Item: Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM
Rating: 5
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As a marketing agency, we were a reseller of SharpSpring's marketing automation product. It is used by our customers to run email, social and website engagement campaigns on their ecommerce webstores. We regularly ran email newsletters, lead gen, abandoned cart follow up, and other types of campaigns for our customers. We also used the API to build custom integrations.

Pros and Cons

Good entry level price point for small companies who want enterprise features
Easy to implement into the website
Customizable to individual organizations needs.

Account management is inattentive and slow to respond to inquiries
Leadership does not empower account managers to fix customer problems
Billing and accounting mistakes are frequent and challenging to resolve
Account and relationship terms are often changed without notice, or buried inside marketing messages.

Return on Investment

We earned some cashflow by reselling the product
Time spent working through constant problems with their team negated any profits we would have realized from the relationship.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio (formerly Evergage + MyBuys), ActiveCampaign, Pardot, Mailchimp and Marketo

There are 2 tiers of marketing automation software. Highly customizable, feature rich enterprise applications, and out of the box simpler solutions for smaller businesses. SharpSpring is unique in that is offers enterprise feature sets at the small business price point.

For our enterprise customers who aren't ready to make large investments in big brand marketing automation like HubSpot, Marketo or Salesforce Marketing Cloud, SharpSpring provides an entry level option for an enterprise product.

Key Insights

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?

Did implementation of Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM go as expected?

Would you buy Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM again?

Other Software Used

Marketo, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio (formerly Evergage + MyBuys), Pardot, ActiveCampaign

Likelihood to Recommend

SharpSpring's product is quite functional and largely works as advertised. I would recommend it to a company who is comfortable being self-reliant in their use of the software, and willing to work around bugs when they do come up. The problems with SharpSpring are almost entirely inside the administration of the company. Your front-line support and account reps are friendly and responsive, but not empowered to make decisions or help solve customer problems. When escalated to higher-ups in the company, relationships become very challenging. On at least 5 occasions we brought up serious issues, and gave up on resolving them after reaching the point of exhaustion.

Product delivers on enterprise features at entry level prices but the company fails to support its users.

Overall Satisfaction with SharpSpring