Keap email marketing software review: Pros & Cons, Features, Ratings, Pricing and more

In 2018, customer relationship management (CRM) software company Infusionsoft was rebranded as Keap. Now, it sells two solutions—Keap and Infusionsoft. Infusionsoft is the company’s original product and has the most advanced features. The new product, Keap, uses a streamlined, small-business-friendly interface suitable for rapid deployment of sales pipelines, marketing automation, and customer management.

In our Keap email marketing review, we take a close look at the platform’s offerings to decide whether it competes with the best email marketing services available today.

• You can sign up for Keap here.

Keap: Plans and pricing

There’s no free version of Keap, but there’s a 14-day free trial period for the premium plans. There are three such plans; Keap Pro, Keap Max, and Max Classic. Pro starts at $129 monthly for 1,500 contacts and Max starts at $199 monthly for 2,500 contacts. The price increases according to the number of contacts you have.  For example, 5,000 contacts will cost $229 per month on the Pro plan and $254 per month on the Max plan. 

The Pro plan is limited to 2 users while Max is capped at 3 users, and you’ll have to pay $29 for each extra user. Max offers some features that you can't access on the Pro plan, such as promo codes and marketing analytics. 

There’s no standard pricing for the Max Classic plan. You have to contact Keap's sales team to get a custom quote. This plan is designed for enterprises with a large number of users. 

Keap: Features

What sets Keap apart from competitors is its tightly integrated customer management tools. List management, sales pipelines, marketing campaigns, appointment management, metrics, and invoicing are all readily available in an impressively intuitive interface that gives you an excellent high-level view of your business. 

Email marketing is just one of Keap’s functions, yet the software includes a wealth of useful tools for designing and automating email campaigns. You can leverage an extensive library of email templates to create great-looking emails using an intuitive drag-and-drop editor.

For contact management, your contacts can be segmented into lists based on how the customer has interacted with your past marketing efforts. You can also perform A/B split testing to see which of your marketing efforts perform better. Email reports are relatively basic, but they include enough to give small business owners an overview of what’s working and what’s not.

You can use Keap to book appointments directly with your clients. You can also use it to provide quotes to your customers, issue invoices, and collect payments. Keap also supports SMS marketing, so you can send messages to customers just as you'd do via email. There are over 4 billion active email users worldwide and 5 billion SMS users, so they represent great marketing opportunities for businesses.

Keap also offers a tool that let you build appealing landing pages, which go a long way in attracting customers. The platform offers a lot of landing page templates designed by professionals that you customize to fit your brand.

Keap boasts a 20% open rate and a 13% click rate on emails, far higher than the industry standard.

As to security, Keap’s commitment to keeping its customer data safe impressed us. It has PCI DSS level-one on-site assessment certification validated against the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards. The data centers the company uses have completed Service Organizational Controls (SOC) 2 Type II audits, and servers are protected by biometric physical access control systems.  

Keap: Interface and use

We found Keap to be pretty easy to set up. First of all, you’ll need a business email address with a custom domain name. Common email addresses ending with the likes of Gmail.com and Yahoo.com will work, but some features are limited to users with a non-business email address. 

In some cases, Keap won’t offer a free trial after providing your email address and other information like your name and phone number. Instead, it'll seek additional information from you for review and its staff will decide whether to grant you a free trial. This is done to reduce the possibility of a free trial user abusing Keap’s platform. 

If Keap accepts your email address, then you can start your free trial right away. There's a "Getting Started" section of the platform that suggests how to set up Keap for your business with ease. For example, it'll guide you on important things to do like importing contacts, syncing your calendar for appointment booking, and downloading the Keap mobile app on iOS or Android. Keap uses an intuitive, card-based interface, which makes it pretty easy to understand.

Keap: Support

Keap offers direct support via live chat and telephone. Its support staff are available via live chat and telephone 24/7, which is impressive but not unexpected given the relatively high price of the software. 

Before seeking direct support, you can check the official Keap Help Center, which contains a plethora of articles and user guides concerning all the platform’s features. You may find the solution to your challenges at the Help Center without needing direct support. Keap also provides webinars and videos to help users learn about the platform. 

You can buy the Keap Pro Coaching package for $499, which includes five 1-hour one-on-one coaching sessions and weekly group coaching calls to help your business achieve its goals using the platform. Likewise, you can contact Keap's staff for advanced data migration services or to set up the platform for you; the price for these additional services depends on your needs.

Keap: The competition

Keap is a full-featured CRM with features like appointment management and invoicing. If you just want email marketing without all the trimmings, MailChimp is very easy to use and is free if you have fewer than 2,000 subscribers.

Another option focused on email marketing is ActiveCampaign. Although it doesn’t have the flexibility of Keap, ActiveCampaign’s Plus plan is comparable to Keap’s Pro plan in features while being significantly cheaper.

Keap: Final verdict

With Keap, the developers have taken the best features of Infusionsoft and streamlined them, making a modern CRM that’s great for small businesses. The interface is highly intuitive, marketing campaigns are easy to build, and the automation tools are immensely powerful once you’ve gotten over the learning curve.

Infusionsoft users may miss the features that have been stripped out in service of Keap’s simplicity, but Infusionsoft is still offered if you prefer it.

• You can sign up for Keap here.

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