Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM vs. emfluence Marketing Platform

SharpSpring is great for creating and tracking campaigns that span multiple channels. With the Salesforce integration, we are able to keep our Sales team focused inside Salesforce without them needing to learn a new tool. Our Marketing team uses SharpSpring to nurture leads before handing them off to the Sales team. Though the features are available, SharpSpring would not be suitable for social media management or blogs; our third-party tools do a better job at that.

Incentivized

The reporting feature is not as detailed as we require for our documentation, so we have to organize the results into charts and graphs. For every other component of our social media and digital marketing, emfluence checks all of the boxes.

Incentivized

• Their Emailers are very easy to construct and user-friendly. It takes your Newsletter and sales emails to the next level, especially with the action groups and trigger functionalities.
• The life of the lead functionality allows you to see when leads get warmer, so you know when to send them what. Helps improve conversions.

• The deliverabililty and placement reporting really provide insight as to where/when your message has landed with the end user. The preflight also allows you to make sure you have less chance of hitting the dreaded spam box.
• We have used the platform many times for RSVPing to events. It is very useful in messaging respondents and sending separate follow ups to those that haven't responded. It also allows us to be able to easily collect check in lists for staff to have at the time the event starts.
• We use the platform in part of our communication strategy to celebrate birthdays and anniversaries. The video link component has added an extra layer of fun to students and staff.

Incentivized

• The landing page builder is a bit hard to use. Doesn’t have much flexibility.
• Sometimes confusing between types of workflows to use. Opportunity versus visual.
• If you imported contacts that weren’t formatted correctly. It is hard to delete a bull amount. Need to type DELETE for each one manually. No bull options to make changes.

Incentivized

• The email builder is hit and miss. Sometimes it brings in outside code, even when I paste text that matches the format, which loses us time and money.
• More control of email templates, it feel as if it is over simplified.
• Reporting lacks some depth in information and tracking specific users.

Incentivized

It delivers everything it promised and more. SharpSpring is marketing automation transformed. Easy to use, affordable and well supported. Many of our clients will become dependent on the information SharpSpring provides for their marketing initiatives and we are confident they will be there for the long run. When some of the over-funded 'big names' flame out, SharpSpring will be the clear choice for small business users.

This rating is coming from an administrative perspective. With so many features, workflows, dashboards, and more, there is certainly a lot going on, and even the most savvy software user can get a little overwhelmed when trying to decide how to best implement and utilize the platform to its full potential. That being said, the SharpSpring platform is well-implemented and well-organized, with most solutions being fairly intuitive, once you have a grasp of the software. It is fairly easy to learn, but difficult to master. Just like any powerful platform, however, the complexity is worth it, and once you are comfortable navigating and problem solving within SharpSpring, it becomes a great marketing and sales tool which can do virtually anything you need it to.

Incentivized

The support is great which really helps overcome challenges if you become stuck and the training videos are great too. Same-day replies are great and I even got some help with some CSS code on the chat. Not many organizations would do this or even respond.

Incentivized

Simply that we recommend a thorough training process where you take the time to really learn the system and the features so that you can take full advantage and maximize your results. Don't skimp on the training as the more you understand, the easier it will be to implement. A sk a lot of questions and test everything until you know it well.

Incentivized

Constant Contact doesn't stand up against Klaviyo, so we're permanently migrating our lists and customer profiles over to Klaviyo. Constant Contact is an excellent choice for solopreneurs, brick-and-mortar, and businesses that are more heavily focused on face-to-face human interaction. However, companies - or individuals - primarily market and/or sell online, especially Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, and Yotpo, which seem to be more robust solutions.

Incentivized

It definitely does a better job for what we are doing for client than ClickDimensions, but Salesfusion is a platform that we ideally would like to use for all of our clients due to it's customization.

Incentivized

• Streamlined Processes - sales and marketing are now all in the same place.
• Reduced Number of Platforms/Tools - CRM/lead management, email, automation, landing pages, forms, etc are all in the same place rather than using multiple tools.
• Time-saving - sales pipeline is very easy to use for sales. For marketing, we have dozens of workflows that eliminate much of our manual processes from the past.
• Return on Investment - We're more focused on moving the building the business than ever before because SharpSpring has simplified so many of our business operations and we're seeing massive results!
• Lead generation - Up SIGNIFICANTLY (between 3x & 4x) since setting up SharpSpring.

• We always have a very high rate of open percentage, which usually lead to more registration. We can track that we can have a large uptick in registrations after certain emails have been sent.
• The more results we can gather like social media clicks, shares and likes and the email opens we can share with sponsors, the more they will come back as a sponsor and also possibly be more investing in our organization.

Incentivized