Keap CRM Review 2023: An SMB Savior?

In terms of sales and marketing automation, Keap is one of the best in the business.

We say this not only because they provide a ton of automation capabilities to make the lives of your sales and marketing teams easier, but they also make it straightforward to set up.

One way Keap streamlines the automation process is by providing two categories to choose from.

These include the following:

• Easy
• Advanced

This means that beginners can start with easy automations and work their way up from there.

For the purposes of making things easier, we'll give an overview of each section individually.

Easy

In the easy section, you'll find the building blocks of marketing and sales automation that are easily set up and ready to use.

These include the following:

• Ask new customers for a review
• Deal follow up
• Landing page leads
• Invoice reminder

Here's an example of the "deal follow-up" template.

As you can see, the interface is sleek and easy to read, making a complicated concept extremely easy to implement.

We were able to easily set up the automation process with our sales pipeline with just a few clicks. In terms of ease of use with simple automation, Keap might be the best in the game.

Advanced

Things get a little more complicated with some of the advanced automation capabilities that Keap provides.

Luckily, they provide a free Advanced Automations course, available with your Keap ID.

We went through the course during our testing and were impressed by how much useful information it offered.

The whole course lasted about five and a half hours (34 lessons in total). We certainly left feeling more knowledgeable about automation in general.

With advanced automation creation, we were able to achieve a ton in terms of automation with their intuitive drag-and-drop interface.

There is a bit of a learning curve to creating advanced automations, but the free course did a great job of making it easier.

Here's a screenshot of the interface to give you a better idea.

It would almost be easier to list off the types of automation that aren't possible (there aren't many) than it would to list off everything Keap can do.

However, here are some advanced automations we came up with in our testing:

• Converting leads from web forms
• Creating email marketing sequences throughout the customer lifecycle
• Creating automations for segmentation and customer support
• Creating custom forms with conditional logic

At Small Business Bonfire, we love any tools that make our lives easier, and our business run more smoothly.

With Keap, they somehow manage to provide both in the form of powerful, user-friendly automations that don't require an expert to set up.

Are you tired of losing track of your leads and missing out on potential sales? Fear not, my fellow SMB owners—Keap's lead capture and management feature is here to save the day!

During our testing of the platform, we were blown away by how easy it was to capture and organize leads.

Keap offers a variety of lead capture forms that can be embedded directly onto your website, making it simple for visitors to provide their information without ever leaving your page.

Plus, with advanced customization options, you can ensure that your lead capture forms match your brand's aesthetic and messaging.

But the lead capturing fun doesn't stop there. Once you have your new leads' information, Keap allows you to easily organize them into specific categories for targeted marketing efforts.

You can also assign leads to specific team members so everyone knows exactly who is responsible for following up and keeping track of their progress in the sales funnel.

Keap offers a fantastic landing page builder to help further your marketing efforts.

We were impressed with how easy it was to create a simple yet effective landing page.

The first step was choosing from one of their helpful templates (shown below)

It was a hard decision because there were so many great templates, but ultimately we went with the "Creative Agency" template to get started.

We loved the drag-and-drop interface to easily add and customize content, but what was really awesome was the "auto width scaler." This allowed us to easily change the size of our logo without having to resize the photo at all.

Here's what our landing page looked like after just 10 minutes of customization.

We've touched on how Keap makes a lot of complicated tasks seem easy, and their landing page creation is no exception.

At Small Business Bonfire, we use email marketing to connect with our clients regarding affiliate marketing and PPC campaigns.

So naturally, we wanted to see what Keap had to offer.

As it turns out, Keap has all of the features you could need when it comes to email marketing.

You can do everything from the following:

• Setting up custom templates
• Scheduling emails
• Tracking analytics
• Automating your campaigns

This is a true time-saver for marketing teams because you don't have to manually enter customer information or write emails every day.

Plus, Keap offers a ton of beautiful templates (shown below) to make creating your emails easier.

We especially liked how you could filter templates by "industry" and "usage."

For example, here are some usages we could filter by:

• Abandoned cart
• E-commerce
• Events
• Newsletter
• Product launch

This makes it to find the perfect template for your business and get started quickly.

We went with a "newsletter" template and were able to customize it with our logo, font, colors, and content. We especially loved how easy it was to create our own unique layout using the drag-and-drop interface.

Here's what we came up with for our first newsletter email.

Overall, we were more than impressed by Keap's email marketing toolset. We've tested a lot of email marketing tools, and Keap CRM is easily one of our favorites.

Keap has a mobile app that allows you to access your CRM from anywhere. The app is available for both IOS and Android.

During our testing, we downloaded the app on IOS.

We were able to access our clients easily, as well as contact them by email while on the go.

Here's our view from mobile.

Other than contacts, the only other feature we were able to easily access was our tasks.

We've tested a lot of CRMs at SBB, and typically with other CRM apps, we can at least access our pipelines, analytics, or marketing efforts.

It was a bit disappointing that we were limited in our access with the app, but it was still nice to be able to reach out to our leads and clients while on the go.

For any small or medium-sized business, being able to analyze and track their customer data is crucial—and Keap makes it a breeze. With its robust reporting tools, you can easily keep tabs on key performance indicators, sales funnels, and campaign success rates.

But that's not all—Keap goes beyond simply providing generic graphs and charts. Their reporting features are fully customizable, allowing you to see exactly what you need when you need it.

Want to see a breakdown of revenue by product category? No problem. Keap has powerful revenue forecasting capabilities. Need to know which sales rep is bringing in the highest numbers? Keap's got your back.

And for those who crave a bit more automation in their lives (and let's be real, who doesn't?), Keap's reporting can even trigger alerts and reminders based on specific metrics.

So if you set a goal for a certain number of leads captured in a week and you're coming up short, Keap will give you a gentle nudge to get back on track.

At SBB, we consider pipeline management to be a crucial aspect of any good CRM.

Being able to track every aspect of your sales process is integral to customer relationship management.

With Keap, you can easily customize and manage all your pipelines in one place.

We like to think of Keap's pipeline management as a well-oiled machine.

Just like how a machine requires different parts to work in unison to perform well, Keap's pipeline management relies on various stages to streamline your sales process.

They are as follows:

• At the beginning of the pipeline, you have your leads (which are like raw materials)
• Through careful nurturing and qualification, these leads are then converted into opportunities (much like how raw materials are refined into usable products)
• These opportunities are then worked on further until they finally culminate in closed deals

During our testing, we were consistently impressed with Keap's pipeline management capabilities.

We were able to get started by choosing one of the following templates:

• Sales pipeline
• Project pipeline
• Custom pipeline

At Small Business Bonfire, we typically deal with affiliate marketing deals and PPC campaigns, so we decided to go with a custom pipeline that we titled "Partnerships."

From there, we were able to customize each stage of the pipeline to our specific needs.

One thing that we really liked about Keap's pipeline management was how easy it was to add "when/then" automation at every stage of each pipeline.

For instance, we were able to create an automation that sent a notification to the contact owner whenever a new partnership was added to the "prospecting" stage in the pipeline.

Here's what the automation process looked like for us.

We tried it out, and it worked seamlessly! Within seconds, we got a mobile, email, and desktop notification about any new partnerships that we added.

This is fantastic for SMBs that need to be able to track and easily manage their deals in real time.

Here's an example of our pipeline with our partnerships added to give you a better idea of the layout.

The one thing that we would have liked to see from this feature was multiple views for each pipeline.

The board view is nice, but it would have been nice to have a table or list view as well.

Task management is an important part of the managing any business. So, how does Keap stack up in this regard?

Well, Keap offers a straightforward task management system to help keep your team on track.

You can assign tasks, set due dates and reminders, and configure workflows for simple yet powerful task management.

We were able to easily add and track some simple tasks related to Small Business Bonfire.

Here's what our layout looked like.

One aspect of Keap's task management that we liked was how the tasks would become greyed out when completed. In our experience testing dozens of CRMs, tasks typically vanish into a "completed" folder when checked off.

With Keap CRM, we were able to see our completed tasks alongside unfinished ones, and easily differentiate between the two.

This eliminates having to navigate between multiple tabs to see what has been completed for the day.

We also liked that it was possible to view and get notifications for your all your tasks on Keap's mobile app. This makes it possible for your teams to track and complete tasks while on the go, which we think is great. 

Overall, Keap CRM provides some great task management tools in addition to all of the powerful automation and customer lifecycle management that the platform is known for.