Constant Contact delivers for small businesses with tools to simplify and amplify digital marketing. Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM is a marketing and sales platform developed to help businesses build their pipeline, nurture leads and close more deals. The tools are designed to help businesses attract the right leads, nurture them with personalized content, and grow with better conversion.
Attract
- Acquires hot leads faster with email & social marketing, plus retargeting…
$449
per month
Hootsuite
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Hootsuite is a social media management platform for building brand awareness, engaging with customers, and driving business results. Users can schedule posts across multiple social networks (including Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube ), manage organic and paid social content together, keep track of customer conversations, integrate with over 200+ applications, and gain actionable real-time insights from social media to make critical business decisions from…
$1,188
per year 1 User, 10 Social accounts
Pricing
Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM
Hootsuite
Editions & Modules
Lead Gen & CRM
Starting at $449
per month
Professional
$99
per month (billed annually) 1 User, 10 Social accounts
Team
$249
per month (billed annually) 3 Users, 20 Social accounts
SharpSpring is significantly more robust for the onboarding option which is helpful for companies want to use and are familiar with CRM/automation systems. You are able to implement strategies on a more diverse and high-level scale that otherwise you are limited to when using …
Global Marketing / Corporate Communication Manager
Chose Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM
We previously used Constant Contact and before moving to SharpSpring, we also looked at HubSpot. SharpSpring is considerably cheaper than HubSpot and we didn't need ALL of HubSpot's features, so that is why we went with SharpSpring. Comparing SharpSpring to Constant Contact …
Salesforce would have been a stronger CRM, perhaps. But they required the purchase of Pardot before they could provide the marketing intelligence tools we needed, and Pardot is expensive. In the end, we needed strong, scalable marketing intelligence and enough CRM capability to …
We prefer SharpSpring to HubSpot for its marketing and sales tools. We found the pricing the best option for what the application provides. We found the training and account managing support far higher in quality from SharpSpring than HubSpot. We were less engaged with the …
Verified User
Administrative Assistant
Chose Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM
SharpSpring wasn’t my purchase decision, but I believe my boss was very impressed with how we could track lead activity—from visits to website to clicks on email content.
Way better than both of these other options and much more powerful. SharpSpring was our first foray into automating parts of this process, but it has been a pleasure to grow with and learn with along the way. Much more useful than the previous noted pieces of software, and the …
When it comes to features and functionality obviously HubSpot and Marketo are ahead of everyone. However, the cost, upfront annual payment demands and difficult learning curve involved in getting to grips with these platforms made them a non-starter for an agency of our size …
When we first started Go Left Marketing we used multiple free versions of platforms such as MailChimp, HubSpot CRM and Instapage until we could afford the investment of an all-in-one platform. We no longer need to have a separate landing page builder and email builder since …
Sharpspring does everything we need it to do. There are no extra costs for seats ( license ) and we get to have unlimited contacts for each sharpspring instance.
SharpSpring is great for creating and tracking campaigns that span multiple channels. With the Salesforce integration, we are able to keep our Sales team focused inside Salesforce without them needing to learn a new tool. Our Marketing team uses SharpSpring to nurture leads before handing them off to the Sales team. Though the features are available, SharpSpring would not be suitable for social media management or blogs; our third-party tools do a better job at that.
Hootsuite is a great tool and we prefer it to some of the others out there. The only negative is the price point and the fact that it keeps going up with no regard to the small non-profits that have been using it for years. After mentioning that the system is great and the fact that we can integrate and customize the posting for each social media site without having to be jumping from one system to the other makes it ideal for a small team doing multiple projects or things at the same time.
Their Emailers are very easy to construct and user-friendly. It takes your Newsletter and sales emails to the next level, especially with the action groups and trigger functionalities.
The life of the lead functionality allows you to see when leads get warmer, so you know when to send them what. Helps improve conversions.
Scheduling of content. The ease of use for Hootsuite's planner abilities is top of the industry. It is simple and effective in posting content to different channels and accounts.
Analytics are superior on Hootsuite. Their custom reports allow you to view very specific KPI's that you can adjust for each channel or account. The reports are also exportable to be used for others in the company.
Inbox management. The inbox manager is superior to any in the industry. Hootsuite allows you to tag certain phrases or keywords to better filter messages based on importance or topic.
The landing page builder is a bit hard to use. Doesn’t have much flexibility.
Sometimes confusing between types of workflows to use. Opportunity versus visual.
If you imported contacts that weren’t formatted correctly. It is hard to delete a bull amount. Need to type DELETE for each one manually. No bull options to make changes.
The ability to tag people or companies across all the social platforms (instagram and Linkedin)
If you're scheduling a post that is going out across all your social channels it would be good to be able to bulk move them if you have to post them on a new date instead of having to do it manually one by one
We have been very impressed with all aspects of this software and the potential for it to radically change how we operate is huge! Support has been exceptional and we have discovered many extra uses for the software than originally thought. Not only will it give us benefits for our company's growth, but for our client's growth as well.
At this time we are satisfied that Hootsuite offers the most of what we are looking for at the most reasonable price point. As the social media landscape and monitoring/scheduling software changes, so do our needs. We re-evaluate our tools semi-annually or as new tools emerge onto the market. If we find at any point that we aren't gaining an advantage, then we are open to switching products.
This rating is coming from an administrative perspective. With so many features, workflows, dashboards, and more, there is certainly a lot going on, and even the most savvy software user can get a little overwhelmed when trying to decide how to best implement and utilize the platform to its full potential. That being said, the SharpSpring platform is well-implemented and well-organized, with most solutions being fairly intuitive, once you have a grasp of the software. It is fairly easy to learn, but difficult to master. Just like any powerful platform, however, the complexity is worth it, and once you are comfortable navigating and problem solving within SharpSpring, it becomes a great marketing and sales tool which can do virtually anything you need it to.
Hootsuite is probably the easiest to use social media scheduler of all the ones that I've used. It's been easy to teach clients how to use the software themselves and it can be accessed easily on anyone's phone through their mobile app. Highly recommend for anyone that wants a software that is easy to learn!
Any outages are communicated in advance and have not been a problem. We let our clients know based on communications from HootSuite. Since we operate 24/7 with multiple shifts, planned outages can interfere with our operations, but we can always work around it.
Hootsuite makes passing on articles from the web very easy- when it works! I have had a number of gliches with Chrome where it does not open properly and the solution (after some toing and froing with support) was to uninstall and reinstall. The support staff are always very helpful (which is great!) but the gliches..... well, they suck when you are already busy!
The support is great which really helps overcome challenges if you become stuck and the training videos are great too. Same-day replies are great and I even got some help with some CSS code on the chat. Not many organizations would do this or even respond.
I can manage all of my accounts on one site! It's absolutely amazing! The dashboard is helpful to see how you are doing as well. Still getting to understand the analytics and may need to reach out for help on this
The online training is decent; however, it takes a lot more time to search for answers to my questions. Having a training session with a live person was much more effective as they were able to quickly address the business needs I have.
Overall I would say to be patient and bring everyone who will be touching the platform to the onboarding sessions. The Virtual Classroom lets you onboard as quickly or slowly as you want. Sales, marketing, design, account management, get 'em all in on it. For the most part, they will be happy to use this platform. I recommend getting as many people as possible to see the SharpSpring demo.
• Combination of vendor and internal. The vendor bumped up our account to the Enterprise version (quite simple and easy) and then set up our organization and team structure. We then had to log in and set up team members and assign members to social media accounts. This was pretty easy to do as they have a great user interface. We simply had to drag and drop people into the correct team giving them access to specific social media accounts.
We use different CRMs for different clients, mostly due to budget and other requirements. SharpSpring from Constant Contact is in the middle, price-wise, but is slightly more user-friendly than ActiveCampaign when it comes to certain things, such as drip campaigns and workflows. Though the price can be prohibitive to some clients, it is extremely robust. I definitely prefer the list-building, the ability to send smart emails and the WYSIWYG editor.
Hootsuite's free account was sufficient for use on behalf of our client. When they restructured their pricing model and eliminated free and affordable subscriptions suitable for a small business, we found that Zoho Social was an excellent replacement. The interface was simpler and the pricing was affordable and suitable for a small business.
Streamlined Processes - sales and marketing are now all in the same place.
Reduced Number of Platforms/Tools - CRM/lead management, email, automation, landing pages, forms, etc are all in the same place rather than using multiple tools.
Time-saving - sales pipeline is very easy to use for sales. For marketing, we have dozens of workflows that eliminate much of our manual processes from the past.
Return on Investment - We're more focused on moving the building the business than ever before because SharpSpring has simplified so many of our business operations and we're seeing massive results!
Lead generation - Up SIGNIFICANTLY (between 3x & 4x) since setting up SharpSpring.
For our organization, all ROI was on time saved and efficiency: for creating posts, for scheduling and publishing, for interacting with users, and for analyzing performances. It all comes in one place and this makes a very huge difference in your workflows. We would say that Hootsuite went beyond our expectations on this front, for example with the dynamics UTMs and the media library. Saving time was the main reason why we wanted to purchase the platform and it did not disappoint at all.
The ROI in time was also fast to get. The learning curse is very short and this is also an important element. Benefiting from the platform did not take long to be experienced.