There are so many different technological systems involved in running a business: payment systems, order management, email systems, marketing, ecommerce and so much more. And while all of these technologies are meant to make running a business easier, putting them all together can have the opposite effect.
Business and marketing automation provider Ontraport recently announced the launch of its new platform, which is intended to help small businesses and entrepreneurs manage all the technology needed to run a successful business.
Said Landon Ray, Ontraport’s CEO:
“Typically, entrepreneurs and small businesses add technology in a piecemeal fashion as they grow and discover the need for it – an email system here, a contact management system there, maybe a way to take payments online, and on and on – slowly cobbling together an unwieldy collection of technologies that just don’t work together the way they should.”
Ray said that Ontraport solves this problem by creating a platform that scales with businesses as they grow. The CRM system includes several integrated tools to tackle tasks like content management, lead tracking, marketing automation, billing management, online payments and more. The overall goal is to consolidate as many business functions as possible into one platform and then automate them to save time and money.
For example, businesses can import customer lists into Ontraport’s system and then add new contacts as necessary. The system allows users to not only keep a running list of customers, but also track interactions such as ingoing and outgoing email, purchases, and website visits. The photo above shows an example of a customer overview within Ontraport.
Previously, Ontraport offered a system called Office Autopilot, which offered many of the same features and abilities. But the new Ontraport system has been redesigned and rebranded.
To date, Ontraport’s automation systems have been used by about 4,000 small and mid-sized businesses around the world. The company first launched in 2006, and the team of 40 is based in Santa Barbara, California.
