Customer relationship management (CRM) is a critical component of a successful digital marketing campaign.
CRM is the backbone that creates a sturdy base for the promotion and sales of any product or idea.
Basically, CRM refers to a set of applications that you will use to manage things like customer databases, customer interactions, and everything that pertains to your customers, customer leads, and customer satisfaction.
Improving sales requires you to improve your customer relationships. Your customer service has to be impeccable if you want to keep customers happy. Keeping customers happy is the only way to grow in business.
CRM can help you with this part of your business. Now the question is what is CRM actually?
This is a quick comparison of the customer relationship managements oftware we reviewed (keep reading for the full reviews with all the pros & cons):
Best CRM for Digital Marketing | Pros & Cons | Pricing | Our P2P Rating |
ActiveCampaign CRM |
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ClickUp |
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*Discounts are available for yearly payments. | |
AgileCRM |
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*Yearly payment gets up to 34% off, two years gets 40% off | |
HubSpot CRM |
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Keap CRM |
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Zoho CRM |
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* Billed annually. Monthly plans available. | |
Pipedrive |
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Monday.com |
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Freshworks CRM |
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Salesforce |
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Sage CRM |
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Insightly |
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Scroll down for the full reviews, all the pros and cons and more!
Customer relationship management software is a tool that companies can use to:
What are CRM Tools?
Customer relationship management tools are the software solutions that enable businesses to implement and manage good CRM. The software connects all the different sources of information and organizes it into place. Customer relationship management tools collect, store, organize and save data in a way that makes it easily accessible to everyone who needs it. From marketing to sales, to customer support to company management – all the relevant information is there and easy to access, in a meaningful format.
One thing that every business person knows is that a happy customer will return. A happy customer will likely tell three or more of their friends about your business.
An unhappy customer will likely tell six or more people about their experience with your business. So, no matter what business you are in, keeping the customer happy is the key to success.
So, how exactly does good CRM make (and keep!) your customers happy?
Let’s take a look at four important benefits of CRM:
One of the biggest digital marketing strategies is to collect simple data on customers when they are browsing the web and looking for particular items.
Then using that information about the person and the item they were interested in and letting sales ads about those items pop up when the person is on Facebook or Twitter.
The sales ad would remind the person of the item they were looking at, and drive customers back to the sites where the item was for sale.
Using customer relationship management to gather data about customers’ likes and dislikes allows you to target specific customers with specific items that they are likely to have an interest in. CRM provides you with the statistical data concerning what the customer has purchased in the past, what they browse for when they are online, and other factors like their age sets, their gender, and the areas where they live.
All of this personal data can be used in your virtual campaign. Instead of doing just one broad-based campaign and hoping that the people who will be interested in the advertising will see it, you can make sure that the people who are going to be interested in something are the ones that see that particular item.
When you use customer relationship management strategies to create data sheets concerning the customers you have, and the leads you have on other customers, you can then approach those customers in a one-to-one virtual campaign.
You can connect with them by using their preferences to make suggestions on their social networking sites so they see the advertisements and are reminded of the things they want or like.
You can send emails that personally suggest certain products and services, based on a previous purchase the customer has made. You know how on Netflix you see the words “since you liked this program” and there are links for you to follow to go to another program that is similar? You can do that with your email campaign.
You can create blogs and articles that address the things your customers might be interested in by looking at the data to confirm their likes and dislikes. When you have relevant information on your page, that your customer or future customer finds interesting, then they will visit you.
When you use customer relationship management applications to create databases about your customers and your products, you can also create a database about customer service calls.
When you start to look closely at your customer service calls, what the customer liked or disliked, and what things you did to satisfy the customer, you are able to create a training program for each of your customer service representatives that will allow them to create satisfied customers out of each call.
TLDR? The Importance of Customer Relationship Management:
Effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the way you organize and manage your interactions with your customers and leads. CRM tools allow you to simplify and streamline your communications for marketing, sales, and customer care. Good CRM helps you gather data to provide better customer service, more relevant marketing, and more effective sales messaging.
ActiveCampaign is a Chicago-based Customer Relationship Management and Automations tool that helps marketers and sales teams connect well with their customers and sell more, with less effort.
You can see the complete sales cycle at a glance and track customers at every touchpoint.
The most important function of ActiveCampaign is its marketing automations, which help reduce the time spent on each lead in the pipeline.
The sales teams that have used ActivecCampaign reported a significant increase in productivity due this feature.
The level of automation ActiveCampaign offers is easily the best in the market. These automations make sure that you’re not missing out on any important aspect of the customer lifecycle and, eventually, help close sales.
Other important features, including lead scoring, win probability, and segmentation, also help improve conversions.
Pros
Cons
Website: activecampaign.com
ClickUp is a comprehensive productivity and project management platform that offers robust, easily set up and fully customizable customer relationship management features.
As a CRM, ClickUp offers everything you need, from one end of your sales cycle to the other. You can use it to manage everything from your lead and sales pipelines to client accounts and ongoing customer support.
Everything can be organized and accessed from one place, where everyone who needs it can find it – making sales and customer service seamless for your team and for the client they’re serving.
As a platform, ClickUp offers a huge array of features, which means you can customize it to suit your specific needs, and use it to manage knock-on processes that relate to your customer relationship management features. This is especially useful if you offer a customizable service or product, where sales, production, and support teams all need to be on the same page.
It offers over 1000 integrations so that you can easily stitch your CRM into your existing tools and processes.
Pros
Cons
Website: clickup.com
AgileCRM offers robust features to handle your customers from end-to-end, from initial lead capture to sales, and ongoing customer support with multi-channel communication.
It is ideal for SMBs that need a dedicated CRM to handle their contacts, marketing, and sales processes from one place. AgileCRM provides everything from contact management to marketing automation, analytics, two-way emailing, live chat, and telephone helpdesk features.
AgileCRM acts as a unified portal for all your sales and customer care activities. You can access contact info, communication history, sales/help progress, and more from one place. This enables members of the team to seamlessly pick up where someone else left off while providing a smooth experience for your customers.
Pros
Cons
Website: agilecrm.com
HubSpot is one of the world’s leading platforms for online marketing, sales and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). With dedicated productivity tools and automations, it helps reduce manual involvement in the process and saves time from menial tasks.
HubSpot Customer Relationship Management comes with free tools for lead generation and email marketing that help grow and nurture the customer database. The service teams can stay organized through efficient communication and elevate their productivity. The software supports all kinds of third-party integrations and provides adequate reporting and tracking features.
The CRM tool gives full visibility into the sales pipeline in real-time. There is a detailed reporting dashboard that gives information on sales productivity and individual performance. You can create and organize your own sales pipelines with automated tracking. The pipelines will give you a good idea of the various stages of customer relationship and where it goes off.
There is a free landing-page builder that helps create professional-looking landing pages. You can use the free ad management tools to convert visitors from these landing pages to qualified leads. Besides, you can connect with them via live chat or by setting up one-to-one chat conversations with chatbots.
The Universal Inbox feature allows you to view, manage, assign, and reply to all customer conversations irrespective of what channel they are coming from.
HubSpot CRM supports over 300 integrations through which you can connect your existing software for free, and get even more out of the tools and applications your business uses every day.
Pros
Cons
Website: hubspot.com
Keap is an all-in-one sales and marketing platform that offers a wide range of services including sales pipelines, marketing automations, and Customer Relationship Management. The CRM helps businesses across various industries streamline their client relationships and manage customer experiences.
The client database software helps improve organization and increases workflow efficiency. Instead of maintaining huge databases for records, you can handle all client activity and communications from a single place. The records can be easily edited and automatically updated, requiring minimal human involvement.
The software can easily connect with Zapier, Gmail, Outlook, and AppointmentCore, streamlining your communication channels and boosting email efficiency. You can send highly personalized emails that drive action or sales. There are pre-written templates that can be edited and campaigns can be automated.
Smart forms help collect and organize client information so that it can be used in automated campaigns easily. The automation builder is really powerful and allows expert marketers to create flexible campaigns and set triggers for various client actions. This way you can create repeatable pipelines that make sure that leads do not leak away.
The reporting capabilities by Keap are extraordinary as it helps users run analyses on email campaigns, sales pipelines performance, and ROI data. The software can also be remotely managed from an Android or iOS device.
Pros
Cons
Website: keap.com
Zoho CRM is a comprehensive customer relationship management software for businesses of all sizes, from solopreneurs and SMBs to global enterprises.
You can use Zoho CRM to manage all your customer data, omni-channel communications, and important documentation. It acts as a unified platform to manage your interactions with customers at every step of the sales cycle.
Zoho CRM offers a comprehensive suite of features and an exceptionally high level of customization for just about all aspects of the software, from custom dashboards and reports to custom workflows, automations, and personalized communication templates.
It integrates with all other Zoho products and over 800 third parties. You can also create custom integrations so that no matter what you need, your customer relationship management can work seamlessly with your tech stack.
Zoho CRM also provides a mobile app, which is especially useful for remote sales teams and sales reps on the go.
It is perfect for growing SMBs because it is an easily scalable solution that handles your needs so matter how big you get.
Pricing plans are affordable and flexible, so you’re only ever paying for features you currently need, but as you grow, you can upgrade your plan so your customer relationship management grows with you.
In addition to a vast number of standard integrations, Zoho also offers a robust developer platform to extend what your CRM can do.
For those who want to delve into analytics and responsive optimization, you can leverage Zoho’s AI called Zia to identify trends in your data, spot anomalies, and provide accurate predictions.
Pros
Cons
Website: zoho.com/crm
Pipedrive is all about building and maintaining pipelines for various business functions. You can create customer service, sales, and marketing pipelines from one tool. Pipedrive is a super easy tool to configure and navigate.
Compared to many other CRM software, you don’t have to be a tech pro to work with Pipedrive.
Pipedrive works for teams of all sizes, and it’s fully customizable. This means you can add your unique branding and pipeline actions to achieve your desired results.
With the drag-and-drop interface, businesses can create custom fields, automate their workflows and manage sales, customer queries, and deals,
Pipedrive’s email and communication tracking features are another reason to opt for this customer relationship management software. You can integrate internal communication channels, manage sales-related tasks, create and send invoices and identify qualified leads.
Pipedrive has in-depth data and tracking features too. Businesses can access pipeline metrics, visual reports, and custom dashboards.
Pros
Cons
Website: pipedrive.com
Monday.com is a comprehensive Resource Management software that provides a wide range of capabilities, including Customer Relationship Management and Project Management.
The interface is designed in a flexible manner, which allows you to easily organize your projects and customize your workflows.
The most important features of Monday.com’s CRM include managing leads and sales pipelines, client tracking, contract management, and onboarding new customers.
The project management orientation of the software allows teams to easily collaborate on leads.
The best and most well-known feature of Monday.com is that it turns the to-do lists into a game, encouraging all team members to complete their tasks on time.
The projects are broken into smaller tasks, which can be divided into even smaller subtasks.
Each task is color-coded, so the status and the progress of each member is quite clear. Green means complete, red means stuck, and so on. The urge to turn every block green is what keeps the team going.
The CRM solution was in fact introduced to allow the sales teams to collaborate more easily on customer relationships and boost results. The tool also supports a number of integrations and automations.
Pros
Cons
Website: monday.com
Freshworks is an AI-powered Customer Relationship Management tool that enables sales and marketing professionals to improve their understanding of their customers, through detailed insights and analytics.
The most important features of Freshworks customer relationship management include email marketing, lead scoring, market segmentation, AI chatbots, and salesforce automation.
The software allows marketers to deliver a personalized marketing strategy to each customer, at every touchpoint across their lifecycle.
This way they are able to boost their clicks, conversions, and overall engagement for the marketing activities of the firm.
The 360° customer view provides complete details about customers and prospects, including touchpoints, conversations, appointments, tasks, and much more.
Pros
Cons
Website: freshworks.com
Salesforce is one of the most reliable customer relationship management platforms because there’s almost nothing you can’t do with this platform. Salesforce provides functions and features to help you generate and manage leads, sales, and your customers.
Salesforce users enjoy a clear interface that’s easy to navigate. The only problem is configuring this tool. While the usability is fantastic, it takes technical knowledge to set up Salesforce and train your team to use it.
You don’t have to opt for one Salesforce package if you need a 360-degree solution.
Salesforce is an all-in-one marketing and CRM platform. You can use this software to handle all your operations and strategies.
You can leverage client insights on buying patterns and trends, and use predictive analytics to drive client appreciation. There is also a function for agent routing so client queries get to the right people.
Another fantastic feature of Salesforce is the ability to add custom branding. You can customize buyer communications and content with your branding elements.
If you find Salesforce too tricky to configure, there are loads of online resources to help you!
Pros
Cons
Website: salesforce.com
Sage CRM provides specialized solutions for lead generation, nurturing, and conversion. This is the CRM tool you need to secure and track qualified leads and push them through your sales and marketing funnels.
Large enterprises would appreciate this customer relationship management software because it stores all your client and lead information and provides detailed reports.
You can leverage insights on your clients and leads, like their demographics, purchasing behavior and trends, and how they interact with your brand. All this data allows businesses to deliver personalized campaigns and strategies.
Sage CRM’s real-time insights are another benefit of this platform. With real-time data, you can understand the specifics of your buyers and identify and solve risks before they occur.
If you want to collaborate with or share your data with another business, Sage customer relationship management makes this easy. You can integrate any of your top social tools, share branded reports, communicate with your team, and work with other teams.
Another persuading aspect of Sage CRM is how easy this tool is to navigate. While the interface could use improvements, it’s not challenging to use Sage CRM.
Pros
Cons
Website: sage.com
Insightly is a favorable CRM platform for small businesses. These companies love this platform because it’s easy to configure, the user interface is enticing and the pricing isn’t too steep.
Insightly helps businesses build and manage client communication pipelines to optimize their results. You can integrate loads of tools like MailChimp and QuickBooks into Insightly’s unified customer relationship management software.
There isn’t a steep learning curve for this software. If you need guidance, Insightly provides many online resources. However, many small companies and startups find all of Insightly’s features too overwhelming, and never use some of them.
What’s handy about Insightly as a customer relationship management software is its agent tracking and routing products. You can tag specific client queries, ensure they route to the correct agents, and track their progress.
Insightly will let you know how your agents perform and pinpoint areas that could use improvement to take your customer service to the next level.
Pros
Cons
Website: insightly.com
This is the virtual age of business. People are doing more online business: shopping, researching, banking and investing, than ever before. Companies are having a hard time keeping their online apps up and running because technology changes so fast and by the time they have an app developed and ready to use, they need to make changes to it.
The CRM software allows you to manage all of the data you have on each client so you can quickly see which client might be interested in a new product or service you have to offer.
You can generate leads through the data that shows you what the client has liked in the past, how to reach that client, and the other criteria you have accumulated on the client.
The information is easy to access and you can use different prompts to create a sales lead list. You can also use the information to see which client just need you to make contact and make certain they are still happy, or see if there is anything you can do for them.
This builds client service to a new level. Your customers will feel more appreciated and it will seem that you remember them.
Each sales team member knows certain information about the leads they have or their past clients. They may know that Mr. Black does not like to be called before 4 pm, or that Miss Smith lives alone and does not like strangers just showing up at her door. Some of the information these sales team members have in their heads and in their notes are what will help your company cement a sale.
If the team member that knows that information quits or gets sick, the information is lost. If you use CRM software your team members can share information with each other and you will always be ready and prepared to close the next deal.
This software compiles all of the potential leads and client data so that everyone in your company is up to date and has the information they need to serve your clients better.
Top executives say that building a quality lead for their sales team to contact is the most critical aspect of making more sales and more profits. These executives use the data their software compiles to:
The biggest thing that this software data collection does is provide you with the ability to follow up on potential leads so that fewer sales are lost.
You will have a reminder for your sales team on who they need to call back and when they need to make those calls
The team member will know what has been tried in the past so they will know what they need to say or do when they make the follow-up.
You can read more details about the need for CRM in digital marketing campaigns by following this link. Applying CRM strategy will increase your business success.
CRM is a set of applications that you will use to manage things like customer databases, customer interactions, and everything that pertains to your customers, customer leads, and customer satisfaction. Read this guide to learn more about CRM and its importance.
CRM helps to track the level of satisfaction of your customers as well as gather data points that will help your launch better digital marketing campaigns and sustain healthy business growth. Read more about the role of CRM in digital marketing in this guide.
There are many CRM solutions out there and many of them are doing a decent job integrating with other solutions. However, there are a couple of solutions that are best fit for companies that do most of their marketing online. Check out the best 5 in this article.
Business News Daily: 11 Benefits of CRM Systems
Forbes: Why Is Customer Relationship Management So Important?
Forbes: Why You Need A CRM For Your Business
Gartner: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Defined
WebFX: Do You Need a CRM Software? The Top Benefits of CRM
Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. 102 No. 8, pp. 442-452: Adopting Customer Relationship Management Technology