7Sheep vs. Ontraport

I use 7Sheep for marketing as a sales person. This works well for me as a single user. I do not think I could use the software together with my colleagues. Although we could have separated lists the access rights might not fit our use case. It has a strong marketing focus and cannot replace a full CRM system.

Starting a business you have enough stuff to deal with. Ontraport takes the headache out of the tech side. Everything works together and you don't ever get left alone to figure things out. I would beg any new business to invest in Ontraport. Or if you want to grow and scale an existing business it would be great. I think it more for service-based business.

Incentivized

• Affordability: the only solution we found on the market that gave us what we needed at a price we can afford!
• Flexibility: 7Sheep seems to offer enough flexibility in the advance features that we can customise it as we need.
• It's easy enough for our whole team to be able to use.
• Their team is helpful and supportive.

• Campaign builder. The visual campaign builder is very easy to use and feels pretty modern.
• CRM: customizing what type of data I'd like WHERE has been great. Custom fields, being able to move them around.
• Task Management: one of the things that set ONTRAPORT apart from other similar automation platforms is the tasks. You can trigger automated tasks that cause your salespeople to take action, and the tasks stay in the queue until the salesperson takes that action and checks it off. This is great for putting together a web of accountability.

• The personalized tags cannot be accessed from the menu/page you create your emails. I get around this by opening two windows, but in the future this might be an improvement.
• I needed to create custom reports in order to get the overview on the campaigns that I needed. More generic reporting would be a useful feature.
• I would like to be able to duplicate e-mail campaigns across different activities/databases. I could set up a mailing template for this but sometimes it would be good to be able to just re-create a particular campaign that we received a good response to for another, entirely different, activity.

• Ontraport is a very powerful and robust system capable of a great many things. The time it takes to get to know the program is a little intimidating. Don't get me wrong, you can get started right away, but a year in I know I am still not making the most of all Ontraport can do. I am UK based so access to their advanced trainings means international travel, maybe some online events could be initiated.

The tool serves our needs and we like the user interface. The few times we contacted support they were super helpful and responsive. When we asked for more integrations they confirmed the integrations we need (e.g. Hipchat) for the near future.

My client was already using Ontraport and had a decent investment in the tool. As soon as we turn around the revenue situation with my client's products, we will be ditching OAP immediately, despite the significant re-implementation cost we are going to face moving to a new system. I am part of a high-end, professional marketing group, and the overwhelming sentiment with these other professionals is that one should run away from this as fast as humanly possible. I thought their words were just ungrounded opinion, and I deeply regret that I did not heed them more closely before sinking still more time and effort into OAP.

It is easy to use and if I do have a problem or question I receive an answer almost immediately.

The software is just easy to use. The UI is fairly intuitive. The help system is pretty good. I find it is pretty quick to get my work completed and if I don't document my things well, I can always figure out how I did something when I need to make changes. When I have a problem the tech support is easy to deal with and when things need to get escalated they are resolved quickly.

Most of the time OP runs fine. But I've had to submit more support tickets this year do to messages, seq.'s or rules not running correctly. Also experienced slow response times moving in and around OP.

With both chat and email support I have always had enough ways to get through to them! Their support is good, honest and most importantly supportive. They helped us set up and start using the tool when we got stuck. Moving from Mailchimp where there were some semantic lessons to learn and they took the time to help us get used to 7Sheep

The techs are reasonably savvy, highly courteous and want to do right by their customers. Unfortunately, the product they are supporting is so deeply flawed that there's only so much they can do when your legitimate business requirements are simply not supported.

I went to their Ontrapalooza event, and it opened my mind as to how the software can be used.

If you know your business, ONTRAPORT is easy

I've used MailChimp before and I liked their product as well, however, data protection is key in our organization. As we are working in multiple countries, some of which have very strict data protection laws, and it was important that we kept the data stored on servers in Europe. MailChimp's servers are in the US, as is the case for many other similar companies. That alone was a major reason for us to go with 7Sheep, which is a European company that keeps all data stored on servers in Europe

We used it because it was recommended by other coaching companies. It meets well the need we have which is mostly about creating different type of access based on when the clients joined our program. You can easily create automations and rules to be notified when clients evolve in the program. It allows us to send them our messages at the right moment.

Incentivized

With the new lower priced options, it's now easier for newer businesses to start with a more basic version and upgrade as they need more features.

• I was previously part of a survey with 7Sheep and results showed that we were saving 20 mins per participant per event we held, a working week for an event of 100 people.
• Automating our operational logic with the admin triggers in 7Sheep means there is no time lag between tasks and teams, certainly greater efficiency.
• Tracking engagement on our site and with our outbound campaigns means better and faster reporting and enables us to report on impact in a more quantifiable way. (On the human side, my team members get positive feedback from our target audiences which is very motivating. It is nice to see data backed up by people.)

• ONTRAPORT has helped us as we continue to segment our users - we're able to quickly determine what messaging is working and what isn't.
• Their form loading is so slow at times that it negatively affects signup conversion rates on our website.
• They have an open API that let's us connect to other productivity and marketing tools without hiring programmers.

Incentivized