Why do companies need CRM software?
- When choosing the CRM program that you will need in your company, you must first identify all the features available in the CRM program to determine what will suit your business size only because your choice of features that you do not need will lead to two problems.
- First, the cost of the CRM program will be high. You have to choose many features that you do not need, especially if the size of your company is small.
- Secondly, the failure to train employees to use the program because the features are many and they do not use most of them, but the CRM program becomes more challenging to deal with, and therefore the program has become useless.
What are the advantages of using a CRM system?
Some of the advantages of using a CRM tool include:
- Don’t let any of your leads fall through the loopholes: bring them automatically from your website, inquiry emails, phone calls, and social site to your CRM.
- Save time by automating routine tasks: From assigning leads to sales reps to sending emails promptly, a CRM platform helps you automate mundane daily tasks.
- Accelerate your sales conversion process: Streamline your sales process and get better insights into the progression of potential customers in your conversion funnel quickly.
- Improve customer retention and loyalty: Easily track each customer’s interaction to provide a more personalized pre-and post-sale experience to encourage customers to stay in your business and come back for more.
- Make informed decisions faster: Business owners and managers get a complete and accurate view of team activities and sales trends to make better decisions.
Why use a CRM?
- No matter what, you should prioritize the industry or region your company operates in, building and nurturing solid relationships with clients.
- Maintaining good relationships with your customers gives you an edge over your competitors, and a CRM allows you to achieve that.
- Centralize customer data to enable your sales, support, and marketing teams to make quick, informed decisions.
- Improve team productivity by simplifying business processes and automating routine tasks.
- Get detailed analytics and deeper insights into your team’s activities.
- Turn customer data into business intelligence to drive revenue.
Who Should Use a CRM System?
CRM systems are always associated with sales teams, and over time, these solutions expand to become a significant part of the marketing, commerce, and service functions, to name a few.
CRM evolves by constantly collecting customer data, analyzing that data, and using the knowledge gained to deepen relationships and improve business outcomes.
It allows any customer-centric employee (or those who support customer-centric employees) to convey, “We know and appreciate you.”
CRM supports you beyond the sales process, which is critical to business performance. With an in-depth knowledge of the customer, companies can:
- Display and sell additional new products at the right time and the right price.
- Helping service teams solve problems faster.
- Helping development teams create better products and services.
Why use Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?
You might be wondering why CRM systems are so important. There is very little difference in terms of product features and capabilities between competing products. Many customers now make purchasing decisions based on their experiences with your company.
To deliver a great customer experience (CX), you need a complete view of your customer (and the correct data to compile that view). CRM systems integrate customer data from various sources, including email, websites, physical stores, call centers, mobile sales, and marketing efforts. Marketing and Advertising.
CRM is all about knowing your customers, their needs, your past interactions with them, and what future interactions will look like.
What is the purpose of a customer relationship management (CRM) system?
The goal of CRM is to support strong, productive, and loyal relationships with customers through informed and differentiated customer experiences at every stage of the customer journey. Why? To improve customer acquisition and retention.
This central idea wraps around your CRM strategy. You can achieve a large part of the goal of customer acquisition and retention by providing experiences that keep your customers coming back to you, and CRM is both a strategy and a tool for achieving those experiences.
What does a CRM system do?
A CRM system collects, correlates, and analyzes all data related to a particular customer’s journey (including customer information, interactions with company representatives, purchases, service requests, assets, and proposals) and then provides an interface that allows users to access that data and understand each touchpoint, It is through this understanding that the foundation for a strong relationship with clients is built.
Customer data can also be collected for commission modeling, sales forecasting, zoning, campaign design, product innovation, and other sales, marketing, and service activities, all of which can help improve customer acquisition and retention efforts and increase revenue.
CRM software and tools help you simplify the customer engagement process, build strong relationships with your customers, build customer loyalty, and ultimately increase sales and profits.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Let’s look at two scenarios from the customer’s point of view:
You need service on a product you purchased from a company you have dealt with before, and you even registered the product. And when you call the customer support line, the customer service agent has no idea who you are or who you bought and when.
You now have to go through the routine process of providing information available to the customer service agent, such as the model or serial number that is difficult to identify or access by customers.
Not only do you have to waste your valuable time providing this information to a company that should have this information, but you also have the feeling that you are not an important customer to the company because it seems that they don’t know anything about you, even though you get the required service, you are seriously looking at Compete the next time you’re thinking of buying from that company.
Best Low-Cost CRM Software for Small Business, CRM software is one of the most important programs that can help you manage customer relationships with your company, increase sales and manage potential customer relationships, and contribute to the growth of your business significantly, so learn with me the most important programs CRM for small businesses.
Best Low-Cost CRM Software for Small Business
In the following lines, we will mention the most important medium-cost CRM programs for small businesses:
Agile CRM
All-in-one software bundles contact management, sales, marketing, and customer service packages into one simplified dashboard and offer sales tools with a 360-degree contact view, detailed reports, and timeline.
It also provides project and deals management tools, marketing tools for creating and registering leads, sending emails, and marketing tools through social media.
In the end, you can use the best CRM software, HubSpot, especially since it is free and easy to use and preferred for small companies in their beginnings, to manage customers wonderfully and with a solid plan.
If you specifically want CRM software to manage your sales, you can use Agile CRM or FreshSales, as they are essential in improving sales for your company.
As a startup, you will start with the basic version of any software at first and then move towards more advanced plans as your company grows, but with Agile CRM, there is a real problem with the few features in its basic version.
Built on a promise to help sales teams better organize their sales process, Agile CRM has severely limited some critical features that small businesses need to manage their customer-facing activities efficiently.
All the features you get in the basic version are essential that The software will direct you towards a higher plan to access rudimentary automation features even as part of the sale.
GreenRope
GreenRope is an all-in-one CRM that helps you generate leads, increase awareness, and boost your conversions. It is straightforward to use and is one of the best CRMs for businesses of all sizes.
With GreenRope, you can track emails, websites, and more in real-time. It helps you find the most converting pages, time on page, and total page views in a clean dashboard.
GreenRope is designed for anyone looking for a CRM that integrates sales, marketing, and operations into a single platform.
Some of GreenRope’s features include:
- Marketing automation.
- Drag and drop the builder to create stunning emails and landing pages.
- Integration with popular applications such as WordPress and Zapier.
- The mobile application, so you stay connected with CRM.
- Shared access to increase team collaboration.
- HTTPS and two-factor authentication for security.
Pricing: GreenRope offers different packages, and they start at $149 per month. You get 1000 contacts and all the features.
SendinBlue CRM
SendinBlue is not your regular CRM software. It’s not even CRM software per se. Instead, it is primarily recognized as an email marketing software. And, like MailChimp, CRM just so happens to be a complementary function within its suite of tools.
But don’t let this fool you. Although SendinBlue is primarily a digital marketing solution, it does not neglect the aspect of its CRM. It is one of the strongest candidates in our best free CRM suite because it is not limited to just basic CRM features. Instead, SendinBlue goes beyond common trends to offer additional premium features.
Consider workflow automation capabilities, for example. While most free CRM tools ignore even basic automation, SendinBlue free CRM goes ahead and facilitates advanced marketing automation workflows for up to 2,000 contacts.
It also provides a workflow editor to intuitively customize the entire automation system and page tracking tools for keeping tabs on the target audience.
In the end, you can interact with your leads and contacts via email, SMS, web forms, and landing pages.
SendinBlue is also great for sending automated transaction messages via emails and SMS messages. It even gives you the honor to customize it accordingly.
SendinBlue Free CRM Software Features
- SendinBlue’s free plan offers email, API, and integration support.
- Real-time reports, marketing automation workflows, webpage tracking, workflow editor, and advanced templating language.
- Transactional email and SMS sending, and CRM for sales.
- And customizable subscription forms, advanced contact splitting, unlimited contacts and details, A/B testing, SMS marketing, email, and SMS customization.
- Email template library, mobile-friendly email designer, plus 300 emails per day.
What SendinBlue CRM Features Do You Pay Extra?
SendinBlue has three premium plans that cost between $22.50 per month and $173 per month (Lite, Essential, and Premium), plus a dedicated enterprise option.
Insightly
Insight CRM also happens to be a direct competitor to HubSpot CRM since it targets roughly the same market segment.
To be more precise, Insightly is a cloud-based CRM system that provides small and medium-sized businesses with a suite of tools for marketing campaigns, sales operations management, project management, and facilitating integrations with related applications such as Microsoft Outlook and Gmail.
These capabilities have attracted more than 1.5 million users to Insightly. They continue to leverage them for call management, advanced reporting, project management, workflow automation, quote generation, lead generation, customer management, email tracking, contact management, and relationship management.
The CRM mobile app complements these add-ons with voice notes and business card scanning.
The one we’re interested in is, of course, Free CRM Insight, a permanently free tool for managing sales, contacts, and projects. But, here’s the kicker – it restricts not only some functionality but also the number of users and records.
However, the third version is the free trial, which provides all the premium features for a limited time. And think about it, you might want to start here because Insightly won’t force you to commit. You will be free to proceed without providing your credit card credentials.
But don’t let that deter you from trying the free version. Although it may not be as powerful as the compatible version, Insightly’s CRM CRM is still one of the best free CRM tools on the market.
Its tools primarily allow you to manage tasks and projects, create and launch email campaigns, connect the CRM system to your customer’s social media accounts, convert leads into sales opportunities, coordinate proposals and simplify the entire sales funnel.
But unlike HubSpot CRM, Insight Free CRM can only accommodate a maximum of two users. On the brighter side, at least, they have an impressive array of project management capabilities and task management, sales management, and customer management.
Additionally, this free CRM solution comes with accounting integration, custom reports and charts, group email and custom email templates, as well as self-service support. The number of records you can store here is 2,500, with two fields assigned to each record type.
And in case you’re wondering, Insightly logs refer to reports, comments, event notes, emails, tasks, projects, opportunities, organizations, leads, and contacts.
You get to manage it all through a delightful straightforward interface. Insight has designed its system focusing on ease of use, a seamless user experience, and intuition.
What CRM Insightly features do you pay extra for?
- Insight Free CRM is optimized for users who need project management, sales management, and simple contact management capabilities.
- Small and medium businesses with core dynamic sales projects would particularly like here, as they would be able to customize dashboards, reports, and data fields on a large scale.
- However, the best users of Insightly Free CRM are the sales teams that deal with service-based businesses.
- The system allows them to manage their sales and service projects within one streamlined CRM software.
What CRM Insightly features do you pay extra for?
Insightly CRM offers its premium features through three pricing plans Plus, Professional, and Enterprise for $29 per user, $49 per user per month, and $99 per user per month, respectively.
Engagebay
Engagebay prides itself on ease of use and affordability. This software provides an all-in-one platform for marketing, sales, automation, and CRM. It is incredibly self-evident. So much so that you don’t need any technical knowledge to get started.
Engagebay is ideal for small businesses and startups to acquire, nurture, and convert leads into paying customers.
So, if you are looking to score more leads, you can create and launch lead generation forms and popups to collect the names, email addresses, and/or contact numbers of your leads.
You can also create and publish engaging landing pages, send custom email campaigns, and design an automated marketing funnel.
On top of that, Engagebay also provides the tools you need to identify high-quality leads so you know where to prioritize your time and resources better. Engagebay makes it easy to filter leads and determine their quality based on various criteria, including consumer engagement, behavior, location, etc.
Features of Free CRM Software
With the Freemium package from Engagebay, you can get the following features for free:
- Email Marketing.
- Autoresponders.
- Email broadcasts.
- Sequences.
- Lead snatchers.
- Landing pages.
- Help Desk.
- Live chat.
What CRM Features Are You Paying For?
Engagebay CRM offers its premium features through three pricing plans Plus, Professional, and Enterprise for $49 per user per month, $30 per user per month, and $30 per user per month, respectively.
Bitrix24
If you’re the type who would fancy a CRM solution that doubles as a social collaboration app, then Bitrix24 is worth checking out. This is an exceptional tool that not only facilitates sales automation but also actively promotes communication within SMEs.
Then guess what? Although you can only access the full Bitrix24 feature from the paid business plan version, the free version isn’t that bad. I would say that it provides about 70% of all functionality.
Now, this is quite impressive, especially when compared to the rest of the options in this best free CRM guide.
The surprises don’t end there because this is the most exciting part – while the bulk of today’s CRM solutions are distributed either on cloud or self-hosted systems, Bitrix24 happens to belong to both worlds.
Yes, this is correct. Believe it or not, Bitrix24 is not your average CRM software. You can use it as a cloud-based tool or install the whole system on your local server. Then when you need to integrate it, you will notice that the cloud version comes with a REST API while the self-hosted version is an open source CRM with API.
On the flip side, however, the cloud-based Bitrix24 CRM is much cheaper and provides an always-free option. In other words, you can bet that Bitrix24 Free CRM is entirely cloud-based.
Now, when we go into its details, Bitrix24 Free CRM is primarily described as an open-source CRM system optimized for sales team management, sales automation, marketing automation, customer support, email marketing, online payments, quoting, and billing as well as pipeline management.
Social cooperation among team members is one of the main tasks here. Bitrix24 is the best free CRM solution for end-to-end team collaboration. It provides all the essential tools your team needs to interact freely, simplify sales tasks and projects, and share files and assets.
Then to build a strong team, Bitrix24 Free CRM has a flexible administrator system that helps you set up additional user accounts and control the corresponding privileges. You can assign user roles, manage account access permissions, specify data visibility, and assign leads to different team members.
The only drawback is that you can only register a maximum of 12 users per account. If you want an unlimited number of users, you will have to buy the Bitrix24 Professional plan for $199 per month.
But if 12 votes are good enough, you’ll be happy to learn that Bitrix24 Free CRM makes up for user limitations in many different ways.
For example, all the team members you bring to the board should collaborate extensively thanks to the systems task management functionality, which comes along with project management, site building, time tracking, workload management, human resource management, document management, and communications tools.
Bitrix24 Free CRM allows team members to engage contacts across multiple channels to speed up the conversion process. Apart from emails, you can interact with your leads via video conferencing, instant messaging, and phone calls.
Then to keep all the resulting customer interactions organized, the CRM system automatically saves emails, messages, and phone recordings in chronological order. Each contact is eventually linked to their respective interaction history.
Another area in which Bitrix24 Free CRM really stands out is system customization. It happens to be a widely available flexible CRM tool open to many vital modifications.
Who Should Consider Using Bitrix24 Free CRM Software?
Bitrix24 CRM Free is mainly recommended for small and medium business teams that constantly work closely with each other. Its multiple collaboration tools facilitate seamless communication, human resource management, document sharing, workload management, project management, and task management.
Plus, given that it’s an open-source CRM solution, you should have an easy time reconfiguring your entire system as sales and team processes change.