Marketing Cloud Account Engagement vs SharpSpring

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Our analysts compared Marketing Cloud Account Engagement vs SharpSpring based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Marketing Automation Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Product Basics

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) aligns marketing and sales to meet KPI goals. A variety of tools help users measure and optimize efforts to produce better results. It offers powerful features like lead management, automated email marketing, analytics generated by AI to help augment the user experience, landing page generation, lead generation and more.

As part of the Salesforce ecosystem, it can seamlessly connect with other offerings to enhance data flow and more easily extend capabilities.
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SharpSpring is a cloud-based sales and marketing platform that facilitates building automation rules to send customers with dynamic content or targeted emails based on their interests. It also provides adequate support for marketing agencies.

Features include behavior-based email, campaign tracking, dynamic landing pages, a blog builder, anonymous visitor ID, a form builder, reporting and analytics, social media management, and integrations. Lead scoring helps track a lead’s page visits, demographics and engagement to enhance nurturing efforts.
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$449 Monthly
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Product Assistance

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Videos
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Product Insights

  • Generate Leads: Ensure pipelines which are fully stocked with leads using automation, smart forms, landing pages and more. 
  • Customizable Dashboards: Access a bird’s-eye view of the marketing workflow and reports with custom views and shareable insights. 
  • Enable Re-Engagement: Re-engage dormant leads by sending automated emails based on triggers such as time, interactions and other custom parameters. 
  • Improve Analysis: Associate webinars and live events with revenue and analyze customer interactions across channels. Leverage Google AdWords to track prospects for paid search. 
  • Streamline Lead Management: Find the right leads and deliver targeted messaging for seamless digital marketing. 
  • Align Sales and Marketing: Unify the efforts of marketing and sales teams using engaging campaigns, CRM integration and real-time alerts. 
  • ROI Reporting: Track, evaluate and measure campaign performance to tweak variables on the fly and meet KPIs. 
  • Lifecycle Reporting: Analyze a sales funnel, identify stuck opportunities and adapt marketing efforts according to requirements. 
  • Improve Marketing Performance: Discover insights quickly with campaign health metrics and then make adjustments in real time. 
  • Visualize Campaigns: Visual tools make it easy to see where intervention might be needed or how customers travel through the sales funnel. 
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  • Email Templates: Leverage prebuilt email templates optimized for mobile devices and any email client, including Outlook. The templates' prebuilt layouts can be edited and sent to customers on the fly. 
  • Folders Categorization: Stay organized by grouping emails and templates in folders. 
  • Document Storage: Store documents such as case studies, white papers and marketing sheets with a content delivery network. 
  • Custom Fields: Capture detailed information about customers, including buyer personas, customer service and other attributes. 
  • Buyer Personas: Create buyer personas using a customizable template that can be stored on the platform. Use personas to segment content and campaigns, delivering personalized content. 
  • Cart Abandonment Follow-up: Set up email workflows to automatically follow up with leads that forego their purchases. 
  • Important Page Visits: Mark specific areas of the website as “Important Pages” and the system will automatically boost lead scores for contacts who visit those pages. Set up automated workflows and lead nurturing campaigns for leads who visit those pages. 
  • Email Inbox Delivery: Identify daily priorities without logging into the platform with information about daily anonymous website visitors, leads, opportunities and customers delivered via email. 
  • Landing Page Templates: Create a series of linked pages to funnel visitors and prospects for lead generation by using predesigned templates. 
  • RSS Email Syndication: Automatically send email blog posts to a list of followers on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Customize with thumbnail images, titles, dates and other dynamic content. 
  • Content Page Templates: Offers a library of prebuilt index and content page templates that are mobile responsive and can be edited from the blog editor. 
  • Campaign Tagging: Create custom categories and common tags such as email, Google, referrals, organic and offline to group, ungroup or break down campaigns. 
  • Social Notes: Promote internal collaboration with social avatars, “Mark as Read” tags and a clear conversation timeline. 
  • Webinar Integrations: Promote, share and improve web conferences through integration with WebEx and GoToWebinar. Capture lead data from sign-ups and link a dedicated sales funnel to each event to follow up with automated email workflows. 
  • CMS Compatibility: Supports all major content management systems, including WordPress, Drupal, ExpressionEngine, Joomla and more. 
  • Reminders: Create reminders from any page and attach them to opportunities and contacts to schedule a follow-up. Reminders can also be combined with social notes to assign tasks. 
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  • Campaign Visualizer: Tracks marketing and sales efforts as customers move through the sales funnel and provides a high-level overview of a campaign. 
  • Dynamic Content: Improve lead generation and customer experiences with dynamic and useful content specifically tailored to a target audience’s needs, wants and interests. 
  • Landing Page Builder: Standard, easy-to-use and customizable templates enable better customer service and increase lead counts. 
  • Smart Forms: Collect information at every interaction and enrich data pools with a simple drag-and-drop form builder. 
  • Organic and Paid Search Tools: Integrate with Google AdWords to determine ROI and then analyze keywords to improve performance. 
  • Social Posting: Track prospects and leads in social platforms. Schedule posts at optimal times for the greatest impact. 
  • Email Builder: The email builder is simple to use, yet powerful, and can be attached to any number of automated tools and tracking measures. 
  • Einstein: Gain insights on campaigns to optimize marketing assets and find new audiences using machine learning. 
  • Email Reporting: Track metrics like clicks, opens and more. Provides SPAM analysis and preview services to extend email reporting. 
  • Auto Segmentation: Deliver a personalized experience with dynamic content by leveraging automatic contact segmentation. 
  • Activity Tracking: Track prospect activities and maintain an activity history from a CRM, Gmail or smartphones. 
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  • Email Builder: Offers drag-and-drop email editor and HTML customization. Dynamic features and smart tags automate the process of customizing email messages. Designs can also be saved as templates for later use. 
  • Email Campaign Testing: Native integration with Litmus facilitates testing and previewing emails on dozens of applications, email providers and devices. 
  • Behavioral-Based Email Tracking: Gives complete information on visitor activity, including page visits, form fills, webinar sign-ups and white paper downloads from email campaigns. 
  • Web Form Builder: Provides: 
    • A drag-and-drop tool with auto-completion capabilities to design and customize web forms and CTA buttons.
    • The option to view and test forms before making them live.
    • CSS to customize forms.
    • Data sharing with other applications and databases by adding a Postback URL to sync information automatically.
  • Customer Segmentation: Offers lists that automatically update as contacts meet the list’s criteria such as location, visited pricing pages, product interest and more. Map a field in web forms to preset buyer personas, setting up questions accordingly. Responses aid list segmentation, allowing follow up with personalized information. 
  • Workflow Builder: Supports automation tasks and leverages branching logic, task combination and action groups to devise a path buyers should take. Responses use custom triggers and filters to personalize lead journeys. 
  • Lead Scoring: Scores leads based on engagement. Custom metrics allow increasing or decreasing scores, including page visits, filled out forms, content downloads and specific demographic characteristics. Assigning a decay rate on leads automatically decreases scores over time. 
  • Real-Time Alerts: Automated workflows can trigger notifications via email and SMS whenever a sale is made, a high-quality lead is created or a prospect moves along their buyer’s journey. 
  • Pipeline View: Create and customize custom deal stages to track the progress of an opportunity. Provides a drag-and-drop interface to move opportunities across deal stages to get an overview of each prospect’s progress through the sales cycle. 
  • VisitorID: Tracks anonymous visitor IP addresses with reverse IP lookup to identify companies that visit the business’ website. Records page visits, recognizes visitors’ views on an important page, determines where they came from and identifies which search terms led them to the website. 
  • Customer Timeline: Offers a timeline view of individual buyers’ journeys to track significant events associated with each contact. 
  • Landing Page Builder: Provides a WYSIWYG interface with HTML for customization. Pages can automatically adapt based on visitor preferences and behaviors. Supports optimizing for mobile and creating a series of linked pages to design a funnel for visitors and prospects. 
  • Content Calendar: Offers an interactive application with daily, weekly or monthly list views of all the planned content such as social activity, scheduled emails and blog posts. Share social media content immediately or at a later date. 
  • Site Tracking: Embeds a custom tracking code snippet in landing pages, websites, microsites or blogs to track every visit. Add media center links to track visits to external resources. 
  • Blog Builder: Provides a WYSIWYG blog and website editor that’s customizable with HTML views. Includes dynamic content that can automatically adapt to resonate with different audiences based on who they are, what interests them and how they behave on the blog and website. Also has an embeddable social sharing widget. 
  • Google Ads Integration: Tracks the ROI of paid search engine marketing campaigns and derives keyword data. 
  • Campaign Analytics Tracking: Automatically tracks website visitors conversions from the moment they first visit till the final sale. Detailed campaign analytics track campaign ROI goals and work offline without the need to set up conversion funnels. 
  • Social Listening: Find and filter social conversations on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn by hashtag, keyword and more. Spots customer queries, captures interactions to identify prospects that are ready to buy and offers affiliate programs to promote current customers to help close the next deal. 
  • Custom Reports: Customizable across campaigns, email, social media and CRM to include business-specific metrics. Measures and predicts present and future performance, turning data into insights. 
  • Open API: Developers have access to a platform-agnostic, open API that supports programming languages such as Java, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Python and more for building custom integrations with third-party software. 
  • Third-Party Integration: An app marketplace provides access to prebuilt extensions and integrations across categories such as CRM, accounting, analytics, forms and more, extending capabilities. 
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Product Ranking

#3

among all
Marketing Automation Software

#7

among all
Marketing Automation Software

Find out who the leaders are

Analyst Rating Summary

78
82
100
86
85
35
100
0
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AI-Based Capabilities
Compliance and Data Security
Lead Management
Email Campaign Management
Dashboard and Reporting
Email Campaign Management
Mobile Capabilities
Text Campaign Management
Lead Nurturing
Lead Generation

Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement
SharpSpring
+ Add Product + Add Product
AI-Based Capabilities Campaign Management Compliance And Data Security Dashboard And Reporting Email Campaign Management Lead Generation Lead Management Lead Nurturing Mobile Capabilities Platform Capabilities Social Media Campaign Management Text Campaign Management 100 85 100 92 94 90 100 67 40 72 50 50 86 35 0 54 100 91 90 92 100 0 50 100 0 25 50 75 100
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71%
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we're gathering data
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we're gathering data
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we're gathering data
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91%
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86%
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27%
we're gathering data
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we're gathering data
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we're gathering data
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50%
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100%
14%
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86%
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Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

31%
0%
69%
77%
0%
23%

User Sentiment Summary

Good User Sentiment 3522 reviews
Great User Sentiment 1663 reviews
79%
of users recommend this product

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement has a 'good' User Satisfaction Rating of 79% when considering 3522 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

87%
of users recommend this product

SharpSpring has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 87% when considering 1663 user reviews from 3 recognized software review sites.

3.9 (1740)
4.5 (571)
4.12 (587)
n/a
4.1 (532)
4.5 (620)
4.0 (26)
n/a
3.8 (637)
3.9 (472)

Awards

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated Marketing Cloud Account Engagement and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for AI-Based Capabilities, Compliance and Data Security and Lead Management.

AI-Based Capabilities Award
Compliance and Data Security Award
Lead Management Award

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated SharpSpring and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Email Campaign Management, Mobile Capabilities and Text Campaign Management.

Email Campaign Management Award
Mobile Capabilities Award
Text Campaign Management Award

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Integration: More than 90% of users who mention integration noted the benefit of being able to connect Marketing Cloud Account Engagement with the wider Salesforce ecosystem.
Email Marketing: Users can seamlessly set up emails, create content, measure performance and report results, according to all reviews about email marketing.
Lead Generation: It offers robust tools for lead generation and nurturing, as reported by 85% of user feedback on these features.
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User-Friendly: The platform is easy to use, and the kanban boards, the marketing automation and drip campaigns are easy to adapt to, in the experience of 69% of users referring to this aspect.
Robust Lead Tracking: Over 60% of reviews about this feature appreciate the end-to-end tracking functionality for marketing and sales data, with the ability to generate, track, filter and score leads.
Customer Service: All reviews on support say it’s professional and highly responsive.
Updates: The system constantly keeps updating with new features and offers updated dashboards for use, a benefit according to 75% of users mentioning updates.
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Cost: The product costs more than the functionality it offers, according to all the users who mention this aspect.
Complexity: It’s difficult to understand and involves a lot of clicks, as observed by 95% of users mentioning this aspect.
Reporting: The lack of vigorous reporting tools is a matter of concern, according to 85% of user feedback on the topic.
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Mobile App: Every user referencing the mobile app suggests it’s inoperable, not relevant and lacks basic functionalities.
Limited Design Flexibility: The landing page builder lacks the ability to add custom code, restricting users' ability to fully customize their pages and potentially hindering brand consistency or advanced functionality.
Email Deliverability Issues: Some users report challenges with emails landing in spam folders, which can impact campaign performance and lead to missed opportunities. It's important to note that email deliverability can be influenced by various factors, so it's recommended to investigate and address potential causes to improve deliverability rates.
Reporting Limitations: Users mention that the reporting features could be more robust, particularly in terms of attribution and providing deeper insights into campaign performance. This might make it difficult to accurately measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts and identify areas for improvement.
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Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is liked among users for the seamless integration it offers with Salesforce, leading to stronger marketing capabilities. It also offers various functionalities to make email marketing more powerful and is relied upon for lead generation. However, the cost of the product might be too much for smaller companies, especially given the lack of reporting options. The complexities of the platform also make it difficult to get used to according to the majority of reviews. Overall, the product is a good pick for larger enterprises seeking robust marketing automation, particularly those already using Salesforce that can leverage the tight integration for enhanced marketing.

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SharpSpring combines CRM and marketing automation functionalities to provide robust, user-friendly features and performance. Users particularly appreciate its lead tracking and regular software updates that improve and add features. Comprehensive customer support is another prominent benefit. Some product limitations include a lack of display functionality in the form and landing page builders and a mobile app that isn’t user-friendly and lacks responsiveness. Custom stylesheets are also time-consuming to work with. Despite some drawbacks, it can be a solid option for businesses looking for a budget-friendly and intuitive sales and marketing solution.

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