Office AutoPilot Review: Behind The Scenes With Office AutoPilot

Like so many things, Office AutoPilot is a software that was borne out of necessity. It's been very difficult for business owners to effectively integrate, track, and monitor their advertising, followup, conversion, and sales in an organized fashion. Truth be told, most business owners don't have a damn clue about the advertising channels are profitable or unprofitable to them, what their lifetime-value of their clients really are, how effectively their followup campaigns are converting, or how much (or little) their CRM is being used by their employees.

I don't say this condescendingly - I was one of those people for a very long time.

Our businesses always made money because we were good marketers. Many times, good marketers and entpreneurs aren't always the best business managers. That was our story - we'd go out and make a ton of money, but have good controls to measure channel-specific and media-specific ROI.

What we didn't have was a tight understanding on what was generating money for us, and what was losing money for us. We didn't really have a system in place to monitor our metrics . When we made a change (or a series of changes) we didn't really have a great way to check results beyond standard A/B split tests.

We used several types of software to automate our followup - Aweber, iContact, GetResponse, etc. for our followup emails (we tried them all, and liked Aweber best). We used InfusionSoft for all our business automation, and the results with Infusion were always...unpredictable. (you can get a colorful review of Infusionsoft here).

That all changed when we found Office AutoPilot.

Many business owners are familiar with "automated followup", i.e., following up with leads either through email, snail mail, or on the phone. Many are familiar with marketing "triggers", so that if a client or potential cliant takes an action, it "triggers" additional actions (for example, someone opens an email and clicks a link but doesn't buy - you can "trigger" so that they get a special offer or a personalized note asking what questions they have). Many business owners are familiar with landing pages, CRM, personalized URL's, and tracking ROI...but it's usually a bear to try to manage all these essential elements with anything that comes close to looking organized, must less maximizing all these different elements.

But Office AutoPilot makes all this stuff easy to set up and easy to manage. No, really: it DOES make it easy. Here's the breakdown of what it does and how it works:

OAP can give you a full picture of what your prospects are doing.  All email responses, all website visits, all the pages they view or don't view...they gather all this data for you to show you exactly what is happening with your marketing and how they react to it.

If you're not using direct mail, you're losing money.  Some prospects will respond online - some will respond on the phone - yet others will respond to mail.  OAP actually fulfills variable data postcards.  You can automate the delivery of postcards the same you do with automated email followups, for an additional layer of profits in your business.

Personal URL's (called "PURLs") can be assigned and integrated in with your direct mail. Your prospects get mail that is personalized for them (e.g., www.Google.com/Eric.Schmidt).  PURL's have been shown to increase direct mail response 400% or greater.

Triggers are "if then" types of rules that that allow you to customize followup based on a users actions.  You can use these to segment your database and provide a more appropriate, customized follow-up to your prospects.

Of course, they offer personalized trackable email - giving you accurate open rates, CTR's, and other important statistics.

Do you know who your most valuable leads are?  Do you know where they come from?  You will once you apply Lead Scoring into your campaigns.  You basically assign points to any action that your prospects take, and that gives them a grade.  You can then use those grades to route prospects through a customized sales funnel.  You can tie this into your creatives, so that you know which banners and ads produce the best leads, and which ones produce the worst leads. You can factor the scores into your bidding for PPC campaigns or CPV campaigns.  It lets you prioritize your time with your most high-value leads.  They will even help you with suggestions for using this feature strategically.

Tracking phone calls is an important aspect of a business in which phone communication is required (and in most web businesses, it definitely needs to be a part of the game).  You can track how many calls come from a specific lead source, and collect names, phone numbers, and address information via reverse phone database lookup.

SmartForms can be added to landing pages and handle the new lead any way you choose.  You can tag contacts with interest information, route to the correct sales channel or even thea specific sales person, and launch complex marketing sequences easy - automatically.

You can also create pre-designed marketing sequences that involve multiple channels - phone, email, mail - to get maximum ROI out of your database.

You can easily automate the process of registering, delivering, and following up with event attendees (or event no-shows).  This is incredibly powerful when using webinars or teleseminars to grow your business.

Alright, this is the part that I'm sure you're eager to hear. What are the BAD parts of OAP?

Will, it's not a perfect software. Up to this point, it has VERY limited capability in managing an affiliate program. Infusionsoft doesn't do many things well, but they do affiliate management better than OAP.

Also, integration with merchant processing has been spotty. They used to recommend a service called Ultracart for integration, and have since launched their own. We are in the processing of testing it, but it hasn't been overly impressive thus far.

Finally, people looking to make money with their affiliate program may be disappointed. They evidently don't do pixel tracking, which allows an affiliate to view into a paid advertising campaign and see what is converting and what is not. It's not easy to implement, and frankly, I'm surprised that a company that prides itself on direct-response advertising doesn't have this kind of simple functionality built in. It's not that difficult.

After using so many softwares, and going through the hassle of figuring out how each one worked, we have been floored with how simple, easy, and quickly we can use Office AutoPilot. If you'd like to get started and check out a demo, you can check out:

The Office AutoPilot Demo

Thanks for reading - we hope this overview saves you the time and hassle of trying to piece an inferior solution together (we did that for a very, very long time).