Complete Keap Review: Perfect Solution, or Good Option?

Launch Your Online Business in Just 7 Days

When looking to start your new online business, it can often seem like a challenging task.


But it doesn’t have to be!


When you’re looking to establish your presence as an online business, you should ideally have the following:

  • Interested leads
  • Automation that turns leads into customers while you’re busy working on other aspects of your business.

Fortunately for you, there are quite a few tools out there that can help you grow your business on autopilot!


Today’s review is all about Keap — Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software aimed to help you increase your sales and save time with automation.


So, is it worth it? Let’s find out!

1. What is Keap?

Keap logo

Source: Wikipedia.org

If you’re not yet in the loop of what Keap is or you're simply looking for more information about it, this is where you’ll find it.


Keap, formerly known as InfusionSoft, is a business growth platform.


Its core offering consists of:

  • CRM
  • Email marketing
  • Automation
  • Lead generation

Keap’s best feature, and probably the reason why many use it, is its strong CRM feature.


Keap started back in 2004 as a lead management automation tool.


So, it’s natural for them to have established themselves as key pioneers in the field of CRM.


By adding additional features to their software, they’ve managed to turn InfusionSoft into the platform we know today — Keap.


These additional features enable entrepreneurs to grow their businesses!


And you can see that it’s loved by many one-man bands by its rating of 4.1/5 stars on Capterra.


However, when it comes to integrating automation and email marketing sub-tools, it can start to get a little confusing.


So, let’s have an in-depth look at Keap’s main features to see what it has to offer your business.

2. Keap's features

Keap has a lot of features that work to its benefit, but that isn’t always a good thing.


It comes down to how effectively it can integrate with your business and its general usefulness to business owners.


With that said, here are the top features that Keap advertises:

2.1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Source: Zapier.com

It’s quite exciting to review a growth tool, and for good reason — there aren’t that many good ones on the market.


Since Keap’s predecessor is InfusionSoft, a key feature to expect is CRM — and it does not disappoint!


Their CRM feature allows you to house and track all your client communications in one place.


Keap’s client management software allows you to follow up with your client and keep them in the loop, as well as keep company records, and manage how you get paid.


You can also integrate your data, applications, and devices with various software like Zapier, Gmail, Outlook, and AppointmentCore.


The software responds promptly to your existing contacts and sends new leads with highly personalized responses that drive actions and sales.


Their CRM software also allows you to:

  • Save time by choosing from a variety of pre-written emails
  • See your customer details at a glance
  • Pull up any shared files, documents, contracts, and images shared between you and your customer
  • Customize your email templates and personalize messages
  • Use automated internal forms to collect specific information

These features allow you to seamlessly stay in touch with your leads and customers alike.


If you’re onboarding over 100 new leads daily, then it'll be impossible to get in touch with all of them.


With Keap, you can onboard new leads and follow up with them in a fast and efficient way.


These new leads need a welcoming email — welcoming emails are important to growing your business as they:

  • Allow you to introduce your brand
  • Receive 4x more opens than all other mails
  • Receive 5x more clicks (therefore higher website traffic)

If you’ve got a tool that automates this aspect of your marketing, growing your business will be much, much easier!

2.2. Email marketing

Email Marketing

Keap's email marketing

We briefly looked at email marketing in the previous feature, but it just comes to show how smoothly CRM and email marketing integrate.


So, we all know there are plenty of specialized email marketing tools out there, like ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, and MailChimp, but Keap holds its own.


Firstly, one of Keap’s email marketing features is that they offer plenty of beautiful templates.


After choosing the one you like, you’ll be able to customize it to fit your branding.


Secondly, you’ll be able to segment your audience. But what exactly is that?


Email segmentation is the process of dividing your contacts or email subscribers into groups according to their interests, activity, and more shared factors.


This way, you can personalize their emails on a larger scale.


This is pretty handy for making sure you’re maximizing the lifetime value of all your contacts.


For example, leads may be interested in one product type, while customers might want an upgrade.


With email segmentation, you can sell to all of them by adapting to everyone’s unique needs.


Keap also has a simple email marketing automation feature that allows you to set triggers, like:

  • Lead fills out a form Keap automatically sends them the lead magnet
  • Lead engages with your website → Keap sends them an email with a great offer
  • Customer checks out the pricing page → Keap invites them to upgrade or get in touch with your sales reps

And at the end of the day, you’ll be able to see how effective your email marketing is with Keap’s email reporting.


All in all, Keap’s email marketing features are simple but powerful, and a refreshing feature to see in a CRM tool.

2.3. Landing pages

Landing Pages

Source: Moosend.com

Similar to tools like systeme.io, Keap allows you to pick from a gallery of templates and then customize them to fit your branding — creating the perfect landing page.


The best part? You don’t have to write a single line of code!


You can also customize your landing pages based on:

  • Traffic sources
  • Products or services
  • Special offers
  • Events

Their templates also allow you to add a variety of conversion-driving elements to your Keap landing page, for example:

  • Testimonials
  • CTA buttons
  • Lead generation forms

After building your landing page, you can add it to your automation sequence.


Since landing pages are the “crown jewels” of your sales pipeline, it’s great that Keap offers this feature.


The difference in traffic sources and other characteristics is a nice touch for large-scale personalization.

2.4. Marketing automation

Marketing Automation

Keap’s marketing automation system is fueled by their CRM and email marketing.


What does that mean?


You can set up triggers and Keap will automatically send the relevant emails to your contacts.


You can also capture lead information like behavior, preferences, or likeliness to buy, and then use that information to set up lead conversions more effectively.


This is pretty handy for lead nurturing through email sequences.


However, that’s all there is.


Honestly, it’s a little bit underwhelming.

2.5. Keap in touch with contacts

Keap in Touch With Contacts

Keap has a unique feature that allows you to message your contacts… If you're a US resident.


One of the main benefits of SMS marketing is that everyone reads their texts.


The average open rate of a text message sits at about 99%, with 97% of messages being read within 15 minutes of delivery.


Keap is forward-thinking with this feature, and many entrepreneurs love it!


So, in addition to email, you’ll also be able to keep track of contact with your leads through your texts and calls.


They'll also automatically be added to your customer base, creating their customer profile which allows you to automate accordingly.

2.6. Sales pipeline

Sales Pipeline

Source: Sopro.io

Keap’s sales pipeline feature is a great feature for sales teams.


The nice thing about a tool like this is that you don’t need an entire sales team.


You can run the entire thing by yourself and still benefit from it!


A sales pipeline allows you to visualize where your leads and customers are in your pipeline:

  • Do you need to send them an offer?
  • Are they ready to convert?
  • Should you nurture them with an email sequence?

You can also automate your sales pipeline management.


For example, when a lead gets an offer, you can re-qualify them as a prospect.


Sales pipelines work great, but sales funnels are usually better when it comes to turning leads into prospects, and prospects into customers.


A sales funnel-building tool like systeme.io is a great alternative, and it’s free!

2.7. Other features

The features covered so far are the most effective features to use when wanting to get your business from zero to hero.


However, Keap also offers a few features for scheduling and paperwork:

  • Payments
  • Reporting and analytics
  • Appointments feature
  • Quotes
  • Invoices and payments

The most significant of these is the Appointments feature, as it allows you and your customers/partners to work together to find the perfect time to schedule meetings — clash-free!


So, now that you have an idea of what you’re getting yourself into when using Keap, here are the pricing details.

3. Keap's pricing

Pricing

When scouring Keap’s pricing page, you can see that they’ve made quite a smart move (or perhaps not) by adding a slide bar to input the number of customers you have.


This is smart because not all businesses are equal.


Some can easily afford to pay for Keap’s pro plan and supplementary software, while others might make it their only option.


With that said, Keap offers 4 plans. If you have 500 leads (the lowest amount on their slider bar), then pricing starts as follows:

3.1. Keap Lite

Keap Lite is the first, most affordable plan built for smaller businesses and/or single entrepreneurs.


This plan will cost you $40/month for the first 2 months and $79/month thereafter.


The features include:

  • CRM
  • SMS and email marketing tools
  • Automation
  • B2B capabilities
  • Invoice and quote generator
  • Appointment scheduling tools
  • Reminders and reports
  • Internal forms

One downside of using Keap Lite is that you won’t be able to use the landing page builder or marketing automation tools.


This will make it a lot harder to scale your business.

3.2. Keap Pro

Keap Pro will cost you $80/month for the first 2 months, thereafter, it'll cost you $159/month. This plan has everything in Keap Lite with the addition of:

  • Sales pipelines
  • Marketing automation tools
  • Landing pages
  • A/B testing
  • Recurring payments

This is the plan you’d have to pick if you wanted to grow your business as fast as possible with Keap.

3.3. Keap Max

Keap Max will cost you $100/month for the first 2 months, and $199/month thereafter. This plan is recommended for established businesses and teams.


Keap Max includes the Keap Lite and Keap Pro features as well as:

  • Checkout forms
  • Subscription management
  • Lead scoring
  • Analytics

This plan is great if you're looking to upscale your business and you're 100% sure that Keap is the tool for you.

3.4. Keap Max Classic

This subscription plan is priced on demand and is suitable for advanced ecommerce and sales team needs — it's essentially InfusionSoft before it became more user-friendly and was renamed Keap.


Just a reminder that these are the baseline prices if you are 1 user, with 500 leads.


If you have more contacts or want to add other team members, you’ll have to pay more.

4. Keap's pros and cons

Pros and Cons of Using Keap

4.1. Keap's pros

Keap is equipped with lots of great features.


Below are some of the pros of using Keap:

  • It’s easy to use

Just consider the fact that you can build landing pages visually.


Normally, you’d have to either learn how to code or pay someone to do it for you.


With Keap, you just have to drag and drop sections to create an effective landing page.


Similarly, it doesn’t take a lot of knowledge to create automation rules.


This is why all-in-one tools like Keap which offer a few tools are great to use.


You don’t have to learn the intricacies of each tool; you can set things up with just a few clicks.

  • It saves money

If you don’t use a tool like Keap, you’ll have to pay for a few tools, including:

  • A contact or customer relationship management tool
  • An email marketing tool
  • A landing page builder

And that’s what you need, just to get started — but a tool like Keap offers all of these features under one roof.


We all love saving money by paying for one tool versus individually paying for the entire toolshed.

  • Plenty of integrations

What Keap doesn’t offer, it makes up for with its integrations.


If you run an online store, you can easily integrate Keap with:

  • Ecommerce tools like BigCommerce
  • Manage your emails with Keap’s Gmail integration
  • Optimize your checkout page conversion with ThriveCart

Alternatively, you could just use systeme.io and get all of those features in one.

4.2. Keap's cons

Keap is a handy tool, but it does have a few significant disadvantages:

  • It’s not that useful to new online businesses

You would get the most value out of Keap if you’ve been running your business for a while.


It’s pretty heavy on the CRM side.


And while email automation is a nice touch, it’s still not as simple and sales-focused as some other tools.

  • Landing page builder, and nothing but

Normally, tools that offer landing page builders offer plenty of conversion-focused elements, as well as advanced sales funnels.


Unfortunately, Keap does not.


So yes, you might use it for a portion of your work.


However, if you want to minimize your costs and maximize your sales, then other tools can do it much better.

  • It’s expensive for what it offers

It's extremely expensive for what it offers.


Although the slider option on their pricing page is a nice feature, it may be a bit of a limiting factor.


Specificity is great in many things, but not marketing tool prices.


Keap could offer a lot more features for entrepreneurs to warrant the $79/month asking price for such a limited plan.

5. To Keap or not to Keap?

Below are our thoughts on whether or not you should consider using Keap for your business depending on the type of business you run and how you run it.


We recommend using Keap if:

  • You are a client-focused, service business
  • You have a current list of at least 100 engaged contacts
  • You or someone on your team has a basic understanding of digital marketing
  • You would like to automate your prospect and client flow
  • Your business has a good focus and strategy around lead generation
  • You sell one-on-one services and would like to automate more in the marketing or fulfillment process

We don’t recommend that you use Keap if:

  • You sell to corporate clients (B2B) and rely heavily on company records to link contacts (Keap does not offer this feature)
  • Your business relies on custom-built reports to drive business decisions
  • Your business has a complex CRM structure with advanced record linking (Keap can’t create new record types)
  • Your business is a startup or strapped for cash
  • You’ve never really done any online marketing before or aren't keen to learn about digital marketing best practices
  • Your business has more than 15 employees — meaning you're generally too big for the feature set that Keap offers

6. Systeme.io: Keap’s best alternative?

systeme.io home page

Systeme.io's homepage

If you want a tool more powerful and more affordable than Keap, then you’ve found it!


Systeme.io is the best all-in-one marketing tool for lightning-fast business growth!


Some systeme.io features include:

  • Website and page builder (visual, drag and drop) with templates
  • Sales funnel builder (automate your entire sales process)
  • Email marketing automation
  • Workflow automation
  • Affiliate marketing
  • Membership sites, courses, and webinars
  • Blogging and dropshipping
  • And more!

And the best part? You can start growing your business with systeme.io for $0/month with our new free plan!


Customers have given reviews time and time again saying how easy systeme.io is to use.


What makes our software a great option is that it’s a super-powerful sales engine all under one sleek hood.


Stay in touch with your customers, turn leads into fans, and reach your revenue goals fast!

7. Conclusion

So there you have it!


It's no secret that Keap is a powerful CRM tool, but it does have its downsides.


With a tool like systeme.io, you get a variety of incredibly affordable plans loaded with simple, but powerful features to launch, grow and scale your online business with ease.


Are you ready to take your business to new heights? Sign up for our Freemium plan today!

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