What is SharpSpring from Constant Contact?
What do you like best about SharpSpring?
It’s been a good introduction for our small business to track leads and their interactions on our website. The built-in email platform, while a little clunky to design, is well integrated in terms of tracking interactions.
Lot’s of features – Truly too much for most people
SharpSpring integrates well with Salesforce, which is key to our Marketing team being able to support our Sales team. We now have insight into where our leads come from and how they engage with our content – something we never knew before! Life of the Lead is our favourite feature because it gives our Account Managers context when engaging with a lead. We have more lead generators on our website (like a chatbot, free trial request, and opt-in forms) that we never had before. We also have access to more powerful (and easier!) reporting, which makes month-end reporting cycles more enjoyable.
I like that it integrates with social networks and with other programs that we already used previously as mailchimp, zoho crm and all google applications. It is also a very user friendly tool and its reminders make sure you don’t overlook any activity. The management of sales opportunities is very easy to visualize, allowing me to see all the funnels I have in each sale, so I can solve it.
We have implemented SharpSpring for our clients and are using it ourselves for Marketing Automation, emailmarketing and social media marketing. Our clients are very pleased for the way we create leads for them. SharpSpring gives a lot of insight in the way leads are generated and we use the automation tool also for cross selling and stay in touch with existing customers. Before SharpSpring we looked in to both HubSpot and Infusionsoft but SharpSpring is the best solution for us. Worth every penny and more.
Initially, it was a good fit for my agency because it had reseller accounts, and I could put my clients on it. We liked that initially, even though it was a little clunky to use, we could get it to do what we needed for CRM, email, and automation for our clients.
What do you dislike about SharpSpring?
Custom reporting needs more development, especially if you’re relying on this for attribution metrics. It would be very useful to look at these high level reports (such as a donut chart of # of opportunities tied to campaign) – and actually be able to click into the data for more information. Things can be cross-referenced in the system, of course, but that feels outdated by today’s standards.
Email templates are a little particular and their most recent billing changes are clunky at best. Since the sell-out to Constant Contact, pricing has gone up considerably and the value has gone down.
There is a lot to learn but the onboarding process helped to ensure we had the support we needed from both a strategic and technical perspective. We’ve had some technical issues with not being able to use emojis for social posts and with not receiving email notifications for some workflows. The technical support team was very helpful, but unfortunately, there are still some outstanding tickets.
I was trying to create a landing page for our new promotions and it was quite a chore to do, due to the fact that there are many processes with many useless specifications that hinder the creation. In addition to its unattractive and not very customizable templates, which made my experience more chaotic. In the end I preferred to use another program for this task.
What problems is SharpSpring solving and how is that benefiting you?
This is the first CRM platform I’ve implemented and managed. SharpSpring has been a good, value-based solution for us. It will be some time before I outgrow it, and has been instrumental in tracking marketing metrics and sales pipeline for our <100 person company.
As an agency, we’re now kind of stuck with SharpSpring because we have clients signed up for the service and with the recent price increases (about 20%) we about break even – Not worth the work involved to support the software.
Thanks to SharpSpring, we have been able to better align our sales and marketing efforts and automate many of our manual marketing processes. SharpSpring has helped us mature our marketing processes by being more strategic with campaigns and segmenting our list to be more targeted and personalized in our messaging. Instead of using multiple tools that don’t talk to each other, we have one integrated tool that supports our marketing and sales teams.
Pros
Cons
Features
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Campaign Analytics
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Conversion Tracking
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Event Triggered Actions
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Campaign Planning
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Contact Database
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Content Management
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Social Media Integration
SharpSpring’s pricing starts at $399/month. Please contact SharpSpring directly for further pricing information.
Starting price: $399.00 per month
Free trial: Available
Free version: Not Available