Item: Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM
Rating: 9
Author: Meghan Pavasaris

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are a small agency and we use SharpSpring for all of our clients. Because of the price point, we are able to implement it to greater or lesser degrees based on the services each client requires. For some, we have implemented landing pages with workflows and buyer personas. For others, we use it more like an email platform.

Pros and Cons

The value is exceptional. There is no way we'd be able to offer the benefits of marketing automation to our clients with any other platform out there now.
The people have always been a pleasure to work with.
The onboarding was customized to how we were planning to use the platform. At no point were we made to feel that we didn't know marketing at all just because we hadn't yet used a marketing automation platform.
They are constantly rolling out new features and capabilities.
Really easy to keep our clients up to date with their automatic VisitorID emails and other automation we've set up.

You want to have someone on your team who knows basic HTML. The WYSIWYG editor can be glitchy and it is much easier to just hop into the code.
Some features are not totally robust. For example, negative triggers are not available (has not visited the page/has not opened the email/has not viewed the media). However, there are ways to work around that using filters or lists.
Roll out and features and capabilities are slightly behind the industry. For example, social media was only integrated in December 2017. That has not been a huge downside for us because, for example, we had been using another platform for social media.
Can be glitchy, especially when new features are rolled out. For example, automatic image resizing while maintaining proportions didn't work for a couple of weeks. I did the calculations on my phone until it was working again. The glitches have never been deleted-all-your-contacts level, just a bit annoying.

Return on Investment

We're front of mind for our customers with the daily or weekly VisitorID emails.
Our clients have long sales cycles. We've been much better able to tie marketing activities to sales than we ever have before using the Life of Lead.
We've been able to use automation features for our own agency and our clients to save time.

Other Software Used

Trello, Buffer, Canva

Likelihood to Recommend

I would say this is the only choice for agencies, especially for smaller agencies or agencies working with smaller companies. SharpSpring is a platform; it is not a marketing university. So this is for marketing professionals who are going to keep up with best practices and teach themselves how to get the most out of it. This is not for busy founders who want their hand held on how to implement it and how to apply it to their company. This is also great for smaller marketing budgets and/or marketing skeptics who want or need a more gradual rollout of marketing automation features and services.

Products Replaced

Key Differentiators

Price
Product Features
Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
Third-party Reviews

Ideal for agencies and smaller companies

Overall Satisfaction with SharpSpring