SharpSpring - right-sized marketing automation for small to mid sized businesses and marketing agencies
January 26, 2017
SharpSpring - right-sized marketing automation for small to mid sized businesses and marketing agencies
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Overall Satisfaction with SharpSpring
I use SharpSpring as the marketing automation platform both for my own business and I also implement this for clients. It supports content marketing, email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and CRM aspects required for business development users. Many marketing automation platforms are bloated, over complicated and expensive. I chose SharpSpring for my own agency as it has the feature set I need, plus it’s quick to set-up and master. That's particularly important as I can get my clients productive quickly, so the issue of cost of marketing automation goes away and we can start focussing on what really matters, creating great content and generating leads.
- Ease of use - The separation of tasks and workflows seems to make this a much simpler product to use than Act-On which I had previously used for 2 years and felt was comparatively difficult to master.
- WYSIWYG landing page builder. Great templates. Easy to learn. You don't need to know HTML to create great looking pages.
- The new personas feature is brilliant when combined with "Dynamic content blocks" (which you can use on landing pages as well as emails. Ther benefits - easier to remain relevant for different audiences, without having to set up multiple pages, emails, and workflows. This makes the whole system much easier to manage.
- The built-in CRM is a huge advantage and is perfect for BDM teams or smaller companies. Obviously, if you can make do without a full-featured CRM like Salesforce, you'll save thousands by switching to a simpler product like SharpSpring. (I used to use Act-On integrated with Salesforce and that was an absolute pig.)
- I've found the training/on-boarding satisfactory and the ongoing technical support is fast and personal.
- Pre-filled forms (so you can progressively profile leads on repeated visits to your website - works fine on websites (I've implemented these forms on WordPress websites). But surprisingly the same is not true of SharpSpring's own landing page builder, where if you use the WYSIWYG method to place a form on a page, the form will not pre-fill even if the lead is already 'cookied'. There's a workaround, but its hard work. This is a really annoying shortcoming, but I expect SharpSpring will put this right very soon.
- The above issue is representative of SharpSpring being a smaller vendor than many of its competitors. The QA could be better. But taken as a whole the product is good value in my opinion and once you get accustomed to certain glitches, you quickly learn to work around them. A case in point - I don't trust "List member counts". At least not when I first create a list. This can mislead you as you think a list criteria has not worked when in fact it has. The problem usually goes away after 1 hour, after which time the member count is correct.
- On-boarding training was a bit haphazard for me. The trainer was prone to spend time teaching features rather than raising the bar to discuss what I really needed. That said, the training was sufficient and the support service is always there for agencies. They'll coach and advise on anything. Support is not just a bug-tracking process.
- It's helping me win new business
- Leads to longer term customer relationship with retainer income
- Perfectly complements marketing content production service