Item: Keap
Rating: 8
Author: Jacob Siner

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Keap as our primary CRM for both prospects and current customers, housing data about the marketing and sales process as well as current plans, team members, invoices, subscriptions, and anything needed to describe a customer account. We also use it as our primary email marketing and automation tool building evergreen campaigns, one-time campaigns and blasts, or triggering 3rd party integrations for things like direct mail and text messaging.

Pros and Cons

Highly customizable - fields in contact records can be created and integrated with many different tools
Automation - this takes a learning curve to do really well but is very powerful if you know how to use it. Well beyond cheaper email campaign solutions
Reports (mostly) - There are probably hundreds of reporting options in different parts of Keap, and the most useful ones can be highly customized with all custom fields, saved, and used on a recurring basis. Some reports I wish had more capabilities like their main ones, but for the most part it works very well.
Integrations

Detailed logic building in campaigns can be somewhat challenging for new users. After 5 years I don't feel limited by this but when it's time to train new team members they're prone to mistakes for quite a while.
Some reports lack the ability to combine with custom fields/other search parameters which requires some work arounds like tagging the results of one report to open in a different report and narrow down.
Change history on company records, contact records, subscriptions etc is difficult to see. This doesn't come up often but sometimes we need to see who changed a setting or subscription and can't find that right within Keap
Quickbooks integration. This applies mainly to Keap Max Classic, but connecting invoices to quickbooks now requires a Zapier connection which is not as simple as most Zapier connections to make work cleanly, especially with multiple products on an invoice.

Return on Investment

We use it to build out months of content at a time or leverage evergreen campaigns for new leads, sales funnels, etc. and that saves a lot of time for our team

Key Insights

Do you think Keap delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Keap's feature set?

Yes

Did Keap live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Keap go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Keap again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Zapier, ConvertFlow, Leadpages, WordPress

Likelihood to Recommend

Keap's advanced tools can power a seriously complex marketing team / CRM team. Its deliverability rate seems pretty high which is helpful and I've yet to find a challenge we couldn't do something to address. That said, those advanced features also mean you need someone or a small team that is well-trained to really use it to its full potential. If you're going to pay for it, you should be prepared to train up and utilize it well otherwise there may be a cheaper option if you need something simple.

Super powerful as long as you can handle learning superpowers

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Keap