Pipedrive Vs. EngageBay 2023: Best CRM for SMBs?

Managing your customer data is essential for any CRM, and EngageBay delivers in a big way!

For starters, the CRM allows you to easily store and manage contacts. 

We tested this out (over six months) by adding in our affiliate marketing B2B contacts to EngageBay.

Each contact card allowed us to add and edit the following information:

• Name
• Email
• Role
• Tags
• Company

Plus, we could easily create and update custom fields (shown below) to tailor EngageBay to SBB. 

In this case, we created a check box to let our team know whenever a follow-up was completed with a client.

That little box alone saved us tons of time and energy tracking who we had already contacted. 

The fact that EngageBay has a great user interface makes it almost too good to be true!

Look at how clean and easy-to-read our contacts dashboard looked during our testing.

Our takeaway: The ability to quickly make customizations on the fly while easily managing your customer relationships is pretty impressive. Add in the fact that it’s affordable and you’ve got a powerful platform in EngageBay.

A great sales pipeline is like a well-oiled machine; it keeps your sales team running smoothly and helps them stay organized.

EngageBay makes this process easy by offering a customizable pipeline for managing the following:

• Deals
• Partnerships
• Sales stages
• Leads (with predictive lead scoring)

In our case, we added some of our affiliate marketing partnerships to EngageBay. 

It was easy to navigate (with virtually no learning curve) and offered us a ton of utility. 

We especially loved being able to quickly switch between multiple views. For example, here’s how our list view looked. 

This view is particularly helpful, as it allowed us to see a ton of info, including the following:

• Deal ID
• Name
• Milestone
• Amount
• Description
• Owner
• Created/closed date

With EngageBay, our team was never confused about the stage of a deal or a hot lead. It allowed us to focus on what matters most—closing more deals. 

Check out our grid view, which allowed us to drag and drop our deals across the pipeline (with ease).

EngageBay provides impressive, easy-to-use pipeline management with advanced features such as lead scoring, multiple views, and customizable pipelines.

Managing your day-to-day tasks can be overwhelming for any small business owner. 

Luckily, EngageBay helps you stay organized by allowing you to create, track, and assign important tasks.

We added some typical onboarding tasks at Small Business Bonfire to test this feature. 

Check out the “create task” card below for a better idea of how it looked.

With each card, we were able to easily add and edit the following information:

• Name
• Type
• Priority
• Due date
• Reminder date/time
• Notes

From there, we could easily drag and drop our cards into the appropriate stage of our tasks grid (screenshot below).

While this feature from EngageBay isn’t necessarily going to revolutionize your business, it’s extremely important to stay organized as a small business owner.

Email marketing is absolutely essential to your marketing efforts. 

Thankfully, EngageBay offers the ability to easily create and customize marketing campaigns with helpful templates (shown below).

These templates allow beginners to essentially bypass the learning curve. 

We were able to create and send out emails (with powerful marketing automation) like never before with their campaign creation. 

Let’s walk you through our process!

We created a new broadcast (pictured below) and gave it a name. This broadcast was to introduce our newsletter (the Bonfire Field Guide).

From there, we were able to create each phase of the campaign. For our newsletter, these included: 

• An email to announce the newsletter
• The actual newsletter
• A follow-up email

Here’s a sneak peek into the creation process of our introduction email. 

Note: We especially loved being able to track the performance of our campaigns (opens, clicks, unsubscribed) in real-time. This is important for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), as you want to ensure your efforts pay off.

Overall, EngageBay makes creating campaigns super simple (even for beginners) and offers tons to help you along the way. 

Creating powerful lead-capturing forms for free sounds like a dream come true (but EngageBay makes it a reality). 

With EngageBay, you can create both inline and web popup forms (without spending a dime). 

We created our newsletter sign-up form in minutes (shown below) and were able to easily customize the design and information fields.

With each form creation, we were able to customize the following:

• Name
• Type of form (contact, subscription, etc.)
• Fields for info capture
• Logo
• Company colors

The bottom line: EngageBay makes it incredibly easy and affordable to create powerful web forms (without sacrificing important features like design customization). 

Landing page creation is a crucial component of any successful small business’s marketing strategy. 

These standalone web pages are tailor-made for a specific marketing campaign, aiming to convert visitors into leads by making attractive offers or sharing significant information. 

With EngageBay, we put the landing page creation feature to the test (over six months).

We experimented with creating various landing pages to engage different audience segments. 

The process was made incredibly accessible by the gorgeous templates EngageBay offers. 

Check out the gorgeous templates offered by EngageBay to help you get started on your landing page. 

These templates allow even beginners to create stunning landing pages with ease.

The customization options offered by EngageBay were impressive and allowed us to create unique designs for each of our campaigns. 

Here’s a quick snapshot halfway through our landing page creation process. 

Overall, EngageBay’s landing page creation feature is user-friendly and efficient and offers a wide range of templates to cater to all your marketing needs. 

In today’s digital landscape, businesses must have a strong online presence and provide excellent customer service. 

EngageBay offers a live chat feature that allows you to engage with your website visitors in real time, answer questions, and address concerns.

To test this feature out, we added the live chat widget to our website (it was incredibly easy to install). 

We were able to customize the widget’s appearance (pictured below) to match our brand and even set up automated chat greetings.

 With EngageBay’s live chat capabilities, we connected with our website visitors and potential customers in a more personal and timely manner. 

At the end of the day, EngageBay’s live chat feature is fantastic for scaling businesses—it helped us improve our customer service and drive more conversions. 

Trust us when we say your service teams will thank you for this feature!

Managing your customer concerns can be a daunting task, especially when using multiple channels like email, social media, and chat. 

EngageBay’s ticket management feature allows you to centralize all customer inquiries into one easy-to-use system.

We tested this feature by sending ourselves test tickets through different channels (email, social media, and live chat). 

All of these inquiries were automatically converted into tickets with no effort on our end. 

We could also easily add new tickets (like the one pictured below).

Each ticket card allowed us to customize the following information:

• Name
• Subject
• Assignee
• Message
• Priority

We especially liked how easy it was to keep track of each ticket’s status and progress at a glance. 

This feature is incredibly helpful for small businesses looking to streamline their customer support process and improve response times. 

Check out our ticket dashboard view, which clearly displays the status of each ticket with color-coding. 

Our two cents: If you’re looking for robust (and completely free) ticketing tools, look no further than EngageBay. It’s got all the features you need to efficiently handle your customer inquiries (without breaking the bank). 

EngageBay’s Service Automation feature is a game-changer for small businesses looking to streamline their processes. 

This feature allows you to automate your repetitive, time-consuming tasks, enabling you to focus more on what matters. 

Here’s a sneak peek into our automation creation process. 

EngageBay makes establishing triggers, conditions, and actions easy with just a few clicks. 

This means you can set specific triggers (like a customer action or a specific time/date) that cause automation to start, specify conditions that need to be met, and then define the action that should occur when those conditions are met. 

The entire process is easy to follow, and you can get your automation up and running quickly.

Throughout our six months of testing, we created a ton of service automation. 

These included the following:

• Automatically assign users to a new ticket
• Send a notification for any high-priority tickets
• Create a follow-up task after a ticket is resolved

Overall, EngageBay’s service automation saved us time and effort, allowing us to focus on growing our business (instead of completing tedious tasks).