At OurCrowd, most of the communications we do with our investors is over email. Our deal launches, our event notifications, our messaging — is primarily driven by email.

So, early on, when it came time to determine which CRM solution we were going to use, we spent a lot of time researching the different options out there. There’s absolutely been a proliferation of great CRM tools, with tons of choices for businesses like ours.

We had a few requirements:

  • that the CRM be easy enough to use that non-technical people could set it up and run it
  • it wouldn’t break the bank — we didn’t want to spend $20,000 per year for a CRM
  • that it tied into our website, so we could analyze the efficacy of our messaging and marketing campaigns
  • that it have some basic workflow associated with it (for example, after someone makes an investment, some tracking to ensure we communicate properly with the right documentation)

We chose this week’s App of the Week, OfficeAutoPilot (soon to be re-branded, Ontraport). Though no solution is perfect, we’ve been very happy with OfficeAutoPilot, or “OAP” as we like to call it around the office. Our investor relations team uses it to profile and communicate with our investor base of thousands of investors around the world. My marketing team uses it to push the right messages to the right investors at the right time. Our tech team uses it to track user activity on the website and determine how good a job we are doing at serving our investors. And, lastly, our finance team uses OAP to kickoff the investment and documentation process once an investor clicks the ‘I’m interested’ button.

Ontraport
OfficeAutoPilot is a full-blown marketing automation package for small and medium businesses. It has landing pages for us to capture leads (like we do on our newsletter signup page), can send direct mail (yes, snail mail), and even has built-in payment processing (good for a company that sells informational products). Without OAP, we probably would have had to use multiple systems to satisfy our requirements.

What do you use for your CRM and/or Marketing Automation package?

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