SharpSpring

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm a marketing and communications strategist at a branding and design agency. We provide packaging design, retail design, and graphic design.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with SharpSpring?

We were looking for a platform to house our contacts, provide marketing automation, and store our data. We also wanted our sales and marketing team to access everything they needed in one place.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

SharpSpring offers an all-in-one platform that helps us with sales and marketing. Our sales team uses it to track and score leads. Whenever someone visits our website or fills out a form, we can see the pages they look at. We also know if a subscriber opens an email. Furthermore, it allows us to turn leads into opportunities and put them through a funnel. Our team can also create reports and so on.

Meanwhile, our marketing uses SharpSpring’s platform to send email newsletters and blasts to our subscribers, create landing pages, build forms for our site, and so on. Additionally, we can schedule social media posts and store media files. All of these things can be automated through the platform. For example, we’ve just created an automated email campaign that will send 90 different emails.

What is the team composition?

We’ve interacted with several teammates because they assign us to a different person each time we need help. They have specialists for email marketing, form creation, contact lists, technical issues, and so on.

How did you come to work with SharpSpring?

We looked at a lot of similar companies, but SharpSpring offered the best price.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent about $15,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project started in September 2019, and it’s ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

Our email metrics have increased since we moved to SharpSpring. Our leading metric for success is our click-through rate, which has gone up by 25%. We also appreciate the automation capabilities that they offer — it’s really allowed us to scale up our email marketing.

How did SharpSpring perform from a project management standpoint?

Their project management is good. SharpSpring has a pretty good helpdesk system — we would send them a ticket, and they’d assign an expert depending on what we need help with. They’re really good at getting back to us with solutions and insights within a day. Our communication is usually through email.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their price point is lower than some of their competitors, but they provide similar capabilities. SharpSpring is always trying to give us more value by adding new features, which we appreciate.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They could be more proactive in reaching out. We always have to contact them first, so it would be helpful to have a dedicated resource working on our account.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Make sure you have a clean and up-to-date database before starting the project. We had a lot of outdated information when we moved to their platform, which created a lot of work.