Marketing Automation software is a CRM solution for sales, marketing and customer service in a business. Marketing automation includes email marketing, lead management, social media integration and more. In one suite of tools you can publish your blog, send out email campaigns with autoresponders, manage contacts, appointments and follow-up.
Catch, coordinate, and keep track of every touchpoint between your organization and your leads and customers to create more opportunities for both sales and marketing. Create a single view of the customer that brings together data from across CRM, marketing automation, email marketing, and web analytics tools – all in one place. No matter if you’re in sales or marketing, interdepartmental plotting makes sure you’re on the same page with the customer at every step in the process.
HubSpot (Best CRM marketing tool overall)
Founded by MIT alumni, HubSpot has been a dominant player in inbound marketing since 2004. Today they have many modules, including a CRM system and Marketing Hub.
Pros:
Helps with social media marketing campaigns and does blogging too. You can set up landing pages and do A/B testing to see which works best. Marketing automation tools help streamline the process. Track the efficacy of your marketing campaigns in real-time with “revenue attribution reporting.” Of course this works great atop your CRM data.
Cons:
HubSpot does not offer many customization options. Its focus on marketing automation and contact records might be limiting if you want better relationship-based marketing.
Pricing:
- There is a suite of Marketing tools for free
- Marketing Hub starts at $45
- Marketing Hub Professional starts at $800
- Marketing Hub Enterprise starts at $3,200
Mailchimp (Best free CRM for marketing)
Mailchimp started out as an email subscription app. It has since grown to cover things like contact management, marketing and creative tools.
Pros:
This CRM solution has sales force automation and marketing tools. Access customer conversation histories from phone calls to emails and chats. Lead form integration turns website visitors into contacts. Segment leads and customers in many ways, like by including industry, lifetime value, and location. Marketing automation makes setting up workflows easy. Also works with other Mailchimp apps like email drip campaigns.
Cons:
Importing data can produce duplicate leads. Integrations are limited in number, and automation features are not super advanced.
Pricing:
- There is a free version of Mailchimp Marketing
- Essentials plan starts at $9.99
- Standard from at $14.99
- Premium from at $299.99
Keap CRM: Best CRM Software for Ease of Use
Keap CRMKeap is a great choice for solopreneurs and small businesses that don’t need a lot of bells and whistles with their CRM.Keap’s combination of sales and marketing tools keeps all your customer activity data and outreach efforts in a single location.All plans require a $500 onboarding fee.VISIT SITE
Keap is a great solution for busy small business owners looking for a turnkey CRM that’s easy to set up and maintain. Its migration team will help you move your company’s existing data from many popular CRMs into Keap for free. Its fee-based onboarding service includes one-on-one coaching and other training materials to get you up and running in no time. Live chat support and an extensive online library of helpful resources are available 24/7, and phone and email support are accessible on weekdays.
Keap’s entry-level plan is designed with small and emerging businesses in mind. It includes the core tools companies need to support sales efforts, including lead capture, client invoicing and contact management tools. Scheduling software makes setting up meetings a breeze, and the email sync with Gmail and Outlook helps you centralize communications in a single organized system. Keap scales as your business grows, so you can easily add more functionality to the CRM as the need arises.
To help users reach their target customers, Keap recently released a new feature: automated text message marketing. With this new capability, users can set up text message responses to automatically generate when certain events are triggered (e.g., a customer completes a web form). This feature not only reaches your customers where they are, but also takes the burden away from your team, streamlining your customer communication process.
Plan upgrades provide additional features to nurture customer relationships, such as automated sales pipelines, customizable dashboards, and reporting tools that shed valuable insight on team performance. The email templates and list segmentation tools help you message the right audience at the right time, while the built-in reporting tool tracks the campaign’s effectiveness and customer engagement. If you want to sync your customer data from other platforms, like MailChimp or Constant Contact, Keap offers a native integration for you to do so. The integration allows you to quickly sync your data while keeping your pre-built audiences intact, so you don’t miss a beat with your customers.
Keap can help small businesses simplify their sales process with its useful Checkout Forms tool. With select plans, users can create customizable checkout forms to collect customer payments without sending a complete invoice. What’s more, Keap recently enhanced these e-commerce tools so businesses can create intuitive checkout pages with embedded promo codes and one-click upsells. You can also add branded logos and colors to make your checkout forms match your business. Together with Keap’s intuitive automations and synchronization, these embedded features add to the software’s overall usability.
Salesflare Review – Best Lead Management Tools for Small Business
Any CRM worth its salt should definitively answer one question—how does this help teams sell better?
As you see on this list, different platforms have come up with different answers to this question. Salesflare stands out for pushing lead management tools to the forefront without being bogged down with superfluous features.
If your team could use some help guiding opportunities from lead to win—and, honestly, what team doesn’t—Salesflare could be just the ticket.
It starts with the software’s intelligent information gathering. Salesflare pulls contact info, company role, and much more detail automatically from emails, social profiles, and other sources. This information is stored both in a dedicated section for each account you’re selling to and a universal contact book accessible by your whole team.
Salesflare automatically logs actions by your team—such as meetings, calls, and other touch points—and by the prospects and customers themselves, whether they open an email you sent, click a link, or visit a landing page.
In this way, Salesflare is very flexible for how your team approaches the buyer’s journey. Whether you prefer one member of your team to guide opportunities from start to finish or if you have hand-offs at various points, the information is all there.
Anyone can step in and have the latest information plus the current state of the lead based on recent actions.
When you add in the platform’s notifications for when prospects take an action or any other triggering event, your team will get really good at moving quickly on warm leads or prospects who have signaled their readiness to purchase.
The combination of simplicity and power inherent to Salesflare makes it a great tool for smaller B2B sales outfits.
Not only do you get useful automation and the tools to help really nail follow ups (and, thus, really encourage leads along the path to purchase), you get key features like:
- Team-wide timeline view for tracking opportunities from lead to win
- Personalized, scheduled, trackable email campaigns
- Insights dashboard that can be segmented by team member, pipeline, or date range
That’s all included at the base Growth plan for $29/user per month.
One step up from there is the Pro plan, for $49/user per month. With that you’ll also get:
- Custom email workflow builder for multiple simultaneous campaigns
- User permissions, including view-only access
- Custom dashboards
There is also an Enterprise plan for $99/user per month. The main benefits of that are the additional support you get, such as a dedicated account representative and custom-made training modules for your team.
Salesflare really shines for smaller B2B businesses and the lower two pricing tiers are quite palatable for that purpose. You can give it a try with Salesflare’s free trial or request a demo today.
Conclusion
Improve your customer experience with an easy to use all-in-one customer relationship management, marketing and sales software for small businesses. Offer a single view of your customer’s journey across several digital channels: website, mobile app, email and social media. Connect with prospects and customers via personalized, cross channel engagement strategies to get more sales.