Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM Reviews and Ratings
Rating: 8.1 out of 10
Score
8.1 out of 10
Community insights
TrustRadius Insights for Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Intuitive User Interface: Users have consistently praised the intuitive user interface of Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM, with many stating that it makes tasks easy to accomplish. Several reviewers have expressed their satisfaction with how easily they can navigate through the platform and perform various marketing activities.
Wide Range of Marketing Capabilities: Many users appreciate the extensive range of marketing capabilities offered by Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM. They have highlighted features such as automation workflows and personalized messaging, which allow them to create targeted campaigns for their audience. The platform's versatility in managing multiple campaigns has also been commended by several reviewers.
Reliable and Insightful Reporting Tools: Reviewers value the reliability of Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM's software and its ability to provide insightful reporting tools. The CRM system effectively tracks leads and interactions, allowing users to gain valuable insights into their marketing efforts. This feature has received positive feedback from a significant number of users who appreciate the comprehensive reporting feature provided by Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM.
Our company uses SharpSring to offer our clients managed marketing services - which include marketing campaign development using SharpShpring's marketing automation platform. For our company it allows us to satisfy more of our client's needs and at the same time balances our dependence on project work for retainer based revenue.
Pros
For agencies looking to offer best-in-class platform to clients - this is it. Just last week SharpSpring came out with landing page builder that added to my value proposition for clients.
The sales staff of our clients find the product easy to use - from top of the funnel notifications to managing opportunities and related activities.
Creating emails is very intuitive. No one at our agency is a coder and we do very well.
Cons
Need more event themed email templates. This would save time with clients doing demos for large numbers of potential clients.
Likelihood to Recommend
Pricing, ease of use, product offering and support make the SharpSpring platform the best solution for agencies. The dashboard makes it extremely easy to manage several clients from one screen.
I use SharpSpring for my clients for inbound marketing campaigns. With it we can quickly and easily create campaigns, optimize them, and track them.
With that, our most basic "drip" or follow-up communications are completely automated and customizable. Sales data is relayed to the contact manager which can be integrated into CRMs, though it isn't necessary in many cases, and the pipeline tracking and sales automation resulting from this is also efficient and effective.
All told we are able to generate and track leads and optimize key communications channels for conversions.
Pros
SharpSpring provides all the functionality my clients and I need most at a fraction of the cost of leading competitors.
SharpSpring is a user-friendly application with excellent self-help tools and support.
SharpSpring is constantly improving its application without passing on costs to subscribers.
SharpSpring is constantly improving support.
Cons
There are times the application is slow but it is hard to tell where that "fault" lies. Regardless it hasn't caused major problems.
Email design can be a little clunky. When using our designs using built-in templates, the HTML doesn't always behave.
Social analytics to connect with campaigns that SharpSpring supports would be nice to have.
Likelihood to Recommend
I use SharpSpring for companies of different sizes and industries so I think it is ok there. The only place there may not be sympatico is if a company requires an enterprise solution. For example, I don't know that SharpSpring supports SSO.
We market our coaching and consulting services to several different industries. It is all direct marketing and almost exclusively driven by outbound email campaigns. That means dozens of campaigns and thousands of leads in dozens of different lists. We use SharpSpring to manage those lists and automate those campaigns. It provides us the technology to do all of that. Since I've been in the business a long time, I've seen this category of software grow from "do it all yourself with your email and a lot of elbow grease" to the current state of the art. The ability to build workflows and triggers that can automatically respond to various logical conditions is essential in our business, and I have found SharpSpring to be not just powerful but also pretty easy to implement.
Pros
Email segmenting: like most marketers, we email a big list, and then - based on the type of response - will segment that list into smaller groups. Each group then gets moved to a different email campaign as appropriate. SharpSpring makes that ridiculously easy, and it works very well.
Building Workflows: I used to build workflows in InfusionSoft. It was certainly powerful, but honestly, I felt like it was unnecessarily complex. SharpSpring's builders apparently felt the same way, because building workflows in SharpSpring is about a billion times easier than InfusionSoft and not remotely as confusing. That's not to say it is perfect. I have a few niggling complaints, but I haven't found anything I can't do that I want to do.
Email Reporting: I love how fast, precise and easy-to-read the email reports are. I know exactly what's working, and exactly what's not. Split tests are dirt easy. List sampling is dirt easy. Great stuff. I actually wonder how I lived without this.
Cons
I have mentioned this before, but I wish I could start a workflow based on time PRIOR TO a date or event rather than AFTER a date or event. This is a minor complaint as there is a different way to accomplish the same thing. But I think it'd be slightly more intuitive to provide that as an option. (Also, I wouldn't be surprised if they don't allow this option for a good reason I haven't considered.)
I often will make follow-up phone calls to a list based on their response to an email. So I click on the name to go into the contact manager, make the call, make my notes, and press BACK to go back to the list. I wish it went back to the name I was on rather than back to the top of the list. That's an irritation.
The interface sometimes is a little inconsistent. In particular the "Settings" icon seems to move around from one corner to another. It's a little thing, but it is occasionally irritating to realize the settings button on THIS particular screen is in a different corner than it was on THAT particular screen.
Likelihood to Recommend
It's less appropriate to light-weight mailing needs. This is a marketing automation platform for grownups. If you only have one small mailing list, then you probably don't need SharpSpring. If you aren't trying to drive conversions of leads into prospects and prospects into customers and customers into repeat customers, then you probably don't need SharpSpring. If you want it to be your CRM platform, you will probably be disappointed. It has CRM-like features, but that's not what it was designed to do. It is designed to automate your outbound marketing and track responses to your digitial properties.
<p>SharpSpring is my go to system for managing all my business relationships, sales enablement, opportunity management, lead scoring, campaign ROI tracking and more. I have helped over 300 companies implement various marketing automation and CRM solutions since 2008 when I became an Infusionsoft customer and then, partner.</p><p>The primary reason I sought a new solution was I outgrew what I was using and wanted to explode my email and contact list, email volume, without blowing through my budget. SharpSpring empowers me to do this with amazing ease, considering my extensive experience using systems like SharpSpring.</p><p>Please choose any software like this wisely. Include your entire team, key players, in the decision and selection process. These systems are only as effective as they are implemented. Plan on hiring and paying a proven professional with at least 10,000 hours experience doing this kind of work. Unless you also make your own paperclips, don't be in the marketing automation, email and content marketing business on top of what you do best now. While there are a growing number of viable marketing automation solutions on the market now, your decision to invest in true sales enablement and marketing automation is the difference between getting what you want in your business and staying where you are, or worse, like getting left behind by your competition because someone like is driving their SharpSpring marketing automation and sales enablement bus.</p>
Pros
Killer ROI tracking at the campaign level.
Exceptional email deliverability and reporting at workflow, email level.
Powerful sales enablement tool, light CRM, easily integrated with all top CRM solutions.
SharpSpring doesn't try to be all things to all people. They do what they do best, email marketing, automation, lead scoring, opportunity and sales pipeline management, etc.
Great support for partners.
Partner centric is good for the customer because SharpSpring doesn't let "anybody" sell this kind of software like many of their competitors.
Cons
List management could be improved.
Their new landing page builder is going to be awesome. (Just announced!)
They dramatically improved their focus on support for partners which helps us serve customers better, more affordably.
Likelihood to Recommend
<p>SharpSpring is best suited for company owners and CEOs who seek to align sales, marketing, team and tech. SharpSpring and any serious sales enablement and marketing automation platform needs a real administrator, champion of sales and marketing team admin and performance, to properly set up and manage this powerful solution for the long haul.</p><p>Do you see professional sports teams taking a short term view of giving their players the best gear, coaching and training? No. For a reason. The top performing sales and marketing teams commit to choosing and using the gear, software, that is best for them. This takes intelligent, informed decision making for success.</p><p>SharpSpring is not a real CRM system so don't expect it to be. If you need a high powered CRM, choose it wisely, also, and integrate it with SharpSpring. Again, this is all about suitability of your software solutions. Give this proper consideration, talent, time and budget and you will get a positive ROI. I've seen it many times provide a huge result. I've also seen this fail often, too.</p><p>No software will double your sales or fix your systemic failures and flaws in your business model. This kind of software will make your weaknesses glare in a big way, which has the distinct benefit of giving you and your key players a choice; fix your business with the right solution or not.</p>
We are currently using SharpSpring to track leads and lead behavior across our entire company. We have 8 different schools at the moment, all in different cities. SharpSpring helps segment those leads based on the location they would attend as well as the course they are interested in. We're able to track where leads came from with UTM codes in online posts and even through QR codes on flyers. We finally are getting a clear picture of which marketing efforts bear the most fruit. SharpSpring really helps tailor our interactions with leads. The automation features eliminate a lot of lost information or forgotten follow-ups as well.
Pros
Customization is almost unlimited.
Great customer support and tutorials are available through their support staff.
The workflows and rules are easy to set up. They follow logic statements and don't require a programming degree to understand.
Cons
Reporting is not as customizable as fields.
Set up can be tedious and time-consuming. It's a product of high degree of customization.
Integrating with existing forms has its limitations. You'd be better off switching to a SharpSpring form.
Likelihood to Recommend
SharpSpring is perfect for companies that are trying to tailor their message based on behavior. It provides a lot of information on behavior and custom workflows allow you to send emails or follow-up reminders to sales staff. For instance, if a student visits our financial aid page, I am going to send them aid information until they sign-up because that is clearly a hurdle for them.
I would say SharpSpring would be less ideal if you want to track elaborate multi-stage sales processes with reporting. You can get this information, but it won't be in a neat little graph until you make one yourself.
As a user of the product, we use it to manage the marketing automation for our company. We have a complex sales cycle and use SharpSpring to automate the process. As a reseller and integrator of this product, we use it for many of our clients and help them manage and automate the marketing and lead nurturing process.
Pros
Conditional emails - using various triggers and actions, it is possible to personalize communications with prospects based on their online actions. This feature is useful for better matching the visitors needs with our content assets.
Integration - the integration with Salesforce is easy and seamless
Lead scoring - the lead scoring module is easy to use and helps better understand when a lead moves from MQL to SQL.
Cons
At first, the integration with Salesforce was a bit painful. But they are dedicated to customer and partner success - when you need a new feature or need to improve a feature, they listen and usually act.
Footprint - when you are pushing lots of data into Salesforce, the nature of Salesforce and their data usage rules is a bit painful. Logging activities in Salesforce creates a large data footprint.
Likelihood to Recommend
SharpSpring is designed for small and medium sized business - although we have used it with large companies. It is much less expensive than Marketo, which is why we generally recommend it to our clients. However, for a client with extensive automation requirements, a more robust solution is usually required. Our belief is that the features in most marketing automation systems are never used. If you want solid functionality, SharpSpring is the 80/20 solution - it has the necessary features to do almost everything. However, if you want all the bells and whistles and have a much bigger budget, then a more robust solution is probably required.
We're a digital marketing agency that specializes in helping small to medium sized businesses grow and we use SharpSpring's marketing automation software for our own internal use as well as for the majority of our clients. SharpSpring's solution helps companies manage their multi-channel inbound and outbound campaigns to accelerate their Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) growth.
Pros
Easy to setup - speed is important to us because our clients want results fast. What I like about SharpSpring is that it can be setup in less than 1 day if not faster (depending on the features that you need in the beginning of your rollout).
Graphical UI - metrics are soooo important and what we notice is that our clients really like the highly visual and meaningful dashboards and analytics that SharpSpring comes with out-of-the-box to help them and us understanding what campaigns are working and why.
Lead Scoring - extremely simple.
Web Forms - are flexible and changing the design is easy so that it integrates with the look and feel of your website and landing pages.
Integration with Salesforce.com and other CRM's - super easy and out-of-the-box.
Partner Portal - this helps us easily add / manage all of our clients in 1 place.
Support - words cannot express the excellent support we get from the SharpSpring Team!
Cons
The pro is that the integration to Salesforce.com and other CRM's is so easy because it's out-of-the-box. The area of improvement would be that it needs to allow some flexibility of what the client wants the integration points to be. That being said, it does the job.
Likelihood to Recommend
The solution and business model of the company is definitely designed and focused to help and support agencies which is why it's such an awesome solution for us.
SharpSpring is being used across the organization. It helps us stay in touch with clients and prospects and it also helps us understand actual and prospective sales, which helps with resource planning and allocation.
Pros
Sophisticated yet easy-to-use marketing automation allows us to nurture contacts and stay in touch with them.
Tools to help identify "hot" prospects allow our account people to identify potential projects and clients that are more likely to buy.
Tracking of campaigns helps us understand what elements of our marketing is working and what isn't working.
Pipeline tracking of proposals allow us to see what's on the horizon and to better understand our business cycles.
Cons
Reporting could be a bit more robust.
Likelihood to Recommend
SharpSpring works well for both B2B implementation and B2C, although the implementation process is quite different, so this is a key area to understand. Ease-of-use is an area where SharpSpring really outshines the competition. It's designed for marketers to use and doesn't require involvement of an IT team to implement campaigns and marketing automation.
We are currently using SharpSpring in our sales department with collaboration from our marketing team. SharpSpring has helped us with nurturing lower tier leads that our sales team doesn't have time for. With the help of SharpSpring we send these lower tier leads calculated emails to keep them engaged until they build a high enough point total for our sales team to reach out to the lead to begin the sales process. It has made our sales team much more efficient!
Pros
Lead Nurturing - SharpSpring is a cost effective tool to nurture leads and contact them only when they are ready to buy.
Email Marketing - SharpSpring offers a user friendly WYSIWYG email editor along with pre-developed responsive email templates to use.
Sales CRM - Keep track of all your leads in SharpSpring. Whether they are only doing research or ready for a quote.
Analytics - Quickly look at web metrics for your website. SharpSpring has a dashboard that reveals your website's visits, keywords searched and most popular landing pages, etc.
Cons
I have had a few instances of SharpSpring going down.
SharpSpring's resource center could be more extensive.
SharpSpring's workflows and task could be more intuitive.
Likelihood to Recommend
SharpSpring is perfect for online marketing agencies who want to get in on lead nurturing and email marketing. In my opinion every company should be doing some sort of lead nurturing. In our selection process we researched many different lead nurturing software tools and SharpSpring just seemed like the best fit for us. It was exactly what we needed at a great price!
SharpSpring is being used by our organization to track and score leads as they progress through our funnel. Our sales team also uses the platform to manage opportunities. It saves our team an incredible amount of time and allows us to focus on ready to buy leads.
Pros
Text message notifications are sent directly to our sales reps as the leads become qualified. Other marketing automation systems do not integrate this feature and this is what our B2B clients love the most who are constantly on the road.
The list segmentation tools are incredibly powerful and much easier to manage than other systems out there.
SharpSpring also allows for unlimited users which is a great feature for companies looking to save cost on CRM seats and manage all marketing/sales efforts in one platform.
Cons
User interface occassionally has glitches, but the development is always addressing these issues immediately.
Likelihood to Recommend
This is definitely the best tool out there for agencies. Small businesses will benefit as well, but really it is perfect for any marketing agency looking to resell and support the platform. Enterprise solutions are probably too large for this program. For e-commerce SharpSpring has an excellent integration with Magento and overall the integrations through Zapier have worked great!
