Sharpspring is a Marketing Automation Platform which claims to be “a fraction of the cost of competing solutions” but with an entry level price of $400 for just 1500 contacts, I for one am going to take a bit of persuading.

It isn’t all about money though, and I have tried hard to see what differentiates Sharpspring from the others in the same approximate price range but I’m struggling to do so. That’s not to say is doesn’t look like a perfectly good system, it does, but there is a lot of competition in this space at this price and some of it has a very solid track record.

Sharpspring is, no doubt, a comprehensive system with everything you need to effectively run your digital marketing strategy built in as standard. Many systems offer a similar set of functions but many more offer just a few of them making it necessary for you to interface with other packages in order to get the full functionality. Not always quite as seamless as you are told.

So what’s in the Sharpspring box of tricks that makes it so comprehensive? This screenshot from their own website sums it up pretty well:

There is one feature which did catch my eye, over and above the usual suspects which include Marketing Automation, Landing Pages, CRM & Sales Automation and so on, and that is “Anonymous Visitor ID”. Now this is interesting because it is offering the same kind of information, using reverse IP lookup to try and identify your site visitors, that you would have to pay a fairly hefty sum for if you purchased it separately from vendors like Canddi or Lead Forensics.

If you want, or need, that kind of contact information then the hefty starting price for Sharpspring could well be justified.

I’d normally say that if you are in the market for a marketing automation system then SharpSpring really should be on your shortlist for a trial but it seems, even if you are willing to put the time in to do that the vendors are not – there’s no trial period available, just a demo which you have to arrange with them and isn’t the same thing as a proper in-depth trial with real data.

As I said earlier, the Sharpspring entry level account will cost you $400/month for up to 1500 contacts. This is much higher than, say, Infusionsoft’s entry level of around $200/month. and Infusionsoft is a better established and more widely used system.

However, if you like the sound of that Anonymous Visitor ID function that could well be a deciding factor, in which case go for the Sharpspring demo and see how it looks.