Welcome to Ontraport. Chances are you’ve decided to implement this software in your business for a few specific reasons – maybe there are some marketing funnels you’d like to implement; maybe you’d like to improve your email delivery, or maybe you want to finally get all your tools and data in one place …

That’s great, and our goal is to get you set up and accomplishing those goals right away. But there’s also a lot more under the hood of Ontraport that we think you’ll want to know about. In fact, understanding the foundations that make up Ontraport will give you a bigger-picture perspective and help you work faster and smarter in the long run.

If you’re building a shed, a dollhouse, or a house, you might use some of the same tools, but each project will also require some very different, very specific ones. While many softwares are the set of tools for doing one thing – building the shed or the dollhouse or the house – Ontraport is simply all the tools. It’s your entire tool collection, and you’ll choose and customize the tools you need to accomplish your goals at any given time. What’s more, the value of Ontraport goes beyond the value of having all your tools in the same toolbox. Behind the scenes, the extensive data that’s collecting and flowing between these tools gives you the ability to personalize and highly target your marketing.

Now, there are some core ways our users use the app and some ideal strategies, which we go over in our Marketing Automation Masterplan and various other courses. In this course, you’ll learn about the core framework for the tools so that you can apply your knowledge to accomplish anything you’d like.

In this course, you’ll learn about the following Ontraport frameworks.

Collections: Collections are where your data is stored, organized and managed.
Systems: Systems are mini-collections where you can store all of your related assets — such as pages, emails and automation maps — together in one place.
Automation maps: Your maps are where automation happens and where all your data and assets come together.
Editors: Editors are where you design your assets such as pages and emails.
Tracking: Tracking is constantly running in your account so you can access comprehensive, accurate data about your contacts and your business.
API: The API expands the functionality of your account by interacting with integrated software applications.

The ultimate advantage of the full toolbox

Not only does having a full toolset allow you to create a customized platform to suit your business’s unique needs, but it also means everything you need to run your business is in one place. Although you may have come to Ontraport for a specific set of tools or purpose, understanding how it all works together and the extent of tools available to you can support you in using the platform to its fullest capacity and getting the most out of your investment.

The all-in-one nature of Ontraport, combined with its ease of use, is what sets it apart: Other all-in-one platforms are typically so complex that they require you to hire consultants to implement and manage them, while software that only offers one or a few tools is limiting and requires often-faulty integrations to create a complete system.

Having an all-in-one system is easier for you and your team to manage, allows you to create a better business, and empowers your growth. Here are just a few of the ways an all-in-one system is beneficial:

Streamlined customer experience

In Ontraport, you have a rare combination of 1) all the assets you use to promote your business and interact with customers, such as your pages, forms, emails and SMS texts and 2) all the automation and contact management that connects it together. This allows you to create complete and seamless customer journeys, without hiccups that are often the result of tools in separate systems.

For example, with Ontraport you can rest assured that those who make a purchase on your order form will receive the related order confirmation email, and those who sign up for your webinar will be added to your group of webinar attendees and receive the webinar login information, because it’s all connected in one system that was built to work together.

Accurate and comprehensive analytics

When all your business tools are in one place, so are all your data. You not only have all the information about your customers that you’d typically get from your CRM system, but because all your marketing assets are also housed in Ontraport, you also have all the information related to their performance. With your tools and data so interconnected, you’ve really got a complete picture of your business.

With such extensive data at your fingertips, you can analyze your results quickly and then optimize to improve. Because it’s all collected in one system, you can be confident it’s accurate –there’s no need to reconcile mismatched information from multiple systems.

Personalized marketing and customer relationships

Having such comprehensive data all in one place also allows you to create the kind of targeted, personalized marketing that’s necessary to succeed in today’s competitive landscape.

Ontraport keeps track of all the ways your customers interact with you, such as their email opens and clicks, their page visits, form fill-outs, purchases and referrals, and all these data are stored in their contact records. The system also stores all the demographic data you have gathered about your customers, such as their address and occupation. You can easily create groups of contacts or set your automated paths based on any combination of these data, giving contacts highly personalized attention and ensuring they receive the right message at the right time. This is impossible to do when all the information is scattered across numerous, disparate business tools.

You’ll learn more about how Ontraport’s all-in-one advantage comes into play throughout the lessons in this course.

It’s all about the data

As you may be noticing, the fact that Ontraport stores all your business data is central to the platform. With that in mind, let’s dive into how data works in Ontraport.

Ontraport is a data-based system, not a list-based system. Many of the software tools that businesses use in their early stages for managing contacts and automation are list-based systems, meaning contacts are sorted into lists, and each list has its related automated follow-up. For example, you might have a list of contacts who purchased Product A and who receive a series of follow-up emails and another list of contacts who purchased Product B who receive a different follow-up email series.

This works for simple contact management but gets very unwieldy when a business begins to grow. First, it’s very common for a contact to end up on multiple lists, so ensuring they don’t get bombarded with follow-up, receive repeat messages, or receive the wrong messages at the wrong times becomes a challenge. Second, this simplified system of segmentation prohibits you from providing the sophisticated level of targeted follow-up that’s necessary for effective marketing and relationship building. For example, if you want to send a special promotion to contacts who’ve purchased Product A but not Product B and have done so within a certain timeframe and live in a certain state, this is nearly impossible with a list-based system.

With a system that’s data-based like Ontraport, however, this becomes very simple and automatic. In Ontraport, you have one database, and each contact is in the database one time. Each contact has a contact record that stores all their data, from demographic information such as their address and occupation to behavioral information such as which products they purchased and when, which pages they visited, and which emails they opened and clicked. Every piece of data can be used in any combination to create intricately segmented groups and personalized follow-up. In fact, the data in contact records serves as the basis for all the interactions you’ll have with your contacts as well as all the analytics you have available to you.

You’ll learn exactly how Ontraport’s data-based system applies throughout the app to give you an advantage during this course.