The Best Marketing Automation Software for Agencies in 2021

The best marketing automation software for agencies automates repetitive marketing tasks to allow more time for higher priority activities. Credit card failures, wrong tracking, over or underspending, consuming data pulls — we’ve all experienced it. But automation is no longer the future — it’s here now. 

If you’re not yet using automation to improve efficiency — and in turn, your agency’s bottom line — consider the following software automation statistics. After all, inefficiencies are costing many businesses 20-30% of their annual revenue.

Start implementing automation in your workflow and learn more about optimizing all of your campaigns with SharpSpring.

What is SharpSpring?

SharpSpring is an incredibly comprehensive, affordable platform that provides sales and marketing automation, CRM, and end-to-end customer lifecycle support for digital marketing agencies. SharpSpring is known for its Revenue Growth Platform. This wholly integrated Platform works with comprehensive sales and marking tools to create excellent revenue streams for seamless customer experiences through end-to-end solutions.

SharpSpring’s Platform is built to easily integrate multiple high-end marketing tech software and make it easily manageable on a single platform. Since individual contracts, invoices, relationship management, financials, and other applications need simultaneous coordination, SharpSpring integrates this stack on a user-friendly platform to allow greater flow and revenue growth. 

7 Benefits for Marketing Agencies

SharpSpring’s Revenue Growth Platform allows comprehensive behavioral tracking, an automated rules engine, and a unified database and CRM. It is a powerful, interactive, user-optimized platform that has a state-of-the-art web visitor tracking system, complete marketing automation, an advanced API, CRM synchronization, call tracking, and many other notable, valuable features. Let us look at some of the benefits for marketing agencies.

Benefit #1: Agency Profit Center

SharpSpring is built around agencies. The agency pricing is 1/10th the total cost of competitors, and SharpSpring also helps with price demarcations. Agencies can opt for monthly or annual packages with a single sign-on. The agency pricing model is cost-effective and designed specifically to keep digital marketing agencies at the forefront. The best benefit is that even though SharpSpring helps you with pricing, the final word is always the agencies. The agencies get to decide what to charge their clients. 

Once that’s done, you can start driving new recurring revenue from all the services associated with SharpSpring, along with additional license markups. SharpSpring will also help with other digital marketing efforts like email marketing, content, and landing pages. Agencies can get the power of marketing automation and quickly implement it to the total client base at hardly any cost. The agency starts making huge profits with very little investment in a fabulous automated system that integrates all the marketing technology within minutes. 

Benefit #2: Measurable Results

SharpSpring believes in measurable results. Many digital marketing agencies are swamped with clients that need to see a return on investment (ROI). The SharpSpring Platform allows for better integration between marketing tools and processes for sharing data. Doing this makes it easier to measure results. 

Since many marketing tools don’t work well together, getting measurable results in time becomes challenging. This issue goes away with the integrated marketing tech platform from SharpSpring. The Platform also offers financial planning and budgeting features according to strategies and client budgets and helps agencies allocate funding to optimize spending. Doing this allows for perfectly analyzed, measurable results in the long term that are directly correlated and compared to goals, milestones, and achievable. 

Benefit #3: Recurring Revenue Streams

The one benefit that only SharpSpring provides is recurring revenue streams. No other platform offers this service to agencies. SharpSpring helps to continually engage with leads in a manner that is conducive to new revenue generation monthly. Apart from this, the Platform also helps agencies transform regular project-based workflows into retainer-based, long-term relationships. 

With highly flexible architecture, the SharpSpring Platform assists with hundreds of integrations to increase efficiency to gain a larger market share and improve brand value. The Platform also helps agencies monetize licenses with additional clients and customers.

Benefit #4: Higher Lead Generation

Earlier, website traffic was the metric by which all digital marketing agencies gauged performance. Now, it is lead generation and conversion rates. Getting high-quality leads is a huge part of the SharpSpring Platform. The marketing automation helps B2B marketers identify the critical leads and convert them into successful sales. Marketing automation helps identify dead leads (those that do not perform an action like filling out a form) and allows marketers to concentrate on anonymous visitors. 

Lead generation and scoring aren’t restricted only to people who come to the website or perform a task; it is also about providing value to the content on the page. Often, anonymous leads do not complete the task and go unnoticed by the system. By identifying these visitors, marketers can track, analyze, and approach the visitors to convert them from leads to sales. 

Targeted emails to anonymous leads are one form of nurturing high-value leads that can increase conversion rates and eventually lead to sales. 

Benefit #5: Higher Conversion Rates

All clients look for higher conversion rates to meet their businesses growth goals. The Platform intelligently gauges buyer readiness for sales engagement leading to higher conversion rates. Following this conversion strategy allows for a seamless customer experience, leading to higher sales. 

The SharpSpring Platform is powered by customer data and allows for powerful buyer behavioral tracking. Strict automation rules allow buyers to naturally move from one step to the next and eventually taking the desired action, which leads to increased conversion rates. 

Benefit #6: Funnel Optimization

The SharpSpring Platform is ideal for conducting a deep dive into the analytics of the agency processes. After the agency signs on and the activation on the SharpSpring Platform takes place, the dedicated account manager runs the agency through the initial setup, site tracking, and user creations. After that, there is a detailed discussion about the individual digital marketing strategies for clients. The funnel is designed and optimized to meet all analytics and optimization processes. 

Agencies can benefit from funnel optimization like CRM reviews, client best practices, component reviews, web analytics, and email reporting. Funnel optimization also allows tips and tricks in dealing with multiple clients, conversion metrics, and sales resources. This optimization further helps customization according to agency size, teams, clients, and data strategy and analytics. 

Benefit #7: Time Management

SharpSpring allocates a dedicated business account manager who is wholly focused on the success of the agency. The training and support provided to the agency teams help tremendously funnel efforts, reduce idle time, and increase efficiency and time management. Since most agencies are overworked and have to manage multiple clients, ensure all the content is streamlined, checked, edited, and published within a given time frame, the pressure can get intense. 

SharpSpring helps reduce the stress by allocating and automating the workload, and they also provide unlimited sales assistance to help crack client calls and deals. The training they provide is invaluable for assisting sales and marketing teams with goals and deadlines. SharpSpring delivers all this with certified training programs designed especially for digital marketing agencies. 

SharpSpring’s High-Value Features for Agencies

The sales and automation platform from SharpSpring helps drive more leads, nurture them, convert the leads to sales, and optimize the entire funnel. Let us take you through some of the features that SharpSpring offers their agency partners:

• Automated Email Marketing: Personalized emails based on buyer behavior
• Live Campaign Tracking: ROI measurements with conversion costs vs. revenue 
• Behaviour Tracking
• Buyer Persona Segregation
• Lead Scoring and Management: Identify prospects and reach out
• Sales Notifications
• Customer Relationship Management: Managing leads, contacts, customer records, and engagement timelines
• Customized Reports and Integrated Dashboard: User-friendly dashboard that can be customized with drag and drop features for results needed at all times. 
• Sales Optimization: Sales automation features help control the quality and cadence of communication with all leads
• Pipeline Management: Progress tracking of all simultaneous projects and deliverables for excellent timeline management
• Cross-Platform Ad Integration and Retargeting: The Perfect Audience solution from SharpSpring allows retargeting of lookalike audiences to drive demand.
• Visual Workflow for Customer Journeys: Visualize the customer journey, and build automated processes to help lead customers further into the funnel towards sales. 
• Social: Integrated social posting, competition tracking, trigger automation, and audience engagement
• Meetings Scheduler
• Code-free Forms
• Dynamic Landing Pages and Emails
• Chatbots for Live Chats
• Screen Sharing and Video Calls
• RSS-integrated Blogging
• Mail Sync
• Media Center: Manage, share, and track the engagement for all sales and marketing assets
• Shopping Cart: Helps automatically record all transactions for sales attribution towards ROI

All these features from SharpSpring are offered to agencies for a fraction of the cost. With these features, agencies can gain insight into the brand audience, target audience, buyer behavior, and asset management. Agencies can also optimize current resources to improve client and customer journeys, decrease idle time, and increase revenue and profits.

SharpSpring Revenue Rockstars Webinar

The Revenue Rockstars Webinar is hosted and sponsored by SharpSpring, especially for agency and digital marketing leaders. The multipart webinar series is designed to assist agencies and businesses with new techniques, tips, and tricks to achieve real-time, measurable results in the long term. 

The SharpSpring Revenue Rockstars Webinar is now available to sign up. Agencies should sign up for additional benefits and real-world examples on aligning sales and marketing strategies from keynote speakers and notable guest speakers. Agencies can adopt techniques to drive sales, close business leads, optimize the marketing and sales funnel, optimize content creation, and grow revenue.

Hosts of the webinar are Chip House (CMO, SharpSpring), Greg Bond (Head of Revenue, SharpSpring), and Tara Benyousky (Product and Content Marketing, SharpSpring). Past sessions featured Jay Baer and Mickey Locey. Some of the upcoming sessions will include superstars of the digital marketing world like Karl Sakas, Seth Godin (Author of 19 bestsellers), Ann Handley (WSJ best-selling author), and Shama Hyder (LinkedIn Top 10 – Voices in Marketing). Agencies can follow the webinars on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

How SharpSpring Differs From HubSpot

SharpSpring built the business platform and marketing automation wholly around how they can add value to digital marketing agencies across the globe. Since they launched, they’ve helped more than 2000 digital marketing agencies succeed in systems and marketing integration and automation. 

HubSpot has helped tremendously by educating thousands of marketers to improve their work. However, their policies and price structures cannot compare to SharpSpring. Let us look at a few key points where SharpSpring differs and add more value to agencies than HubSpot. 

• They Understand Agencies: SharpSpring has focused entirely on understanding digital marketing agencies instead of competing with them. They provide a platform that agencies can use to increase growth, revenue, sales, and output. 
• Price Point: SharpSpring charges as little as 1/10th to 1/20th the cost of HubSpot. Agencies can save up to $5000 per month by signing up with SharpSpring for a high-quality, fully automated platform with complete integration. 
• No Advance Payments: HubSpot insists on upfront payments. All their charges are due in advance of the offerings. However, SharpSpring believes in offering cost-benefits and monetary value addition to agencies. There are no trappings for one-year payment commitments. If agencies do not see the results, they can take their business off the Platform at any time. 
• Agencies are Partners: SharpSpring licenses agencies using the Revenue Growth Platform. They let agencies decide how much and when to charge clients. SharpSpring understands that the clients belong to the agencies, not them. 
• No Targeted Niche: HubSpot charges a signup fee of $5000 and a $2,400 monthly price for 10,000 leads and comparable marketing automation systems. These prices are incredibly high. SharpSpring gives everything HubSpot does and more, for next to nothing (in comparison to the HubSpot rates). Agencies can successfully bring clients onboard the Platform for marketing automation for less than the cost of one HubSpot license. 
• Ease of Use: The SharpSpring Platform is easy to use and is optimized for all agency members. It is also easier to learn and operate than HubSpots’ complicated one. 
• Partner Signups: SharpSpring has seen a record number of agency partner signups. HubSpot does not have the value proposition and benefits in the best price range for agencies. Hundreds of agencies signed up with SharpSpring as against HubSpot in the time frame since the initial launch. 
• Powerful Platform: When it comes down to results, the full-featured marketing automation platform, API, CRM sync, and more offer value additions to marketers and digital marketing agencies. Through word of mouth, referrals, and reviews, SharpSpring has overtaken the spot as a powerful platform. SharpSpring also beat HubSpot with an early integrated CRM launch by a year.  

While HubSpot is a fantastic platform, SharpSpring is offering more to agencies at a more competitive rate. Small businesses, startups, and entrepreneurial agencies cannot utilize integrated marketing automation platforms simply because they cannot afford the exorbitant rates set into play by HubSpot. 

SharpSpring offers a fair chance to all small, medium, and large agencies. They love to help all agencies succeed in the digital marketing space. The SharpSpring Platform is affordable and powerful. 

Many agency clients were getting better deals with HubSpot than the agencies as ‘valued resellers.’ HubSpot also doesn’t quickly renegotiate contracts with agencies. SharpSpring works with agencies and does not offer better deals to their clients. They work with agencies on month-to-month pricing structures and coordinated dedicated support teams to ensure all agencies get the help they need. 

SharpSpring support and account managers jump onto calls with clients, help agencies get more dynamic, offer better solutions to clients, and treat all agencies like valued clients. Not just revenue-generating machines. 

Final Thoughts

Small and large agencies prefer working with businesses that offer results-driven, affordable solutions. The monthly price, coupled with the experienced team from SharpSpring, helps countless agencies achieve their goals and grow their businesses each month. 

The entire team at SharpSpring keeps agencies and their brands first, without thinking about the issues for competitors who put revenue at the forefront. Automated marketing software does not need to be exorbitant; it has to be helpful. Thankfully, SharpSpring understands this and offers only the best in quality to its agency partners.