feedly link allows curation of tweet content. This just scales up our creation and curation process.
• Easy simple overview dashboard - showing key website stats, new visitors, new twitter followers. New blog posts. Social enagement per blog post, linkedin shares etc. simple lead scoring based on pages visited etc. Simple realtime SEO analysis on the blog post builder
• twitter builder. very simple autopilot of increasing your twitter following using key words (it easy has a simple key word tool) to find relevant people to 'like' and hence follow
• Dynamic, responsive team. I have asked a few questions about futures and always received a prompt helpful reply. Chris and his team are clearly commited to developing a great product.
• Once linked to your wordpress site I really like the fact I can log into a dashboard on the web and on my ipad and manage my content delivery and monitor visititors and interaction. I use and know hubspot and the biggest issue for me is the learning curve. Anyone can learn and use Spokal. It provides and integrates a number of tools I currently use today at a far lower cost. It does need to integrate into a third party email provider but frankly the integration is simple. A lot of effort has gone into the design for non techies

• More articles and videos on how to use the various functions of Keap
• Having representatives designated to certain regions or companies for a point of contact when help is needed
• More options when building the emails. While the click and drop options can be a plus, they can also be negative because you are limited to image and text sizing and positions

• I personally would love to see more direct integrations into CRM and more powerful Marketing Automation tools, but the current Zapier integration is a general approach and works in most cases very well.

We have invested a lot into Infusionsoft and are using it to automate our processes and marketing. Changing CRMs would have a HUGE cost for us and based on our evaluations, the grass isn't greener elsewhere. Infusiosoft fits most of our needs and is slowly getting better each year. Their support is great and we will continue to use them until something much better comes around or our company outgrows a small business CRM.

Spokal delivers everything I need to serve my clients in one place. It's so easy to use and their customer service is always available and responsive, there's no need for me to look elsewhere.

You do need to spend some time on-boarding and implementing the software in order to have full functionality. We were lucky - we had colleagues at the university with experience with Keap and then hired an intern familiar with the software to get us set up and ready to use it. We've had some functionality issues with it along the way and that has frustrated myself and the other uses in our department.

Incentivized

Spokal takes away some of the complexity and noise that Wordpress has. Offering a separate login and dashboard to allow a user to create blog posts, check on backlinks, see ranking keywords, social engagement and tracks visitors/ contacts. Spokal provides a lot of functionality that would typically require the purchase of several products e.g. Hootsuite, SEO Moz, SEO pressor, Hubspot. What I really like is the content calendar. I simply drag and drop of my blog posts into my calendar to post to twitter, linkedin and facebook. This is an easy way to repost evergreen content and build my following on twitter. The twitter builder is constantly looking for relevant profiles and conversations based on my defined criteria. The tool automatically likes the twitter user which drives traffic to my sight and actually helps me find followers and potential influencers. This product is ideal for people new to internet marketing or small business owners who don't want to be overwhelmed by the effort to learn, manage and run several tools or wordpress plugins. I have been with Spokal since the start and I continue to be impressed by the support and raft of new functionality being added.

There have been few outages since we became a customer, and when they have technical issues they are typically resolved rapidly.

OMG, it's all in one and that compromises everything, fundamentally. If you want a race car, invest in a race car. If you want a dune buggy, get that. If you want a boat that floats, go for it.

Generally, very responsive support for even our more complicated issues. We do have some open issues that we need resolutions on and that I understand are complicated and will take longer to resolve but the open issues are significantly impacting to our business.

Incentivized

They worked with Bluehost to make sure our blog connected properly. This was done without anyone from Strategic Revolution asking for this help.

I have been to a number of in-person training sessions over the years with Keap and all of them have been FANTASTIC. They really put a lot of time and effort into these sessions. Staff and facilitators go out of their way to ensure that participants are getting what they need.

Incentivized

The results of training online are often based on how people learn. The training was great but with feature updates, you just have to get in there sometimes and do it! The training definitely lays a firm enough foundation for you to be successful even if its can't be updated with every feature update.

Don't let the fear of implementing a new software solution keep you from unleashing the power of automation that Infusionsoft provides. With the right implementation partner, the process can not only be smooth and painless, it can actually help you get a better understanding for how your current communication process can be improved upon.

Keap is fast. The learning curve is shorter and they have an academy for learning with videos quite extensive that explain a lot of different scenarios, specially when you need to customize scenarios of automations and segments. Is cheaper if you consider that this services CRM + Mailing don´t come often in one package and the realiability to send mails is quite good.

Incentivized

I haven't really tried other products at this point. I would say I tried to cobble together a bunch of options to make the right inbound marketing "tool suite". Nothing quite worked well enough. Again, Spokal serves as a very cost-effective option. Particularly relative to Hubspot.

You get a lot of features included, but you don't need to use them all at once to start seeing an effect. When you are ready to use them, they are there. It also scales without costing too much money.

• Automation has allowed us to be more engaged and invested in our customers by reminding us about birthdays and other important events in their lives so that we can celebrate with them.
• We lacked the manpower to sell and distribute orders online before setting up the payments and automation features. We now collect $5k+ a week in lost sales through online ordering.
• List cleaning functionality and engagment settings have allowed us to run a 40-50% email open rate that allows us to create an engaged community around local events and opportunities as well as sales and special offerings.

Incentivized

• It's still early for us, but we can definitively say that we've cut our content creation / curation time down by about 40% while INCREASING the volume of quality relevant content that our audience expects.