SharpSpring from Constant Contact

SharpSpring does everything you would expect at a competitive price. The tool is a very capable marketing automation system, with good email and automation capabilities, as well as some great tracking and social media features.

Reporting is good, but not as good as the best (which is HubSpot in my opinion). Although the capabilities don't hold us back, it would be nice to be able to have easy ways to measure the performance of landing pages/funnels.

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.

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.

Marketing automation features are very helpful.

- 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.

What I mostly appreciated about using sharpspring was the diverse range of features within the platform, since they identify and capture prospect information much easier; wich is very valuable in terms of sales optimization.

Sharpspring has a very accelerated rate for putting out new features, to keep up and compete with other platforms, wich is a pro; however, the new features often need updates. Video Calling, for instance, was great by the time the pandemic began; however, it might not be as established as other video conference competitors.