Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM vs. Meta Business Suite

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.

Incentivized

Meta for Business has made a lot of improvements, but a lot of work still needs to be done as far as troubleshooting. I've had ad issues for months. It's probably getting close to a year. Every time I've submitted troubleshooting tickets, they're either slow to respond or don't respond at all. More than five times I've asked for help with getting the ad issues resolved. This included an online meeting (quite a first), emailing them, and even chatting with them. I went as far as multiple submissions of the materials they requested; I'm still at square one.

• 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.

• Segmentation is HUGE. You can segment by almost anything you want, be it demographic, sociological, behavioral... you name it. You can also create targets based on your visitors and their actions. Even custom lists.
• They are very good at optimizing your campaigns automatically. This is so important because it will improve your ROI in several multiples otherwise
• Managing ads in general works fine, and the data, even though is not exactly as accurate as Analytics, it's pretty decent.
• Gives you placements and different ad types so you can get the most out of it.
• Pixel and catalog integration are very powerful. You can almost instantly start tracking and catalog fetches your site daily for updates.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The amount of text allowed on images can be frustrating since it will include ALL text in the image regardless if it is part of the copy or on something random in the background of the image
• Labeling ads and ad groups can be frustrating as we often had them default to generic titles which we would have to go back and edit. A mandatory field would be helpful, however, that might not be popular opinion as that much detail is really just a personal preference.
• The constant emails from their sales team to "help you improve" your results are a little much.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We have to continue using this tool in order to be effective on this marketing platform. Though there are several changes I wish we could see, the fact is that we will still need to use this product to provide customers with the information they need.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I gave it this rating because it is so easy to learn to use and you are able to grow a following quickly by knowing when to post and who to post to or how to get in front of those prospects easily, and using those prospects to reach even further without any additional processes on your end through the sharing from your engaged readers.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I've found the Facebook for Business support to be hit or miss. For billing questions they're timely and helpful. For complex questions about specific services I've often received a longer wait and a less helpful experience. I'm often redirected to their docs, which are often not particularly helpful.

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.

Incentivized

If you don't want to display your feed to your boss before going over scheduled posts for the week, use the Business site and it will be less awkward instantly. Having someone lean over your shoulder is always a bit awkward, you think about how you smell, maybe consider offering them gum because they have bad breath

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Facebook stacks up against them in terms of its service. I choose Facebook for Business since I use it for business for almost more than a year now and I need to say this it is the most best possible business tool definitely a must-have for all the businesses type.

Incentivized

• 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.

• I haven't had much ROI from using Facebook for Business, and unfortunately, other local businesses I know haven't felt that they got much ROI on their paid ads either.
• The good point of Facebook for Business is that I can still look into who is interested in my products and build around my audience that way.

Incentivized