Constant Contact delivers for small businesses with tools to simplify and amplify digital marketing. Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM is a marketing and sales platform developed to help businesses build their pipeline, nurture leads and close more deals. The tools are designed to help businesses attract the right leads, nurture them with personalized content, and grow with better conversion.
Attract
- Acquires hot leads faster with email & social marketing, plus retargeting…
$449
per month
Adobe Marketo Engage
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Adobe Marketo Engage (acquired by Adobe in 2018) is a marketing automation platform whose basic features include email marketing, drip nurturing, landing pages, and lead scoring, but other editions offer additional advanced features. Typical customers are B2B firms with complex sales cycles.
SharpSpring gives you 98% of the functionality of HubSpot at a much more competitive price. It loses out a little on ease of use and reporting, but once you have got up to speed with SharpSpring there is little that you miss from HubSpot, and the fact that the CRM is included …
Marketo is the king of automation. But for the smaller company, I can't recommend SharpSping enough. Great deal for the money. Great training and customer service. Has been ideal for our organization.
Verified User
Team Lead
Chose Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM
SharpSpring is functional and easy to set up for small teams. There could be better reporting functions and a better vision of the life of a lead. It is easy to learn too, so teams can expedite their marketing function timelines easily.
There are 2 tiers of marketing automation software. Highly customizable, feature rich enterprise applications, and out of the box simpler solutions for smaller businesses. SharpSpring is unique in that is offers enterprise feature sets at the small business price point.
I was a Certified Marketo Expert and most of the functions that are available in Marketo are also available in SharpSpring, but at a fraction of the cost. SharpSpring offers many automation configurations, though it's a little more work to set them up than Marketo, and the …
SharpSpring compares very closely with HubSpot. They have many of the same features and abilities, and their pricing is close. We preferred SharpSpring's monthly contracts over HubSpot's which is why we went with them.
As for the other tools you can't really compare. Zoho CRM is …
I've worked with HubSpot, Adobe, Marketo, Pardot and a myriad of other digital marketing tools. I've used tools that cost 1-2 million a year, spent months on integrations. I've honestly never found a tool that is so capable, so easy to implement, and does not require 6 figures …
Leading solutions have great functionality at any one moment, any platform may have a better feature. Unless you have some unique requirement or integration, I think you will find that SharpSpring delivers the core functionality you need, is constantly improving and most of all …
We like SharpSpring the best because of the Life of the Lead feature. We did not really see that feature on other marketing systems. Also, the price of the system and the agency model is a better value than those other systems. Finally, we like the staff as they are very …
When we started to search for a total Marketing Automation platform in 2016 we were afraid of the expensive prices for a limited license to users. We tried different platforms very well known like HubSpot, but as we needed characteristics the price started to be a problem …
SharpSpring is the best bang for your buck compared to other email and marketing automation tools. We chose it because has most of the features everything else has, but at a cheaper price. We decide to keep them because the software works great, but we also get more value as …
SharpSpring provides better email marketing automation than Mail Chimp and Constant Contact. It's easier to build automated workflows in SharpSpring than it is in Active Campaign or Keap (formerly InfusionSoft). SharpSpring offers a very good suite of tools at a more affordable …
SharpSpring offers nearly all the features that the competitors do at a fraction of the price. Also, SharpSpring is far more economical than any of the competitors. However, even if price was no object, SharpSpring is more user-friendly, has a more logical interface, and has …
HubSpot and Marketo and very robust software/programs but I felt they were cost prohibitive to many companies just entering into the field of marketing automation (or companies just starting to expand their marketing budgets.)
SharpSpring provides all the functionality my clients and I need most at a fraction of the cost of leading competitors. It does so in a user-friendly application with excellent self-help tools and support.
We liked the price better and its ease of use. Also, we are in banking so security is crucial. Our IT did a thorough risk analysis and seemed pleased with the results so everyone has been happy.
SharpSpring is on par with other automation tools that cost much more. The feature set is very similar and it provides similar results. The price point makes it a no-brainer for many businesses. It's also nice that SharpSpring does not require contracts and can be used on a …
Before making the decision to buy ShaprSpring we made a comparative chart among many solutions, but these did not have much difference with respect to SharpSpring. It had very similar characteristics but the cost was lower for SharpSpring. First we called HubSpot to ask for …
Originally we moved to SharpSpring for ourselves because of transparency and pricing. But since then it's the fact that Sharpspring have continued to develop the platform with great new features (like the inbuilt CRM, Sales Automation and integrated Meeting booking …
HubSpot, SharpSpring and ActiveCampaign are much better and a lot cheaper than Marketo all have [a] better user interface, UX, WYSIWYG editors. Their lead flow management [is] more intuitive. You will be able to pick them up and run with them in no time. Reporting and assigning …
I think Marketo is most comparable to Pardot, as it is one of the more enterprise solutions. At this point I would rank them on the same level, but I have high hopes for future development and integration of Marketo and Adobe. On the other hand, the big advantage of Pardot is …
If your organization uses Salesforce or even if you have Sales Groups or Divisions that don't use a CRM at all, Marketo is an extremely valuable software tool to communicate in a more effective, timely, and personalized way with prospects, clients/customers.
I did not select Marketo; it's an optional suggestion we make to the customer based on their needs. If I have to say overall: Marketo is behind most of the other tools out there: Price, looks, and outdated functions. For most clients, we suggest other tools. BUT if you want a …
I like SharpSpring better for emails, but Marketo reporting and landing pages are way better. The UI of SharpSpring is way easier to comprehend, but there is more capacity in Marketo.
Periodista | Publicista | Analista de Inbound Marketing y Campañas Inbound
Chose Adobe Marketo Engage
HubSpot is easier to learn and use than Marketo as it requires significantly less IT resources to implement. Both platforms integrate with Salesforce and other popular CRMs, but HubSpot has a free CRM for their users who don't already have one. What makes it immediately …
Marketo's ability to have multiple brands/business units within a company in a single instance with the respective governance from users-roles and permissions, independent databases, independent content but with the facility of creating templates from headquarters to be shared …
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.
I would definitely recommend Adobe Marketo Engage to other large or medium organisations such as ourselves, who have a number of users from different offices around the globe. It is well suited to those who have large email marketing contact databases and need to do sophisticated segmentation. It has a lot of functionality for integration with Salesforce and lead scoring models.
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.
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.
Marketo's email editor is basic in comparison to other cheaper alternatives out there.
Marketo doesn't work as well in B2C scenarios as it does in B2B. One of the painpoints of this is it's difficult to showcase a selection of product recommendations based on purchase behaviour without a very time consuming workaround. It's manageable if you're only selling a handful of products, but it's inefficient when dealing with a large catalogue.
Marketo's form and landing page builder are also behind the times. Perhaps not as bad as the Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform, but for an enterprise company the product should be much better.
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.
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.
In some aspects, the tool can feel quite clunky in parts. But with the rich feature set it has, it's understandable. There is a lot of room for improvement for the user interface. The system itself doesn't have a slick or modern feel, so the usability could feel nicer to use with these areas considered.
Marketo provides different way and abilities to connect. If you are having product support or unexplained errors you can get someone on Marketo support 24 hours a day. One of Marketo's greatest assets in my opinion however would be the community. Often times our company is just looking for case success stories from someone else. In the community you can search for problems you are currently facing and see others having the same issue and solutions for those issues. If not, you can pose a question to the whole community and champions of the product and others can chime in to provide suggestions to fix your needs. The community is truly a 24/7 place to get your answers quickly.
There are times when it is slightly slow for us, where we sit on a screen waiting for it to load. This could be our internet since we have had the same issue occasionally with other systems, but it is enough to make you crazy.
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.
On multiple occasions we've had Marketo support (technical and license based) issues. Technical issues were minor and resolved within a day. License based issues (even things encouraged by Marketo for partners, like provisioning another license) took WEEKS. They actually took so long to respond that the client we were working with withdrew from the contract because they were no longer convinced Marketo was capable of supporting their business. As an agency trying to sell the software, you can only explain away so much before they just made us look silly.
Our account rep stopped out in Lincoln, NE to ensure we were properly set up and running. This was very much appreciated. I was very, very new at this point, so I can't comment very much on the extent of what was taught because I was still brand new to the company and the system
I had never used Marketo prior to taking this job so online training was my starting point. I was able to follow along, it was interesting and quickly and efficiently taught me what I needed to know without a lot of fluff. It was far from boring and really helped me get my hands dirty with Marketo.
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.
1. Have a content marketing plan to run in parallel with the marketing automation installation--you'll need a lot of content to make full use of Marketo's capabilities. 2. Work with sales (and ISRs) to define and document a workflow--build your Marketo installation around how you do business--not figure out how to apply your business to the tools 3. Spend time of data cleaning--both an initial project as well as a strategy for ongoing data management. We found some change manaement issues (no more appending ZZZ to the first name to identify contacts who have left the company, for example, or prohibiting the entry of "info@company.com" email addresses). 4. Find some champions in the sales and ISR teams. You'll have both fans and detractors--work with the fans to build some success stories
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.
Marketo helps us to show our customers we understand them by delivering personalized content, delivered at the right time, every time. Also gives the sales and marketing teams the ability to create more coordinated journeys. From emails to landing pages, Marketo Engage uses in-depth, real-time behavioural and demographic data, and AI to personalize users experience, even for the anonymous visitors.
We look at scaleability in a few different ways. First, the speed while using Marketo has remained relatively the same as our database has grown. Though I would say Marketo is slow at times, it has not gotten slower over the last few years. If anything, it has improved, and they are working to improve it. Second, the amount of programs we have developed in Marketo has exponentially grown as well. Marketo has allowed us to drastically increase our output without having to drastically increase our headcount.
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.