Frequently Asked Questions

What is OfficeAutopilot?
How are you different from CRM?
Who needs marketing automation?
How do I know my email will reach the inbox?
How do you charge?
Can I use Saleforce.com with OA?
What about Microsoft Outlook?

What is OfficeAutopilot?
OfficeAutopilot is a flexible toolset that…

…Is your central marketing database. Keep everything from purchase history to preferences, and use it to be more timely and relevant with your marketing communications.

…will automate your lead and customer management systems. Integrate e-mail, direct mail, sales calls, voice broadcast and more. No matter how you want to follow up, OfficeAutopilot will do it automatically and keep track of your results.

…can how you who’s hot and who’s not. Use lead scoring to send the best leads to sales and nurture the rest over time.

…is your marketing dashboard. Track your marketing and finally get to the numbers that help you make decisions: customer lifetime value, campaign ROI, and much more. Split test everything from emails to landing pages.

How are you different from CRM?
CRM is for sales managers. It tracks activity and gives you stuff like pipeline reports. Sales people hate CRM because it’s typically just another thing to do that doesn’t actually help them sell.

OfficeAutopilot - like CRM - is a contact management system, but it’s designed for marketers. The goal is to:

1. Get your data into one place.
2. USE the data to be a better marketer.

We do that by integrating your contact database, your website traffic data, and an enterprise-quality email marketing system. All that is hooked up to our simple to use, drag and drop automation engine where you can build multi-step, multiple-media triggered marketing sequences that may include email, direct mail, phone calls, voice broadcast, and just about anything else you can think of.

The end result is an extremely flexible toolset that gives you the ability to automatically deliver the right message, via the right media, at the right time based on everything you know about a particular contact.

A nice side-effect of having all your marketing data, contact data, and website data in one place is that we can give you all kinds of numbers that you’ve never had before like customer lifetime value and campaign ROI, plus information on how well you’re moving prospects through your marketing funnel and more.

You simply can’t get this stuff done with CRM. (That’s why we integrate with Salesforce.com, for example.)

Who needs marketing automation?
You don’t need marketing automation if…

…you’re not doing lead generation marketing. That is, if your sales process is one step (ie. they see you, they buy you – like Pizza).

…you’re not using a website as a primary part of your marketing.

…you don’t have up-sells, cross-sells, re-sells, and down-sells to worry about.

…you manually follow up with each and every lead, and you’re happy with the results you’re getting.

Marketing automation is a good idea if…

…you sell a ‘considered purchase’. That is, something people think about a bit before they pull the trigger. This includes just about all B2B, and high-priced consumer products and services. Not pizza.

…you have more leads than you can or want to follow up with manually.

…you’d like to put real sales and marketing systems in place, so you know each lead and customer is handled appropriately. No leads falling through the cracks.

…you have a marketing budget over $2000/month and you’d like to make sure you’re using it effectively.

…you’d like to support your salespeople by nurturing their leads for them over the long term.

Who are typical clients?
We have clients ranging in size from small two or three person start-ups on up to companies like Mimeo.com, with several hundred employees. (But that’s not very helpful, is it?)

We consider our ‘sweet spot’ to be companies between 2-100 employees that consider marketing to be a primary business driver (not just another waste of money).

How Do I know my email will reach the inbox?
Email deliverability is a serious concern for all e-mail marketers. We offer a range of enterprise-level email deliverability solutions, from shared IP on up to a managed private IP with SenderScore certification.

Bottom line: getting to the inbox is a pain for everyone… sending via OfficeAutopilot, you’ll have access to the best tools, servers, management, and advice available.

How do you charge?
OfficeAutopilot is a software-as-a-service (SAAS) application and we charge a monthly subscription fee based on the number of users. There are also a couple of optional modules that may make sense for you. Give us a shout, and we’ll send you all the details on pricing. If you’re comparing, you’ll find OA to be aggressively priced.

Can I use Saleforce.com with OA?
Yes. We have a two-way integration with Salesforce.com that keeps all data on both sides in sync. We also can add ‘contact log’ information to Salesforce, so your SFDC users can see what marketing has been sent to a contact, if they’ve opened or clicked, and their complete, page-by-page visit history.

What about Microsoft Outlook?
Yes, we have an integration for both Outlook versions 2003 and 2007. You can see and edit contact records right in Outlook, and we sync all inbound and outbound emails back to the OA contact log, so you have a complete, central record of who’s communicated what to whom.

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