Ontraport

Sales department.

Ease of customer service contact.

Look/feel of email templates.

Deliverability.

Customer service.

Data tracking.

Pricing.

Communication.

Ease of use.

Trust.

Automation

Customer Service

Ease of use

Customization

3rd Party Integrations

API

Appointment settings and reminders (have to use Zapier to link with Google Calendar)

No mobile app

Dashboards for our daily stats.

The email follows up and broadcasts are simple and easy.

Sales and marketing can now see the impact they have working together. Nobody can point finger anymore.

They have the best customer support. I can't tell you how many times they have walked me through the problems that I created.

Amazing email inboxing.

CRM could be better. It works but is not as robust as I would like. It works fine but I want more reporting.

The membership plug works fine but I want more details on what each member does and how they use the membership. I am sure I could find that but its not easy and I don't have time.

I don't really get the hang of the landing page builder. But that's me vs them.

Tracking numbers & data and displaying them to you.

Segmenting really well & opportunities for more segmenting.

Seeing contact history.

Making things a little more intuitive. It's a huge tool, and sometimes if you don't know exactly where to click & what to click on, you're SOL.

ONTRAPORT has a great funnel system where you can drag and drop certain actions to do a variety of things within the system. For example, you can tag all donors that gave january 2018 - December 2018 as 2018 donors.

ONTRAPORT allows you to customize the information you want on each record by allowing custom fields

Import is pretty easy once you get the hang of your custom fields.

ONTRAPORT is a sales software so for historical donor information, it is not very easy to keep track of.

You should make sure that your software integrates with ONTRAPORT. Some software, like Shopify, integrates easier.

User segmentation for specific messaging is key for us because it helps drive our new client conversions and existing client repurchasing.

ONTRAPORT plays nice with our scheduling software and WordPress so we can implement new material without hassle.

Campaigns and automation is simple to set up and monitor which helps us use more of their tools instead of paying for complex features we'll never use.

Wish they had more options for their forms. Would really like to use multi-step forms.

A lot of times their forms load slowly on the website. Would like to see them speed up their services.

Their broadcasting options are legacy. There are better options out there for sending broadcast messages.

ONTRAPORT is stellar for building campaigns. Their visual editor is somehow completely user-friendly and insanely powerful. The ability to so easily set up a chain of dozens of events, conditions, and outcomes is a huge asset. It's easy to segment users based on things they've bought, sequences they've opted into, etc., and send them down automated funnels.

ONTRAPORT's page builder is great for basic-to-intermediate level sales/landing pages. It's certainly not perfect, but it does allow pretty much anyone to build a nice, clean, mobile-responsive landing page.

ONTRAPORT's contact management is extremely powerful. If you can think of a way you'd like to tag, organize, manage, segment, or otherwise manipulate contact data, Ontraport almost certainly has it built right in.

The page builder is... quirky at best, and sometimes outright frustrating. Blocks will often behave unpredictably, and there are a handful of pretty obnoxious bugs you eventually just learn to work around (for instance, after uploading and selecting an image to insert into a block, you need to move your cursor and hit "Save" on that block. In between your current cursor position and the Save button, there are a handful of stock placeholder images. On its route to the Save button, your cursor of course hovers across these images momentarily. This causes them to autofill into the block in the same split second you hit 'Save,' which means you now have a stock image in your block and you're forced to go all the way back to your image library and start again).

Campaign builder. The visual campaign builder is very easy to use and feels pretty modern.

CRM: customizing what type of data I'd like WHERE has been great. Custom fields, being able to move them around.

Task Management: one of the things that set ONTRAPORT apart from other similar automation platforms is the tasks. You can trigger automated tasks that cause your salespeople to take action, and the tasks stay in the queue until the salesperson takes that action and checks it off. This is great for putting together a web of accountability.

Integrations. Basically, all integrations are done using Zapier. This is a huge time suck. In other programs like ActiveCampaign, you have WordPress plugins to import your data from Gravity Forms. It takes 2 minutes to set up. With Zapier, even a simple integration takes a minimum of 30 minutes to setup and test to the point where you trust it.

Documentation: there is a lot of documentation, but a lot of it is confusing with not enough examples to make something clear.

Templates: other programs like Drip focus on more templates for campaigns. While there are a few here, there's really not a ton and they don't seem carefully curated.

Learning curve: it took a really long time to get it set up for our business. I appreciated the onboarding sessions, which definitely helped a lot, but it could have been simpler.

Version 5: last year ONTRAPORT launched their newest version of their software. I can see that it's a foundation that they will be able to build a lot on, but it's not fleshed out yet. Like a fresh foundation and a good building, but not a lot of paint or polish yet.

Sales funnels: managing people through a sales funnel just happens through a custom field that you set up. There's no predetermined "section" for something that a lot of sales teams would want. It makes it easy to not know what's going to happen with your automation when you send someone to a new part of the sales funnel (ie. you move someone to the next part of the sales funnel, it triggers an automation, maybe you weren't aware of that). It would be great if it gave you a quick summary of some of the automation you're about to send when you take actions.

Intimidation: enough said. It just feels intimidating to set this stuff up. This may be true for all the other automation programs too though.

Create a lead gen funnel from lead magnets, landing page, email sequence quickly and as custom as you want

Landing page builder really works, good combination of fast and easy plus customisable

There is heaps of training material and a lot of articles but perhaps some more video step by steps would be good.

Overall it's great not much to change!

Excellent CRM for small to medium businesses.

Email tracking (date/time sent, received, opened, links clicked, etc).

Automation of repetitive processes.

Stats on emails, sequences, etc.

Managing inventory.

Shipping label integration with USPS/UPS/FedEx.

More complete email delivery tracking. Some group messages not always received by everyone available in the group. Sent, Delivered but not read. Customer says they never got it.

Auto-responder sequences to tailor client engagement

Tracking details of client history

Managing affiliate partnerships

Once you understand the Sequences and Rules, funnels can be easily created, but it would be SO MUCH EASIER to have a graphical interface for developing funnels

The system is sometimes slow to respond

The excellent landing pages and email templates could be even more excellent with additional customization options

Task management is my favorite feature. I love that I can send a task to an outside vendor and have them report on the interaction with my client without them needing to log into the Ontraport system

The Support Team ROCKS! I'm able to get quick help via live chat and knowing that they are just a phone call away is also great. (Even late at night and on weekends.)

The Executive Staff really care about their customers. They are active in the forum and really listen (and address) the challenges of their customer. Give them a use case for a divergent use of a feature that may need a small tweak to the system and they will seriously consider making that possible.

Reporting is not the easiest thing to do in the system.

Affiliate tracking/ reporting is not very intuitive or consistent

If you set-up your system yourself, you just don't know what needs to be set-up in order to track stuff later. Some basic KPIs need custom set-ups to be report-able.

Email Marketing. Ontraport is outstanding. The control that we have over the content, the delivery, the experience that we can provide for our prospects and clients is second to none as far as I am concerned.

Tracking. Everything is measured, compared, tracked, recorded and stored. The mountain of data that is available allows us to instantly see what is working and what isn't, and this saves us time and money.

Customization. I have mentioned the control that we have in email marketing, but that is true in everything.

Support. The team are always there for me. True I may have a problem outside hours, but the knowledge base, videos and Users Community are always there with a solution.

Ontraport is a very powerful and robust system capable of a great many things. The time it takes to get to know the program is a little intimidating. Don't get me wrong, you can get started right away, but a year in I know I am still not making the most of all Ontraport can do. I am UK based so access to their advanced trainings means international travel, maybe some online events could be initiated.

It automatically lets sales people and marketers know which contacts in the database are the most active and even allows you to see which web pages a particular contact has visited.

The marriage of rules and sequences allows us to sit down with clients and map out their marketing, sales and customer service processes and then program ONTRAPORT to carry them out. The business guides the software, not the other way around.

ONTRAPORT encourages a mix of communications; email, post card, postal and text messages. This helps keep the relationship real with the contacts. They don't feel like they are just on an email list. They are communicated in a way that matches their behavior and preferences.

Its blessing is its curse. Too much flexibility and a broad range of features means it can be hard to use to its full potential if you're not familiar with it and some of the features are not as advanced as stand alone solutions; like email templates for example.

The shopping cart and gateway communications are not really geared for product sales yet. It's coming though.

Reporting is a challenge. It's very flexible because you can download just about anything. You just have to figure out how to report it.

Creating Custom Groups and applying the groups to automated filters. We use this to change large groups of contacts at once. We import contacts and use filters to assign the contacts to different territories based on zip codes.

Simple and intuitive rules to automate complex functions. My office staff doesn't even know it's happening. They update one field and magically a contact record is changed, a date is updated and a sequence is changed.

Mailing out post cards with purls is very important to our lead generation. Tracking post card response has always been difficult in the past.

Smart form integration and beyond. We use Ontraport smart forms to not only capture lead information but to qualify them based on their survey.

We follow up every prospect that doesn't buy with a survey generated by ontraport with the promise of a gift card for participation. The fulfillment of this gift card is completed using Ontraport tasks. (to my office manager to mail out. not to automatically mail out gift cards... that would be cool though)

The platform is pretty stable and fast. Every once in a while the system seems to run a little slow. There have been huge improvements in speed and stability since Oct 2014.

Mobile app needs improvement. I have not been able to use it on my smart phone and the web login doesn't work well for my iPad.

Graphic interface showing how all the sequences, forms and opt in pages are tied together in a funnel design would be cool.

Client support and documentation; amazing community available to help with any questions or requests you have in a very timely fashion.

Automation functionality; the system can act as multiple employees without hiring anyone.

Overall usability; with such a powerful system, actually being able to navigate around it is crucial.

Email deliver rates are fast and high.

Tracking open and click-rates is good.

Support is readily available by chat and phone

Does not work with Chrome - cannot even log in

Took them 7 days to fix a security certificate error - all eCommerce activity gave "unsecured or untrusted site" warnings, and it took HOURS to convince them how and where the problem was on their side, including video-capture of a detailed reproduction ruling out other issues. They just did not get the importance of SSL.

Charges made through their system do not send your product "description" through to your payment gateway. (confirmed deficiency with tech support)

The system supports adding/removing tags in one step. DON'T DO IT. Tags get lost. Add the new tag, wait 5 minutes until confirmed, then delete the old tag.

System cannot count. Never delete a step from a step-sequence; everything gets hopelessly thrown out of whack and re-creating the sequence is the only solution.

System lacks significant filtering abilities. No "and", "or" or parenthetical groupings available.

You can filter on "does not contain" for tags, but cannot do the same for sequences. Reason: it hurts their server's performance, so they don't make this feature available to users. You need to do a 3-step work-around that rapidly goes out of date.

No way to rename tags. You have to add a new one, copy over, wait, then delete the first one.

No DESCRIPTION for any tags you create. So you better think them through up front, since renaming is not available, and you can otherwise forget which one was used for what, when, or why. No way to even see how many contacts are using a given tag at a glance. You have to create a filter for each and every tag just to check.

Tagging, Measurement & Tracking

Automation, Systems & Payment

Ease of Use

Simpler way to find the training (took me a while to find it, and wasn't even sure it was the right thing)

I think there's always room to improve the UI so it's more intuitive

The rule based email marketing / business processes are fantastic.

Business automation was something I discovered it does really well, e.g. if card declines, set a followup call and much, much more.

They have some cherry-on-the-top features, e.g. native postcard mailing integration, which is cool.

Unfortunately, not enough developers have jumped on API integrations, which means some fancy things (e.g. integration with QuickBooks) requires you to hire your own coder.