Maybe you’ve dipped your toe in the Keap (or Infusionsoft) waters at some point over the last couple of decades.

Perhaps you got all excited about it at a conference, signed up and then did nothing with it – like so many of us do with so many pieces of software.

Maybe you did use it for a while, but found it too complex or difficult to really get the best out of it, without the time or inclination to properly learn how to use it.

Or possibly you used it for a decent chunk of time, and then fancied a change, and gravitated over to Active Campaign, Hubspot, or one of the myriad other pieces of software out there.

And finally, maybe you’ve NEVER tried Keap in the past, but you’re now on the lookout for something that can help you automate your sales and marketing processes.

Wherever you’re at, here’s what you need to know:

Keap in 2021 and beyond is better, leaner, faster and more powerful than ever before, and if you’re serious about automating your sales and marketing to make your life easier, make your business stronger and give you more time to spend on the things that matter to you, now’s the time to give it a go.

We’ll dive into exactly why now is the perfect time to try Keap, but first, let’s box off this question:

Who is Keap for?

Keap is designed for SME entrepreneurs that run lean operations, helping them to sell and market like a huge company, without the stress, infrastructure, investment and staff headaches.

For most entrepreneurs, there are two big issues:

Keap is designed to solve both of those problems, helping to save time by automating tasks within your business, while also offering a powerful sales and marketing that’ll help you generate leads, nurture prospects and close sales.

So what’s changed with Keap, and why is it worth considering now?

The most obvious one: the name.  In February 2019, Infusionsoft became Keap.

But it wasn’t just a fancy re-brand.  The team at Keap were dedicated to improving, changing and reshaping the product, and needed a name to match.

Here are the big improvements they’ve ushered in along with the name change:

2) Easily automate your sales and marketing

You won’t get any prizes for guessing why they’ve been given that name – they really are a piece of cake, allowing you to automate the kind of tasks you do every week, in just three minutes.

Whether it’s following up on a lead, or chasing a payment, once you’ve set up an Easy Automation, you know that every single prospect or customer is getting the right communication at the right time, every single time.

The impact?  Our customers who use these automation systems save at least 10 hours a week.

3) Get nudges to do the stuff that grows your business

“Nudges” are another new development released in the last couple of years, and like Easy Automations, they’re super simple to use and extremely powerful.

Essentially, nudges work like your own robotic assistant – when you do something, it’ll trigger the software to do the tasks that flow from that action.

Take meeting a new contact for example.

They give you their business card ad suggest you set up a meeting – you put their information in Keap, and you’ll be given a straightforward prompt to email them or schedule a meeting, at the click of a button.

The more nudges you have set up, the more of your everyday, repeatable tasks get automated, leaving you more time to spend on the high value stuff.

4) Schedule an appointment without messy moving parts or multiple bits of software

In most lead generation systems, once a prospect becomes a “lead”, the next step is an appointment – on the phone, on Zoom or in person.

But the whole process of scheduling that appointment can be time consuming – back and forth via email, telephone tag, “I can’t do this date, you can’t do that one”.

Keap eliminates all that with a dedicated appointment booking system that’s baked into the software, meaning that when someone becomes a lead, they can book a convenient time to talk to you, all housed within Keap, and synced to your Google or Outlook calendar.

You can specify the type of meeting you want – if it’s a Zoom, it can be set up to automatically generate the meeting and create the right meeting room.

Once the appointment is made, Keap sends reminders to all attendees to make sure everyone shows up.

If you’re already using an appointment booking system, you’ll lose that cost immediately, as well as the headache that comes when you’ve got one bit of software that doesn’t talk to another – it’s all under one roof.

5) Have multiple contacts within one business

When you’re marketing B2B, it’s often the case that you want to communicate with multiple people within an organisation.

In the past, Infusionsoft had the ability to store companies within the CRM, but it wasn’t particularly straightforward to identify contacts at the companies, and group them together.

That’s all changed with Keap Lite, Pro and Max – the entire way companies are stored and used within the software has been massively upgraded, meaning you can contact people within a company en masse, add custom fields and customisations for one company and not another, and – pretty much – do exactly what you want to do, how you want to do it.

6) Stop the ball getting dropped, with repeatable, automated tasks.

Task lists are a vital asset in most small and medium businesses, and there’s a whole industry dedicated to task management software.

Most of them require a lot of legwork on your part, and many of them also end up being hugely complicated.

With Keap, the system can create and monitor your tasks for you, on an automated basis, meaning nothing slips through the cracks, and the stuff that needs to happen, does happen.

Here’s an example:

You want to grab some feedback, so you ask customer to fill in a form where they can complete a short survey.

Once they’ve finished the survey, you want to thank them by posting out a small gift to them.

Once the gift has arrived, you want to send out a separate email, asking for a Google Review.

All good stuff, but if it remains manual, it’s unlikely to ever happen, but by creating repeatable tasks within Keap that flow from one thing to another, you can ensure it happens, as you want it, every single time.

7) Send the right style communications to the right people, at the click of a button.

The backbone of Keap has always been its ability to help you communicate well with your customers and prospects, and since 2019, there’s been a real focus on the different types of communication that need to be sent within a business.

But anyone that runs a business knows that not all communication is created equal, and you’ll need different types of comms to target different contacts about different things.

As an example, there are three main communication levels most businesses operate at:

We can use these levels in different combinations depending on what we are trying to accomplish with our marketing campaigns and how much data we have about each customer.

Sound complicated?  It can be.

That’s why Keap built the Dynamic Content engine – Keap’s email builder allows you to create structured emails that dynamically build their content based on the data or tags of the contact, meaning that you can create hyper-personalised email campaigns, in a fraction of the time it would take to create the campaign traditionally.

As a result, they can end up thinking that their marketing is the problem, when in reality it’s their sales that’s the issue.

But with full visibility on your Sales Pipeline, you’ll understand exactly where everyone is in the sales process, and where people are dropping off.

Keap has Sales Pipeline built in, which means you can understand exactly where prospects are in their customer lifecycle with just a couple of clicks, helping you to check your sales process is working, as well as highlighting where it needs to be improved and refined.

9) Create beautiful landing pages that generate you more leads 

Ask pretty much any business owner what problem they’d like to solve in their business, and the answer is always the same, “I want more leads”.

And in 2021 and beyond (especially as a result of the pandemic), the easiest way to secure a steady supply of leads is online, and the process to secure them is relatively simple:

Offer something useful or valuable to a prospect, in exchange for their contact information.

But while the concept is simple, there are a lot of different moving parts – you’ll need a landing page, opt-in form, follow up emails, and without one centralised place for all of these, you’ll end up trying to glue various bits of software together, taking hours of time, and costing you lots of cash.

Keap’s Landing Page Builder helps users create beautiful landing pages quickly and easily. The drag-and-drop editor is simple to use and includes well-designed templates that can be chosen with just one click of the mouse.

Landing pages are the first step that people take when they find your company. If they fill out a form, then you can email them and automatically follow up with them on your CRM,

10) Easily integrate with the software you rely on

Even a relatively tech-averse business now has a pretty long list of softwares they rely on – financial systems like Quickbooks or Xero, merchant accounts like Stripe or Paypal, calendars and organisational suites like Outlook or Google.

And that’s without even mentioning Zoom.

All of the above have fully developed, one-click integrations to Keap, meaning Keap slots into your existing system as easy as pie.

If you use a different piece of software?  That’s where Zapier comes in.

Zapier is the “glue” that connects thousands of systems, and Keap works beautifully in tandem with Zapier, allowing you to connect to pretty much any system you can think of.

11) Get 99.5% email deliverability 

Email marketing has been a game changer for small business, allowing them to connect with customers and prospects at a fraction of the price of traditional media.

But if they’re not getting in the inbox, all of that game changing ability diminishes, and in the last couple of years, getting into the inbox and not getting siphoned off by the Email Service Providers has become harder ad harder.

That’s why you need an email sender you can rely on, that gives you the best chance of getting in the inbox.

Independent tests have shown that Keap's inbox deliverability is 99.5%, which ranks above all of its competitors. This probably reflects the quality of their customer base compared to many big email senders.

Keap also provides you with tools and training so that your company's inbox deliverability can improve.

And finally, it’s all about the money…

As well as improving the CRM, marketing automation and sales automation, Keap have also refined the whole financial side of the software, creating a module named “Money’≥

The Money module allows you to create and send out quotes, convert those quotes into invoices and actually take the money with a simple ‘pay now’ button.

In short, getting paid has never been easier, and with full flexibility to create your own products and subscriptions, all under the same roof as your sales and marketing, you’ve got a joined up way of bringing revenue into your business.