Marian Vasilescu May 15, 2022

Premium marketing software reviews right now? I’ve been using Ontraport for my business and my client’s businesses for the past 2 years. I love that it’s so customizable. With a little creativity, you can manage nearly 100% of your business. I use it for my website, membership site, automations, new client onboarding, invoicing, payment processing, email marketing, lead management, customer management, order management, and reporting. There’s a bit of a learning curve—it took me about 6 months to learn enough to feel comfortable and confident. I don’t see this as a downside, though. I prefer to be able to customize everything exactly the way I want it, so a learning curve is a small price to pay! Discover extra info at ontraport vs activecampaign.

On the bright side though, at least Ontraport won’t ask for your credit card details. You’re free to try out its features for two weeks without committing yourself for the long haul. Beyond that, however, the lowest Ontraport goes is $79 per month for the basic plan. So, it might lock you out if you’re on a budget. Now, when you sign up and log in, the first impression you get of Ontraport’s system might be confusing. Considering it reportedly focuses on email marketing, you’d probably expect to find options like “Automation” or “Campaigns” on the menu bar. But, surprisingly, that’s not the case here. Only three of its six main menu options are consistent with email marketing solutions- “Dashboard”, “Campaigns”, and “Contacts”. The rest (“Pages”, “Tasks”, and “Sales”) are more commonly associated with CRM tools as opposed to email marketing. Hence, Ontraport might come off as a CRM solution when you first land on its dashboard.

This software’s user interface is a mixed bag, with some people finding it too complex, while others think it is manageable, so if this is your first automation software, you may need some time to understand this software’s functionalities. Ontraport’s CRM is great for maintaining categorized lists of your prospects, it allows you to send emails and newsletters to these lists to collect their data and update them regarding your business. Email and marketing automation are the strong features of this software and some companies only use Ontraport for its automation.

Lead Scoring: With lead scoring, you gain insight into the engagement level of your contacts. The more you see them engaging in your assets, the more point value they’ll have. It gives you an idea of what they’re most interested in. You’ll notice percentages showing up next to lead scores. Their purpose is to give you an idea of how important a contact’s score is. These are the scores based on the median. The way it works is that the median score gets 50% while the highest one gets 100%. The rest are then weighted to reflect the smaller range values.

Now, when you combine all these provisions, Ontraport transforms into one heck of a powerful marketing and CRM platform. Imagine the possibilities that come with that. But then again, if we’re honest about this approach, bundling all these functionalities in one autoamtion software has one major downside. You risk comprising the overall user experience because of the complex framework involved. How so? Ok, take a second and think about it. Admittedly, quite a number of the “all-in-one” solutions we’ve reviewed here at The Digital Merchant come with a relatively steep learning curve. They give beginners a hard time piecing together their multiple tools. Interestingly, the team at Ontraport understands that, and they claim they’ve tweaked the entire platform to make it as simple as possible.