Agile CRM Vs. EngageBay 2024: Who’s Best for SMBs?

When it comes to contact management, Agile truly shines by offering tremendous utility. 

Our experience with syncing our Small Business Bonfire Gmail account was a breeze, accomplished with just a few clicks.

Here’s a sneak peek of the integration process. 

This enabled us to connect our contacts directly to the Agile CRM platform. But we didn’t stop there; we also wanted to evaluate the ease of manually adding contacts. Much to our surprise, it was straightforward and hassle-free! 

Here’s a snapshot of what our manual contact addition process looked like. 

The bottom line: With Agile, we found contact management to be both seamless and highly efficient.

Great pipeline management can make or break your business. 

We were curious to see if Agile’s pipeline management capabilities lived up to its reputation.

Thankfully, it didn’t disappoint. 

We tested this feature (over six months), adding to our affiliate marketing deals at Small Business Bonfire.

Check out the “new deal” interface, one of the sleekest designs we’ve seen (and we’ve seen a lot).

We loved the ability to color-code each deal, in addition to being able to add a ton of information to each card.

Once we had our deals put in, we could move them around in our pipeline (pictured below).

What Agile does best is keep things simple. Throughout our testing, we can easily say that we were never confused about where any deal was in our sales process. 

This allowed our sales team to focus on what they do best—closing deals.

With the help desk tool, Agile CRM essentially gives you a hub to manage all customer support tickets in one convenient location.

With Agile CRM, we could easily add tickets to our help desk and assign them to specific team members. 

Here’s a snapshot of what it looked like to add a new ticket.

Once we had our tickets in the system, viewing and managing them from a centralized location was easy.

Here are some things we really liked about this feature:  

• Creating and saving canned responses for frequently asked questions
• Adding internal notes to each ticket for easy communication with our team
• Viewing all tickets in a single, organized dashboard
• Assigning tickets to specific team members for efficient resolution
• Adding custom tags to tickets for easy organization and searching 

All in all, Agile CRM’s help desk feature was impressive with its user-friendly interface and functionality. 

Our final thoughts: Agile CRM’s help desk feature is an excellent tool for any business looking to streamline their customer service efforts (at a very affordable price).

At Small Business Bonfire, we believe in working smarter, not harder.

Automation is your golden ticket to getting more done in less time. 

Agile CRM automates marketing sales and service processes across the board. 

Let’s break it down:

• Marketing Automation: Agile CRM’s marketing automation features are highly intuitive and designed to amplify the efficiency of marketing teams. They offer capabilities like automatic email campaigns, web analytics, and a social suite to manage all social profiles in one place.
• Service Automation: Agile CRM streamlines service requests and improves overall efficiency with helpdesk automations. With features like automatic ticket assignment, escalation when tickets aren’t resolved promptly, and the ability to create canned responses for frequently asked questions, Agile CRM ensures no customer request falls through the cracks.
• Sales Automation: Agile CRM shines in sales automation with features like automatic follow-ups, task reminders, and even opportunity tracking. Automating these essential sales tasks significantly reduces manual work, allowing sales teams to focus more on closing deals (and less on administrative tasks).

Here’s a quick look into our automation creation process during our three months of testing. 

We created a service automation to assign users based on different priority levels. 

The learning curve here was a bit steep, but we were impressed with how customizable and efficient this feature was once we got the hang of it.

Agile CRM’s workflow automation capabilities are a game changer for any business looking to optimize its processes and boost productivity. 

Testing Agile CRM’s landing page builder was a straightforward and insightful process. 

We kicked off the evaluation by creating several pages using the drag-and-drop editor. 

The editor was intuitive, making it easy for us to add, remove, or rearrange various elements on the page. 

Plus, we could easily preview how the page would look on different devices – a handy feature for ensuring responsiveness.

Here are some of the elements that stood out during our testing phase:

• Drag-and-drop editor: The drag-and-drop editor was super intuitive, allowing us to easily create and edit landing pages. The freedom to move elements around as we saw fit gave us complete control over the design and layout of our pages.
• Analytics: We loved having access to detailed analytics. The ability to monitor page performance in real time was immensely beneficial in adjusting our strategies based on user behavior and engagement.
• Customization: The customization options were robust. We could easily change colors, fonts, and other design elements to match our brand identity. 
  A/B testing: The A/B testing feature was a great addition. It allowed us to test different variations of our landing pages to determine which performed best.

Agile CRM’s landing page builder is not just a tool for creating pages; it’s a comprehensive platform for monitoring, analyzing, and refining your landing pages to achieve better conversion rates.

Creating web forms to capture leads can help make your sales and marketing teams’ lives much easier. 

Agile CRM allows you to create powerful web capture forms for your website. 

We loved the ease of use and all the customization options available in the form builder. 

Here are some features we found helpful during our testing:

• Responsive forms: The web forms created using Agile CRM’s form builder are responsive, which means they adapt to different screen sizes for a seamless user experience.
  Customization:  The form builder has several customization options, like adding fields, changing the layout and design, and even inserting custom code for advanced users.
  Form analytics: The form builder provides detailed analytics for each form, giving us insights into conversion rates, abandonment rates, and more.

Here’s a quick look into our creation process.

We created a form to sign up for our newsletter (in less than 5 minutes).

From there, we were given the code to easily embed the form onto our website (screenshot below).

This made it incredibly easy to capture leads and grow our email list while we focused on making our clients happy. 

Agile CRM’s email marketing capabilities are truly impressive, serving as a powerful tool for businesses to accomplish the following:

• Connect with their audience
• Convert prospects
• Retain customers

During our six months of testing, we created countless campaigns using this feature. 

Agile CRM made establishing an effective email marketing strategy easy, providing everything from campaign analytics to email tracking. 

One feature that stood out was the ability to create custom templates for each campaign stage. 

This allowed us to tailor our communication to our audience’s specific needs or interests at that particular phase, increasing the relevancy and effectiveness of our messages. 

For instance, we created an introductory template to showcase our newsletter to newly subscribed customers. 

This personal touch added a sense of welcome and engagement, creating a robust and active subscription base.

Here’s a glimpse of the introductory template we created (using the fantastic template editor).

At the end of the day, email marketing is a great way to nurture leads and build relationships with customers. 

With Agile CRM’s versatile email marketing capabilities, businesses of all sizes can execute effective campaigns that produce measurable results.

Understanding data is key to driving success in any business, and Agile CRM excels in this domain exceptionally with its extensive analytics and reporting capabilities. 

With the ability to track a vast range of metrics, this feature provides invaluable insights into how your campaigns are performing and where there is room for improvement. 

The data-driven approach offered by Agile CRM enables businesses to make informed decisions, optimize their strategies, and ultimately achieve their goals.

Here are a few highlights from our testing of Agile CRM’s analytics and reporting features:

• User-friendly interface: We found the platform very easy to navigate. The user-friendly interface makes accessing a wealth of data at a glance straightforward.
• In-depth data: The level of detail provided by Agile CRM’s analytics is incredible. We could track everything from customer engagement and conversion rates to email opens and click-through rates, providing a comprehensive view of our campaign performance.
• Real-time reports: Agile CRM provides real-time updates, allowing us to monitor our campaigns as they are happening and make necessary adjustments.
• Customizable reports: The ability to customize reports based on specific metrics was a big plus. This made it easy for us to focus on the most relevant data to our goals.

Here’s an example of a custom report we created called “Revenue by Source.”

This report showed us exactly where our revenue came from, allowing us to allocate our resources and efforts accordingly. 

The brass tacks:  Agile CRM’s analytics and reporting features are robust, intuitive, and highly detailed, making it an invaluable tool for driving business success.