Benchmark Email vs. Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM

For low volume non-profits, Benchmark Email provides a respectable free service. Ease of use is high and customization of the email is good. The discount for 501(c)(3) organizations and fully free use for non-profits that help children is commendable. Although the GUI editor is flexible and easy to learn, it does have some issues with certain detailed formatting concerns, like properly showing the newlines between paragraphs. Image/photo processing and presentation is similarly both easy to use, but frustrating due to some capability gaps and quirks, like specifying image sizes and display on hi-resolution devices.

Overall, Benchmark Email provides a good service that is easy to learn to expand your communication reach; however, the ROI and satisfaction may not be as high if paying fees comparable to other offerings.

Incentivized

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

• 2,000 contact list space available with no time limit to those who can't upgrade.
• The AB Testing feature helps to improve the performance of your emails by experimenting with different content and send times to determine what works best. Thus great emailing objectives are easier to achieve.
• There is a feature where website and email engagement trigger an automatic email series. For example, the automatic flow of a subscriber from a leads list to a customer list upon making a purchase is awesome.

• 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.

• List maintenance -- navigating multiple lists is a cumbersome activity.
• Analytics about user engagement could be better. It's not super robust, especially if you're used to Google Analytics.
• Customer support is kind of slow to get back to us.

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 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

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

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

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 stated this plenty of times in my previous responses but we moved to Benchmark from Mad Mimi. Mad Mimi's feature set is extremely basic and only suited for start-ups or very small businesses. Benchmark provides enough customization to take the next step in your email marketing program. It's also fairly affordable

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

• If we think particularly on the ROI then benchmark email gives you a definite amount of ROI. But it takes time, you will see the results after a six month span of time. Because sending an email itself is a slow and steady process to follow.

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.