Marketo vs SharpSpring

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Our analysts compared Marketo 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.

Marketo Software Tool

Product Basics

Marketo Engage offers a cloud-based marketing platform for companies to manage and monitor customer relationships. Its integrated modules include marketing automation, social marketing, email marketing, lead nurturing, budget management, analytics, sales insight and website personalization.

It’s designed to serve both B2B and B2C environments. There’s also an active marketers’ community named the Marketo Marketing Nation in which marketers around the globe share their knowledge, ideas and best practices.
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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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Chromebook
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Android
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Cloud
On-Premise
Mobile
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On-Premise
Mobile

Product Assistance

Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
Forum
Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support
Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
Forum
Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support

Product Insights

  • Web Forms: Generate complete customer profiles via social form fills and progressive forms that can recognize known website visitors. Also, ask new questions to visitors. 
  • AI-Powered Content Suggestions: Automatically present relevant content across multiple channels using machine learning and predictive analytics, which identifies top-performing content. Choose content recommendations from the website assets such as videos, e-books, case studies and blog posts. 
  • Marketo Sales Connect: Connect sales and marketing with a single workflow for automated and personalized inbound and outbound engagements. 
  • Better Focus: Sales reps can prioritize and close deals by accessing real-time insights about customers from both sales and marketing touchpoints. 
  • Team Coordination: Plan, coordinate and share marketing activities through a centralized calendar. This simplifies scheduling individual components of a single campaign or coordinating activities across teams. 
  • Campaign Control: Build and modify marketing campaigns directly in the calendar with simple drag-and-drop functionality. 
  • Data Tracking: Track goals and progress with calendar HD, using rotating calendar views and custom background images. 
  • Customer Segmentation: The built-in Audience Hub tool automatically updates members in each segment as their behaviors or demographics change. 
  • AI-Powered Account Profiling: Uses AI-based best-fit indicators for converting into ABM filters to personalize and deploy ABM campaigns by activating the target account list. Also provides predictive customer profile models, custom model tuning and recommendations based on predictive scoring. 
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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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  • Search Engine Optimization: Compares keyword rankings of competitors, provides recommendations for new keywords for higher ranking web pages, and discovers inbound link opportunities based on targeted keywords and competitors’ links. 
  • CRM Integration: Offers native integrations for Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications to provide a bi-directional data sync that auto-updates every five minutes. Also facilitates custom-configured integrations for various CRM platforms such as NetSuite, Oracle, SAP Sales Cloud and SugarCRM. 
  • Lead Scoring: Rank customers by assigning positive and negative scores based on demographics or their likelihood to exhibit certain behaviors, such as making a new purchase, being open to cross-sell offers and more. 
  • Email Marketing: Supports both batch and real-time triggered emails. Helps: 
    • Create personalized campaigns for mobile, web, ads and more using a visual editor and responsive templates.
    • Personalize content based on inferred information from website visitors, such as company, country, zip code and city, helping segment and localize content.
    • Use browsing behavior to identify product interest for target accounts.
  • Mobile Marketing: 
    • Helps connect with customers on the go, track inputs from different marketing channels and respond via mobile apps.
    • Sends push notifications and in-app messages, and incorporates beacon and geo-fencing technology to send location-relevant messages to customers.
    • Visual dashboards measure overall performance by opens, installs and session duration across multiple apps.
  • Social Media Marketing: Facilitates running social polls, sweepstakes and referral campaigns with built-in social share buttons and shareable videos. Integrates social metrics into marketing reports to help measure the impact of social activity on conversions and revenue. 
  • Digital Ad Campaigns: Connects with Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and other advertising platforms, and targets customers with relevant ad campaigns. 
  • Analytics and Reporting: Automatically connect data from different sources into a unified platform. Enables: 
    • Mapping and measuring a customer journey at every stage through shareable, prebuilt dashboards and ad-hoc reporting tools.
    • Designing custom models with the help of AI.
    • Leveraging a suite of attribution models.
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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

#6

among all
Marketing Automation Software

#7

among all
Marketing Automation Software

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Analyst Rating Summary

82
82
64
86
99
35
75
0
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Lead Nurturing
Campaign Management
Dashboard and Reporting
Lead Management
Email Campaign Management
Email Campaign Management
Mobile Capabilities
Text Campaign Management
Lead Nurturing
Lead Generation

Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

Marketo
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 64 99 75 94 88 68 90 100 78 81 88 43 86 35 0 54 100 91 90 92 100 0 50 100 0 25 50 75 100
43%
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57%
86%
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14%
100%
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29%
0%
71%
67%
0%
33%
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
91%
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9%
40%
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60%
85%
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15%
100%
0%
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57%
0%
43%
82%
0%
18%
90%
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10%
90%
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10%
100%
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83%
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17%
70%
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30%
100%
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82%
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18%
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
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88%
0%
12%
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0%
100%
0%
0%
100%
100%
0%
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Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

63%
0%
37%
77%
0%
23%

User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 4522 reviews
Great User Sentiment 1663 reviews
81%
of users recommend this product

Marketo has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 81% when considering 4522 user reviews from 3 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.

4.1 (2125)
4.5 (571)
4.2 (582)
4.5 (620)
4.0 (1815)
3.9 (472)

Awards

we're gathering data

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

Lead Management: The ability to route and categorize leads based on requirements is helpful for staying on top of customers inputs, in the view of 60% of users talking about lead management.
Customizable: All reviews on this aspect agree that the system is highly customizable and offers email templates that can be created as per requirements.
Automation: Marketing and sales automation make it easy to use and eliminate manual entry, according to 83% of users who reviewed this feature.
Reporting: Provides custom reports that fit the user requirement and are insightful, say 75% of users referencing reporting.
Integrations: Integrations for websites, event platforms, survey platforms, mobile apps and more, along with two-way integration with CRM systems, aid functionality, according to 75% of users mentioning integrations.
Customer Support: The training is great and customer support is responsive, according to 66% of reviews on this topic.
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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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Not User-Friendly: The functionality is cumbersome and pages take time to load, in the experience of 60% of users who reviewed the usability.
Dashboard: Campaign dashboards are outdated and the design needs an upgrade, according to 75% of users specifying this feature.
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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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As a part of the Adobe Experience Cloud, Marketo Engage supports both demand and account-based marketing strategies that work in sync with marketing and sales. It offers a range of features that help businesses operations. Notable features that users call out include custom reports, automation tools and lead management. It’s highly customizable and can integrate with a wide range of business systems. Users also appreciate the robust customer service. Some limitations include an inconvenient mobile app, outdated user interface for campaign dashboards and cumbersome functionality. Overall, businesses looking to automate their sales and marketing efforts will find the system has a lot to offer.

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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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