andrewmurrayhq

How Ontraport Changed My Business

Ontraport is the central hub of my business.

Originally, Ontraport was known as Office Autopilot (OAP for short).  Basically, Ontraport went after the market space that was led by 1ShoppingCart a few years ago, and Infusionsoft (or Confusionsoft as it is known among internet circles.)

Ontraport was founded by San Diego native, Landon Ray.

So to understand the progression of a business, you need to understand a few things.

How I Got To Ontraport

1. The core of your business is autoresponders.

if you are just getting into online marketing, you need something you can use to create webforms, generate leads and followup with them automatically.  If you are mainly marketing as an affiliate marketer or network marketer, having an autoresponder liek Aweber or GetResponse is fine.

But when you start selling your own products, you need to look at adding a shopping cart.

And then, if you want to leverage from one of the most powerful sources of traffic, affiliates, you need an affiliate program.

Bascially 1ShoppingCart was simply: Autoresponder + Shopping Cart + Affiliate Program

The problem is that they don't talk well to one another.  They are 3 components mashed together.

Ontraport and Infusionsoft

That's where Ontraport and Infusionsoft are the next step up.  For years, I saw the marketers who were really dominating were using Infusionsoft.  And I never understood why.  It was clunky, hard to set up, and the email deliverability was so-so at best.

But I knew I needed more of a centralized business than I could run from just an autoresponder and a stand-alone merchant account.

So in July 2012, I started using Office AutoPilot (now known as Ontraport.)

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Immediately, there is the initial overwhelm.

Full featured products like Infusionsoft and OAP are used by marketers for 2 main reasons.

Centralization and in-then rules.

Centralization is a critical component of scaling a business.  Every month, I was logging into mutiple affiliate programs, pulling reports, paying affiliates and trying to get a handle on my business.  And it's really hard to get the big picture, when you have income coming in from multiple sources.

So I wanted Ontraport in order to centralize my business.  And at $299 a month, I thought it was a little pricey.  (I was and still am paying the grandfathered version of Aweber at approx $30/mo.)  But I took the plunge anyhow.

I spent some time learning the system.  (They actually have GREAT tutorial videos.)

And I submitted a hoarde of support tickets.  (They have great live chat, live phone support and solid ticket responses and will walk you through how to do anything.)   But it's more complicated than using something like Aweber.

But the key difference for me, was now I had a centralized affiliate program.

Ontraport has a super-tight WordPress membership integration which is amazing called Pilotpress.

The dashboard is great as you can have a quick overview of some key metrics in your business.

  • # of new contacts
  • Sales broken down my product name
  • Email opens and click stats

Seeing the numbers and the sales volume over Paypal + my merchant account is awesome.

I also started to use their split-pay option, allowing customers to pay all at once or in some cases do a 3 month payment plan that ends up being a little more.  Awesome.

But the key is having a full contact record.

For me, having a contact record that includes every email sent to that prospect, when they clicked, complete order history, tracking number of logins to my membership sites all in 1 is incredible.  It gives me a piece of mind that you can only get from centralizing your business.

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Then I started implementing the if-then rules.  This is why the big boys have used Infusionsoft for years – because infusionsoft was the only game in town.  If-then rules allow you to trigger actions when contacts do certain things.

For example, if a customer tagged with tagx buys product y, send them a postcard.

(Yes, Office Autopilot allows you to instantly send them a postcard!)

So your followup can include emails, but also TASKS (that you can assign to assistants) and direct mail followup.  Plus automated voice broadcasts.  It's awesome.

So it helps you better see your business, see your customers and interact with them.

Also, when customers buy multiple products, or opt-in on different pages, it adds the tags to the 1 contact record.  This is miles better than using Aweber where some prospects only use an email address.

Plus, it automatically pulls the IP address (and city/state) from all your opt-ins.  So if you are building a network marketing company, you can market harder to people locally.  Or perhaps if you are promoting a live event on the West Coast, you can hit your West Coast leads harder than your East Coast leads.

Yeah, cool eh?

I know.   And my results have been fantastic.  It took me a few months to really understand the power of it because I was focusing on building another company at that time, but my sales have skyrocketed.  I still have some sales going through Paypal and other channels, but I went from making a few thousand a month to over $193,000 in billings.

And that, has made all the difference in my business and allowed me to have a MUCH more passive type of business.

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The difference between Ontraport and Office AutoPilot is that OAP was still clunky in places.  Ontraport is a complete re-write and MAJOR upgrade that took over a year to complete.  Now it's ready and it's even easier to use and more intuitive.

If you join Ontraport through my link, I'm going to give you a “Getting Started” orientation video I did that will help you get setup quicker.  Plus, we have a private group of members on Facebook that I can give you access to.  Awesome resources.

But only if you join through my link.

Try Ontraport Today.

And if you run into any problems, just reach out.  I love working with other business owners.

 

 

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