SharpSpring Tips & Tricks
16 tips and tricks when using the marketing automation system, SharpSpring.
Marketing automation systems, like many of the tools and technologies available to marketers, come with a range of features and functionality. Even months into using a system as such, users are sometimes yet to experience the platform’s full list of features.
In the long run, this is fine because it allows for focus on specific tasks and campaigns. But I find that elements of inbound campaigns and process automation can always be improved by tweaking and optimising using the system’s features.
As we approach the first anniversary of using SharpSpring here at the agency, we have developed an understanding of its key features and how to get the most out of those features so that they can contribute to wider marketing objectives. This post will offer tips, tricks and ideas of what users can do with those key features.
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16 SHARPSPRING TIPS AND TRICKS
Sixteen SharpSpring tips and tricks to get the most out of the marketing automation system (as well as your campaigns).
1. LAUNCH A CHATBOT (WITH THE VIEW OF CAPTURING CONTACT DETAILS)
I have previously documented our own agency’s testing with SharpSpring chatbots and the results speak for themselves. Launching SharpSpring chatbots come at no extra cost, and once you are familiar with the programming options launching the bot is relatively simple. Program your chatbot to help contribute to your website and overall marketing/business goals. SharpSpring bots are connected to the Contact Manager (CRM), therefore you can capture new contacts and leads directly in the CRM via the chatbot. Look to use the chatbot to generate leads and capture contact details by having the user submit details for meetings, further information and subscriptions. Having the chatbot divert users to pages that include SharpSpring forms, or even help articles, also helps influence lead generation. Be sure to ask for these details - you can then address that user by name throughout the chatbot conversation.
2. USE AUTOMATIONS FOR INTERNAL TASKS, AS WELL AS EXTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS
Automated processes, such as email marketing, are great as they take the burden away of sending emails to lists from marketers. We can, however, go further by automating internal tasks. A range of repetitive tasks, such as follow-ups and updating contact details, as well as reminders and creating those tasks themselves can be done via the SharpSpring system. Visual and Opportunity Workflows are accompanied by Action Groups, that together allow for email notifications, lead owner/campaign change as well as the creating of new opportunities and sales tasks via the Sales Optimizer. Consider your marketing and sales processes, can you streamline anything via automated tasks in SharpSpring?
3. NOTIFY SALES TEAMS OF IMPORTANT EVENTS
Staying with automations. Notifying sales teams of important events is essential if you’re looking to bridge the marketing and sales divide with SharpSpring. Marketing efforts are always more successful if sales are involved and work with the marketing teams. SharpSpring can help salespeople sell because they can be notified of certain actions takes by leads and contacts. So, if a lead - which sales are pursuing - visits a web page, opens an email of views media, that salesperson may see this as the appropriate time to follow up and engage with that contact. Alternatively, if a lead unknown to sales has crossed the lead score threshold into being qualified, or if he or she again has taken a specific action deemed as important by sales, the time for contact might also be now. Email, text and in-app notifications can be set up to notify salespeople of important events with the view of triggering the sales process.
4. ENSURE YOU HAVE A SHARPSPRING FORM ON ALL WEBSITE PAGES
This is something I say to all our clients using SharpSpring and conducting inbound marketing campaigns. The easiest way to increase form conversions (or at least the number of leads) is to include as many forms and methods of conversion on the page as possible. Review your pages and assess where you can include forms, CTAs and links to pages with other forms. SharpSpring’s form editor allows for quick and easy duplication of current forms that can be embedded on non-SharpSpring pages easily. Remember that as a marketer, you’d prefer the website visitor to convert on the current page (increasing the number of leads generated) rather than click-through to another page (increasing the number of pages per visit). Review your web pages and determine what sort of form can be placed on that page, and what sort of action users are likely to take. Product pages might include forms to request demos, and blog pages might include newsletter forms, for example.
5. LAUNCH EMAIL MARKETING FROM PAGE TRIGGERS
Almost every user of SharpSpring can send more automated emails (without spamming a contact). Providing you have set up email workflows following form submissions and publish a monthly newsletter, your next port of call is to send emails following visits to certain web pages. Should known contacts visit a product page, an email can be sent within the next few hours or the next day or so with further information and a meeting calendar link for that user to book some time in with a salesperson. We have several of these triggers on this website, and the open rates for the emails are consistently above 80%. Similar triggers can launch emails off the back of contact page visits, media views as well as LinkedIn interactions. Tip: Assess your website and system assets and determine the type of content a user might like to receive thereafter.
6. HISTORIC DATA AND CONTACTS CAN ALWAYS BE ACTIVATED AND RE-ENGAGED
Large organisations consist of multiple departments and business units, and those units (almost every time) have their own data and contacts hidden away within spreadsheets. Importing this data into SharpSpring is great, but if nothing happens with it, that data quickly becomes worthless. This is data that should always be emailed via activation and re-engagement campaigns, should you have consent or a valid reason or legitimate interest for doing so, with those who have engaged with the email put into new lists and workflows to be served more content in the future. Genuine (owned or earned) data lists can prove valuable, but the SharpSpring lead needs to actively introduce those contacts to website content and begin the process of lead nurturing.
7. MORE LISTS IS MORE SEGMENTATION, MEANING MORE TARGETING
Segmented emails have higher open rates and higher engagement rates - ActiveCampaign has plenty of evidence to support this, as we have for our campaigns in SharpSpring. Segmenting contacts based on their interests and engagement can help you tailor messaging to their particular needs. And as you are sending targeted emails - addressing specific concerns and challenges - your contacts are likely to trust you more and open/click-through your future emails. We have previously written an article on the importance of segmentation in the pharmaceutical sectors that will provide insights on segmentation criteria and categories. Different segments usually follow different purchasing processes and the factors that determine that actual purchase, such as responses to product features, are also different. Tailor emails and content accordingly.
8. ALWAYS KEEP REVIEWING, BUILDING AND OPTIMISING YOUR WORKFLOWS
Automated workflows, triggered emails and conversion path creation are the lifeblood of marketing automation processes. It’s likely that, regardless of your level of utilisation of the system and number of live workflows, you can always improve on those workflows. Optimising the emails themselves is a good start (by creating a report for those emails and ensuring that each workflow ends with another action, such as a list add or user notification. If you’re a B2B organisation, sending those emails during business hours is advisable to help with open rates. You could also create multiple branches so that the emails you send are relevant and are determined by previous interaction with emails. You can view the performance of your visual workflows, including the total number of times the visual workflow has run, on the main visual workflows page. Filtering emails and actions within workflows are also advisable if necessary, as it will be likely that emails (at the specified intervals) have a better chance of influencing that contact. Tip: If you have a large whiteboard in your office, write them down, review each workflow (relative to your end goal) and determine if you can do more to nurture the contact towards that goal.
9. USE THE CONVERSION GOALS FEATURE
SharpSpring's Conversion Goals feature lets you select and track custom fields. These tracked fields can then be used as a place to begin converting more leads. With tracked custom fields and goals, you can build business-specific funnels. This can help you to better understand your marketing materials' impact and provide insight into which are closing more deals and driving sales. This is one of the platform’s most recent features to date and is great if triggers as such need to be documented within your processes, which also act as triggers for other automations and user actions.
10. TRACK ALL CAMPAIGNS VIA THE CAMPAIGN MANAGER
The Campaign Manager is hugely important because it provides inbound and content marketing with tracking. When running multiple campaigns, you may want to see how they compare to one another or view their general performance. Therefore, each link (when shared on third-party platforms) can include a parameter that the system can then attribute as a lead source for all contact. This is useful if you are using paid programs, such as social media advertising or paid programs via third parties, to understand where your conversions and customers are coming from, as well as how successful those campaigns are if lead generation is the primary goal. SharpSpring’s out-the-box attribution does not go down to a micro level, so should social media be your primary lead generation channel, you will want to create new campaign tags for each platform if you are looking to report on each platform.
11. LEAD SCORING AND SCORING CRITERIA
Nurturing leads cannot effectively be done without a scoring system because it’s difficult to determine what is going through the mind of that contact. A lead scoring process can quickly provide users with an idea of where contacts are based on engagement signals. Such signals can indicate intent and can predict when contacts are interested or when it’s a good time for your sales team to contact them. Contacts with high lead scores are generally engaged with your content and may be ready to discuss your products and services, where contacts with low lead scores need further nurturing to aim to pull them through the traditional funnel towards a higher lead score.
Automated reminders can also be set to email prospects who have gone cold and engage them with ongoing email marketing. Setting the lead scoring criteria early will also indicate how your email and content campaigns are performing, as over time, you should see an increased amount of monthly contacts become qualified once they have reached a certain score in the system - a score of 100+ is usually a good indicator of a qualified lead. The scoring criteria can be determined by the SharpSpring user, and various actions can attribute varying scores depending on the content and its intended aims.
12. ADVANCED TAGGING MAKES CONTACT SEARCHING EASY
Once you have a large database of contacts, creating segmented lists is difficult. It’s also difficult to search for specific contacts by sector, area and occupation if you have not asked for such information on your forms or have manually added the data within each contact record without them. Tagging, however, makes creating lists and searching for contact records easy, and contact records can be tagged automatically via form submissions or automations once certain actions have been completed. Always try to tag contacts so that when you need to conduct impromptu tasks, such as one-off email marketing and advanced searching, tags will help paint a bigger picture of the number of contacts you have for that segmented task.
13. SPEND TIME MANAGING THE DATA (AND SYSTEM)
Following up on the last point, power users of SharpSpring will be aware that - although the very nature of the system is to have everything automated - the system needs general management. Often, contacts will have submitted incorrect details on forms (such as missed out a letter on a @gmail email or an obviously spelt name) which can severely affect automated emails in terms of deliverability and credibility. You might find that a workflow, action group or internal process leading from a form submission is broken and needs editing. If your system houses multiple forms, emails, workflows, chatbot responses and conversion goals, it may be the case that an error exists somewhere that, again, affects another automated process further down the line. Spending an hour or so each week/month reviewing your data, audit logs, error logs if you have any custom integrations/syncs and well as the performance of key workflow components. Tip: An untidy database is often a worthless database.
14. COLLECT THE MOST IMPORTANT DETAILS ON THE FORMS SO THAT YOU ARE LIMITING THE NUMBER OF FIELDS
Many web pages decrease their chances of conversions because of forms being too long and asking for too many, often unnecessary, details. Long web forms might make sense because you are collecting specific details, but do you need those details? If a conversion is the goal, I’d be reluctant to include non-essential form fields, especially those that do not help get the job done in the first place. Look at your form fields and (1) decide if the fields you currently have are essential to your data and processes, (2) remove any confusing fields, and (3) review the additional fields you have as required. HubSpot researched 40,000+ landing pages to determine the effect form fields has on conversions and found that the sweet spot for the number of fields on a form is 3-5.
SharpSpring allows you to create dynamic forms that can be placed to capture new lead information via progressive fields if you already have key information. You can also autofill fields with known data should you prefer to offer this option. Either way, your goal is to make it easy to use and submit detail on your SharpSpring forms.
15. ENSURE TEAM MEMBERS ARE USING SHARPSPRING
As a marketing automation system, SharpSpring is often left for the Marketing Manager to use and manage. Whilst it is often recommended that marketing lead, organisations are missing out on key opportunities should other departments, certainly sales and new business, fail to use the system. Power users of SharpSpring should ensure that the wider commercial team are using SharpSpring and its automations to help them with sales-related tasks and activities. Monthly refresher sessions and “lunch and learn” workshops are great to get the wider team onboard with your marketing campaigns and strategy, who can be prompted to log in to the SharpSpring instance and learn more about their leads and contacts, as well as what the system can do to help with their workload and goals. A tip for sales: Spending time learning the system will save more time in the long run.
16. YOU DON’T NEED TO USE ALL OF SHARPSPRING’S FEATURES…
Possibly the most important SharpSpring tip on this post is that you don’t need to use all of SharpSpring’s features. Sounds counterproductive, I know. But you are far more likely to realise your marketing goals by focusing on key areas of inbound and marketing automation, rather than trying to cover all of the basis. For reference, as an agency, our instance has a utilisation score of 70% (Tiger). The Meetings tool in SharpSpring allows you to share your meeting availability with contacts without emailing back and forth to find a meeting time - but you may have a busy schedule and cannot realistically offer this, or perhaps you’d prefer to speak to qualified contacts only rather than open up your meetings to everyone. The Slack integration is also great as it allows for live chat on the website - but should you have a limited team and limited working hours, having such a feature may not be feasible. With focus, you can do the things you want to do well with SharpSpring… so don’t let the utilisation score affect you!
STRATEGY BEFORE THE TECHNOLOGY
SharpSpring is a great piece of technology - it’s flexible, cost-effective and friendly to use. Its CRM feature alone provides good value, but the real benefits come from connecting your content and email campaigns with the system, driving those campaigns towards your marketing goals. Therefore, a marketing strategy that connects such campaigns is required before your SharpSpring instance can start working for you. Without a strategy, SharpSpring is just another tool.
Once you have your strategy in place, you will quickly realise the benefits of an automation system like SharpSpring. Repurpose every bit of content you own or have earned and either host or deliver that content to your lists via the system. Use the tips above to optimise your system usage. Remember to start small, avoiding too many integrations, and then build.
For more on email marketing in healthcare and the pharmaceutical sectors, and how we can help, see our section on CRM and Lead Gen.
