September, 2019 update: Infusionsoft has re-branded into Keap but still offers the same features and services.
Stumped finding the right CRM? You’re not alone. It’s a pretty common predicament to be in as a business owner.
As your business starts growing, you’re going to need help to automate and balance all of your work.
That’s where a CRM like Ontraport or Infusionsoft steps in and lets you relax. Today I will be comparing the two, looking at the difference between their pricing, features, ease of use and more.
Let’s get into it 🙂
Let’s first look at Infusionsoft
Source: Growth Simple
It’s safe to say that Infusionsoft is a company that’s been around the block and has innovated the CRM market for more than 15 years.
Is Infusionsoft worth it? Well, if you want to streamline the customer life cycle, marketing, e-commerce and other processes within your business, Infusionsoft is definitely what you’re looking for.
Imagine being able to focus on other important tasks while many other processes are being automated. You and your employees can get more work accomplished, plan better, and have more data to play with.
Let’s look at some of their main features next.
Marketing automation
Source: Infusionsoft
How does getting more work done with less effort sound?
You can create entire marketing campaigns with Infusionsoft’s drag and drop system. This includes personalized contact messages, triggers based on lead behavior, landing pages, and more.
That means no more repeating every step when you can simply automate it.
I don’t know about you, but having to do the same little tasks every single day started to bug me as a business owner.
I enjoy being an entrepreneur, don’t get me wrong. However, you can probably relate when I say some steps can get very repetitive when running companies.
Continuing, landing pages can also be created with a drag and drop system. No coding experience required. This means no more spending money on expensive design services.
Customize pages to suit your branding, goals, and add any of the thousands of free images it comes with. Landing pages can be used to collect emails, sell products, or generate leads, depending on the stage of your business.
Once you’ve setup a landing page or two, Infusionsoft gives you advanced tracking tools to make smarter decisions.
It’s been proven that businesses which are data-driven experience a 4% increase in productivity and 6% increase in profits, as well.
Source: Infusionsoft
The landing page analytics you will have access to display:
- Purchase history of every visitor.
- Individual browsing trends.
- Individual lead sources.
- The exact pages customers and visitors viewed.
- Average time spent on page.
- How much revenue your landing pages generate.
Sales automation
Close more sales. Save more money. That’s what you can look forward to with sales automation.
There’s no need to hire a huge sales team or increase outreach when Infusionsoft will do it all for you.
Imagine you could organize your leads based on their likeliness to become a customer. Sounds too good to be true? Actually, it’s a feature you’ll have called lead scoring.
Source: Infusionsoft
Based on the prospects actions and activities, a score is assigned based on a criteria you set. This means it’s tailored exactly to your business. When you go to cold call, you can prioritize leads to get more paying customers.
When you need to receive payment, send a quote through the Infusionsoft app, too. It’s fast and secure for both you and the customer. You can also send emails to sales reps if they are accepted or declined to ensure there is no overlapping.
Since a sales pipeline is needed for any serious business, Infusion includes pipeline management tools to maximize results.
Source: Infusionsoft
With management tools at your disposal, you’re going to be able to:
- View how much revenue every product and lead generates.
- Easily train new employees with a streamlined sales process.
- Make accurate forecasts of sales.
- Create follow-up reminders for your team so they can stay on track.
Reporting & Analytics
Data is king.
Without analytics, you won’t have a clue what’s going on inside your business. You won’t be able to optimize, split test, or track improvement, either.
Don’t worry about that though. Infusionsoft has in-depth reporting so you can make better business decisions through real data.
Source: Dasheroo
You’ll have access to easy-to-read reports on conversion rates, web form completion, campaign stats, email delivery, and so much more. Infusionsoft analyzes millions of data points to accurately inform you on your business progress.
Businesses can use this to grow even bigger.
I’m sure you check your analytics often already, so you’ll love that reports include:
- Revenue by lead, products and other criteria.
- Sales generated by each rep.
- Average sales cycle stage times.
- Forecasted revenue levels.
- Referral partner revenue.
No one likes accounting or bookkeeping. Well, unless you’re an accountant or bookkeeper!
For the rest of us, we can enjoy Infusionsoft’s billing and order reports on:
- Payments, receivables, subscriptions and more.
- Failed invoices and payments.
- Customer lifetime value.
- Invoice and quotes you’ve sent.
Do you have a team of employees? If so, wouldn’t it be nice to track all of their login info and performance? Well, Infusionsoft collects admin reports which do exactly that.
You will have detailed reports on user’s info, leads they’ve added, tasks they’ve completed, deadlines, and more. Your organization will be sharper than a knife!
Payments
Getting paid is an important part of business, wouldn’t you agree?
Being able to conveniently collect payments is one of Infusionsoft’s best features. It can be set up in a matter of minutes and deposits only take 2-3 business days.
You can take payments online through your website, on the phone, and even in-person. No matter how you interact with your customers, there’s a way to bill them.
YouGov even concluded in a study that customers are 40% more likely to purchase from businesses that offer multiple forms of payment.
There’s no setup or monthly fee, either. That’s how a lot of processors get you. Infusionsoft has a very reasonable rate of 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction.
All of your payment data will be synced with customers information for further insight, recurring billing, and reminders.
Mobile
Ever since 2014, mobile devices have become the predominant way to browse and shop online.
This means if you aren’t optimized for mobile devices, you will lose out on revenue and customers. That is why Infusionsoft offers many mobile features, including:
- A mobile app so you aren’t glued to your computer all day. It syncs with your desktop so you can do marketing on the go and get real time updates.
- The Infusionsoft app and the plug-and-ply card reader enables you to take mobile payments. Imagine meeting up with a client and being able to bill them on the spot.
- Mobile responsive emails, landing pages, and web forms.
Online sales
According to Shopify, global retail e-commerce sales will hit the $4.5 billion mark by 2021. Everything is becoming digital, so don’t be one of the businesses that’s late to the game.
Infusionsoft will empower your business with an online storefront, shopping cart, and order forms. It’s everything you need to sell online, in one convenient place.
You can sell physical products, digital products, subscriptions, or services. This is great because it enables business owners to experiment with different product types.
Another really cool feature that you also get is a referral program. What better way to grow your business? You can have tons of people promoting it for you, creating a huge network over time.
Every partner gets a portal they can log into to access marketing material, codes, and whatever you wish to give them.
Neilson found that referrals are the most trusted form of advertising. People are much more likely to buy from your brand if they hear about it through word of mouth. Wouldn’t you feel the same way?
Customer relationship management
Relationship building is key for the success any business. That’s the whole point of CRM software after all.
Why do you think that the CRM market is going to hit the $80 million mark by 2025?
It helps you understand your customers better, optimize their experience, and offer more value. Infusionsoft’s contact management is top-of-the-online and made just for this.
Infusionsoft will help you collect information about your leads and organize them in one place. Records can be edited, uploaded, and managed so easily that you’ll be wondering where Infusionsoft has been all of your life.
Orders, account balances, lead scores, and many other metrics will be at your fingertips, too.
Add contacts from the mobile app, import eternal data, and check for duplicate contacts. Your client information will never feel more accessible and streamlined.
Support & Service
You may be thinking this is a lot to take in. There are so many features to figure out. You haven’t used a CRM before like this. The list goes on.
Infusionsoft has hands-down the largest amount of support and services to help you use the software perfectly.
Begin with the knowledge center or help center. User guides, videos, webinars, free e-books and FAQ’s will solve most of your questions.
Still need assistance? Hire an Infusionsoft expert, visit the PartnerCon convention, get coaching, or take a training class.
- Score your lead’s performance for better organization
- Segment your leads into different groups
- Track web activity
- SMS marketing
- Personalized web content
- Predictive analytics
- Bi-directional CRM syncing
- Event management
- Send invoices
- Create quotes
- Create membership sites
- Sales reports
- Mobile app so you can work on the go
- Shopify
- BigCommerce
- Outlook
- Zapier
- Zoho
- Quickbooks
- Almost 700 other integrations
One question we commonly see is “Why is Infusionsoft so expensive?” and the easy answer is that the ROI it can bring is massive.
Imagine the amount of clients and revenue you’ll be able to generate thanks to automation, improved work flow, visualization, and all of the other features you get.
- Starting price: $199/month
- Setup fee: $1,000
- Full feature price: $379/month
- 2.5k contacts: $199/month
- 10k contacts: $379/month
- Larger contact list: Contact Infusionsoft
- Refund policy: No refunds
- Starting number of users: 3
- Extra user cost: Contact Infusionsoft
- Demo available: Yes
- Improves the productivity, organization and marketing within your business which ultimately means more revenue.
- They offer training to help you understand the software which combats the steep learning curve.
- No split testing, bulk social media posting or real time sales alerts.
- Bigger learning curve.
- No free demo.
- Small to medium sized businesses that have up to 100 employees.
Next, Ontraport
“I was running another business and ran into the problems that all entrepreneurs do, and I couldn’t believe there wasn’t a slick solution to solve them”.
This is what the founder of Ontraport, Landon Ray, said when he decided to start up the company. Like many entrepreneurs, he identified a problem in the market that he was experiencing himself and wanted to resolve it.
Ontraport was officially founded in 2006 and offers business automation software to make your life easier.
They boast award winning support, a cutting edge campaign builder, and built-in reporting so you know what’s going on with your business.
Marketing Automation
Ontraport has dynamic and powerful marketing automation. You will lead your customers through a personalized sales funnel that’s tailored to their behaviors and preferences.
Personalization is the future of e-commerce and this software will help you implement it. Not every consumer is the same so it only makes sense to create individual journeys.
With email funnels, ads and landing pages, Ontraport will make purchasing irresistible for leads.
Customize the timing and details of each action in your campaign to make it perfect. You can also set goals to quantify your results.
Sales Automation
Sell everywhere and anywhere. Ontraport enables you to create order forms, upsell, launch a storefront and manage payment gateways. Most importantly, it’s very secure.
Ontraport integrates with PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net and other trusted services. Secure payment processing has been proven to reduce abandoned carts and fraud.
Want to offer memberships? Subscription businesses are on the rise and you may want to take advantage of it.
Whether you offer exclusive content or monthly physical goods, memberships can be a wise revenue stream. You can link your Ontraport to a WordPress website and begin instantly.
Reporting & Analytics
The Ontraport dashboard gives you an overview of what’s happening within your business. No more guessing.
You can customize it to display the most important information. Marketing, sales and engagement is all tracked to identify trends and opportunities.
The reporting dashboard also uses a drag and drop feature to easily swap around metrics.
This way you can configure it so it makes sense for you. Have some new marketing ideas? Split test them and figure out which one performs better.
Finally, you’ll be able to see which products and contacts generate the most revenue to double down.
Support & Service
Just like Infusionsoft, Ontraport has a large array of services to get you familiar with the software.
Their customer service has a 96& sanctification rate so reach out to them with any questions you have. Also visit the answers forum, knowledge, Facebook community or join an online workshop.
For a more hands-on approach, get one on one training, stop by an Ontraport meetup or speak with a certified consultant. The last thing you have to be concerned about is figuring out the software with so many resources.
- Lead segmentation
- Track web activity
- SMS marketing
- Personalized web content
- Predictive analytics
- Event management
- Send invoices
- Create membership sites
- Split testing to discover the best strategies
- Bulk social media posting
- SugarCRM
- Gmail
- Netsuite
- Zapier
- Salesforce
- Quickbooks
- Almost 700 other integrations
Is Ontraport free? Yes, actually! They do offer a demo you can use to test out the platform before investing your hard earned money.
- Starting price: $79/month
- Setup fee: None
- Full feature price: $379/month
- 2.5k contacts: $297/month
- 10k contacts: $297/month
- 25k contacts: $597/month
- 100k contacts: $597/month
- Refund policy: 90 days
- Starting number of users: 2
- Extra user cost: $47/month
- Demo available: Yes
- The pricing is much more friendly with their starting price less than half of Infusionsoft.
- Free demo to try out the platform to see if you like it.
- No mobile app.
- Dashboard can feel a bit lackluster.
- No lead scoring.
- Small businesses, especially those that sell digital products or offer memberships.
So, Who’s Better?
For the businesses that are trying to bootstrap and keep their costs as low as possible, I recommend Ontraport.
Their starting price is very reasonable at $79/month and their contact pricing scales just as sensibly. Go apply and try out a demo of their software today to see if it suits your needs.
If you want a lot more power behind your back to take your marketing to the next level, Infusionsoft will satisfy you and more. They are a bit more pricey but with the results you’ll experience it will be a very positive ROI.