It is a flexible platform that easily integrates with other tools and has annual and monthly payment options at a fraction of the cost of competitors. It includes the same number of contacts with a much lower onboarding fee. It is the most flexible of all available options and offers fantastic features like behavior-based email marketing, native or 3rd party CRM integration, landing page and blog builders, universal CMS compatibility, social media management, and integration with hundreds of applications. It is also the most accessible platform to use, with less than 1/3 of the cost of its competition.
Platform
Customization: It allows administrators to customize and accommodate their unique processes which include the ability to create custom objects, rules, fields, views, and calculations.
Workflow Capability: It automates the process which requires a series of steps requiring intervention by different users. Administrators may write rules to establish when and who the user needs to complete the steps; it also alerts users when they need to take action.
User, Role, and Access Management: It grants access to select objects, data, features, and more, based upon the user role, groups, etc.
Internationalization: It enables users to transact business with the same content in multiple currencies and languages.
Sandbox/ Test Environments: It allows administrators to make and test changes to the CRM deployment quickly. After which, the admins can easily migrate the changes into the “production” and “live” environment.
Document & Content Management: It allows the central interface to consume, publish and edit content.
Performance and Reliability: It allows users to complete tasks quickly.
Output Document Generation: It allows administrators to create templates that enable users to generate dynamic documents in several formats quickly.
SalesForce Automation
Contact & Account Management: It stores and retrieves information associated with customer accounts and contacts, and also tracks company-wide information and communication.
Partner Relationship Management (PRM): It aids partner management by tracking sales opportunities and channels partner leads. It also provides a partner portal to collaborate with channels on sales opportunities and to share product, quoting, pricing, ordering, and training information.
Opportunity & Pipeline Management: It manages sales pipelines and opportunities through their lifecycle from lead to order like tracking stages, probabilities of close, and values.
Task/ Activity Management: It tracks and manages tasks and activities and also assigns due dates and calendar integration to operate daily schedules.
Territory & Quota Management: It assigns and manages territories and sales quotas.
Desktop Integration: It allows users to sync their Calendar, Email, and Contact tools with their CRM system.
Product & Price List Management: It manages the prices associated with the products numbers after you enter them.
Quote & Order Management: It permits the users to create quotes to be provided to customers that contain products, associated discounts and actual prices.
Customer Contract Management: It is essential management of contracts made with customers, that also includes negotiating the terms and conditions, ensuring compliance with them, documenting and agreeing on any amendments that may arise during its execution.
Marketing Automation
Email Marketing: It allows users to send bulk emails, and include features like social media integration, built-in Email templates, sign up forms, subscriber list management, success rate reports, auto-responders, and AB testing.
Campaign Management: It optimizes processes for organizations to develop and deploy multiple-channel marketing campaigns for targeting individuals and groups and track the effect of those campaigns, over time, by customer segment.
Lead Management: It allows users to manage and track leads through a systematic process, that typically involves steps like lead generation, customer enquiry, inquiry capture, lead filtering, lead grading, lead distribution and lead qualification.
Marketing ROI Analytics: It enables analysis of the effectiveness of the organization’s marketing activities.
Customer Support
Case Management: It tracks help requests reported by customers and offers a resolution.
Customer Support Portal: It provides a convenient way for customers to get answers to inquiries, post-service issues, view order histories, place orders, and gain access to other information contained in the knowledge base.
Knowledge Base: It is an information repository which provides a means for information to be collected, organized, searched, shared, and utilized.
Call Center Features: It allows customer support professionals to get access to all information required to support the customer, including case history, customer information, and related social activity of the customer.
Support Analytics: It aids in the analysis of customer support activities to optimize processes and tools.
Integration
Data Import & Export Tools: It is the ability to input, modify and extract data from the application in bulk.
Integration APIs
Application Programming Interface – It is a specification for how the application communicates with other software and also enables integration of logic, data, objects, with other software applications.
Mobile & Social
Social Collaboration Features: It enables multiple users to interact by sharing information to achieve a common goal and focuses on the identification of groups and spaces, where messages are explicitly directed to the group and the group activity is seen by everyone alike.
Social Network Integration: It uses public social networks to listen and engage with customers and also lets them filter what’s essential and respond timely.
Mobile User Support: It allows the software to be used hassle-free on multiple devices such as tablets and phones.
Reporting & Analytics
Reporting: It enables reporting of all the data contained within the system, with the ability to create ad-hoc reports.
Dashboard: It is an easy-to-read, real-time user interface, that shows a graphical presentation of the historical trends and the current status of an organization’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that enable quick, informed decisions.
Forecasting: It enables the projection of sales revenue, based on historical sales data, analysis of market trends and surveys, and salespersons’ estimates.
Web Analytics: It tracks which pages customers visit, captures the history for sales intelligence and lead scoring, and sends alerts to sales reps about the customer’s web activity.
ROI Analytics: It measures leads, pipeline, revenue, prospects generated, investment, and ROI by marketing programs and channels.
Revenue Analytics: It analyzes how leads flow through the funnel by measuring stage to stage conversion velocity and rates. It successfully allocates revenue credit and pipeline among all the marketing activities that have successfully touched an opportunity.
SEO/ Keyword Analytics: It tracks and monitors how you rank for relevant keywords on major search engines and compare your overall performance to the competitors.
Email Marketing
Personalizing and Building Emails: It designs and creates emails with an editor and manages templates.
Sending Outbound Emails: It creates specific lists, manages and schedules email sending.
Manage Email Deliverability: It ensures inbox delivery, unsubscribe processing, includes opt-in management, bounce handlings, email previews, and delivery monitoring.
Automated Email Responses: It sets up automated nurturing emails based on online activities, events, and lead scores.
Online Marketing
Landing Pages and Forms: It builds customized lead capture forms and landing pages for specific marketing campaigns to capture the right qualifying information and maximize conversion.
Dynamic Content: It dynamically customizes emails, forms, and landing pages for specific segments of prospects and customers.
A/B Testing: It tests alternate versions of landing pages, emails, and forms. It helps maximize response rates and increase conversion.
Mobile Optimized: It supports online forms, mobile-optimized emails, and landing pages.
Search Tracking and Optimization: It tracks the performance of links and keywords in major search engines, performance and search rankings. Improves page-level SEO with tools and enhances page performance and integrates with Google AdWords.
Lead Management
Marketing Lead Database: It is the system of record for your most important marketing asset, i.e. your contacts and leads and also includes a view of all marketing interactions between your company and each prospect, including email clicks, website visits, scoring chances, and data history.
Data Quality Management: It consists of cleansing, deduplication, and appending your database.
Segmentation: It segments your database and builds a list of contacts and target leads.
Lead Scoring and Grading: It automatically qualifies, and scores lead based on prospect online behaviors and demographics, and frequency.
Lead Nurturing: It automates drip marketing campaigns that send relevant messages based on prospect behaviors over time and pre-defined campaign steps.
Online Behavior Tracking: It tracks which emails prospects click and open, what keywords they use, what web-pages they visit, and even what they say on social networks.
Automated Alerts and Tasks: It provides real-time sales alerts over email, create tasks automatically.
CRM Lead Integration: It syncs contacts, lead, account, and opportunity information with your CRM system.
Campaign Management
Program Management: It manages marketing programs and campaigns across multiple channels, including video campaigns, online ads, mobile, social media, and virtual events. Also optimizes program assets such as emails, landing pages, campaigns, and lists and tracks program results, objectives, and costs to assess the ROI.
Event/ Webinar Marketing: It streamlines event processes, including registration, personalized invitations, reminders, and post-event follow-up. Integrates with online meeting tools like Adobe Connect, WebEx, GoToWebinar.
Calendaring: It maintains a marketing calendar across multiple groups and manages the calendar for the entire marketing department, from content to promotions to PR.
Budgeting: It manages all aspects of marketing investments, including assigning top-down budgets to various divisions and groups, planning marketing spending across programs, ensuring budget compliance, tracking open-to-spend, reconciling plans with actual invoices and coordinating workflows and permissions.
Social
Social Listening: It monitors what contacts and leads say on sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn, and online communities.
Social Sharing: It adds intelligent social share buttons to your content and campaigns and tracks who is sharing your driving conversions and content.
Social Campaigns: It schedules automated posts to multiple social accounts, integrates with URL shortening services and measures likes, replies, comments, and retweets.
Social Engagement: It establishes that social apps, including sweepstakes, polls, and referral programs, enhance audience engagement.
Social Ads: It amplifies community stories and brands; helps optimize social ad campaigns in real-time and reaches customers by social profile and activity.
Social Analytics: It uncovers customer sentiment, identifies trends to accommodate the customer better.
Brand Safety: It reports and monitors social media activity about brand names or campaigns to identify misleading, fraudulent, or compromising mentions.
Data Sourcing
Data Sourcing: It compiles data from a breadth of either external or internal sources.
Exporting & Sharing Data: It enables the user to communicate data by securely exporting it.
Multi-Device Data Visualization: It allows users to view data on several devices.
Interactive Dashboards: The dashboards which are interactive and customizable so that the user can view sales information the way it fits the needs.
Data Segmentation: It enables the user to prospect data or segment customers in meaningful ways such as by region or industry.
Predictive Analytics
Lead Scoring: It provides rankings or scores of each prospect based on the data provided.
Opportunity Scoring: It provides insights to determine which deals already in the pipeline have the best chance of closing.
Risk Analysis: It warns sales teams of accounts that may be at risk of being lost.
Live Forecasting: It provides live customer data so that sales organizations forecasts stay up-to-date.
Sales Management
Live Pipeline Management: It updates every time a change is made, allowing users to create and trace a deal through the pipeline.
Sales Gamification: It enables competition between sales teams by providing things like scoreboards and challenges.
Account-Based Analytics: It provides insightful data at the account level to arm salespeople with essential information possible.
Activity Tracking: It enables sales managers to stay on top of their game by providing visibility into customer communication.
Marketing Operations
ROI Tracking: It helps marketers measure return on investment (ROI) by analyzing campaign effectiveness.
Data Collection: It gathers data about the impact, effectiveness, and marketing campaigns reach.
Customer Insights: It reports and collects data relating to preferences, customer journeys, and history.
Multi-User Access: It allows multiple users access to a transparent overview of analytics, dashboards, and campaign results.
Spend Management: It includes features for forecasting, budgeting, and managing marketing investments.
White Label: It offers white labelling services for resellers or agencies to customize platform branding.
Campaign Activity
Campaign Insights: It analyzes current marketing and historical campaigns to inform future strategy.
Reports and Dashboards: It creates reports and dashboards to analyze results of campaigns.
Campaign Stickiness: It identifies which marketing campaigns resolved in closed or open opportunities.
Multichannel Tracking: It collects marketing campaign performance data across multiple channels.
Brand Optimization: It provides opportunities for businesses or brands to modify or fix existing or future campaigns.
Predictive Analytics: It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to suggest actions for optimization and predict campaign outcomes.
Templates
Text and Themes: It allows users to edit themes and text on email templates.
Stock Images: It provides a library of stock images to use for emails.
Proofing: It offers email proofing tools.
Pre-Made: It offers pre-made email templates.
Build: It allows users to make their email templates.
HTML: It uses drag-and-drop HTML editing to create email templates.
Logistics
Analytics: It provides analytics reporting so that users can see how their campaigns perform.
Issues: It allows users to identify the potential problems that would stop emails from sending.
Integrate: It integrates with email marketing tools and email.
Attribution Modeling
Single-Touch Attribution/Multi-Touch Attribution: It uses an attribution model that gives credit to one touchpoint in the customer’s journey.
Algorithmic Attribution: It uses machine learning to create an attribution model.
Cross-Device Attribution: It tracks customer interactions across desktop and mobile.
Offline Attribution: It allows users to track touchpoints through offline channels.
Custom Attribution: It allows the user to create a custom attribution model.
Marketing
B2B Attribution: It provides multiple features for B2B marketers.
B2C Attribution: Provides features for B2C marketers.
Marketing Channels: It enables marketers to view and track multiple marketing channels.
Integrations: It integrates with other marketing, sales, and advertising software.
Reporting
Dashboards: It provides customizable dashboards that allow users to manage and view data.
Data Visualizations: It displays attribution data through easy-to-interpret graphs and charts.
Custom Reporting: It allows users to make custom reports.
Content Management
Content Calendar: It enables users to schedule posts in social media in advance and view all scheduled content in a calendar or timeline.
Content Library: It allows users to publish brand content from a shared library.
Content Curation: It provides tools for sharing and curating relevant content across social channels.
Collaboration
Shared Inbox: It collects all customer inquiries and messages from multiple social media channels and delivers them to unified inboxes.
Approval Workflows: It automates the content approval process to ensure social posts get approved by clients or managers before publishing.
Users and Permissions: It allows administrators to give permissions for different teams or users to access features for specific platforms.
Platform Basics
Dynamic Segmentation: It provides users with the ability to segment their users based on varying criteria, i.e. product features, email opens.
Journey Optimization: It automates the optimization and testing of customer-facing campaigns and messaging.
Platform Data
Journey Reporting: It gives the ability to visualize and uncover how users move through your website, product(s), and marketing campaigns.
Trends Reporting: It provides the ability to measure product usage of campaign performance by source, feature, and other trending metrics.
Dashboards: It provides dashboards to join and visualize qualitative and quantitative customer journey data.
Advanced-Data Filtering: It provides data filtering capabilities to help users filter, drill down, aggregate, sort, and group customer journey data.
Platform Additional Functionality
Journey Mapping: It creates the ability to create visualizations, maps of past or future customer journeys.
Integrations: It integrates with sales, marketing analytics, and e-commerce-related software to provide a source of truth for customer journey analytics.
Automated Alerts: It provides the ability to set up automatic alerts to drive actions and improve customer experiences.
Templates: It provides ready-made templates for the creation of a simplified landing page.
Advanced Customization: It allows users to add custom code and edit a page’s HTML or CSS code.
Content Library: It allows users to manage and upload content such as videos, photos, and audio.
Page Optimization
A/B Testing: It enables users to test changes to a page by measuring conversion and administering the shift to a portion of visitors.
Mobile Responsive: It creates mobile responsive pages for optimized viewing on mobile devices.
Web Analytics: It gives users insight into views, unique page conversions, device type and visitor location.
SEO: It optimizes content to increase search engine result rankings.
SharpSpring is an email marketing tool that is used to reach out to clients, market to leads, create remarketing campaigns and drip campaigns for potential leads and also to create campaigns that convert to retention and sales. It is used by both the client care teams and the sales teams to help the business grow and has useful templates which help in creating emails that are functional sales tools and look great too. It has emerged as a great automation tool for re-targeting and drip campaigns and is very handy for small to mid-range companies, who are looking forward to building email marketing campaigns.
