Lead Gen & CRM
What Is Lead Gen & CRM?
Constant Contact delivers for small businesses with powerful tools to simplify and amplify digital marketing. Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM (formerly SharpSpring) is a marketing and sales platform developed to help businesses build their pipeline, nurture leads and close more deals. Our tools are designed to help you attract the right leads, nurture them with personalized content, and grow your business with better conversion.
Who Uses Lead Gen & CRM?
Constant Contact's Lead Gen & CRM platform helps small B2B businesses get more leads, close faster and focus on what drives results with a unified marketing and sales platform.
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Lead Gen & CRM
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Reviews of Lead Gen & CRM
Tom
Alternatives Considered:
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.
Brian
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.
Devon
Sharpspring Has Moved Our Marketing Business To The Next Level
Comments: Honestly, it has been a proper delight working with their team. They are highly professional, friendly, helpful, and just genuinely care about adding value to our business. We're so grateful to have found them.
Pros:
Sharpspring has created a vacuum in my business for the better. Marketing as a service only gets to its final stage once you have a powerful way to leverage the data in your client's businesses to their advantage. We could never do this for our clients until we found Sharpsring. They gave us an easy, straightforward and enjoyable way to offer automated marketing over and above our regular lead-generating offerings - all while making a positive dent in our cash flow from the additional licences we sell. In short - Zebrand is already greatly profiting financially from the experience, as are our clients.
Cons:
Having a few more APIs available out of the box would have been nice, but it has not altered our love for Sharpspring at all.
Chris
Review
Comments: Started out fine until we realized that all the report data within SharpSpring was false. We understand that data accountability is an issue in the marketing automation industry as a whole, but SharpSpring is especially terrible at this. The fact that upper management in IT recognizes that email report data is different between what's in SharpSpring email reports, what's in SharpSpring Life Of The Lead, and what's in the exported email report excel list and subsequently admits that none of it is entirely correct is beyond me. The software is meant to provide genuinely insightful feedback to track user activity and potential conversions, however, the development team.
Pros:
Marketing automation features are very helpful.
Cons:
- There is no escalation process for customer support requests that are above a customer support reps expertise - Email report data is BS and one of the heads of IT at SharpSpring admitted it. The report data within SS differs from the data exported; the excel file has duplicate headline titles with different meanings/data; email data is shit - we sent test emails internally and didn't open them and it shows we opened them 3 times in SS and 4 times in the exported report - Life of the Lead is the most valuable data within SS and yet you cannot automate based on any of it - Life Of The Lead duplicates email "opens" and "clicks" based on how many people are in the chain, giving a false view of engagement from customers - Email clicks are a load of BS - it shows that emails were opened and every link clicked within 10 seconds of sending because of spam bots/filters. SharpSpring doesn't filter this data out, so we can't tell the difference between what's real and what's not. "Can't we export the excel sheet and do that filtering ourselves?" Nope - as stated before, one of the head IT guys at SharpSpring validated our concerns that the excel email report is indeed, shit data. None of it is usable - Rather than creating a backlog of needed updates and releasing them as a batch update on non-business-hours, SharpSpring product development teams push updates during work hours, breaking crucial functionality for 3+ hours/week, leaving our sales staff twiddling thumbs and complaining.
Constant Contact Response
3 years ago
Chris, we're so sorry to hear about the experience and issues you've had with SharpSpring. We thoroughly appreciate that you have expressed specific concerns and hopefully we have the opportunity to regain your trust. I know the team is actively looking into these issues, but if there's anything additional we can do in the meantime, please feel free to reach out to us at [email protected]
David
A Comprehensive Review of SharpSpring
Comments: Overall, I am very pleased with SharpSpring. The platform is incredibly powerful and user-friendly. I have been able to achieve great results with my marketing campaigns and I'm sure that I will continue to do so in the future.
Pros:
SharpSpring is an incredibly intuitive and powerful marketing automation platform. It is incredibly easy to get started and its robust feature set allows for deep customization and segmentation of customer data.
Cons:
The pricing of SharpSpring can be a bit steep for smaller businesses. The customer support can also be a bit slow at times.
