SharpSpring: the good, the bad, the ugly
Updated September 21, 2020
SharpSpring: the good, the bad, the ugly
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SharpSpring
We use SharpSpring to send all of our corporate emails, including newsletters, promotions, pre, and post-event emails, and other marketing related materials. SharpSpring is the only such software we are using. We formerly used Constant Contact but switched to take advantage of the better reporting and contact management features. All of our corporate PR is handled through SharpSpring. We also use it to notify our website users of updates, downtime, etc.
- Collecting website visitor information and actions taken
- Easy to upload and manage contact information
- Healthy and robust analytics make reporting easy
- Creating emails is very clunky. We were used to Constant Contact and SharpSpring is miles away from that. It struggles mightily with Outlook, and most of our customers use Outlook so this is a real problem. I have a very light knowledge of coding and in Constant Contact, I could work through the code and sometimes figure out what the problem was. SharpSpring coding is a nightmare. We can't ever fix anything in the code.
- Support: the model is that you buy SharpSpring through an agency, so anytime you have any questions, you have to go through your agency. This adds time and cost to solving what could actually be a simple problem.
- They will lock your account and you cannot send emails, not even a test email to yourself. They ended up unsubscribing thousands of our users and that was the only way we were able to send emails again. They can be unreasonable with their expectations on list performance. Our customers frequently use "info@" type email addresses and SharpSpring tries to block us from sending to them. It's very frustrating especially when you are committed to a schedule.
- SharpSpring has helped us better understand who visits our website and what actions they are taking. It has been a useful sales tool.
- SharpSpring is not super user-friendly for creating emails, especially for Outlook clients (which most businesses are). Because of the necessity of going through our agency to get help, it adds time and cost to producing our emails.
We previously used Constant Contact and before moving to SharpSpring, we also looked at HubSpot. SharpSpring is considerably cheaper than HubSpot and we didn't need ALL of HubSpot's features, so that is why we went with SharpSpring. Comparing SharpSpring to Constant Contact isn't really fair because the two programs are really quite different. As far as creating attractive emails and getting a good analysis of how an individual email performs, Constant Contact is way ahead of SharpSpring. But Constant Contact only lets you see things in a silo. SharpSpring allows you to view all of the activities a contact takes not just with email, but also on your website. This feature has proven valuable to us and has been a major benefit with SharpSpring.
Do you think Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM's feature set?
Yes
Did Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM again?
Yes