Are you still struggling to manage your customer relationships, track your marketing efforts, and analyze data from multiple platforms?
Finding the perfect marketing CRM to fit your budget, feature requirements, and team size can seem impossible.
I’m AJ, here to narrow it down. Over the last ten years, I started and scaled my business (to a successful multiple seven-figure exit).
My mission with Small Business Bonfire (SBB) is to help you do the same (in a fraction of the time it took me).
So, let’s dive into our list of the best marketing CRMs—guaranteed to take your marketing game to the next level!
After years of SBB testing, here is our list of the best marketing CRMs:
- Best Marketing CRM For AI Content: Capsule
- Best Marketing CRM For All-In-One: HubSpot
- Best Marketing CRM For Customer Journey Mapping: Freshmarketer
- Best Marketing CRM For Project Management: Monday.com
- Best Marketing CRM For Scaling: Engagebay
- Best Marketing CRM For Campaign Creation: Creatio
How Did We Test The Best CRMs For Marketing
My team and I tested each CRM (over 6 months) in the following categories.
- Hands-On Experience
- Feature Assessment
- Ease of Use
- Customer Support
- Scalability
- Third Party Reviews
Capsule CRM: Best CRM for AI Content
Bonfire Rating: 4.6/5
Capsule is perfect for SMBs that want a no-frills CRM designed to help your teams succeed!
Capsule
Learn More Today!-
AI Content Assistant
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Project Management Tools
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Great Mobile App
Why We Picked Capsule CRM
Capsule CRM stands out from the crowd for several reasons.
These include the following:
- Powerful AI Content Assistant
- Easy-to-use mobile app
- Customizable dashboards for a personalized UX (user experience)
- Simple user-interface
- Great email marketing capabilities (with Transpond)
Capsule makes this list of the best marketing tools on the market because of its AI Content Assistant above all else.
This new feature from the platform uses AI to create effective, personalized emails (within seconds).
It’s perfect for SMBs who want to ramp up their marketing efforts in a big way.
Capsule CRM is also extremely affordable, easy to use, and offers a mobile app worth talking about. All that to say—it’s kind of a big deal.
Capsule CRM Features
Regarding email marketing, Capsule CRM is on the list of best marketing CRM software for a reason.
These are some key features that make Capsule stand out in this area:
- Transpond integration – This feature allows users to send personalized, targeted emails directly from Capsule CRM.
- Great mobile email capabilities – The mobile app is highly intuitive and offers great email functionality on the go. It also syncs seamlessly with Gmail and Outlook.
- Customizable email templates – Capsule offers customizable email templates to help users create professional, branded emails in minutes.
Here’s a sneak peek at our integration process with Transpond.
With just a few clicks, we were in business! From there, we were able to create powerful email templates within minutes.
Capsule (with Transpond) offers many helpful themes to get started with (shown below).
This makes Capsule extremely beginner-friendly, eliminating any entry barrier for new users.
We could easily customize each email and send it off directly from Capsule CRM.
At the end of the day, email marketing is a crucial aspect of any successful CRM software.
Capsule’s integration with Transpond allows for seamless and highly effective email marketing efforts.
Capsule’s mobile app is available for both iOS and Android devices.
It allows users to access all of Capsule’s features, including the following:
- Contact management
- Task tracking
- Calendar view & scheduling
- Pipeline management
- Project management
- Email on-the-go
I’ve used a lot of CRM mobile apps over the years. Some are great, and some are so buggy they’re almost unusable.
What’s great about Capsule’s mobile app is that it’s essentially everything the CRM software has to offer in the palm of your hand.
Capsule CRM does three things exceptionally well with its mobile app:
- Ease of use – Capsule makes it easy to navigate through features and get things done quickly on a small screen.
- Feature availability – As I mentioned, the mobile app includes almost everything the desktop version does.
- Design & User Experience (UX) – The interface is clean, simple, and visually appealing—making it enjoyable to use.
Add on the fact that Capsule is very affordable, offers scalable plans, and fantastic emailing capabilities, and you’ve got yourself an app to be reckoned with.
Our takeaway: If you’re looking for an easy-to-use CRM software with a fantastic app, we recommend you make Capsule a part of your mobile marketing strategy as soon as possible.
Here’s our mobile view of Capsule CRM.
Capsule’s new AI Content Assistant helps users create personalized and effective marketing emails in seconds.
It’s perfect for SMBs looking to work smarter, not harder.
Capsule’s AI content assistant can accomplish the following with ease:
- Create personalized email content
- Rewrite content
- Change tone with just a click
We tested this feature by creating emails targeting our affiliate marketing clients.
Check out an email that we were able to create (within just a few seconds) using the AI assistant.
It was as simple as choosing a tone, selecting “create cold email,” and clicking “generate content.”
From there, we could easily edit the content to our specific needs.
With CapsuleCRM, we saved hours and ended up with high-quality emails that we could send out with ease.
The bottom line: Capsule’s AI Content Assistant is an absolute game-changer for SMBs looking to take their marketing efforts to the next level.
It’s fantastic for busy marketing teams looking to maximize efficiency (while still creating effective content).
Capsule Pricing
Capsule CRM offers four pricing plans.
They are the following:
- Starter – $21/Month
- Growth – $38/Month
- Advanced – $60/Month
- Ultimate – $75/Month
Capsule CRM and Cons
- Easy-to-use
- Affordable pricing
- Great mobile app
- Helpful AI Content Assistant
- Lacks landing page creation
- No A/B testing capabilities
HubSpot CRM: Best for All-In-One
Bonfire Rating: 4.8/5
HubSpot CRM has everything you need to help manage customer relationships. Seriously, it's got it all.
HubSpot
Learn More Today!-
Tons of Free Tools From Each Hub
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Landing & Web Page Creation
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Robust Integrations
Why We Picked HubSpot CRM
HubSpot is a fantastic all-in-one platform that offers a wide range of marketing tools to help you easily scale your business.
It’s an excellent choice for SMBs that want to consolidate their tools and streamline their processes.
We were blown away by the extensive range of marketing features offered, including the following:
- Email marketing tools
- Landing page creation
- Web forms
- Website creation
- Live chat
- Marketing automation
- Customer surveys
With HubSpot, you’re not just getting a marketing platform. You’re getting a robust suite of tools to help you scale your business from all angles.
Here are some things we loved about HubSpot CRM:
- Ease of use: HubSpot’s user-friendly interface makes it easy for anyone to navigate and use the platform. New users can quickly get up to speed with a simple layout and intuitive features.
- Marketing automation: HubSpot offers powerful marketing automation capabilities that allow businesses to create personalized campaigns and track their success.
- All-in-one platform: By combining CRM, CMS, marketing, sales, and customer service tools, HubSpot provides a comprehensive solution for businesses.
- Integration: With over 300 integrations available, HubSpot allows businesses to connect their favorite tools and streamline their workflows.
There’s a reason HubSpot is one of our all-time favorite CRMs—it’s powerful, intuitive, and guaranteed to provide great return on investment (ROI).
HubSpot CRM Features
When it comes to email marketing, HubSpot has you covered.
The comprehensive CRM software provides all the resources you need to run a successful email campaign, including:
- Gorgeous beginner-friendly templates
- A fantastic drag-and-drop editor
- Email marketing analytics
- Great marketing automation to make life easier
My team and I tested the platform (over six months), creating all kinds of campaigns in the process.
Our take? We were blown away!
Here’s a look at the templates offered by HubSpot.
This essentially takes the hassle out of email design, allowing SMBs to focus on the content and strategy instead.
The drag-and-drop editor (shown below) is also incredibly easy to use.
We were able to customize our emails with just a few clicks.
We were able to easily add the following to each email:
- Images
- Video
- Buttons
- Footers
- Products
- Social links
Once everything was in place, we could schedule and send emails directly from the platform.
HubSpot also offers fantastic analytics, allowing users to track the success of their campaigns.
In a nutshell, HubSpot CRM provides all the necessary tools and resources for SMBs to run successful email marketing campaigns (with ease).
It’s important to note that HubSpot isn’t just for building landing pages.
They offer a full website builder (CMS) to help businesses create stunning, functional websites without prior coding knowledge.
This allows you to build your marketing campaigns and website under one roof, providing the synergy you need to scale your business.
Here are some key features that make HubSpot CMS stand out:
- Drag-and-drop editor – This feature makes creating beautiful, professional websites easy for users with no coding experience.
- Personalization options – HubSpot allows businesses to create personalized content based on visitors’ behavior and interests.
- SEO optimization – With built-in SEO tools, HubSpot helps businesses improve their website’s search engine ranking.
- Responsive design – All websites created in HubSpot are automatically optimized for desktop and mobile devices.
- Integrations – Integrate with popular tools like Google Analytics and Adobe Photoshop to create a seamless workflow.
Here are some themes and templates that HubSpot provides to help you get started.
We could create a website in less than 10 minutes from start to finish.
We loved the ability to easily add our coloring and font choices for the website (shown below).
From there, we could design our page with the drag-and-drop editor.
Here’s a snapshot of our creation process during our testing.
While using HubSpot, we created landing pages, blog pages, and websites for our campaigns.
We found the platform incredibly easy to navigate (even for beginners).
So, if you’re looking to mix up your marketing strategy and create powerful pages whenever needed, give HubSpot a try!
Understanding your customers is integral to the success of your business.
Luckily, HubSpot offers a survey tool that allows you to easily create and distribute surveys.
You can use HubSpot’s survey creation to accomplish the following:
- Gather feedback
- Conduct market research
- Improve customer satisfaction
We found creating surveys on HubSpot extremely easy.
You can choose from pre-made templates or build your own customized survey from scratch.
HubSpot offers the following survey templates:
- Customer support: These surveys are used to gauge the quality of your customer support service. They help you understand your support team’s effectiveness and identify improvement areas.
- Customer satisfaction: As the name suggests, these surveys gauge how satisfied your customers are. The feedback can shed light on what you’re doing well and what areas could use improvement.
- Customer loyalty: These surveys measure the loyalty of your customers, providing insights into repeat purchase likelihood and brand recommendation inclination. High scores reflect strong customer relationships, while low scores may indicate a need to improve your customer experience.
Here’s a quick look at our perspective during our testing.
We found the survey creation process to be seamless and user-friendly.
Once we had our survey ready, it was a breeze to distribute it via email or embed it on our website.
And the best part? HubSpot gives us detailed analytics for each survey so we can gain valuable insights from customer feedback.
Overall, HubSpot’s survey tool is a fantastic addition to their CRM and marketing platform.
HubSpot CRM Pricing
HubSpot CRM offers a free plan in addition to three paid plans:
- Free Plan – Free Forever
- Starter CRM Suite – $30/Month
- Professional CRM Suite – $1,335/Month
- Enterprise CRM Suite – $5,000/Month
Check out our in-depth HubSpot pricing guide to learn more!
HubSpot CRM Pros and Cons
- Robust suite of features, including sales, service, marketing, and CMS
- Tons of free tools
- Website, landing page, and blog page creation
- Powerful marketing automation
- Great mobile app
- Pricing can be expensive for Professional and Enterprise plans
- CMS Hub is not as customizable as some dedicated CMS platforms
Freshmarketer: Best For Customer Journey Mapping
Bonfire Rating: 4.6/5
Freshmarketer is a marketing platform with a ton of automation for tech-savvy folks.
Freshmarketer
Learn More Today!-
Customer Journey Mapping
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Affordable (and Scalable) Pricing
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Helpful Journey & Email Templates
Why We Picked Freshmarketer
Freshmarketer is a CRM software designed to help businesses map out their customer journey and create personalized experiences for their customers.
Here are some features that made Freshmarketer stand out to us:
- Customer journey mapping: With Freshmarketer, businesses can map out every touchpoint of their customer journey and create personalized experiences at each stage.
- Affordability: Freshmarketer offers flexible pricing plans that cater to businesses of all sizes, making it accessible for SMBs.
- Helpful templates: We were impressed by the variety of templates available for businesses to use in their journey mapping and email campaigns.
- Automation: Freshmarketer offers automation options to streamline marketing processes and create efficient workflows.
- Great email marketing tools: With Freshmarketer, businesses can use segmentation and personalization to send targeted emails and improve their email marketing strategy.
My team and I think Freshmarketer is perfect for SMBs that want to get a bird’s eye view of their customer journeys, streamline tedious tasks, and create powerful campaigns.
Freshmarketer Features
Tracking your customers’ journeys from start to finish can be tricky without the right tools.
Thankfully, Freshmarketer’s Journey Builder makes it easy to visualize and track every interaction your customers have with your brand.
With this feature, SMBs can easily do the following:
- Map out their customer journeys
- Create personalized touchpoints
- Optimize the entire process for better results
Freshmarketer provides pre-made journey playbooks (pictured below) to help you get started.
We utilized tons of these playbook templates throughout our testing period.
Within each playbook, we could easily customize each customer journey, making them unique to our business’s needs.
Here’s a quick look into the customization process on our end.
We were able to easily add the following:
- Triggers
- Actions
- Conditions
This way, we could follow our customer lifecycle (from prospecting to post-sales).
Our two cents: If you want to create personalized journeys for your customers, Freshmarketer’s journey builder is an excellent tool to have in your arsenal.
Email marketing is a proven tactic for generating leads and nurturing customer relationships.
Freshmarketer offers a robust suite of email marketing tools to help businesses make the most out of their campaigns.
Here are some features that stood out to us:
- Helpful templates: Freshmarketer offers a variety of email templates that are easy to customize and use for your campaigns.
- Segmentation: With Freshmarketer, businesses can segment their email lists based on factors like demographics, behavior, and interests to send targeted emails.
- Personalization: The platform allows for dynamic personalization within emails to create a more tailored experience for customers.
Here are some of the gorgeous templates offered by Freshmarketer.
These templates make it easy for even those completely new to CRM to create professional-looking emails.
We were able to create our own personalized email in a matter of minutes, thanks to Freshmarketer’s user-friendly interface.
Here’s how it looked from our perspective.
We were able to easily add the following to each email by dragging and dropping:
- Text
- Lists
- Images
- Buttons
- Video
- Social links
All in all, Freshmarketer’s email marketing tools exceeded our expectations and were a valuable addition to our testing process.
Freshmarketer provides excellent marketing analytics to take your SMB to the next level.
We created curated reports in a matter of seconds, giving us a top-down view of our marketing performance.
This feature made it easy to measure the success of our campaigns and make data-driven decisions moving forward.
Here are some of the reports we created.
We could drag and drop each widget within each report to customize our view.
Freshmarketer also allowed us to create and track custom metrics and attributes.
Check out one of the reports we created and customized.
This is perfect for niche SMBs that need specific data to measure their success.
The bottom line: Freshmarketer provides some of the best marketing analytics in the game. It’s easy to create and customize reports to your specific business.
The best part is that you can use this feature for free!
Freshmarketer Pricing
Freshmarketer offers 3 paid plans in addition to a free plan.
The paid plans include the following:
- Free – Free Forever
- Growth – $23/Month
- Pro – $179/Month
- Enterprise – $359/Month
Freshmarketer CRM Pros and Cons
- Fantastic customer journey tracking
- Powerful marketing analytics
- Affordable pricing plans
- Great email marketing capabilities
- Marketing automation tools
- Lacks marketing integrations
- There's a bit of a learning curve to the interface at first
Monday CRM: Best for Project Management
Bonfire Rating: 4.8/5
Monday.com was made for the dreamers, the folks who get stuff done!
Monday.com
Learn More Today!-
Tons of Project Management Tools
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Affordable Pricing & Free Forever Plan
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Powerful Analytics & Reporting
Why We Picked Monday CRM
Monday.com is a CRM platform that offers a wide range of features (at an affordable price) to help SMBs scale their marketing efforts.
Here are some reasons why we chose Monday.com for this category:
- Customizable automations: With Monday.com, businesses can create custom workflows and automations to streamline their marketing processes.
- Integrations: The platform offers integrations with popular marketing tools like Mailchimp, Hubspot, and Google Analytics.
- Project management capabilities: Monday.com is primarily known for its project management features, making it a great option for businesses looking to manage their marketing campaigns alongside other business projects.
- Scalable pricing plans: Monday.com offers a range of pricing plans to accommodate the needs and growth of different businesses.
Overall, Monday.com is a versatile platform that can adapt to the needs of any type of business.
Monday CRM Features
Project management is crucial for any marketing strategy, whether tracking marketing campaigns, deadlines, or team tasks.
That’s where Monday.com comes in with its project management features.
The platform offers customizable boards and templates to keep your team organized and on track.
Here are some features we loved:
- Collaboration: With Monday.com, users can comment, tag other team members, and upload files directly onto tasks for better collaboration.
- Multiple views: The platform allows for multiple views, including calendar, Gantt chart, and Kanban boards.
- Ease of use: We could easily customize our boards and templates to fit our specific needs.
Here’s an example of one of the boards we created for tracking our newsletter campaign.
Our takeaway: While project management might not seem like the most important aspect of marketing, it can make or break your team’s productivity and organization.
Monday.com offers a user-friendly solution to stay on top of tasks and projects.
Monday.com shines brightly with its robust marketing automation features.
The CRM software helps businesses automate repetitive tasks, saving time and ensuring accuracy.
It allows for creating custom workflows, significantly boosting efficiency and productivity.
Here are some things we loved about Monday.com’s automation:
- Customizable workflows: Monday.com allows for creating personalized workflows, ensuring the automation aligns perfectly with your business processes.
- Time-saving automations: Repetitive tasks can be automated, freeing up your time to focus on strategic initiatives.
- Trigger-based actions: Automations can be set to occur based on specific triggers, ensuring timely and relevant actions.
- Advanced logic builders: With their logic builders, you can create complex automation workflows encompassing multiple variables and conditions.
After exploring these features, we found that Monday.com offers an array of practical templates to help kickstart your marketing automation journey.
These templates are super user-friendly, easily customizable, and incredibly helpful in navigating the automation tools. Check out some of the awesome template options below!
The bottom line: These templates are a game-changer for businesses new to automation, ensuring you have a seamless start.
They’re also perfect for automation experts looking for a quick and easy way to start.
Monday.com offers fantastic marketing integrations that can take your marketing strategy to the next level.
Here are some of the top integrations we tested out:
- Mailchimp: Monday.com integrates seamlessly with Mailchimp, allowing for easy email campaign tracking and management.
- Google Ads: With their Google Ads integration, businesses can easily track ad performance and make data-driven decisions.
- JotForm: With this integration, businesses can create and track custom forms to gather essential customer data.
The CRM software offers a fantastic app marketplace (screenshot below) to easily search for any integration you might need.
Plus, Monday.com offers a fantastic pairing with Zapier to add thousands of third-party apps to the mix.
Monday CRM Pricing
Monday.com offers four paid plans in addition to a free plan.
These include the following:
- Free – Free Forever
- Basic – $10/Month
- Standard – $12/Month
- Pro – $20/Month
- Enterprise – Custom Pricing
Monday CRM Pros and Cons
- Affordable, scalable pricing plans
- Great marketing automation capabilities (with templates)
- Fantastic project management tools
- Easy-to-use interface
- Tons of useful integrations
- The free plan is limited in terms of marketing features
EngageBay: Best for Scaling
Bonfire Rating: 4.7/5
EngageBay offers a suite of awesome tools to help you scale your business and stay organized in the process!
EngaegBay
Learn More Today!-
Excellent Landing Page Creation
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Powerful Email Campaigns
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Great Marketing Automation
Why We Picked EngageBay
EngageBay is a fantastic all-in-one platform that’s as powerful and easy to use.
We picked it because it offers a crazy amount of utility for SMBs with virtually no learning curve.
Here are some standout marketing features of the platform:
- Landing page creation
- Web form creation
- Email campaigns
- Powerful analytics
- Marketing automation
EngageBay is perfect for SMBs looking for a powerful solution that’s easy to learn (and won’t break the bank).
EngageBay also offers a free plan that offers some great features for sales and marketing teams to take advantage of.
EngageBay Features
EngageBay offers easy-to-use landing page creation tools that allow SMBs to create professional landing pages (no coding experience needed).
My team and I tested this feature by creating a landing page for our newsletter—the Bonfire Field Guide.
Let’s walk you through our process.
To start with, we navigated to the “landing pages” tab, where we were offered some helpful templates (shown below).
From there, we were brought to EngageBay’s drag-and-drop landing page editor.
Here’s how it looked from our perspective.
With this editor, we were able to easily customize the following aspects of our landing page:
- Logo
- Brand colors
- Text
- Images
- Web forms
- Links
Overall, if you’re looking to create powerful landing pages that are easy to manage, EngageBay has you covered.
If your sales and marketing teams struggle to capture leads, EngageBay’s web form creation tools are just what you need.
They’re easy to create and can be embedded on any website or landing page.
Here’s a look at the web form we created for our newsletter (within less than 5 minutes).
We loved the ability to easily customize our forms in terms of the following:
- Logo
- Colors
- Font size & style
- Custom fields
The best part is that creating and embedding web forms is completely free with EngageBay’s CRM software. There’s virtually no learning curve—with just a few clicks, you’re in business!
Email marketing is an integral component of any business’s marketing strategy.
It’s essential for maintaining a strong connection with your clients, keeping them informed about your latest offerings, and nurturing them through the sales funnel.
EngageBay understands this importance and provides tools that make email marketing effective and straightforward.
Here’s what stood out to us about EngageBay’s email marketing:
- Powerful templates: EngageBay offers an extensive collection of templates to help you craft powerful email campaigns swiftly. These templates are adaptable, user-friendly, and designed to facilitate high conversion rates.
- Intuitive campaign builder: With EngageBay, you don’t need advanced technical skills to create stunning email campaigns. The builder is intuitive and straightforward, allowing anyone to create professional-looking emails.
- Email tracking: EngageBay’s email tracking feature allows you to track open rates, click-through rates, and overall engagement, ensuring you’re always informed about your campaign’s performance.
We created an email campaign to test these features to introduce our Bonfire Field Guide to our readers.
The templates provided by EngageBay (shown below) allowed us to swiftly design a visually appealing and engaging email.
The process went really smoothly, and let me tell you, the campaign was a hit!
The open rate was seriously impressive, showing how effective EngageBay’s email marketing tools are.
Here’s a snapshot of the email content creation process.
Overall, EngageBay’s email marketing tools offer everything a business needs to scale its marketing efforts.
Your marketing teams will love the seamless experience and results-driven features provided by EngageBay.
EngageBay Pricing
EngageBay Sales Bay offers a free forever plan and three paid plans.
They are as follows:
- Free – Free Forever
- Basic – $14.99/Month
- Growth – $49.99/Month
- Pro – $99.99/Month
If you want to learn more, check out our full EngageBay pricing guide!
EngageBay Pros and Cons
- Extremely easy to use
- Affordable, scalable pricing plans
- Tons of automation capabilities
- Great landing page & web form creation
- Limited marketing features with the free plan
Creatio: Best For Campaign Creation
Bonfire Rating: 4.8/5
Creatio makes it easy to manage every aspect of your business in one convenient place!
Creatio
Learn More Today!-
Great Landing Pages & Web Forms
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Email Analytics Tools
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Powerful Marketing Campaigns
Why We Picked Creatio
Creatio is an all-in-one platform that helps businesses streamline their sales, marketing, and customer service processes.
Here are some standout marketing features of Creatio:
- Landing page creation
- Web forms
- Marketing automation
- Email campaigns
- Marketing analytics
- Marketing plan creation
We picked Creatio because it offers SMBs a comprehensive solution for businesses to manage their marketing efforts effectively.
The platform has a bit of a learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, it’s a huge boon for your marketing strategy.
Creatio Features
Creatio’s landing page creation tools are powerful and easy to use, allowing businesses to create professional-looking landing pages even without prior coding experience.
We were impressed by the range of customization options available with Creatio.
Here’s a closer look at what stood out to us:
- Ability to add images and text
- Easy form creation
- Customization options for branding
- Mobile-responsive pages
We tested out this feature by creating a landing page to promote our Bonfire Field Guide, and we were pretty happy with the results.
Here’s a sneak peek into the creation process.
We also loved that we could easily track where our leads were coming from with Creatio’s analytics tools (as shown below).
This level of insight is crucial for businesses looking to optimize their marketing efforts and generate more leads.
Creatio offers an advanced marketing campaign builder that simplifies the entire campaign planning process.
It allows businesses to visualize and execute each step of the campaign efficiently.
Here’s how Creatio empowers you to create powerful marketing campaigns:
- Campaign flow mapping: Creatio provides an intuitive interface that lets you map out every aspect of your campaign flow. This helps in visualizing the progress of your campaign from start to finish.
- Audience segmentation: With Creatio, you can segment your audiences with just a few clicks. This feature lets you target specific customer groups with personalized content, increasing engagement and conversion rates.
- Landing pages & web forms integration: Creatio makes linking your landing pages and web forms to your marketing campaigns easy. This ensures a seamless customer journey and maximizes lead generation.
We set up a campaign to promote our newsletter.
The entire process was smooth and efficient, from mapping out the campaign flow to segmenting our audience and linking our landing pages and web forms.
Here’s a snapshot of the campaign flow creation process.
At the end of the day, Creatio provides a unique way of creating and executing marketing campaigns, making it an excellent choice for businesses looking to boost their marketing efforts.
Web forms are an essential component of any business’s marketing strategy, as they allow for easy lead generation and data collection from potential customers.
Creatio offers a user-friendly web form creation tool that makes it possible for anyone to create professional-looking forms in minutes.
Here’s what we loved about Creatio’s web form features:
- Customizable fields and design options
- Integration with landing pages and campaigns
- Easy data collection and management
To test this feature, we created a web form to capture leads for our Bonfire Field Guide.
The process was straightforward, resulting in a visually appealing form that seamlessly integrated with our campaign.
With our web form in place, we were able to efficiently collect leads and data for our campaign.
Creatio CRM Pricing
Creatio offers three paid plans.
They are the following:
- Growth – $25/Month
- Enterprise – $55/Month
- Unlimited – $85/Month
Creatio Pros and Cons
- Sales, marketing, and service in one convenient location
- Great marketing campaign, landing page, and web form creation
- Impressive reporting & analytics
- Excellent lead nurturing & prospecting tools for sales teams
- No free plan
- Customer support was slow to respond
What is a Marketing CRM?
A marketing customer relationship management (CRM) platform is essentially a system for managing all your marketing efforts in one place.
It allows you to track and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the entire sales cycle, from lead generation to conversion.
The goal of marketing CRM software is to streamline and improve your marketing processes by providing valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and engagement with your brand.
This information can then be used to create more targeted and effective marketing efforts, ultimately leading to increased sales and revenue.
Why Use a Marketing CRM?
Great customer relationship management software can revolutionize the way you do business.
These tools offer many advantages that streamline your operations and enhance your customer relationships.
Here are a few key reasons why your business needs marketing CRM software:
- Customer insights: CRM tools provide deep insights into customer behavior and preferences, allowing you to tailor your products, services, and marketing strategies to meet their needs effectively.
- Improved efficiency: By centralizing all your marketing efforts and customer data, CRM solutions improve efficiency, saving you time and resources.
- Personalized marketing: With a CRM, you can create personalized marketing campaigns that resonate with your target audience, leading to improved conversion rates.
- Better decision-making: The analytical capabilities of CRM software aid in robust data-driven decision-making, enabling you to optimize your marketing strategy for maximum impact.
- Increased revenue: CRM systems can substantially increase your business’s revenue by improving customer relationship management and maximizing marketing effectiveness.
- Scalability: CRM tools scale with your business, ensuring your marketing efforts can keep up with your growth.
Benefits of a Marketing CRM
Great marketing CRM software can provide multiple benefits to your business, making it a crucial investment for long-term success.
Here are some of the key benefits of using a marketing CRM:
- Improved attribution
- Better data surrounding campaigns
- Analytics & reporting
Improved Attribution
One of the biggest challenges businesses face is determining which marketing efforts generate leads and conversions.
But fear not! Marketing CRMs are here to save the day.
They can give you valuable insights into which campaigns, channels, and activities drive the most significant results.
So you can optimize your efforts and make the biggest impact possible.
Better Data Surrounding Campaigns
Who doesn’t love to make informed decisions, right? A top-notch marketing CRM helps you do just that for your marketing campaigns.
You know, the nitty-gritty details that really tell you what’s going on. Not just the surface-level stuff but a deep dive into your campaign performance.
With this kind of detailed customer data at your fingertips, adjusting your campaigns for maximum effectiveness becomes less of a guesswork and more of a science.
It’s like having a crystal ball for your marketing strategy!
Analytics & Reporting
I’ve always tried to make data-driven decisions in my career.
With a great marketing CRM, you can have a detailed look at the following:
- Customer data
- Campaign data
- Revenue data
This data is critical because it helps you identify areas of success (and failure) in your marketing strategy.
This information lets you make informed adjustments to improve performance and drive better results.
Basically, it’s like having a personal dashboard that tracks all your marketing efforts for you.
Top Marketing CRM Features to Look for
Here are our favorite features to look for in an effective Marketing CRM:
- Marketing automation
- Social media management/scheduling
- Bulk email scheduling
- Marketing attribution
- Collaboration tools
- Analytics & social reports
- Advanced segmentation
Marketing automation tools can help streamline your marketing efforts and save you valuable time and resources.
With a marketing CRM platform, you can automate tasks such as the following:
- Email marketing
- Social media management
- Lead scoring and nurturing
- Segmentation
This feature is particularly helpful for small businesses with limited resources, allowing them to streamline their processes and focus on other critical business areas.
This automation allows for more consistent and targeted communication with customers while freeing up your team to focus on other critical areas of the business.
Social media is a vital component of any successful marketing strategy today.
A good CRM should have features that enable you to manage your social media presence seamlessly.
Here are some key features to look for:
- Social media scheduling
- Social listening and monitoring
- Social analytics and reporting
These tools allow you to schedule and publish posts, monitor social media conversations around your brand, and analyze the success of your social media efforts.
Bulk email is a great way to reach a large audience quickly and efficiently.
However, managing bulk email campaigns manually can be time-consuming and prone to errors.
A marketing CRM with bulk email scheduling features can help you streamline this process, saving you valuable time and effort.
These tools also provide insights into the success of your email campaigns, allowing you to make necessary adjustments for maximum impact.
Marketing attribution is essentially giving credit where credit is due.
It’s identifying which marketing efforts are driving revenue and giving proper recognition to those channels or campaigns.
A top-notch CRM can help you track and measure your marketing attribution efficiently, providing you with valuable insights into the effectiveness of your campaigns and channels.
This information enables you to make data-driven decisions and optimize your marketing strategy for maximum impact.
A great CRM should have collaboration tools that allow your team to work together seamlessly, whether they’re in the same office or working remotely.
These tools enable efficient communication, document sharing, and task management, making it easier for your team to work together toward a common goal.
Data is crucial in making informed decisions about your marketing strategy.
A marketing CRM with analytics and social reporting features can provide detailed insights into your campaigns, channels, and audience.
From click-through rates to ROI, these reports help you understand what’s working (and what needs improvement).
Targeted marketing is more effective than generic messaging when it comes to driving conversions.
With advanced segmentation tools, a marketing CRM can help you target specific demographics, behaviors, and interests with customized messages that resonate more with your audience.
This feature allows you to create personalized experiences for your customers, increasing the chances of conversion.
How to Choose a Marketing CRM
Now that you understand the importance and benefits of a marketing CRM, it’s essential to choose the right one for your business.
Here are some steps to help you make an informed decision:
- Step 1: Understand Your Budget
- Step 2: Choose a Marketing CRM from our List!
- Step 3: Test Drive the Marketing CRM Features
- Step 4: Engage Your Marketing Team
- Step 5: Finalize Your New Marketing CRM
Let’s walk you through it.
Step 1: Understand Your Budget
Your budget is a crucial factor in choosing a marketing CRM.
Identify how much you’re willing to invest and determine what features are must-haves for your business.
This will help narrow your options and ensure you choose a platform that fits your budget.
Step 2: Choose a Marketing CRM from our list!
We’ve done the research for you, and now it’s time to choose from our list of the best marketing CRMs.
Consider your budget, business needs, and desired features as you make your decision.
Step 3: Test Drive the Marketing CRM Features
Before making a final decision, testing the platform is essential.
Most marketing CRMs offer free trials or demos that allow you to explore their features and see how they work for your business.
Step 4: Engage Your Marketing Team
It’s crucial to involve your marketing team in the decision-making process.
After all, they will be the ones using the platform daily.
Get their input and feedback on which CRM they feel most comfortable using and how it can benefit their workflow.
Step 5: Finalize Your New Marketing CRM
After considering your budget, testing the features, and consulting with your team, it’s time to decide.
Choose the marketing CRM that best fits your business needs and aligns with your marketing strategy.
Marketing CRM Final Thoughts
Investing in a marketing CRM can elevate your marketing efforts and fuel business growth.
These platforms offer a range of awesome features, from automation to collaboration, analytics to segmentation, that can streamline your processes and boost the effectiveness of your campaigns.
With the right marketing CRM software, you can take your marketing to the next level (and achieve some seriously impressive results).
So, why wait? Level up your marketing game with a top-notch CRM from this list!