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Agency Overview For SharpSpring Marketing Automation
August 09, 2018

Agency Overview For SharpSpring Marketing Automation

Tony Burke | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller

Overall Satisfaction with SharpSpring

All of our team are using SharpSpring across the board, from management who use all features to track incoming sales and opportunities, through to our web designers, who use the CRM and email features to talk with clients and send them updates. Overall, the system is very useful as it keeps all of our important sales and marketing materials in one place, speeding up our working processes and environment.
  • Having used other marketing automation products in the past, SharpSpring comes in with a fresh and relevant product, packed full of workflow features that help our marketing team and sales team reach their goals.
  • The CRM is well crafted and easier than most other CRMs we have either tried ourselves or worked on for our clients.
  • They are always new features in planning and SharpSpring are very welcoming of new feature requests.
  • The automation and visual workflow system is easy to operate once you have a marketing plan in mind. Once you have something to say, it is easy to say using SharpSpring.
  • GDPR compliance on all aspects is great.
  • The mobile app is a little basic in terms of full automation access but works well as a CRM when I am traveling.
  • The landing pages are not fully SSL certified, but I understand that is a work in progress from the developers.
  • The opportunities section for managing potential sales is set up for 1-time contract fees or job totals, rather than options for monthly management contracts.
  • The built-in tag system is for automation only, where new clients assume when they see the option, that is for the contact manager and are a little disappointed when it is not a contact searching tool. I understand that is also a work in progress to make better in the future.
  • So far, SharpSpring has been very positive for our ROI, simply as we created our instance to work for our benefit and use it now to strengthen where we were weakest before.
  • Of course, dealing with the transition into a GDPR compliant era with offline systems and several online systems, SharpSpring's approach and commitment to compliance for its customers worldwide solved some problems for our team knowing that we had right to forget options and double opt-in tools at our disposal before the rulings even came into place.
  • It took a lot of work to transition all of our contacts, email templates, media and opportunities from our older CRM, MailChimp and our cloud storage. I would say to anyone considering any marketing automation service to be aware that it takes quite a few weeks, if not months to get fully set up and trained in the systems enough before you start to realise a real ROI.
We have worked with Pardot in the past, for 2 clients, which is also an amazing system. Ultimately, we choose SharpSpring due to its lower cost and flexibility to use for ourselves. As an agency, we have options to manage and recommend SharpSpring to our clients.
We have also trialed the HubSpot option several years ago, where the cost was prohibitive at the time.
SharpSpring is ideal for companies that have a contact database of 5000 upwards, who email updates and marketing messages 3 - 4 times a month. In comparison to other email systems, it's worth the fees alone for better email management, not to mention the CRM aspects of the system. Everything else is a bonus.

Smaller SME clients, who have a smaller contact database may not get the full value, compared to using free available marketing tools.

Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM Feature Ratings

8.9
WYSIWYG email editor
9
Dynamic content
10
Ability to test dynamic content
7
Landing pages
7
A/B testing
8
Mobile optimization
9
Email deliverability reporting
10
List management
10
Triggered drip sequences
10
9.0
Lead nurturing automation
10
Lead scoring and grading
9
Data quality management
8
Automated sales alerts and tasks
9
9.0
Calendaring
9
Event/webinar marketing
9
9.5
Social sharing and campaigns
9
Social profile integration
10
10.0
Dashboards
10
Standard reports
10
Custom reports
10
8.0
API
Not Rated
Role-based workflow & approvals
8
Customizability
8
Integration with Salesforce.com
8
Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Not Rated
Integration with SugarCRM
Not Rated

SharpSpring Support

So far, every issue has been dealt with professionally by the support team and they even follow up again after the issues are resolved to see if everything is still o.k.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
No - Our lifetime support is included in our licence fee.
Yes.
We had created a specific contact page form using several fields and when live on a campaign, some of the data was not being transferred to our contact manager correctly, so when we reached out for support, 2 members of the support team were on it, inspecting the form, testing the form with dummy data until they figured out a referral field was the issue. Simply altering the form fields solved the problem and the form has worked perfectly ever since.