SharpSpring - All The Workflow Power of InfusionSoft, Much Easier to Use
June 24, 2016
SharpSpring - All The Workflow Power of InfusionSoft, Much Easier to Use
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SharpSpring
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Like all great tools, it allows me to get more done with less effort. I can write email campaigns, build workflows, create lists and - most importantly - retrieve the analytics from those mailings in minutes.
I built a lot of workflows in Infusionsoft. Lots of choices. Lots of pretty graphics. Certainly powerful. But honestly, I found it all very confusing. I don't think all the choices and all the graphics actually helped to simplify the process. They certainly made it LOOK different, but I can't say it made it better. SharpSpring on the other hand has managed to retain the power I found in Infusionsoft with a lot less complexity. Building a workflow took very little time, was easy to test and easy to troubleshoot. A much simpler interface that I found much easier to learn and easier to use.
Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM Feature Ratings
Using SharpSpring
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Convenient Feel confident using | Slow to learn Lots to learn |
- Workflow is dirt-easy to build, test and troubleshoot.
- Triggers are super easy
- Lists are super easy
- Creating emails is very good. Good WYSIWIG and dynamic content tools.
- List segmenting is good
- Choosing an individual contact from within a list to update, and then going back out to the list doesn't take you back to the same place in the list. It always goes back to the top of the list. This is irritating.
- The "settings" button tends to change its location depending on the page or function I am using. A little confusing.
Yes, but I don't use it