Autoklose vs. Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM

If someone only runs a campaign using email and telephone communication, Autoklose is perfect, and I highly recommend it. If someone uses a more diverse set of tools and wants a more complex type of sequence, Autoklose does not allow their users to program communication tools that some other tools and software allow.

Incentivized

Constant Contact is excellent for small businesses wanting a simple email to their customers and leads. We've found that it's not the most robust solution for more complex funnels involved in e-commerce or information publishing. For instance, setting up specific flows based on user behavior, VIP status, and other attributes is lacking.

Incentivized

• It is helping in editing, managing, and send[ing] out large marketing campaigns.
• It is easy to handle multiple emails in appropriate sequence.
• Our company [has been] using this for a very long time. It is one of the perfect email solutions we found for our organization.
• I have been very much impressed by their support staff.

Incentivized

• 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.

• AutoKlose uses your own email, (e.g. Microsoft Outlook), so it runs the risk of exceeding the Microsoft Message Rate Limit, which can be problematic for your Outlook account.
• Additional throttling limits for the SMTP Authentication protocol are:
• 30 messages per minute
• Recipient rate limit of 10,000 recipients per day.
• Exceeding these limits will cause the following issues:
• Exceeding the per minute limit causes email delivery delays, any excess in message submission will be throttled and successively carried over to the following minutes.
• Exceeding the per day limit causes the following error message:
• 554 5.2.0 STOREDRV.Submission.Exception:SubmissionQuotaExceededException.

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

We love it and it works

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

Whether it's setting up integrations, creating email campaigns, managing conversations with prospects, Autoklose is a well-designed tool that provides clarity along the way for users to find their bearings, and understand what to do. The help documentation is excellent, the support is great, but the tool is built in a way that simply makes sense when you're using it.

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

We have really had no issues.

Incentivized

Always loads fast.

Incentivized

Our Autoklose rep is amazing! Jelena has always gotten back to us within 24 hours, despite living on a different continent. She is completely proficient with the tool and is usually able to answer our questions with a brief email or short virtual meeting.

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

Jelena is amazing! Very knowledgable. Great instructor.

Incentivized

Jelena is fantastic. She always responds to emails immediately.

Incentivized

It is extremely easy to implement and start using right away

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

I think that I have already said it, Autoklose has much better support and is really quick to set up and use compared with any of the other systems that I have used over the years.

Incentivized

Pros of SharpSpring:

• Design unlimited custom fields
• Can send content & templates to Sales to send in their reach-outs (Outlook extension)
• Ad retargeting
• Social listening tool
• Social media scheduling
• Email builder: dynamic content
• Landing pages: dynamic content, rebrandable domain name
• Chatbot Platform seems intuitive to use
• Forms auto-complete for known visitors
• Instant 2-way sync with Salesforce
• Trigger automated workflows from social media
• It was easy to receive demo, streamlined sales process

SharpSpring: approx. $13,000 USD per year + $2,000 USD one-time for onboarding Pardot: $32,400 USD per year + $3,000 to $5,000 USD one-time for onboarding HubSpot: $20,381 USD per year + $3,000 USD one-time for onboarding Marketo: $29,015 USD per year + $4,500 USD one-time for onboarding

Incentivized

It's expensive to have a single seat for each salesperson, so the alias feature will be the perfect addition to this product.

Incentivized

• I feel the increased prospect engagement and business opportunities created supported the cost. In my industry 1 customer can support positive ROI.
• I saw an overall increase in mass emailing effectiveness and we were able to automate majority of our campaigns which increased productivity for marketing & sales.

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.