Affinity (or Project Affinity) headquartered in San Francisco supplies pipeline automation with automatic data and file capture with deduplication, task reminders, sales team efficiency reporting, as well as the platform's machine learning collective intelligence engine for judging the relationship strength salespersons are developing or to uncover the next best lead to contact.
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Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM
Score 8.6 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Constant Contact Advanced Automation helps users to send the right message at the right time, from Social to SMS and email to ecommerce. Multi-Channel Campaigns - Create comprehensive marketing campaigns with just a few clicks. The Campaign Builder tool can help launch a multi-channel campaign across email, social, and SMS. Pre-Built Automation Templates - Setup your automations quickly with pre-built automation templates to…
Nudge.ai is well suited for individual contributors without enough time or resource to do proper research on clients/prospects. It may work as well for larger teams, but I don't have experience using Nudge.ai in that environment. Nudge.ai is easy to use, so the onboarding and ramp-up time is quick.
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.
Almost all of Adobe Photoshop's features for a fraction of the cost. It was an easy decision for our organization.
The interface and most of the features are an almost mirror image of Photoshop. Flat fees instead of high yearly fees are much more desirable for our small team.
They have a great support forum for the little one-offs that aren't quite like the Photoshop app, or don't have the same exact name as Photoshop. The forum really helps when this happens. The YouTube support from the company and other users has been very helpful as well.
I use Sketch as my primary vector design tool. Affinity allows me to take a .ai, .eps, or other proprietary format and convert it to .svg for use/manipulation with Sketch and back. I can't say enough for this feature. It has helped me stay less pigeon-holed into Adobe products, which have lacked innovation for a long time in my opinion.
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.
Sometimes interacting with a large data set is a little buggy, i.e. choppy when navigating the page.
It would be nice to have a feature, where the status of an opportunity changes automatically when a certain thing happens. For instance, when I send a cold email, the status of a prospect would change from "identified" to "contacted."
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.
We will definitely be renewing. The value for the price we are paying is solid, and we are interested in growing our use to see if we can expand on the value we are getting from Nudge.ai.
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.
For a regular user of Photoshop, Affinity is a very easy transition. It has all the same features and once you adapt to it, and it provides a quick return on investment.
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 have not had much opportunity to go directly to support, but the training modules that are employed by the company are fantastic. I also find that if I need to understand something, there is always another user ready and willing to share their secrets. As this tool becomes more accepted local communities will also start to organize
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.
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.
