Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

Sharp Spring - A great email marketing tool and more!

Kommentare: SharpSpring is a complete email marketing tool that we use to reach out to clients and market to new leads. We use the automation tools to create drip campaigns and re-marketing campaigns for potential leads. We also use the page builder to build simple landing pages and sales funnels. The contact manager has the ability to mange our list of 30,000+ without any extra costs. It used by both our sales teams and client care teams to help the business grow. As a marketer I use SharpSpring to create campaigns that convert to sales and retention.

Vorteile:

SharpSpring is a great tool for small to mid range companies looking to build email marketing campaigns. It has great templates which allow you to create emails that look great and are functional sales tools. There are also great automation tools for drip campaigns and re-targeting.

Nachteile:

The visual email builder can be finicky at times, resulting in editing directly in the code. If you are unfamiliar or uncomfortable formatting HTML code it can be overwhelming. Also, the social media tools are weak. It would be nice if I could schedule and post content directly from SharpSpring.

SharpSpring is the Best of the Best

Kommentare: My overall experience with SharpSpring has been wonderful! While the platform still has kinks to work out (what platform doesn't?), their customer service is amazing and they move at a rate unseen by others to make the platform better every day. I highly recommend them not just for their platform, but their people are friendly as well.

Vorteile:

I really enjoy the various features that are available within the platform! It allows us to quickly and easily identify our prospects, capture their information on the website, and then market to them in a way that is meaningful and generates new business for us.

Nachteile:

In their mission to make their platform compete, they often focus on getting new features out quickly but then have to go back and update later. I've seen this happen for them with tools like Video Calling, which became quickly available due to COVID-19 but lacks the robustness of other dedicated video platforms that I would imagine most companies already use.

its not bad

Vorteile:

its great for analytics and building a brand

Nachteile:

its not the best app and kinda pricey but not bad but there is better ptions

SharpSpring Great Platform With Amazing Support

Kommentare: Overall the platform is powerful at a great price, and the team at SharpSpring wants you to succeed, and that shows in their support, courses, documentation, and forums. Not only does SharpSpring benefit Right to Evolve internally, but our clients and the work we do see the benefits as well.

Vorteile:

SharpSpring has features to create marketing operations and track those campaigns either manually or automatically. Considering I can tie all the potential avenues of a campaign into one spot and see how users interact with is a great win. At a glance, it is essential to read the data and make the right decisions; SharpSpring brings all the data to one platform. It makes work more enjoyable that we can create a single campaign with a list of contacts, email templates, unique forms, dynamic pages, trackable media, automation, and analytics in one spot. Not to mention, once we create this base campaign and all its numerous pieces, I can then quickly use all the parts as a template to do another or a third, and so on. Making it very efficient over time. SharpSpring has a lot of features, but I am thrilled with our CRM, email marketing, ads, funnels, all in one location. All this and the support team have been top-notch every step of the way. I also like to learn myself, which they provide via courses, updated videos, and documents that my team and I can reference.

Nachteile:

Interface and design consistency are my two significant cons for this platform. Like most, once you know the platform and its interface, you can be very successful. No difference here except that the design process between creating emails, pages, and forms all have their unique process. I believe it would improve user efficiency if the page and email creator, for instance, had a standard procedure and the same layout of tools. The platform has a lot of features with more coming, so you have to know where all the pieces are between the settings, marketing, and sales menu layout.

Marketing Automation - at a fraction of the cost of Hubspot

Kommentare: I'm enjoying using it as being able to do everything in one platform makes life much easier and it's much more affordable than Hubspot. There are enough tools to keep the most experienced marketer busy to help attract leads through chat, emails, forms, landing pages etc...

Vorteile:

The ability to create a clear sales funnel and track your client through the sales process is really easy and highlights areas where more work and focus might be needed in your sales process. There is a ton of features to engage users and build your audience, you just need to spend time and be open to exploring ideas. Implementing dynamic content which changes depending on the customer persona is cool. The support team always reply same day, there is online chat (US times) too.

Nachteile:

There are some definite bugs such as data fields 'locking' when creating a landing page and the later it becomes editable again. Strangely the design side of emails and landing pages is not cohesive. So you have a limited range of fonts in forms but lots of customisation for colours for headings, then the reverse for landing pages. Thinks like buttons for GDPR can't currently be customised which looks odd. Also, the onboarding process for Squarespace websites is different and this is not mentioned anywhere. Just needs to have someone invest some time to deal with all these issues and implement a decent upgrade. Generally, all very minor things but stacked up can provide a bit more challenging onboarding process than what it needs to be.

Full-featured marketing automation on a budget

Kommentare: Prioritizing leads for Salesforce, collecting customer feedback, and better tracking the effectiveness of marketing efforts are the key things we get out of SharpSpring. We are able to collect leads using SharpSpring forms and then deliver them to the right salesperson using their visual workflow tools. We can make lists and campaigns based on ANY criteria in the system, which is super impressive. The Life of the Lead is a revelation: Being able to see all digital interactions of our customers is a complete game-changer for Sales. With Life of the Lead, Sales is more informed and can take on calls armed with the right information to best serve the customer.

Vorteile:

The support is top-notch. They go above and beyond to ensure all questions are answered. If there is a key feature needed in the software, they'll work to make sure that you get that feature or have a workaround. They respond quickly, and they are incredibly knowledgeable. It's hard to list just one thing I like best! It's the most competitively-priced tool on the market... and it's a fraction of the cost of nearly any other marketing automation tool on the market.

Nachteile:

With their constant upgrades, SharpSpring occasionally can be a bit buggy while features get ironed out. Nearly all issues have easy workarounds, and the fixes come fast. It's a minor quibble for a service that is basically as good as it gets.

SharpSpring makes my life easier.

Kommentare: It's a great platform, and the support team has been very responsive with any questions we've had over the last few years. The onboarding process was great and we never felt alone in learning how to use it. I also like the regular webinars and learning opportunities that SharpSpring hosts for marketers/agencies.

Vorteile:

The email builder, landing page builder and form builder are all straightforward and fairly easy to learn. There are also help/support articles for pretty much anything I need help with or get stuck on. The "life of the lead" view is helpful to see a contact's interactions with our brand.

Nachteile:

The email and landing page builders offer a lot of flexibility in layout/design, but sometimes they are a bit too restrictive in terms of moving elements around.

A better option to Hubspot and other Marketing Automation solutions

Kommentare: We like the platform as we can track online and email interactions with prospects, customers and partners. This helps us with qualifying lead generation and tracking the stickiness of campaigns. The training of SharpSpring was challenging but we were able to muddle through and figure out a lot of stuff on our own. Customer support has also been great when they are able to help with issues that may arise.

Vorteile:

We like the fact it is much cheaper in cost as compared to HubSpot and other marketing automation platforms. The ease of using the platform has made it easy to early adoption of the end users and we are able to fully track our MQL and ROI.

Nachteile:

SharpSpring has an extremely high demand on email accuracy rate of 98% so quite often we get suspended due to bounced back emails. Sometimes it is difficult to have an almost 100% list when people leave companies. We have as a solution, pay for 3rd party email checker services,to help mitigate this and we also send a larger portion of emails though mailchimp.

SharpSpring user for 4+ years

Kommentare: We really are able to do so much more with our marketing. We can see the interaction of clients with our marketing as a whole, not just off of one campaign. We can trigger emails and actions based on their behaviors which is very beneficial.

Vorteile:

Being a Partner for 4+ years has allowed us to grow with them. When they were a startup, we were able to really see the changes the partners were requesting and the software has come a long way. They really value their Partners (agencies).

Nachteile:

Sometimes SharpSpring likes to release new features, while they need to also work on continually improving their existing features.

A powerful platform, but still has a long way to go

Kommentare: We use Sharpspring for email automation, marketing automation, lead tracking, reporting, as a CRM, and as a sales tool. It allows us to track contact interactions from first touchpoint through sale. It has been a huge help.

Vorteile:

My favorite thing about Sharpspring is the ability to track and analyze the entire life of a lead, from start to finish. It allows us to optimize our funnels and nurture prospects from interest to sale. It is a really powerful tool and offers (almost) everything you need for marketing automation from automated workflows to landing pages and forms to email design. I also love their lead scoring.

Nachteile:

Though it offers a lot of features, it's not all that usable compared to similar products. There are countless small usability issues. Landing pages are pretty difficult to create. Support is usually great – but can at times be entirely unhelpful. Automation has some key features other tools allow. Overall, there are just a lot of features that still need to be added in order to really compete.

Impressive product, exceptional value

Kommentare: I'm not spending as much time connecting tools and I'm spending way more time defining and executing strategies. I'm creating a robust customer engagement strategy that is inclusive of sales and marketing. I'm solving the problem of identifying content that the consumer truly wants and needs to convert.

Vorteile:

First, fantastic price. Personalization can drive amazing results. SharpSpring gives you a solid set of tools that all communicate with each other flawlessly and for an exceptional value. It's a sophisticated tool with a lot of depth, but the certifications, demos, videos, tools, customer service all make it very easy to use. Just when I think I've figured out the edge of the depth on the tool, I realize there's another level. The automation is top notch. The ability to track so many actions, behaviors and then to take action to help the customer go further along the funnel. It fulfills the needs of so many other tools - HootSuite, Sprout, Calendly, Mailchimp, CRM, Sales CRM, TypeForm, and WhoIsVisiting (to name a few).

Nachteile:

Not a lot so far. I'll always take more templates, pre-made content. Don't get me wrong, it has content, but the more the merrier.Billing can be a little confusing, but I know they have an update coming very soon. In fact, I just received an update email about it. I'd love to see more progress on the SharpSpring iOS app.

Used as point solution with all the potential of an enterprise platform

Kommentare: The interaction with customers has improved a lot since we started using SharpSpring's marketing automation, we have a better vision of the various client profiles that we've interaction with, and we've been able to focus on every single one of them with a more mindful approach. The chatbot helped to get more leads because we discovered that visitors feel more open to sharing their lead information with a more dynamic tool than a form per example.

Vorteile:

It has a lot of features and they keep adding new ones. From only one platform I'm able to keep track of my client's websites, create the forms, and manage the submissions, leads can schedule meetings with specialists without having to wait (or to interact with another human being) and I can keep track of everything with the help of the Life of the Lead. The automations available are a big deal as well, everybody in the team is aware of their responsibilities and the platform helps them never forget to follow-up.

Nachteile:

The email builder could use some improvements, maybe something more intuitive, more templates, more flexibility while making changes. Also, de contact manager is still kinda coarse, should work more like a database and not only as a display, it could be more flexible. And allow to bulk-import contacts with no emails could be huge.

My Secret Weapon

Kommentare: I love this product so much that I take it with me from role to role -- and it is always the legacy that I leave behind. It allows me to make a huge impact in a short period of time.

Vorteile:

For several years now, SharpSpring has been my secret weapon. I work largely with educational, startup, and nonprofit ventures - so we are always resource constrained. SharpSpring's platform allows me to leverage a small (or solo) shop into something of competitive size, then scale up as we grow. And it doesn't break the bank. When you're working with a skeletal or non-existent team, the ease of use and customer support become critical: SharpSpring always "wows" me on this. Plus, the automation lets me optimize the resources I have while the intelligence tools keep me from wasting time on projects with low ROI. SharpSpring delivers the functionality that gets me noticed by the higher ups. (In one role, we doubled all major KPIs within a year's time.) I couldn't do my job without it!

Nachteile:

Marketing Intelligence software is complex and the learning curve can be challenging, even with great support. Also, not everything in SharpSpring is where I expect it to be - I often use the chat support function to find tools. Oh, and if you are West Coast, start your SharpSpring projects early as chat support wanes after 3pm Pacific due to the company being headquartered in Florida.

SharpSpring is full featured, low price, and amazing tech and account support

Kommentare: I've helped a number of businesses drive revenue with this software and it always drives more revenue for them. Of course, you have to understand how marketing automation works (I teach it at a local business school) and how to use the software correctly but there is a ton of documentation and how-to videos and when that fails, there's always a support person to walk you though whatever you're trying to do and they stick with you. My "customer success manager" will even get on the phone with a prospective client and help with a demo. Just a great company

Vorteile:

I love the way the tracking is displayed on a timeline so you can see everywhere a prospect went. The built-in CRM and sales funnel pics up where the marketing funnel leaves off and keeps the automation going during and after the sale to upset and resell. The new retargeting and (soon to be) advertising feature is amazing, not only retargeting your visitors but it finds similar customers to target. Overrall, it's really intuitive and easy to use, and I've used many marketing automation platforms over the years. This is the least expensive. No long-term contracts to sign but still has all the features of the much more expensive ones. And the LiveChat feature you can put on your Web site that was just added (at no additional cost) brings a huge feature that other companies charge more than the entire cost of the SharpSpring subscription.

Nachteile:

No complaints at all. The learning curve wasn't very steep and the price is right. They even have evening support hours.

Comprehensive Marketing Automation Software

Kommentare: SharpSPring has been a massive help to our business. We are agency partners and we have grown our business by using the software and demonstrating the power of the software to others. SharpSpring themselves are always looking to improve the software and often realse new features or updates which improve the overall experience. They are constantly evolving and I like that. It's what is needed to keep at the forefront of today's marketing.

Vorteile:

SharpSpring has a comprehensive range of tools to help you get the most from Marketing Automation. It integrates with your website easily and can track visitors to your site from all your differing campaigns. The tools are easy to use, once you have been through the training and can be manipulated to work together to suit your business. Delivering insights and analytics to help you tweak your marketing and increase your ROI.

Nachteile:

The software is comprehensive, so there is a learning curve. You can get started easily with it, but you have to continue to learn to get the real powerful insights from it. Setting up takes quite a lot of tweaking to get the results you need, but it is simple and powerful to use and delivers results right from the get go.

Wonderful Customer Service

Kommentare: We are now able to track our leads, handle campaigns, and track sales. It has been a great CRM platform.

Vorteile:

The system is easy to use and the customer service is stellar. Whenever I have a question I have someone there to help. I can live chat, or schedule a 1:1. This is very important.

Nachteile:

There are a few missing features but they listen, take note and work to add in new features.

Amazing product

Vorteile:

When i used constant contact it was really good. It has everything you need!!

Nachteile:

NO cons really. For me it had everything

Great for an agency, but trying to get clients involved is next to impossible.

Kommentare: We joined the SS family mainly as a means of sending automated drip marketing emails on behalf of our clients, which it does well. We also like being able to see the life of every individual lead directly within the program. It lets us know where our strongest leads lie and where we need to do better. All in all, it gets the job done despite the interface headaches we frequently encounter.

Vorteile:

There are a lot of features. Almost too many, actually. I can't imagine a company that could possibly use all of them successfully. Regardless, it's nice to know the option is there if a situation arises in which a certain feature becomes useful. My favorite function/feature has to be the lead tracking system. I love being able to see every interaction each lead has with my client's business. The automated actions on top of that in response to customer interaction is the main reason we use the software. It makes drip email campaigns a breeze. I like that it tracks conversions as well (although you have to set it up to do so which isn't necessarily the easiest process ever). All in all, though, it does the job we need it to do.

Nachteile:

The SharpSpring system is VERY non-intuitive for non-marketers (and heck, even for marketers sometimes). There are just too many ways you can screw up and have to start an email, action, or workflow completely over again. We have several clients who we act as their entire marketing department for and trying to get their sales representatives to use the system the way it's intended is next to impossible. They just don't understand it or even it's purpose, even after we've done training after training after training with them. We've even had SS support do training directly with them, to no avail. I ended up creating my OWN versions of step-by-step tutorials for our clients just to make things easier to understand. The other major drawback is it's way too easy to get "blacklisted" (aka hit spamtraps and honeypots), which I realize is a problem with email marketing in general, but SS doesn't have enough safeguards in place for preventing this type of situation. We have one client who likes to import their email lists in from an on-site wifi sign-on system, which inevitably leads to poor list quality regardless of how many safeguards (email weed-out) parameters we put in place ourselves. Getting on SS's blacklist is pretty much the worst thing that can happen because you still have to pay for the service even though you can't use it until your un-blacklisted, which can take a while. Lastly, their email-design interface is terrible and trick to navigate.

SharpSpring in Motion..

Kommentare: Overall for many years i have been a happy and engaged customer and agency. Look forward to a greater tomorrow.

Vorteile:

the price and support speak a lot about the company. The fact that its packed full of features that are easy to use makes it a great product for good value...

Nachteile:

Lack of country support and advocacy. Discussion around data and data sources seem to be a hurdle.

SharpSpring is a great all-around platform for anyone looking to grow their business!

Kommentare: Overall, SharpSpring has changed the game for how our agency helps our clients grow. We have better data, better sales pipelines, and a better team thanks to the knowledge gained through SharpSpring.

Vorteile:

My favorite part about SharpSpring is knowing that if I am struggling with something, there is always a support agent a phone call, or chat away. I have continued to receive amazing help in a timely manner which truly matters for our brand and our growth.

Nachteile:

My least favorite part of this platform is that there is a vast amount of room for growth in areas that appear to be simple from a non-technical user standpoint. An example is that the date format on forms is set in a YYYY/MM/DD and this cannot be changed. Though, in the United States, a common format would be MM/DD/YYYY. This has led to frustration for our clients and website users.

SharpSpring is a Gamechanger for Campaign Tracking

Kommentare: SharpSpring has been a successful decision for our agency since we got it in 2017. Within the first month it was making a huge positive difference for us and our clients. Their support has been a big part of our success with it and it continues to be an essential part of our digital marketing offering.

Vorteile:

The biggest benefit of SharpSpring is having visibility into the leads we generate. In the past we could see impressions and clicks and website visits from our campaigns. Now we are seeing the actual leads and being able to follow activity after the initial contact. The added visibility has been an absolute game changer in the value we can provide our clients. I really like the Life of the Lead feature where once you have a lead in the system you can track all their activity in great detail, seeing when they came back to the website, what pages they went to, if they opened emails, etc. We've even had instances where clients claimed they were not getting leads from our campaigns and once SharpSpring was installed, not only could we now provide reports of leads we were generating, but we caught a hole in their customer service where leads we were providing were not getting responses from scheduling staff. So we not only provided reports of the leads we generated, but helped close a gap in a serious customer service issue that was happening.

Nachteile:

It takes quite a bit of effort to get up to speed on SharpSpring as there are a lot of moving parts. But their support is great and always gets back to us quickly and efficiently to keep us on track.

Great Support Team, lacking some tools, but overall pleased with the software.

Vorteile:

The email tracking, website traffic tracking, lead management, and automated workflows are stellar.

Nachteile:

There's a considerable lack of Account based reporting/automation. Most features are geared towards Contacts and Opportunities.

Not worth it

Kommentare: Not good. Lots of "oh yeah, sure, it does that." Only to find out that the software doesn't actually do what they just said it does or no one from sharpspring knows how to make it do that.

Vorteile:

Seemed like a great and more affordable option compared to HubSpot. Not much else to say here since we had a boat load of issues with it.

Nachteile:

Everything was cumbersome. From onboarding to implementation. Even getting someone on the phone from the right department to help us when we had issues with email was a problem. Overall, really clunky and outdated. We ended up going to Hubspot and it's SO much better and not even that much more expensive especially when we think of all of the time we all wasted trying to get sharpspring to work.

Why aren't you using SharpSpring?

Kommentare: Overall, it has been easy to adopt. As we continue to improve our email and social media formats/topics/ frequency - we are seeing an increase in leads come through the website.

Vorteile:

The integration of the software with our internal systems took less than an hour. The comprehensive training was great - we were able to dive right in and now run all our emails and social media through SharpSpring. We are just starting to evaluate the journey of our contacts and their scores - to better target them.

Nachteile:

The analytics could be better - it would be nice to be able to review metrics on a monthly. weekly, daily basis. Right now all metrics appear as a lump in 1 selected time frame.

This is a worthless product

Kommentare: Nothing. This company is completely worthless. They deleted a clients account out of the blue and also do not follow through with their commitments.

Nachteile:

After being an agency partner for 2+ years, our company has yet to make a dime off of this investment. First of all, the training they "supply" is almost non-existent. When we first became a partner, we had a couple of calls but then, nothing. There were many "learning pains" that we endured with SharpSpring even so much so as, demos I do with clients being times that "sharpspring is down." It is very difficult to sell a product that does not work when you are trying to show clients the power of the system. We also had a MAJOR real estate brokerage use the site for recruiting and, when messages were not being sent as they were scheduled to send, the client left our company and the SS product. The platform is over priced and does not provide the support you would expect from a company as such. SharpSpring has cost us as a business for our choice to invest in them. Had we gone with a platform that actually worked when it was needed and had the kind of training for us that they should have, we would be way ahead of the game. Instead, we are starting fresh with a new company that will hopefully fulfill their part in our agreement. I would never recommend this product to anyone that is looking for an automation system.