A Review of Ontraport

I first heard about Ontraport a few years ago from some friends at Mindvalley.

According to a testimonial by their founder Vishen, Mindvalley’s COO spent six months comparing delivery rates, open rates, and the general performance of Ontraport against all of their major competitors, and Ontraport came out on top.

In August last year, I ran my own analysis comparing Ontraport (previously Office Autopilot) against Infusionsoft, Marketo, Pardot, Hubspot, and Eloqua. Out of the five, Ontraport was the only tool to score a 5/5 review.

Like all software, Ontraport is not perfect, and there are many things that their competitors do infinitely better. When looked at from a birds-eye view, though, Ontraport is one of the best marketing automation solutions available to fast-growing online businesses.

So, let’s jump straight into the pros and cons of Ontraport, starting with their strengths.

The Good

The most affordable marketing automation system – One of the most obvious benefits of Ontraport is their pricing. Their pro plan starts at $297/month and has no additional setup fees. In contrast with Infusionsoft, who charge a mandatory $1,999 kickstart fee, this makes Ontraport quite attractive financially.

Ontraport is particularly affordable for companies that have enormous mailing lists or who send a large number of emails. While Infusionsoft charge $379/month for 10,000 database contacts and 50,000 email credits, Ontraport allows you to have over twice as many contacts and email credits for just $297/month.

You can see a comparison of Ontraport and Infusionsoft’s pricing below:

Highly scalable & less price creep than competitors – One of the most common criticisms of marketing automation tools is their price creep. Going from 1,000 contacts to 10,000 contacts on Hubspot, for example, will increase your monthly fee from $800/month to $2,400/month.

With Ontraport, the fees for adding extra users, contacts, and email credits are significantly less than some of their competitors, which makes it easier and more affordable to grow your list size and automation sequences.

What’s also particularly nice about Ontraport’s pricing is that you only need to pay for what you need. Instead of having to upgrade to the next tier, you can just pay an extra $99/month for 100,000 extra email credits, or $47/month for an extra user.

A huge range of good features – With Ontraport, you get a CRM, shopping cart, affiliate management tool, landing page / micro site creator, auto-responders, a WordPress membership platform, online event / webinar creator, and task automation for a few hundred dollars per month.

To get this level of functionality in Infusionsoft, you’d need to buy quite a few add-ons.

Usually when a company offers a list of features like this, you might suspect that some of them are just going to be bells and whistles. This isn’t the case with Ontraport – all of their features are actually quite good.

What’s also particularly nice is that, unlike Infusionsoft and Hubspot who ‘unlock’ more features as upgarde your plan, you get access to the whole suite of Ontraport features, whether you’re on their pro or team plan.

True multi-channel marketing – One of my favourite aspects of Ontraport is the ability to automate sequences across multiple marketing channels. You can, for instance, communicate with leads via 2-way text message, or even by posting them a postcard.

This ability to communicate not only across social platforms and via email, but also outside of the online world is a huge selling point for Ontraport, as it gives companies an opportunity to stand out from the crowd and reach leads / customers where there’s less noise to compete with.

Great email delivery rates – Ontraport have their own dedicated IP addresses for sending emails, which have very high sender reputations, enabling you to avoid the spam box and get great email delivery rates.

Highly-segmented reporting – With Ontraport, everything is tracked using UTM variables, making it easy for you to know your CPA, customer lifetime value, and which lead sources or content campaigns are generating the best ROI.

Great customer support – While I don’t have any first-hand experience with Ontraport’s customer support, it’s evident from the hundreds of positive reviews that their support team are both technically knowledgeable and helpful in educating customers.

On top of their standard support, Ontraport run their own annual conference and have a good amount of educational content to ensure that customers get the most out of their software.

Mobile apps – At the 2014 Ontrapalooza (Ontraport’s annual conference), Ontraport announced the launch of both an iPhone and Android app that allows you to manage your CRM, add new contacts, and subscribe users to your sequences.

While you can’t review reports or do anything too in-depth, the apps are useful for keeping your contacts up to date and sending quick messages (either via email or text) to different groups.

Powerful shopping cart features – From automated credit card payment collections, to upsells and pre-made sequences designed to reduce money lost from abandoned cart payments, the Ontraport shopping cart has a lot of powerful features to reduce friction and boost conversion rates.

The Bad & The Ugly

Not the most inspiring dashboard – While it is completely customisable, the Ontraport dashboard isn’t particularly inspiring or visually intuitive. As shown below, the main dashboard displays a table of boxes that show whatever metrics are most important to you.

Steep learning curve – It can take weeks and months to fully understand what you can do in Ontraport. While their software does have a steep learning curve, it’s good to remember that this is the case with all marketing automation tools.

The impact that Ontraport can have on growing a business almost certainly makes the steep learning curve worth the effort, but there are areas where I think Ontraport could make the software a little bit easier to learn.

Sequence creation isn’t as intuitive as competitors – One of the most powerful features of Ontraport is the ability to create automated sequences that are triggered when leads complete a certain action. While their sequence creator is powerful, it’s not quite as intuitive or fun to use as some of Ontraport’s competitors.

Below is a comparison of Ontraport’s sequence editor next to the Infusionsoft sequence editor.

Not many integrations – While Ontraport do have an API and 24 partner integrations, their infrastructure for third-party apps is nowhere near as extensive as Infusionsoft, who at the time of writing have 348 apps and integrations in their marketplace.

Ontraport’s integrations include most of the common services, like Quickbooks, WordPress, PayPal, 1ShoppingCart, and LeadPages. But with only 24 integrations you’re obviously a little bit limited, unless your developers are able to play around with the API.

No online community – For such a powerful and complex tool, it’s surprising that Ontraport don’t have an online community for Ontraport users to share tips, strategies, and case studies. While this is also a feature lacking among most marketing automation tools, I think it’d be a great addition to their service.

Duplicate records – Ontraport don’t make it easy to clean up your records and remove duplicate contacts. If one user downloads an eBook from your site, attends a webinar, and buys a product, they can end up being added to your database three times. While this wouldn’t be an issue if Ontraport had an easy way to remove duplicates, they don’t.

In Summary: Who is Ontraport best for?

If you sell information products, run a membership site, or have any kind of online training or education company, Ontraport is easily the best marketing tool for you.

While Infusionsoft is definitely worth looking at, Ontraport is a bit more affordable and has a lot more features that’ll get you up and running in less time.

Ontraport don’t have a free trial, unfortunately, but they do have a free demo that you can sign up for here. They also have a 90-day money back guarantee (with no setup or cancellation costs), so worst case scenario you can always cancel your account within the first three months and get your money back.

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