It seems that a necessary component of every successful marketer today is a love of tools. No, not hammers and hacksaws - I’m talking about software. We’re now at the point that there is a digital solution for nearly every need an in-house marketer may face.

Email marketing, social media scheduling, content distribution, search engine optimization, and marketing automation software all have a home in the modern marketer’s toolbox. As a digital agency, we spend a lot of our time using these tools, and when it comes to marketing automation, one of the best options out there is SharpSpring.

SharpSpring is a relatively young player in the marketing automation space, but the CRM and automation tools it provides are ideal for in-house marketers, especially those who work closely with the sales team. The platform offers many of the features you’d expect in an automation tool, including dynamic lists, email marketing, and detailed analytics. Plus, it packs a few extra features to make your job a bit easier.

Here are 7 SharpSpring features that marketers love.

1) Visitor ID

Ever wonder who is actually coming to your website on a day-to-day basis? Yes, you probably have Google Analytics setup with your website (if you don’t, you should) and you can get a ton of fascinating and valuable data from it, but GA does not offer specific visitor tracking information.

VisitorID assigns a unique tracking code to each user who visits your site. By taking a look at that user’s IP, they create a profile around that person that includes their company, professional contact information, and the pages they’ve viewed on your website. You can even set “important pages” and VisitorID will make note of any of those specific pages the user visited.

Plus, you can receive a daily email digest of the information VisitorID collected the day before. It helps paint the picture of the types of people visiting your website, and that can make all the difference.

2) Forms

If you are using your website as a lead generation tool (hint: you should be), capturing user information is key. The primary way to do this? Forms.

SharpSpring has a few different options for form creation. You can create a form directly in the SharpSpring platform, or you can map third-party form into the tool using custom fields. Basically, that means that you could use your preferred form tool (Wufoo, Gravity Forms, etc.) and send the data from that form directly into SharpSpring.

SharpSpring also offers easy-to-understand analytics from your form submissions with a feature called “Form Insights.” You can measure, compare, and optimize the form performance using this tool, which can lead to better conversion overall.

3) Email

Once you convert website visitors into leads, the next step typically involves some form of email communication. You can use their WYSIWYG editor to create beautiful email templates and messages, and save those emails to be sent however you like (more on that in a moment).

The built-in templates come out of the box responsive, meaning they will look great on any device. As the majority of email is being opened on a smartphone, this is a huge factor in email marketing success.

Another powerful feature is the ability to add custom merge variables to email content. Custom merge variables allow you to add personal information unique to the email recipient without having to create a new email. For example, you can set up your next newsletter to start with the greeting “Hi, NAME,” where “name” changes depending on the contact you are sending it to (i.e. Hi, Bob!).

4) Marketing Automation

If you aren’t familiar with it, marketing automation is exactly what it sounds like - executing your marketing efforts automatically based off a set of rules and lists. SharpSpring itself is a marketing automation platform, and it offers you loads of flexibility in how to market to your leads.

The most common example would be automatically emailing a lead based on their actions. You can set up lead scoring logic that award points to a lead as she moves through your funnel, visits specific pages on your website, or even click an email you send. Once that lead has a certain number of lead score points, you can have an automated email send their way (asking if they would like a demo, for example).

You can automatically send internal notifications whenever you have a new contact form submission, add a lead to a list if they view your pricing page, or even move a lead through an automated email-based lead nurturing workflow. The capabilities are endless, and can be custom for your marketing needs.

5) CRM

SharpSpring allows you to track opportunities from initial contact to close, and help you keep a big picture view of your sales pipeline. You can also create custom deal stages and fields, as well as integrate data between SharpSpring and your current CRM, if you choose.

Every action your leads take will be recorded in Contact Manager tool (part of the CRM) which gives you great insight on who is doing what, and when. This type of tool gives you unique perspective into what marketing efforts are leading to closed deals, and what tactics you should either improve or step away from.

Plus, if you’d like to invite your sales team into the tool but are worried about them inadvertently changing a marketing email or something of the sort, you can grant them user access as a “Sales Representative,” which will keep them to the CRM-portion of the tool, and out of the marketing side of things.

6) Analytics

Ever wonder what your actual marketing ROI is? ROI is a number leadership wants, but internal marketing coordinators, managers, and directors have a difficult time showing. That’s why one of our favorite parts about using SharpSpring is being able to easily identity lead value, closed deals, and marketing ROI.

The analytics tool can show you basic website data, like traffic, bounce rate, and time spent on site, but it can also give you detailed analysis of form data, and even cost per lead (based on your marketing spend).

If proving and easily sharing ROI information is important in your organization, this may just be your favorite part of the tool.

7) Integrations

Remember when I said that marketers love tools? Add integrations to that list.

SharpSpring easily integrates with popular platforms like GoToWebinar and WebEx, as well as Zapier (the custom integration tool). This kind of flexibility helps you do all of your marketing work in a single place, and ensures that your data is accurate and talking to each other.

And finally, SharpSpring works with all of the primary CMS platforms, including WordPress, Joomla!, ExpressionEngine, Drupal, and a handful of others.

There you have it - a complete overview of the best SharpSpring features for marketers. Want to learn more? Connect with us here to learn how your organization can benefit from a marketing automation platform and digital marketing partnership.