Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring)

Sharp Spring - A great email marketing tool and more!

Comments: 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.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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 Great Platform With Amazing Support

Comments: 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.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

its not bad

Pros:

its great for analytics and building a brand

Cons:

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

Marketing Automation - at a fraction of the cost of Hubspot

Comments: 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...

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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

Comments: 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.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.