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
Instapage
Score 7.5 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Instapage, from AirSlate since the October 2023 acquisition, offers post-click automation to help digital advertisers create more relevant and impactful advertising, unifying the post-click stage of the advertising funnel. Instapage helps marketers to maximize conversions by creating, personalizing, and optimizing post-click landing pages at scale, and automatically connecting ads with relevant post-click pages.
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 has a greater value for money. It brings comparable functionality to HubSpot at a better price. It brings more functionality and power than ActiveCampaign. The life of the lead is an important tool for our customers because it brings insight even prior to the opt-in …
SharpSpring's customer service blows the competition out of the water. They are an integral part of your success with SharpSpring. I've never had such great customer success teams that are always going out of their way to make sure the solution they provide is the right one.
Better at maintaining clients and using as a Marketing Agency. A few more features with a little less customization in some areas like workflow builders. However, the API is way better in my opinion and has a native Salesforce Integration. The CRM is less than agile, but the …
At first we were forced to duct tape a lot of tools together for ourselves and our clients to get things done. We were doing this until we could afford the investment of a platform we could latch on to and build our business around. We understand that Sharpspring is a "swiss …
The Instapage editor is super flexible and easy to use. You can move any element to any spot on the canvas. Instapage and unbounce have better editors when it comes to flexibility and control. Leadpages and HubSpot offer visual drag-and-drop design but both of them are more …
Because of its ease of use, Instapage remains a staple in our marketing stack. While we are using native landing pages in WordPress more and more (because we have more skill and resources) and implementing the landing page page builder in SharpSpring, if we got into a pinch …
We are SharpSpring clients and love many aspects of their marketing automation platform. Because their landing page features and functionality need some refining, we still use Instapage frequently to service our clients' needs. We plan to use Instapage for as long as we need to …
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.
Well-suited for simple landing pages which don't have any complex functionality. Great for creating landing pages for lead generation campaigns - as it comes with tons of excellent templates and a variety of forms. Not great for pages that contain a lot of information and can potentially be very long. We found that Instapage is not a great fit for building pages that need to be updated frequently, like a blog page.
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.
Instapage makes it easy to frame out a landing page really quickly. They provide template blocks for various components of a landing page (header, features, testimonials, etc.) that you can easily modify for your own needs. Other tools provide whole-page templates, but I much prefer the section-level templating. It's more convenient to assemble a page this way and add the details on top of that versus taking a finished template and peeling away design and functional elements to get what I want.
Instapage's mobile auto-resizer works better than other platforms I've used. I found that I had many fewer adjustments on their auto-resizing of the full page than I've experienced with other tools. I still had to work with text size a bit, but they generally did a better job of ordering elements for mobile the way I would want and maintain proportionality of page elements better.
Instapage has a lot of integrations that marketers will love. I don't know if they particularly stand out in this respect, but this is a particularly important aspect of their tool that most marketers will care about.
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.
There are only a couple of minor issues that I dislike. One is offering a Drupal community-approved update to their module. We are using a slightly older version of Drupal and it appears they don't have plans to offer a Drupal-approved update to their module for that version.
There are also random bugs when trying to format text. For example, sometimes a sans serif font appears as a serif and doesn't seem to want to change.
If you work with a template and some code, it can be challenging to edit the default coding.
The built-in forms can be a bit limiting.
The program will try to automatically reformat for mobile, but it may not always be exactly the way you want it to look, so there is a bit of redesigning required when going to mobile.
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.
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.
I've tried all of the other landing page services on the market, and this is literally the easiest to use. I am not a designer or software developer, just a simple guy and if I can learn how to use it, anyone can. That's what won me over. Their support and pre-made templates are awesome, but the usability is what I love!
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.
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.
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.
HubSpot was terrible because it required a lot of coding experience if you wanted to work outside the given 4-5 templates. If you wanted a new template built, or to rebrand existing templates, they charged you. Very inflexible program and was very challenged by it. Our main website was built using WordPress, which is great for building webpages, but more difficult to build a landing page without the distraction of the top navigation menu. Instapage literally answered all the problems we were seeking to address: simplicity, customization, ease of use.
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.
We've not had much of a conversion rate on some of our landing pages -- but this could be because we are relatively green with the marketing side of things and forget to send people to it. It's not easy for people to find on their own -- so I highly recommend you use some of the "hidden" SEO tools to increase the ROI. Without it, you're not going to be happy with your investment.