Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM vs. KUKU.io

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

If you would like a reliable scheduling tool, KUKU.io is not the one to use. If you like to share lots of industry news, secondary content, or content from your website/blog, be aware that KUKU.io will corrupt the preview headline. You would be far better off using another scheduling tool. I have now changed to a free tool and it has all the same capabilities without this corruption issue. I also used paid ones which are equally good.

• 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.

• It is easy to use and setup.
• Nice and clean UI
• Great support if you need help or if you have any kind of feedback.

• 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

• io corrupts headlines of articles you reshare. When you schedule a post with a URL in it, the Title of the blog post that is displayed below the picture/preview gets corrupted. So if you add any text in with the URL, that will replace the headline. I have noticed this on both LinkedIn and Twitter.
• Very poor support team. I have found that the support team at KUKU.io are extremely rude, unwilling to help you and take a long time to reply. On some occasions I have had to message them three times in the chatbot for them to even reply. None of these times has the issue been resolved. When I reported to them that KUKU.io was corrupting headlines, at first they refused to take responsibility. Finally, they admitted it was the platforms fault but said they were not doing anything at that time to fix it.
• Analytics are poor. The analytics suite in KUKU.io does not give you anything analytics for LinkedIn. The ones it provides for Twitter you can get directly from Twitter. So no value is added there.
• You cannot tag LinkedIn accounts. I use HubSpot to schedule social media posts which allows you to tag companies at least. KUKU.io cannot.

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

The support team are extremely rude and often unresponsive. All of the issues I have reported to Kuku has been responded to with "we are not looking to resolve this issue at this time." On a few occasions, they have tried to deny the issue lies with them, before evidence has been provided. Then, they have refused to fix the issue.

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

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

I think Buffer is a great service, but I like the simplicity of KUKU.io and the engagement of the people working at KUKU.io

• 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.

• Since I am using KUKU.io it saved me a ton of time I am able to spend on other things.