Our Thoughts on Ontraport

ONTRAPORT recently updated their interface (4.0) making it bolder and easier to navigate. They receive lots of praise for their platform, which packs a lot of punch for such a relatively low price.

Pros

• Pricing – The most obvious benefit of ONTRAPORT is the affordability of their service. At $297/month with no setup fees and two hours of free onboarding calls, they’re positioned very competitively.

  What’s important to consider with Ontraport is that they give you access to all of their features, and the ability to store 25,000 contacts and send 100,000 emails. While some other tools may start at a lower entry price, you would likely pay 5-10x the cost of ONTRAPORT for the same level of contacts & features. They’re scalable so that as your business grows, they can grow with you so you don’t need to worry about switching systems later. The offer of a 90 day risk free guarantee is practically unheard of these days along with month-to-month or discounted annual pricing option after the 90 day risk guarantee period.

• Great community – ONTRAPORT has award winning customer support via phone, chat, and email during most business hours. They’re clearly committed to the success of their customers, holding a 97% satisfaction rate and all their reps work from one central location for seamless communication between support and development.

  They upgraded all of their servers for redundancy, invested in a content delivery network to ensure the fastest speed internationally and are constantly looking for ways to make their app quick and responsive. They also have a great community of users on their Facebook user group, an education site that’s free to ONTRAPORT customers, a quarterly bootcamp and certified consultant course and an annual business building event in Santa Barbara, CA.

• Unified system – ONTRAPORT is the automated engine behind your marketing campaigns, seamlessly integrating your emails, landing pages, ecommerce and more with your CRM so you can hyper-target your leads and convert them into customers.

  When you have separate systems managing all of these operations, your data is strewn about and it’s challenging to be able to make intelligent, data-driven decisions about your business. ONTRAPORT combines your marketing efforts into one, central system so you have ONE place to call for support and ONE place to look at your business data.

• Custom objects – ONTRAPORT offers the ability to build custom objects which is only available in enterprise systems such as SalesForce, Marketo or Eloqua. Custom objects allows you to create relationships between multiple databases. unique to your organization.

• eCommerce features – ONTRAPORT has a large range of impressive ecommerce features including automatic credit card payment collections and the ability to add upsells, cross-sells, cart abandonment and credit card expiration notification automation.

Cons

• Dashboard user interface – While you can create virtually any metric you’d like, their reporting dashboard isn’t particularly visually appealing as it doesn’t have graphs and charts.
• Automation campaign builder – While Ontraport’s campaign builder is easy to use and sufficiently powerful, it works by adding text-based rules one under another. We find the visual ‘flowchart’ style campaign builder used by some of Ontraport’s competitors more intuitive to use.