Finding client relationships challenging? It’s time to use a CRM.
Customer Relationship Management is a system for businesses to manage all communication and interaction with existing and potential clients. CRM helps you build and maintain client relationships with a streamlined process. To sum up, it’s a tool specifically made to manage your messages, calls, reports, and inquiries in a more organized manner. Aside from managing your customer information, CRM tracks your interaction with your customers–helping you to have better knowledge about them. With the help of a CRM, you don’t have to manually take note of the client’s location or birthday. Specifying the R in CRM, this powerful tool can do wonders on building your customer relationship–helping you to win new clients, make follow-ups, and even establish a rapport.
Maybe you’re starting to ask if you need CRM for your business marketing?
And the answer is… definitely!
Your customers are the life of your business. Your business exists because you wanted to serve them (and also to earn!). Therefore you must establish and maintain a good relationship with them— which can be achieved through a CRM.
If you’re curious about the usual features included in customer relationship management tools, here are some, but not limited to:
- Contact Management
- Reports and Dashboards
- Workflow
- File Storage
- Communication Channels Integration (Chat, Email, Support)
- Campaign Management
- Social Media Management
- Email Marketing Integration
- Teams
- Sales Performance Management
In this blog, we will discuss the top CRM tools that will help you with your marketing.
Table of Contents
1. Top 10 CRM tools for your marketing needs
2. What are the pros and cons of using marketing CRM for your business?
Top 10 CRM tools for your marketing needs
In all types of business, it’s crucial to pick the right tool that’ll help you achieve your goals. To help you choose the right CRM tool you can use for your marketing needs, here are some tools that you can check out:
Zoho
Zoho CRM is one of the most well-known CRM tools to help you achieve marketing goals through an exceptional customer experience. It enables you to connect different applications to achieve your preferred CRM workflow. You can use Zoho CRM to engage with your clients across your social media platforms, manage sales, marketing, and support teams, use AI for interactions, allow customers to create tickets for concerns, create automation, and analyze reports.
Zoho CRM Features:
- Desk
- Books
- Creator
HubSpot
HubSpot takes the word “Free” seriously. From resources to guides and templates, marketers can’t just take advantage of free high-quality content, but also of HubSpot’s CRM. If you want something to try for FREE, Hubspot is the CRM tool for you. HubSpot CRM is a complete tool designed to assist your Sales Leaders, Salespeople, Marketers, Customer Service Teams, Operations Managers, and even you as the business owner. It’ll help you automatically update reports and track your team’s quota.
HubSpot CRM Features:
- Reporting Dashboard
- Company Insights
- Deal Tracking
- Pipeline Management
These features are free, but it’s recommended to go for a paid account if you want more advanced features.
FreshSales
This CRM tool helps the sales team solve their problems by combining all of their sales needs in one comprehensive tool. Promoting to help your sales team discover the right leads and how to nurture them, you can conveniently manage multiple pipelines and close deals with this tool. Freshsales also allows you to have a unified view of your customers, use intelligent assistants, and save time through automation.
FreshSales CRM Features:
- Even Tracking
- Deal Management
- Advanced Reporting
- Automated & Personalized Emails
- Mobile CRM
- Built-in Phone & Chat
Nutshell
Are you a B2B business owner aiming to close more deals? Nutshell could help you with your goal. It’s a complete CRM and email marketing tool that’ll help you collect more leads and quickly get customer information. It’ll also help you turn subscribers into customers, automate tedious tasks, get more prospect replies, analyze data, and help you keep track of every closed deal.
Nutshell CRM Features:
- Sales Automation
- Reporting
- Forms
- Team Collaboration
- Contact Management
- Pipeline Management
- Marketing
Sendinblue
Sendinblue is a complete marketing tool that also includes CRM in its features. It helps you organize your team and keep yourself updated on every customer transaction without messing up your data. If you want to see if it works for your team, you can try it for free.
Focusing to help you quickly set up CRM, you can centralize and organize all of your clients’ and prospects’ contact information, as well as keep you on track of your business process to not miss a sales opportunity.
Sendinblue CRM Features:
- Email Marketing
- Chat
- SMS Marketing
- Inbox
- Marketing Automation
- Transaction Email
- Segmentation
- Landing Pages
- FB Ads
- Sign Up Forms
Sharpspring
Sharpspring tool labels itself as an all-in-one revenue growth platform. It’s another complete tool that’ll help you fuel your business growth through marketing and sales automation plus competitive CRM features.
The main goal of this tool is to help you generate leads, increase sales and revenue, and optimize sales and marketing funnels.
Sharpspring CRM Features:
- Marketing automation
- CRM
- Sales Engagement
- Social Media
- Ads
SugarCRM
Breaking the traditional CRM— that’s one of SugarCRM’s promises to its users. They’ll help you monitor the movement of your client relationship activities without the stress and hassle of dealing with messy data and different tools.
The tool’s number one goal is to help you focus on the more significant tasks for your business. At the same time, the platform does the functions of capturing leads, monitoring and assisting clients, and other tedious work for you.
SugarCRM Features:
- Marketing Automation
- Sales Automation
- Customer Service
- Artificial Intelligence
- Revenue Analytics
Agile CRM
Known for its tagline, “Sell and Market like the Fortune 500”, the main goal of Agile CRM is to help you execute a selling process like a Fortune 500 business (Fortune 500 is a list of largest United States Corporations). If you want to boost your sales like them, then Agile CRM might be perfect.
Like other CRMs, it’ll help you establish a process for your Sales and Marketing while helping you assist with customer needs too! You can also integrate it with Twitter, Facebook, Google Apps, Twilio, RingCentral, LinkedIn plus more if you pay for your account.
Agile CRM Marketing Features
- Marketing Automation
- Landing Page Builder
- Social Suite
- Email Marketing
- Mobile Marketing
- Email Tracking
- Exit Intent
- Landing Page Builder
- Push Notification
If you’re on the hunt for more features of this CRM, take a visit to their site to explore more.
ActiveCampaign CRM
The focus of ActiveCampaign is automation for a better customer experience. They offer CRM tools for both B2C and B2B Companies.
Read more: The Difference Between B2B and B2C Marketing: The Complete Guide
Their features are built based on these goals: to reach, to nurture, to convert, and to grow. And if you’re a noob with CRM tools, you’d be happy to know that they provide free online training.
ActiveCampaign Marketing Features
- Contact and lead scoring
- Win Probability
- Pipelines
- Split Action
- Attribution
Indeed there are plenty of tools available for your CRM strategy; all you have to do is pick the right one suitable for your goals and marketing needs.
What are the pros and cons of using marketing CRM for your business?
Like any other tool, using a CRM for your business marketing also has its advantages and disadvantages. Here they are:
Pros
Can automate some process
Using a CRM system for your business allows you to automate some processes, which can help you save time and energy. With the help of AI and other automation tools, you can set up auto-responses and make other data entry tasks automatic.
Pro Tip: Automation continuously improves businesses nowadays. Did you know that you can also automate the process for your online PDFs? PlatoForms, a tool that enables you to convert PDF to online forms, allows you to connect your online PDF forms to different applications and achieve an automatic workflow.
Increase in sales and profit
CRMs are designed to help businesses improve sales. Aside from being one of the factors needed for a successful lead gen campaign, it also polishes your business sales cycle while supporting your team to reach their target, resulting in more closed deals. CRMs help your sales team reduce costs as well— which is another factor that affects sales revenue.
Hassle-free collaboration
CRM allows you and your whole team to work together by providing all of the tools that you need in one place. It offers transparency and clarity through reliable reports and real-time data.
Establish a customer relationship
Aside from automation and hassle-free processes, CRM also builds a stronger relationship with your clients. You can send them personal greetings or personalized emails without hassle using CRM. Since CRMs provide automated responses, it enables you to give your customers their needed support 24/7. As a result, you earn your customer‘s trust and build a relationship with them.
Cons
Additional Expense
There are free CRM tools, but you’ll have to subscribe to a paid account if you want to maximize their features. (Which is recommended if you handle lots of clients and are expecting exceptional results).
Needs a proper setup
CRMs are sometimes tricky. That’s why you need to be careful in setting up their pipelines and automation. Without proper setup, CRMs can be ineffective. You should pay attention to each of the pipeline’s and workflow’s details or else the process won’t work correctly for both your team and clients. Setting up CRMs is practical and powerful if you know how to use them correctly.
Some CRM tools for marketing are complicated
If you’re a tech noob, you might find some complicated CRM tools for you and even for your team. It’ll need a lot of patience in that case to achieve the perfect CRM system for your business. There are also times when your team needs to attend CRM training and seminar that can take more time and cost for your business.
Building up a solid CRM process could be time consuming
Building up a perfect CRM for your business marketing needs a lot of training and testing. You have to determine what works and does not work for you and your clients. You’ll also need time to learn the tools inside CRM software.
Using a CRM for your business marketing is beneficial, but like other online tools and strategies, it also has its downsides.
The question is, can you handle the downsides to achieve the benefits? The decision is in your hands.
Convert online PDF forms for your business with PlatoForms
Building customer relationships is challenging; you have to set your plans, goals, and practical tools. One of the secrets to establishing a customer relationship is making everything convenient.
If you’re looking for something that’ll do both– an effective tool that can make everything convenient for clients, PlatoForms is the answer! PlatoForms is an online PDF tool that helps you convert PDFs to online forms allowing your clients to submit PDF data online. If you’re ready to level up your CRM, sign up here.
