There’s many, many, many, many CRM’s/Email Marketing tools available to help you manage your contacts and keep in contact with them.  With all the choices available it’s important to check out reviews for potential software purchases beforehand.  

So, here’s my review of Keap (formerly InfusionSoft).  

Keap is an all-in-one email marketing and sales CRM platform. In terms of functionality and price -point, they’re competing with Salesforce and accordingly I would expect they’re best suited to businesses of roughly 15 people upwards. Less than that and you’re unlikely to use the functionality you’re paying a premium for, which is never a good situation. 

The interface is fairly clean and tidy, and the automation tools appear to be pretty powerful, but settings often aren’t in the place you would expect them to be so it’s not as easy to learn and then use the various features as it should be. I say this as a person who can and does learn how to proficiently use at least one piece of software every month for my clients, if I think it’s annoying to use, then you are going to tear your hair out.  

The email designer is just ok, it loses out for ease of use to even Mailchimp and you can’t access email templates except through the campaign builder workflow (unlike Mailchimp). Even though there is an email template tab in the account settings. This tab apparently refers to notification type emails and allow you to edit the email test and metadata with no way to change the appearance. Not what I would call a template. 

The lead/contact management interface is similarly fine but doesn’t appear to have any clear engagement/lead rating system.  

I don’t have experience with other parts of the functionality, so I won’t speak to those, but there’s one final and very important piece of functionality that all online software MUST have, and that’s the ability to export your data and cancel the account with ease.  

Here Keap breaks the unspoken but vert strict rule of online software. You can’t cancel your account from the account settings interface. You have to fill out a “contact” form and WAIT for an “account manager” to call you back. This by itself would be reason enough for me to never recommend them to anyone.  

However, it gets worse. 

A client of mine had signed up for Keap on the recommendation of someone in their network (prior to becoming my client by the way). My client gave the software a good go, taking a course to understand how to use the functionality. They built out templates and automations and other pieces in the software, but even with the course information they didn’t use 90% of the features.  

The truth was Keap was more complex than their business needed, which is fine, it happens. So now they needed to move to a cheaper and easier to use software. I exported all the data I could. Got their written confirmation to close the account. And went to do so. Cue red flags and alarm bells!! The cancel account option is a contact form! Surely that isn’t right, I think. So, I google “How to cancel Keap account”. Ah, yep, Keap documentation says this is how you do it…. Ok then. I enter my clients’ information as they’ll have to be the ones taking any calls. I notify my client and hope for the best. Several days later, we have a catch-up call and I ask if the account has been dealt with. She says no, she’s repeatedly tried to get in contact with them, and NOBODY has called or replied or done anything that might constitute contacting her.  

Which I think is ridiculously unacceptable. The next step for her was contacting her credit card company to get the charges blocked. The account was cancelled after that, but I feel like one should never have to get to the point of calling your credit card company to cancel an account, and it really shouldn’t be so hard to get in contact with a company. 

After this experience, it occurred to me to compare this poor experience with the procedure for cancelling a salesforce account. A little research tells me that with them also you need to contact an account manager to go through the process of cancelling the account. A quick google shows several very dissatisfied former customers who had similar issues. Given this information, I think there is one major difference between Salesforce and Keap. In my prior dealings with salesforce, we had an account manager that we were in regular contact with. We knew who to talk to if we had any problems. On the other hand, my client did NOT have an account manager at Keap, they had no one to contact and no way to get a message to someone who might do something about cancelling the account. They were completely at the mercy of this ridiculous “Contact form”. It should also be noted that both Platforms require contact with a sales rep to OPEN an account.  

To conclude, be careful what you sign-up for. If you have to talk to a Sales Rep to open an account with an online software platform, you should also expect to talk to one to close the account. My general advice would be that if your business is smaller than 15 people you most likely don’t need software that requires an account manager. If you DO get a piece of software with this kind of sign up process, make sure you know who your account manager is and/or ALWAYS have a current contact at the company. Finding yourself at the mercy of contact forms and tech support portals when you need specialist help is certain to cause a bad time.