CRM and email marketing are two of the most important components of any online business.
- They allow you to provide exceptional service to your customers and keep them informed about new promotions and events.
- In order to provide this service, though, you need to have the right tools at your disposal.
- If you’re looking for the best CRM software or the best email marketing software, check out our list of recommendations below.
Table of Contents
Best Crm And Email Marketing Software
Customer relationship management (CRM) software with email marketing capabilities allows businesses to communicate with leads and customers individually or on a mass scale without leaving the platform. A CRM with email marketing includes features for designing email templates, deploying them, and monitoring the results of email campaigns. We evaluated dozens of CRMs with email marketing functionality and narrowed it down to the top five.
Here are the best CRM options for email marketing:
- Freshsales: Best overall email marketing CRM option, offering extensive email campaign customizations
- Zoho CRM: Excellent choice for businesses looking to integrate their business communications with other productivity applications
- HubSpot: Great option for email-heavy startups looking for a free CRM option
- Salesforce Essentials: Ideal for small teams that need basic email marketing features, such as e-signature and document management features
- Nimble: Best for sales teams that want automated contact insights and data enrichment features
crm and email marketing for small business
HubSpot CRM
Most people who work in sales or marketing have heard of HubSpot. Its co-founder and CEO, Brian Halligan, even coined the now very well-known term ‘inbound marketing’, a philosophy that HubSpot is built on and seeks to educate its users on through courses and free resources.
Founded in 2006, HubSpot has come a long way since then, now employing over 3,000 people around the world. After all, it does have a plethora of products and excellent customer support to accompany them. But what makes it one of the best CRM tools?
The great thing about the HubSpot CRM solution is that you can get started for free, and many businesses won’t need to upgrade from the free plan for years. In fact, it won’t charge you a cent if you have under 1M contacts. Pretty generous, right?
What I liked about HubSpot:
HubSpot CRM is an excellent product for small businesses looking for a free CRM platform. You can: track leads and customers, create timelines of your interactions with customers, chat in real-time with prospects, integrate with Gmail and Outlook, create tasks and goals for your team, and much more. These messages and calls can be tracked, and if you upload documents to the platform, you can see when the contact has opened them.
The great thing about the software is it’s painless to use. You can tell they’ve invested time and money into designing a user interface that won’t overwhelm non-techies. It also offers a mobile app and allows you to integrate with hundreds of third-party apps.
Both the free plan and the Marketing Hub Starter plan come with unlimited users, making this the best option for large teams on a budget. The Sales and Service Starter plans come with 2 users, or you can pay to add more. There are also plenty of third-party integrations.Contact ProfileSales pipeline
What HubSpot could improve:
Some businesses might decide that they’d like to upgrade to one of HubSpot’s paid plans in order to benefit from additional features (e.g. contact and company insights, email templates and tracking, etc.). The problem with this is that your subscriber limit actually drops right down from 1 million to 1,000.
Plus, there’s the issue of price. If you want access to its pro sales features such as sales automation, predictive lead scoring and multiple deal pipelines, you’ll need to fork out a tremendous $500/month. This price tag isn’t exactly affordable for small businesses, so I’d only recommend it for the free version and Starter plans.
HubSpot CRM Pricing:
HubSpot CRM – Free
Marketing Hub – Free / $50 / $890 / $3,200/month
Sales Hub – Free / $50 / $500 / $1,200/month
Service Hub – Free / $50 / $400 / $1,200/month
Growth Suite (All products bundled together) – Free / $113 / $1,780 / $5,000/month
Try HubSpot CRM for free!
EngageBay
EngageBay is another great CRM software for small businesses due to its affordable prices and a myriad of features that will keep both the sales and marketing team happy.
The EngageBay team prides itself on building a CRM software that anyone can use and boasts a customer base of over 5,000 companies, which isn’t bad considering it was founded in 2017.
It gives you a 360 view of your customers, allowing you to see all the customer points (be it SMS, automations, phone call, emails) at a glance. You can automate repetitive tasks, analyze customer data and nurture existing customer relationships whilst building new ones.
What I liked about EngageBay:
So why is EngageBay one of the best CRM software products?
EnageBay’s pricing structure is divided into sales, marketing and service hubs, and I found the plans to be very affordable. Its prices rise incrementally and its Basic plan costs just $12.99/month per user.
In terms of usability, EngageBay has a very intuitive interface and is a good choice for those who don’t have a ton of experience working with sales pipelines and deal management. A neat feature is that you can switch between the sales, marketing, service and live chat dashboard, meaning that everything is organized in a way that doesn’t overwhelm each individual team.Lead profileSales pipeline
What EngageBay could improve:
The free plan limits your emails and contacts to 1,000, which is on the small side considering that other free customer relationship tools like HubSpot come with unlimited contacts. Its list of direct third-party integrations is also not very big.
EngageBay doesn’t have a mobile app. If your business requires this feature, check out Freshsales.
EngageBay Pricing:
CRM & Sales Bay: Free for 1,000 contacts, 1,000 emails/month, 2 lists, appointment scheduling, predictive lead scoring, Gmail/Outlook/Office 365 integration
Basic: $12.99/month per user for 10,000 contacts and 10,000 emails/month
Growth: $24.99/month per user for 20,000 contacts and 20,000 emails/month
Pro: $49.99/month per user for 30,000 contacts and 30,000 emails/month
Try EngageBay for free!
Salesmate
Salesmate is a CRM and automation suite that helps small businesses streamline their sales, marketing, and customer experience processes. Salesmate CRM provides a plethora of features and stays within your budget at the same time, making it the most accessible CRM and automation solution.
Founded in 2016, Salesmate has witnessed enormous growth over the years, powering more than 4000 sales teams from various kinds of businesses. But is what makes it one of the best CRMs for small businesses?
What I liked about Salesmate CRM
Salesmate is a powerful CRM platform that comes with a good range of robust features. It includes everything from contact management and sales and marketing automation to built-in calling and live chat.
Automation journeys allow you to set up automations based on a whole host of triggers and conditions, there really is nothing you can’t automate with Salesmate. The automation builder is also very visual and easy to use. In fact, I found the software very user-friendly in general.
Salesmate has data centers in both the US and EU and offers a mobile app for iOS and Android.DashboardSales PipelineAutomation journey builder
What Salesmate could improve
When the user is creating a new automation journey, numerous actions and conditions may be slightly overwhelming for beginners. Some automation templates would help with this.
Power dialer (in-built call automation tool), email sequencing and date-based workflows are not available on the starter plan There’s also no freemium plan.
Salesmate Pricing
Salesmate provides a free trial of its Boost plan for 15 days.
Starter plan – $15/user/month
Growth plan – $30/user/month
Boost plan – $50/user/month
Enterprise plan – Custom pricing
Discounts applied to yearly subscriptions.
Try Salesmate for free
Freshsales CRM (From Freshworks)
Freshsales CRM is part of a multi-product suite from Freshworks. It also offers products related to customer service tickets (Freshdesk, which you have probably heard of), live chat, call centers, and more. It was launched in 2011 in India and Freshsales CRM came on the market 5 years later.
Freshworks’ package is a very complete one, which makes it attractive for small businesses. It includes built-in phone software (which automatically logs calls), lead scoring, user behavior tracking and sales automations.
What I liked about Freshsales CRM:
This is a very robust CRM software for small businesses wanting to manage their sales pipelines; it offers a great deal in terms of customization options and the type of information you can store. Aside from the 25+ fields, it gives you, you can add as many advanced custom fields as you need (on the higher tier plan).
In spite of having so many options, it boasts a simple and easy-to-navigate interface. I especially liked the drag and drop deal pipeline view, which gives you all the information you need at a glance, including tags such as ‘Warm lead’ or ‘At risk’. This enables you to prioritize leads that need your attention and makes sure your sales process is running smoothly.
Freshsales has its own app for both Android and iOS included on all plans.Deal pipelineLead profileDashboard
What Freshsales could improve:
Just a small detail, but when moving deals around on the pipeline, it sometimes takes a few seconds to update.
Be aware that no reports are available in the free plan and you won’t have access to the sales funnel view in the Deals section.
As the name implies, this CRM solution is geared more towards sales teams, so you’ll be missing some key marketing tools.
Freshsales Pricing:
Find out more about Freshsales’ pricing here
Free: $0/user/month
Growth: $18/user/month
Pro: $47/user/month
Enterprise: $83/user/month
Try out Freshsales CRM for free!
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is first and foremost an email marketing provider, and it does this very well! In fact, ActiveCampaign is our number one tool for sending email campaigns. Its automations and deliverability are excellent, but what about its CRM software?
ActiveCampaign was founded in Chicago in 2003 and launched its CRM software eleven years later to complement its main offering. The cheapest plan it’s available on is the Plus plan, which costs $70/month, though there are discounts if you pay yearly.
So why choose ActiveCampaign’s CRM software for your business?
What I liked about ActiveCampaign:
The price may seem a little more expensive considering ActiveCampaign doesn’t offer a free plan, however, you should note that it comes with advanced automated workflows (which really is excellent) and up to 25 user accounts for your coworkers. Other providers on this list charge per user – which can get rather pricey quickly – and don’t include advanced automations.
With its drag and drop deal pipeline, the system is easy to use. Stages are fully customizable, so you can create as many as you need. If you have multiple sales processes (e.g. for each product or service you sell), you can also create a sales pipeline for each of these. The Conversations feature means that you can nurture customer relationships in a natural way, hopefully helping to increase sales.
What ActiveCampaign could improve:
Unfortunately, it’s not possible to export your list of deals from the tool (this could be done through an API, but it’s not ideal). The reports could perhaps go a bit deeper.
Some might not like that the concept of leads and accounts doesn’t really exist within the tool. Instead, everyone is a contact and the deals associated with it and everything else is all managed in the same place.
See how it did in our ActiveCampaign vs HubSpot comparison.
ActiveCampaign Pricing:
Plus plan: $70/month for up to 2,500 contacts, unlimited sending, lead and contact scoring, advanced email marketing automation and 25 users.
Professional plan: $159/month up to 5,000 contacts, machine learning capabilities, training and consultation sessions
Try ActiveCampaign CRM for free!
Conclusion
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