An active contact is a contact that you are actively emailing through the software. For example, one month you may send a big email campaign so you have a lot of active contacts that month. Then next month, you can reduce the amount of active contacts.

The nice thing about Act-on is that their contracts are all monthly. Other marketing automation providers have hard annual contracts, but this is more flexible and easier to try.

If you have not done so already, you may be interested in reading our Act-on Software Review

Historical pricing (~2010/2011)

Older Kapost reviews cite an entirely different pricing model based on the number of users as compared to their current one. At the time, Kapost was initially free for less than 3 users, $8/month/user for up to 15 users, and custom pricing for more than 15 users.

Current Pricing (December 2012)

Until recently, Kapost was not publishing pricing on their website. However, recently they readded a pricing page revealing a much more expensive pricing than compared to their original model. The current pricing works as follows:

Standard Edition ($1200/month)
For this edition, you can have up to 8 users, 5 content types, and basic support. Basic support really is basic. You get access to their knowledge/support base, and web/email support with a maximum response time of 48 hours. Their persona/funnel grid is available at as a paid add-on for this edition.

Pro Edition ($3000/month)
In this edition, you can have up to 15 users, 10 content types, basic support, and the persona/funnel grid functionality included.

Enterprise Edition (Requires a Custom Quote)
The Enterprise Edition gives you an unlimited number of users, content types, the persona/funnel grid functionality and premium support. Premium support includes everything the basic support includes with the addition of a maximum 24 hours response time, phone support, and priority case routing.

Compendium breaks up what their software does into four different parts: creating and capturing content, moderating content, and lastly broadcasting content.  Here’s a walkthrough of each component, and how Compendium plays a role in each.

Content Creation and Capturing. Compendium helps author original blog content through blogging software technology called Web-to-Post.  It’s basically a form that you can embed to solicit user generated content (UGC) from your customers such as testimonials or stories. Similarly, they have a feature called Email-to-Post where you can forward emails such as customer service interactions that can be later repurposed into blog posts. In addition, they have a “Message Meter” that weighs your keyword strength, suggests other keywords to include, and a marginally useful block that displays third party content relevant to the post you are authoring. These features are similar to content optimization tools such as ScribeSEO, or Inbound Writer. Lastly, they have an API if you want to programatically upload content into your blog such as customer surveys.

Content Moderation.  Once you have created or captured content, Compendium Blogware allows you to then moderate the content to decide what should get published, what should not, and set permissions on a per author basis.  For example, you can set up workflows so that content requires approval by Paul first, then Nick and Tiffany before publication.  This is reminiscent of approval workflow tools like Kapost, or DivvyHQ, which are useful for companies that have legal approval processes or strict brand and content guidelines.

Content Broadcasting.  Lastly, you can distribute your content through Compendium to various channels such as a blog, or various social media outlets (such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook). Compendium comes with its own content management system (CMS) and will host your blog for you. The blog is optimized for SEO using automatic categorization.  Furthermore, it can purportedly scale well because its hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is behind a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

The downside is that Compendium seems to have no integration with existing CMS’s such as WordPress.  This has a few consequences: While Compendium seems to have a flexible templating language, their templates are built using a proprietary XML format that would require a non-trivial amount of work to really customize.   While WordPress has thousands of community built plugins and themes, with Compendium, you would be restricted to the widgets and plugins they offer out of the box.  Also, because Compendium hosts your site, you are required to locate the site either on a subdomain (blog.yourcompany.com) or on an entirely new domain (www.yourblog.com) instead of a sub-directory on your existing domain. As a result, any backlinks you receive may credit the blog and not your corporate site.

Compendium is a compelling all-in-one solution for companies that need to get a robust blogging solution out the door with minimal IT support.  With Compendium Blogware, they can easily solicit and create content, build an approval workflow, and distribute content all under one roof.  Lastly they can do this in a hassle free manner without having to worry about the complexities of hosting and scaling, or on-site search engine optimization (SEO).

At the same time, Compendium at the minimum is a $7,000/year commitment.  As an alternate route, a company could piece together a similar solution using Inbound Writer or ScribeSEO for content optimization, Kapost or DivvyHQ for content moderation, WordPress for the CMS along with some social media sharing, email to post, and SEO plugins, and a hosting service for the site.  While this will not have all the features that Compendium provides, it does provide enough for many marketers to get something off the ground with minimal cost, but greater effort.

Who should use it

Larger companies. Larger companies seem like a closer fit for Compendium because of the pricing, but also some of the features geared toward companies with complex workflows and multiple authors.

Companies with Active Support Teams and User Bases. Compendium prides itself in being about to not only assist in creating content, but also in the capturing of content through web forms located on corporate websites, or community pages, and through customer support emails.  If your company has a very active user community, Compendium may be a strong fit for sourcing content from that community and repurposing it into search indexable blog content.  Similarly, if your company has an active emailed based support team, then many of the questions that they answer on a regular basis can also be easily repurposed into blog content through Compendium.

Companies that are starting from scratch. If you already have a CMS that you have invested in heavily, Compendium is probably not a fit for you because you will have to painfully migrate to their CMS.  On the other hand for companies that do not have any blogging platform, Compendium is a quick way to get up and running.

Pricing: 

• Growth tier: $500/month + $1,000 set up fee
• Pro tier: $1,500/month + $2,500 set up fee
• Enterprise tier: $5,000/month + $5,000/month set up fee

Pros

• All-in-one offering. Easy to get up and running.
• Flexible templates that are customizable.
• Great for getting whole organization or customers to contribute to content marketing via email to post and web to post.
• Built-in SEO.

Cons

• Does not integrate with existing CMS’s such as WordPress.
• No subdomain support.
• Weaker moderation features than dedicated content workflow tools.
• Weaker content optimization features than dedicated tools.
• Proprietary XML templates that may be hard to code.

Kapost lets you manage the editorial and content creation process from start to finish regardless of your content strategy.  Within Kapost, you can brainstorm compelling content ideas, onboard and organize writers, run the content production process and editorial calendar, distribute your content, promote the content, and then measure results.  Kapost is primarily geared towards text based content but also handles video, tweets, and eBooks.

The actual product consists of a content store of documents similar to Google Docs / Drive where you can see the status of each asset, the next steps, the author and the submission deadline. From there you can edit some of the content directly within Kapost if it is text based, and designate various metadata properties such as what client this is for (useful for agencies), categories, tags, twitter status, persona, buying stages, and submission deadlines.

One of the most powerful features is the ability to control the status and stage of content in the editorial process through tasks as shown in the screenshot below.  For example, the article in the screenshot as a next step needs to go through copy editor review.

You also get a Google Calendar like interface where you can view a publishing calendar for all your content by submission deadlines and you can drill down by content type or status.

You can also manage payments for content by assigning a payment per post.  This is likely meant for an outsourced team of writers using services like Textbroker or Scripted.

For distribution, you can publish your content to a wide variety of content management systems such as WordPress and Joomla, social media channels namely Twitter and LinkedIn (but notably not Facebook), and other various channels (YouTube, Tumblr, Slideshare).  They also market themselves as integrating with Eloqua, but unfortunately the only way to actually get your content into Eloqua is through a manual cut-and-paste.

Lastly, for analytics you can view content performance by page views, unique visitors, tweets, and likes.  One of the powerful features here is that you can pivot these statistics based on the type of content, category, or author to name a few.

Who should use Kapost

Multiuser teams. Kapost only makes sense where you have a team of people involved in the content production process.  It’s not clear based on our review what the minimum number of users should be, but with less than three users it adds more overhead than value. In fact, the larger your team, the more powerful Kapost becomes.

Companies with a multistage approval process. Many companies in regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services, or companies with strict brand guidelines, may find Kapost useful to manage the approval process within their marketing department or between marketing and legal.

Agencies. Kapost seems like a strong fit for agencies or professional services firms because they have both large editorial teams, and multiple clients / destinations for created content.

Pricing: Kapost pricing ranges from $1200/month to $3000/month and beyond.  Read this for a full overview on Kapost pricing.

Pros

• End of end solution, from content inception, to publishing, to analytics.
• Very strong workflow process for large teams or high volume content production teams.
• Great editorial calendar overview.
• Familiar user interface if you use Google Apps.

Cons

• No analytics on sales performance of content such as leads generated.
• No clear way of incorporating marketing automation systems or email marketing systems.
• Relatively light featured to support payment for outsourced writers.