Solid Marketing Automation for Agencies
Overall Satisfaction with SharpSpring
As a marketing agency, we recommend SharpSpring as the marketing automation tool for our clients. For each of our clients, it solves the problem of being able to send marketing emails to large lists, creating web forms for generating leads, tracking marketing campaigns, creating automation tasks to follow up with leads or notify users.
- SharpSpring's form builder is excellent. Easily select fields to use, including progressive fields, and styling a form to the look and feel of a website can be done just by pasting in a URL of the website. The form code is made using JavaScript, so it's a simple copy and paste function to put the form on the website, and any changes made in SharpSpring are instantly reflected on the website.
- Automation is great in SharpSpring. The workflow builder is intuitive and a great way to visualize your automations. It shows all the available triggers, and then you can select from a vast array of automated tasks. These are great for anything from form notifications to complex automated email nurture campaigns with lots of "if this, then that" statements.
- The Life of the Lead function on the contact record is great for CRM purposes. Right on the contact record, you can see all the activity of a contact record, even website visits before they ever filled out a form. It can match the IP address of a website visitor to an email address as soon as they fill out a form. You can then see how long someone was evaluating a product or service and which pages they viewed. Then as the lead grows, you can see which emails they've opened and clicked, and the form data they've submitted.
- The email builder is kinda disappointing. While it's not necessarily difficult to use, the blocks and layouts available are not as expansive as some other platforms, and the ease of dragging and reordering and making it responsive on mobile is pretty lacking. The look of an email in the builder is very deceiving. The live email almost never looks like it does in the builder, especially on mobile. It hurts the trust I have in the platform when I am building emails.
- SharpSpring has positively affected our business objectives. It is a software that we can use as an agency to resell to our clients. Because we use it for multiple clients, we gain some efficiencies by learning the software and using it in different scenarios. We get a discount for being an agency and are able to help generate leads for our clients which in turn keeps them as a happy client.
Infusionsoft and Pardot each have their strengths and weaknesses compared to SharpSpring. Overall, Infusionsoft and Pardot are more robust, while SharpSpring is more affordable. SharpSpring is much easier to use as an agency, as it's easy to learn and easy to manage multiple clients. Infusionsoft has a much better email builder and has a better CRM contact management system. Pardot has better reporting, landing pages, and out of the box integrations.