InfusionSoft vs Office Auto Pilot Unbiased Review

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I guess the first vital piece of information to disclose is that I don’t work for either Infusionsoft or OAP, however I do use and manage both products for various clients.

There are pro’s and con’s to each platform as you would expect, but hopefully I can give you a bit of insight here as to which direction you should take.

It seems interest in Infusionsoft and Office Auto Pilot has increased lately as a greater number of businesses are looking to automate and improve their online marketing and customer management systems.

Business owners are getting serious about delivering a fantastic user experience to their customers, and also want to better track customer response to emails, landing pages, sales pages, and upsells.

If you are running an online business that does over 10k per month, then you are probably looking for a software that makes your life easier and lets you better gauge customer flow and intent… so you can ultimately make more money.

I’m noticing a lot of businesses that were running either Nanacast, or FusionHQ, or even just Paypal payments are looking for that next level of software to automate and improve their marketing. Don’t get me wrong… Nanacast, FusionHQ etc. are excellent options for some people and are much lower priced, but if you are looking for the ultimate in automation, there’s a reason Infusionsoft and OAP are three times the price.

Below, we shall look at the features offered by each product and I’ll give you the general consensus as to which product is for who.

Business Model/Industry

OfficeAutopilot is recommended:

If you are a single entrepreneur or own a small business.
If the total employee strength of your company is less than three.
If you are sure that the size and strength of your company is not going to expand, in which case you would have to switch.
If your industry/business is one of the below mentioned or similar in function:
- Author
- Speaker
- Blogger
- Coaching
- Consulting

Infusionsoft is recommended:

For bigger companies with a comparatively more complex structure and functioning.
If you have sales staff and large teams working for you.
If you see the possibility of expansion in terms of the company’s size, function and strength.
If your industry/business is one of the below mentioned or similar in function:
- B2B Marketing and Sales
- Sales Pipeline based model
- E-commerce
- Traditional company (brick and mortar business) etc.

Business Needs and Function

OfficeAutopilot is recommended:

If your business needs emailing in high volumes.
If online marketing as well as traditional marketing, in general, are new to you.
If you need a more personal touch without having to spend extra money.

OfficeAutopilot is not recommended:

If you intend to run a multi product store where your customers would buy multiple products and need the ‘add to cart’ button.
If your business is B2B, since it is neither aware of business nor has it been factored into its CRM.
If you feel there is a need to have capabilities to design visuals.

Infusionsoft is recommended:

If your business needs more dependency on campaign builder or a visual flow chart.
If your business needs community support and support from big events.

Infusionsoft is not recommended:

If you are in need of personal help and not in a position to afford it.
If you have the tendency to get overwhelmed and confused by technology, because this is a tad bit complicated.

Cost and Effectiveness

OfficeAutopilot:

They offer starting packages at around $300 per month.
The team package that allows management of a team of 5 members is priced at $597 monthly.
It will help you with marketing, up-selling, promoting and monitoring your marketing efforts across the Internet.
This also gives you the power to rule and segment your database so as to perform targeted marketing.

Infusionsoft:

They offer a wide range of packages.
Some start as low as $199 per month, while some start at $999 per month, with a set up fee of around $2000 or above.
Infusionsoft also provides CRM, which makes it more effective for bigger companies.
It automates email functions, processes payments, built-in affiliate program and other things that you would require to set up an offline or an online business by strengthening sales channels.

Support:

OfficeAutopilot support is available during the following times:

Monday to Thursday from 7am to 9pm PST.
Friday from 7am to 3pm PST.
Saturday from 9am to 1pm PST.
Sunday from 5pm to 9pm PST.

Infusionsoft support is available during the following times:

Monday to Friday from 7am to 5pm, Arizona (AZ).
Chat support is also available from Monday to Friday for 24 hours a day.
On Saturdays and Sundays only chat support is available.

Final Verdict:

Personally, I prefer Infusionsoft from my dealings so far. Their system seems more logical to me, even from just the menu’s and user interface. Sometimes I have to hunt around OAP for a while to find the buried link or option I’m looking for.

Having ‘Live Chat Support’ 24 hours a day is a huge plus for Infusionsoft. When you’re working on big campaigns with lots of moving parts, I just want quick answers. Usually my questions are quite technical so sometimes I have to submit a support ticket, but that’s ok. My timezone in Australia is ~15 hours different to the U.S as well, so it’s nice to have Live Chat and get answers any time of the day.

Some of the things that bug me at the moment with Infusionsoft are:

– The new order forms don’t seem to have support for 2 different payment options. Full Pay or Payment Plan. Which means I have to setup legacy order forms and then if I want to do a one-click upsell, I have to hack a legacy web form and include an action set that creates a product order on success. Action sets only get executed every 8 hours or so, which means the upsell order isn’t processed straight away. Frustrating

With Office Auto Pilot:

– Tracking. Great Idea, Huge opportunity to send custom emails to particular customers based on rules or even just analyse their paths through your site. Problem is, I’m not using a standard smart order form or hosting it on moon-ray.com. For this particular scenario, initial form data is validated through our own system and then being sent to OAP. I’ve been back and forth with support looking for a solution but it would require major changes to our current flow which is just not viable. A simple option to identify the customer to OAP through javascript would be nice, but apparently not available. Frustrating.

Having said that, I work with some big marketers locally and internationally who love Office Auto Pilot, so it does depend a lot on your industry and the features you are looking for.

Hopefully this article has given you some insight into which option may be best for you. Please feel free to add your comments below, and if you would like some help setting up OAP or Infusion, please email me at mike@mikeleembruggen.com.

April 23, 2013/by Michael Leembruggen

Brand Your Clients WordPress Dashboard – Free Plugin

Blog

If you are building WordPress sites for clients, then here’s the perfect solution to quickly brand the dashboard with your own logo, and remove the default WordPress widgets that confuse your clients.

Now, everytime your customer loads their WordPress admin area, they will be reminded of you and feel an overwhelming urge to call you up and give you more money to implement new features on their site.

I hope you enjoy this plugin… It is quite simple, but quite handy if you are tired of training your clients on how to navigate the WordPress admin.

If you are indeed a local website marketer, then please feel free to hit me up through email. I work with a number of local website marketers as I offer a white label service where you can make more money selling advanced marketing strategies and not have to worry about the tech.

Download WordPress Plugin – Simple Dashboard

Here’s a walkthrough of each step:

Click “Add New” on the Plugins Page

Type “Simple Dashboard” into the text box and click Search

Click “Install Now” under Simple Dashboard

Click “Activate Plugin”

You should see this message on the next screen…

Navigate back to the WordPress Dashboard

You should now see a new simplified layout…

Click “Configure” to brand the Dashboard image with your logo

Enter your own website/logo details and click the Submit button

Click “Configure” on the Posts Widget

Customize the widget to your liking and then click Submit

Repeat this step for the Pages widget. You can choose how many items you would like to display as well as whether to show the post author and date.

Select “Dashboard Options” in the left hand side menu

Download your current settings to roll out to your other WordPress sites

Done!

Save that file in the last step to your computer and upload to as many WordPress installations as you like to brand them with your logo and widget settings.

July 30, 2012/by Michael Leembruggen

Here’s a Fantastic Plugin To Organize Your Mac Mail

Blog, Productivity

Check out Mail Act-on. It’s very handy for doing advanced and automated actions in Mac Mail. I love James Schramko’s Inbox Relief strategy but I just don’t find it convenient to have Gmail opened in a web browser all the time.I have multiple email accounts and I like being able to see all new incoming mail at a glance.

If you do use Gmail, you will already be familiar with the ‘Archive’ feature. It’s a great way to clear your inbox screen without actually deleting messages. Best of all… it’s a one click operation.

Now with Mail Act-On, I can create custom rules and assign them a shortcut key which is even quicker than a one click operation.

Here’s the process:

Connect to your email/Gmail account through IMAP
Create a new folder/label called “Done” or “Handled” (whatever you like)
Create a custom Act-on Rule to move messages to your new IMAP folder and assign that rule a shortcut key
That’s it! Now when you respond to an email, you can press Option +D (my chosen shortcut key) to move that email to your “Done” folder

This means you can effectively clear out emails that you have “handled” and only see the emails that you need to deal with in your inbox. It helps you stay organized and on top of everything (especially if you have lots of clients to respond to everyday).

The other benefit to this approach is that all your old emails are still searchable through Mac mail.

You can also use the built in Mail Act-On menu like the picture shows below… in case you forget your keyboard shortcut key 🙂

Image via Flickr – Mail Act-on

Reduce the effort required to manage your email

Perform multiple actions on messages in a fraction of a second and eliminate time consuming and error prone manual organization such as drag and drop message filing.

via MailActOn.

September 14, 2011/by Michael Leembruggen

Is Posterous Taking A Page Out Of Google’s Book By Launching ‘Spaces’

Blog, Insights

Looks like Posterous is taking a page out of Google’s book with their new launch of Spaces. This employs a similar concept to Google + circles where by you can designate certain updates to only show to particular groups of people, whether it be your friends, colleagues, family etc. I’ll be looking into this a bit further over the coming weeks and I’ll let you know how to take advantage of this update.

Image Via – Posterous Launches Spaces

Image Via – Posterous Spaces for the

A Space to call your own.

So, what is your Space? It’s where you

share photos, video, thoughts or whatever.

It’s perfect for staying in-touch with friends,

family, and groups.

A public Space?

Public Space

When it’s worthy of the masses, broadcast to everyone.

Or private Space?

Private Space

To control who sees what, simply make it private.

via Welcome to Posterous Spaces.

	Not a blog any more – it’s a space! RT @ojezap: From my tech blog: #Posterous revamps its group sharing, calls it Spaces: http://ow.ly/6suvs
Via Twitter

	RT @nakeva: Posterous Swaps Blog Platform for Social Network http://t.co/iqNLdeg via @Mashable @meetusinghal
Via Twitter

Posterous gets a massive revamp. New Web app, new iPhone app and introduces ‘Spaces’.

Via Google Buzz

#RGP Posterous Reborn: Spaces Challenge Google Plus and Facebook: Posterous, the niftiest self-publishing platf… http://t.co/fCU1oI2

Via Google Buzz

September 13, 2011/by Michael Leembruggen

Nanacast Advanced Techniques

Blog, Internet Marketing

Nanacast has become quite a popular shopping cart service for many people selling products and services online but it can take quite a bit of getting used to as it is quite different from most other services especially when it comes to affiliate management.

If you are wondering how to email your nanacast affiliates their swipe emails then check out this walkthrough video on how it’s possible through the Nanacast Advanced Outgoing API:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2631gvVdLrw

If you are using nanacast and you would like me to set this up for you, just contact me through this site and I’ll get back to you.

August 26, 2011/by Michael Leembruggen

Stop obsessing over HTML5 and CSS3

Blog, Uncategorized

Stop obsessing over HTML5 and CSS3 | Webdesigner Depot
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2011/06/stop-obsessing-over-html5-and-css3/

As web designers, we all seem obsessed by HTML5 and CSS3 at the moment. Endless posts, tutorials and discussion about them dominate the blogosphere. But how much are we learning that can be applied today?

Don’t get me wrong. We all need to understand HTML5 and CSS3. And a lot of it can be used today.

My point is that we seem to be spending a disproportionate about of time reading up on the subject when so many other areas deserve our attention.

It’s true. As techies we are often more interested in bits and bytes rather than the things that actually generate business for us.

June 21, 2011/by Michael Leembruggen

Magic Url Shortener

Blog, Internet Marketing

Link tracking is a fundamental part of online business. If you don’t know where your traffic is coming from then you don’t know how to optimize your website, your sales process, and your business.

Google provides a set of parameters you can add to any link which automatically get tracked through Google Analytics. This means you can now easily track exactly where your traffic and conversions are coming from. Problem is, these parameters aren’t easy to remember, and its rather tedious to navigate to the Google URL builder page everytime you want to create a trackable link.

Now you don’t have to. You can create Google Url Builder links very easily using the Magic Url Shortener extension for Google Chrome. You can even shorten those links using the popular bit.ly shortening service all through one interface.

Check Out Magic Url Shortener here…

Download the Magic Url Shortener Tutorial PDF

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXnmy_U6xeg

June 1, 2011/by Michael Leembruggen

Easy WordPress Links

Blog, Techie

Here is a super easy way to integrate: WordPress, affiliate links, and Google analytics…

The benefit of this method is that all you need to do is create a new page in WordPress and input your affiliate link. Everything else is done for you.

If you are tracking your blog through Google Analytics you will now see those links as content pages in your report.

You will need the WP Page Refresh Plugin to use this method. You also get the Affiliate Cookie Drop Plugin as a bonus. Scroll to the bottom of this post to purchase these plugins.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5wjnpGzFBY

Click Here To Download The PDF Walkthrough

To create a sample redirect page, click the “Add New” link under the Pages dropdown

You can also do this with Posts. You might like to create a category called “recommends” and then have each Post under that category redirect through your affiliate link.

Specify a title for your new page

Note: You may want to click the “Edit” option on the permalink setting and delete the dash so your permalink looks something like: http://mikeleembruggen.com/productname/

Note: Make sure you have the WP Page Refresh and Affiliate Cookie Drop Plugins checked under “Screen Options” at the top of the page

Scroll down to the WP Page Refresh section and enter your affiliate link into the “Destination URL” field

Enter a “Delay Time”

0 means that the page will redirect immediately after it has finished loading. This will be fine for most uses.

Click the “Publish” button

That’s It!

Now you should see a new link on your home page and when you click that, it will redirect through your affiliate link.

Affiliate Cookie Drop settings: If you want to redirect to a custom page other than the direct affiliate landing page… Select your affiliate link, right click, and select “Cut”

Example usage: You can use this Affiliate Cookie Drop plugin to direct link to an order form instead of the sales page if you have already pre-sold the customer.

Paste that link into the “Affiliate Link” field in the Affiliate Cookie Drop settings

Enter your custom landing page URL into the “Detination URL” field in the WP Page Refresh settings

Click the “Publish” button

That’s It!

Easy WordPress Links – Comes With WP Page Refresh Plugin, Affiliate Cookie Drop Plugin and How-To Guide

May 18, 2011/by Michael Leembruggen

Leveraging Your Greatest Assets: Time & Energy

Blog, Insights

Something that’s becoming more apparent to me every day is that I have a finite amount of highly productive energy available to me each day. It kinda sux, because naturally I want to get as much done as possible but when I think about the times that I am most productive and actually get things done, it’s really a small window.

This is the case for everyone no matter how smart you think you are. We, as humans are cyclical by nature, we are not computers and cannot function linearly, which means we cannot produce a high constant output for long periods of time. This became clear to me after watching Tony Schwartz presentation. (Thanks for sharing that video Kyle).

For me, I work best under pressure. This is more of a pressure I place on myself rather than other people placing it on me. That’s just stressful, but when I know that I only have an hour left in the day before I need to turn off the computer, my brain switches into productive mode and I start thinking about what can I do in this last hour that is really going to make a difference to my business.

I find near the start and end of the day are times that are highly productive for me. At the start of the day, I have new energy, and I can get a task done that needs to get done. At the end of the day, I have that pressure situation where I know I need to get something done before the day ends.

Then there’s days where you are down, which is natural. Like I said, we are cyclical. Happens to be today for me. I didn’t get enough sleep last night and I don’t believe I really have the mental enthusiasm to get done a high energy task I wanted to do today. If I do it just because it needs to get done, then there’s a high chance that I won’t produce my desired outcome. I will get frustrated with the whole process, and I may abandon something that is a good idea simply because I attempted it when I wasn’t at a mental high point.

It’s a hard pill to swallow. What do you do? Try work yourself into a high mental state, pump yourself full of guarana energy drinks, or simply leave it until another day?

I’m interested to know your opinion on this and what works best for you.

I think it’s important to identify when you are at high mental capacity and when you are just having a bad day. I think sometimes when you are low, it’s better to completely switch off, give yourself a break, and realise that it’s ok. You need a break.

The danger of thinking about anything business related when you are in a low mental state is that your decisions still stick moving forward. If you make a decision about something when you are down, that decision will carry forward even when you are back up to high mental capacity. It will cause you to abandon things, believe something doesn’t work or is too hard, and make judgemens that affect the rest of your life simply because you were having a bad day and weren’t thinking clearly.

April 1, 2011/by Michael Leembruggen

Mind Map Software – Bubbl.us Review

Blog, Mind Map Software

If you are looking for a very simple and easy-to-use mind map software, then bubbl.us might just be the answer for you.

I have got to hand it to the developers of this software. They have made it extremely easy to get started. When you fist load up the website, you see a button in the middle of the page that says “Start Brainstorming”. You click that button and you’re immediately in editing mode for your new mind map. Brilliant. No sign up necessary, but of course once you start creating a mind map, you decide you want to save it and you sign up.

Here is a quick video walkthrough of the software showing various different aspects of it. There are a few little quirks I found such as the Pin/Unpin aspect that made it quite difficult to work with large maps, but overall I think it is an excellent platform if you are looking for something simple and easy to use, and best of all… FREE.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pld4pKlllOY

Here is an example of the HTML embed option:

Some of the other mind map software available is FreeMind, MindMeister, MindNode, iMindMap, Mind42, MindManager, & SimpleMind.

If you like this post and would like me to review other mind mapping software, then please leave me a comment below.

March 30, 2011/by Michael Leembruggen