CRM software is the most important relationship-building tool that a sales professional has.
CRMs help sales teams keep track of conversations, reach out to prospects at the right time, and automate manual tasks so that sales reps can focus more of their time on high-value activities. But one underrated benefit of CRM is its ability to make email outreach easier and more effective.
Considering that 80% of buyers prefer to be contacted by email, your email strategy needs to be sharp from a messaging perspective as well as time-effective. (You can’t spend 15 minutes crafting each email when there are dozens of new prospects you have to touch on a given day.) The good news is that many of today’s CRMs offer email tools and automations that speed up the outreach process without sacrificing personalization or quality.
In this article, we’ll compare eight leading CRM solutions that include email communication features, to help you understand which solution might be right for you and your team. But first…
The software must have this feature to strengthen the mobile access of data or documents. Such features enable mobile usage of software and make the workflow smoother and easier. With strong multi-channel support, top CRM tools for small business enables the work go smoother and ensure better results for the business. Integrated Analytics. NetSuite CRM takes the guesswork out of forecasts with real-time sales data, complete visibility into opportunities, and a rich set of forecasting tools. Top features: Streamlined lead-to-cash processes. HubSpot Academy is the worldwide leader in inbound marketing, sales, and customer service/support training.
Why You Need a CRM With Email Features
- CRM tools for marketing are designed to help you find and nurture higher-quality leads. They can automate time-consuming marketing processes—such as events, email nurture campaigns, and paid media advertisements—and provide greater visibility into the customer’s journey from prospect to lead.
- CRM software is the most important relationship-building tool that a sales professional has. CRMs help sales teams keep track of conversations, reach out to prospects at the right time, and automate manual tasks so that sales reps can focus more of their time on high-value activities.
So why should your company consider investing in a CRM with email functionality? There are many reasons, the most important being improved sales effectiveness, increased productivity, and transparency across your sales team.
Effectiveness
For many sales professionals, email is the secret weapon in their selling arsenal. When you combine email with the customer insights stored within a company’s CRM, you’ll be able to craft much more personalized and, ultimately, more effective messages. Comparing the success rates of your templates and automated email sequences helps you fine-tune your messages to boost your success rate.
Productivity
Imagine the time you’d save if your CRM were to offer native email functionality or a two-way sync with your email program. Rather than bouncing back and forth between programs, you could do all your work out of one system. Plus, saved email templates save you a lot of time on re-typing.
Transparency
When your CRM offers email capabilities, your entire team will have a complete and accurate view of the customers you’re attempting to serve.
Email conversations can be stored in a CRM’s customer timelines, which means that any member of your sales, marketing, or support teams can get full context on your company’s relationship with a prospect or buyer, simply by looking them up in your CRM.
Without a CRM database, email communications are hidden away in personal email inboxes, unable to be leveraged by anyone else on the team.
Best CRMs for Email Communication
So the question is, which CRMs have the best email capabilities? More importantly, which of these platforms is right for your company? The following eight CRMs have made email an integral part of their feature sets. Read through the descriptions of each to determine the right fit for your organization.
1. Nutshell
Nutshell is a sneaky powerful CRM and sales automation platform that’s “simple enough for any team, sophisticated enough for any business.” This mantra applies to the software’s email capabilities as well.
The service is equipped with a strong set of email automation features including email sequencing, shareable templates, easy contact filtering for targeted bulk emails, and powerful integrations with Constant Contact and MailChimp for perfectly timed email marketing—everything you need to take the grunt work out of email.
Nutshell’s personal email sequence tool allows sales professionals to create and schedule email drip campaigns at scale. These email sequences shut off automatically once your recipient replies, and can even be set up to trigger when a lead reaches a certain pipeline stage, which means you can nurture all your new prospects without lifting a finger. And because Nutshell tracks reply rates of your sequences, you’ll be able to easily tell which emails work best and which need to be rewritten.
Every salesperson knows that retyping the same emails over and over again is incredibly tedious. Nutshell’s time-saving email templates remove the monotony from the workday and allow users to fire off messages in seconds, not minutes. Plus, Nutshell’s two-way sync with Gmail and Office 365 help you stay organized and productive in or out of your CRM. (Even if you use a different email provider, you can still send outgoing work emails from Nutshell.)
In 2021, Nutshell released Nutshell Marketing, its first-ever email marketing automation tool. Available for an additional monthly charge based on your number of marketing contacts, Nutshell Marketing allows Nutshell customers to send beautifully designed marketing emails to thousands of contacts at once, and immediately measure their impact. Because Nutshell Marketing is powered by Nutshell’s CRM platform, you’ll no longer have to worry about contacts getting out of sync between your sales and marketing software, and you can build highly targeted audience lists based on any customer segment.
If you’re looking for a powerful yet completely intuitive CRM solution with cutting-edge email functionality, you can’t do much better than Nutshell.
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Are you falling off your prospects’ radars? With Nutshell’s personal email sequences, we’ll remember the follow-up for you.
LEARN MORE2. Insightly
Insightly is a popular name in the world of CRM and the platform really focuses on helping its users build strong, lasting relationships with customers. One of the ways they do this is by offering email automation features.
Inside the platform, users are able to create and send emails with just a few clicks and view real-time analytics for all campaigns. Insightly also offers a handy email template feature to save salespeople valuable time.
From one-off messages to bulk sends, this CRM offers a fair amount of native email options, and integrates with Outlook, Gmail, MailChimp, and Zapier for more functionality.
3. Agile CRM
With Agile CRM, users are able to easily create, send, and track email campaigns in addition to the traditional customer relationship management features the platform offers. Users simply have to choose the look they’re going for from a selection of visually pleasing templates and then begin to craft their messages.
Speaking of crafting a message, Agile’s personalization features make connecting with prospects a cinch. Contact attributes (details such as recipient name, location, industry, etc.) can automatically be pulled and included to give each email an individualized feel.
But all this template and personalization goodness wouldn’t be beneficial without some way to track results. Fortunately, Agile CRM includes a robust reporting dashboard to monitor things like email opens and click-throughs. And the lead scoring feature helps users accurately qualify leads based on the metrics in the reporting dashboard.
Additionally, Agile CRM offers email A/B testing, a handy drag and drop email builder, social sharing, and the ability to send autoresponders. We have to admit, the email capabilities that come with this service are top-notch.
4. Zoho CRM
Zoho is a complete software suite that offers everything from accounting software to helpdesk tools. One of the company’s many offerings is a CRM platform which happens to also have email functionality.
Similarly to the solutions already reviewed, Zoho CRM includes an email template feature which will free sales teams from tediously drafting the same messages over and over again. The Zoho template creator also includes drag and drop capabilities, making it super simple to add text, images, tables, etc. to emails.
Zoho CRM comes with reporting features as well that inform users of when their messages were sent and if they were opened and read. Sales managers using Zoho CRM will also be able to see analytics for each salesperson they oversee and determine areas of improvement.
It should be noted that while bulk email campaigns within Zoho CRM are possible, users will have to integrate the platform with another Zoho offering named Zoho Campaigns. The integration is seamless but it’s another step that potential users should be aware of.
ONE TEAM. ONE TOOL.Powerful email marketing, minus the headaches
Nutshell Marketing plugs directly into your CRM data, so you can create highly targeted audience segments, track the impact of your emails in real-time, and manage all your communications out of a single tool. Get started for free!
LEARN MORE5. Microsoft Dynamics 365
Microsoft Dynamics 365 delivers all-encompassing CRM functionality through specific applications focusing on the key CRM components—sales, marketing, and customer service. All of them help make a sales process efficient, boost productivity of sales and marketing teams and improve customer service.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales allows collecting customer data from contact information to purchasing details within the whole customer life cycle. Also, the module comes with predefined sales paths that guarantee a personalized and consistent sales process.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing combines customer information, provides marketing automation features like lead scoring and customizable email templates, and helps creating personalized customer journeys.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service offers a wide range of features from automated case management to dashboards and reports.
6. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a unique entry on this list for one simple reason: it started as a marketing automation platform, then later added true CRM functionality. This fact doesn’t mean the platform can’t competently manage your customer relationships, it just means that the tool is specifically designed for those who prioritize marketing automation above all other features.
Because of this, ActiveCampaign looks and operates more like traditional email marketing software than the CRMs you’re probably used to. Once inside the platform, users can build email newsletters, craft full automated sequences, schedule messages, and view reports.
ActiveCampaign’s template library is extensive, as are the personalization and list segmentation capabilities. A/B testing is also included and integrations with Paypal, Shopify, Facebook, and 250 other apps can be easily set up.
In brief, ActiveCampaign is a great option for those seeking a marketing automation platform with CRM functionality rather than a CRM service with marketing automation features. It’s also one of the more expensive options on this list. Marketing automation and CRM features can be had for $49 a month or more depending on the number of contacts a user has.
7. Copper
Copper is another CRM on this list with a unique twist: It’s specifically made for G Suite users. If your company doesn’t use the Google platform, this solution definitely won’t work for you. But if you do, you might enjoy the convenience of having a CRM service that’s specifically built for Google.
Unsurprisingly, Gmail users will have an incredibly short learning curve with this CRM—the entire solution lives inside the email program they already use every day. Users simply fire up Gmail and can immediately begin building better relationships with contacts.
Related: Save time and stay organized with the Nutshell for Gmail Chrome extension!
As far as email capability goes, though, Copper is pretty limited on its own. Users can send one-off messages via Gmail, build templates for streamlined sending, and automate certain responses. But for more detailed email automation capability, users will need to integrate their Copper accounts with MailChimp.
Due to the limited email automation capabilities, we can only recommend Copper to folks who are already using G Suite and MailChimp and are more interested in standard CRM features than advanced email functionality.
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GET THE GUIDE8. HubSpot
HubSpot is a very well-known software company offering CRM and sales enablement tools to support their widely used marketing automation platform. As far as email automation features go, the platform offers access to automated sequences, a template editor, and detailed analytics.
Once a user has selected a template and built an email sequence, it can be automated, freeing up more time for other tasks and ensuring that important leads never fall through the cracks. User emails can then be tracked for opens, click-throughs, and downloads. Uses can also score leads and predict the likelihood of them becoming customers, based on historical data.
All in all, HubSpot is great for companies who want a full package. If you’re looking for one solution to handle your website analytics, manage your blog, organize your contacts, and send emails, HubSpot is a solid choice, though the cost could be a deal-breaker for growing companies.
Choosing the Right CRM for Your Company
It’s important that your company invest in the right CRM solution, considering that sales reps rely on CRM so heavily to make connections with their buyers. The eight solutions mentioned in this article are all good options for email communication and the one you choose really comes down to what you need out of your CRM software.
If Nutshell caught your eye, we encourage you to start a free trial. You’ll be able to explore our award-winning platform for 14 days and discover if it’s the right fit for your company. If it is, our Nutshell Sales plans with email communication features start at just $19 per user per month, making Nutshell both a powerful and affordable option.
NO CREDIT CARD REQUIREDNot a Nutshell customer? Try us free for 14 days!
Introduction
What are the best social media management tools out there? A quick Google search of the topic will yield list upon list. Many of those lists are curated by vendors. Here we’re giving you a breakdown of 10 of the best social media management platforms from the point of view of the user, not the seller.
Whether you are a startup, small business or large enterprise, social media is the best way to spread brand awareness and share great content marketing. Networks like Facebook and LinkedIn are ideal for finding an audience and getting more customers. And because these days you might have many social media accounts across all the big social networks, you need the best social media tools.
Social media managers make it easy for team collaboration. You can curate content, plan posts and schedule content, and monitor all the engagement. And it all happens in one single dashboard and unified inbox. Social media management tools are necessary for marketing strategies, marketing campaign analytics, audience targeting and trend forecasting.
Whether you want to play around with free trials and free plans, or you are ready to subscribe for a premium social media management plan, this article will streamline your research and help you pick the social media management platform best for you.
Social media management software comparison chart (top 10)
Product | Platforms | Best for | Pricing (starts at) | Website |
Hootsuite | Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr | Overall | $29.00 | |
Buffer | Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest | Startups | $15.00 | |
Sprout Social | Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter Pinterest | Small businesses | $99.00 | |
Sendible | Facebook, Instagram, Google My Business, LinkedIn, Twitter Pinterest, Tumblr | Agencies | $24.00 | |
Agorapulse | Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter | $79.00 | ||
Tailwind | Instagram, | $9.99 | ||
TweetDeck | Free | |||
CoSchedule | Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, WordPress | Blogs | $14.00 | |
e-clincher | Facebook pages, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Google My Business, Yelp, Blogger | $59.00 | ||
Meet Edgar | Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn | $19.00 |
*per month billed annually
What are social media management tools?
Your team, your company or your brand wants to have a social presence. This means that there are likely several social profiles and social media accounts. These happen across many platforms. The biggies are Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. There are others too like WordPress, Blogger, Pinterest and YouTube.
You have a lot of accounts across all social media platforms. Social media management tools are for controlling all of these. The first major tool in the box is a single unified dashboard. It will let you monitor your profiles in one place. You can also collect all the engagements from different platforms and analyze them.
The single dashboard also works like a unified inbox. You get to read all incoming communications in one place. You can also respond to them all without platform hopping.
Another major social media management feature is for planning and publishing content. This is a huge part of social media marketing. The best social media management platforms help you curate content for posts. This includes texts, media and hashtags. They will let you schedule posts on a content calendar and even recommend optimal post times.
Social media management platforms do social listening. They analyze trends and popular topics and to give you insights. This is very useful for planning marketing strategies and reaching the right audiences.
Then there are digital marketing teams. Social media management platforms are a necessary part of their software stack. These platforms make it easy for teams to collaborate on curating content. Also for composing posts and planning a publishing schedule.
What are the best social media management tools? Here's our top 10 list
If you are looking for the best social media management tools then our list of the top 10 below will help you to choose. Some are broad, others are niche. Some are better suited to individuals and small teams, and others are better for startups and SMBs. Read on to see which social media management platform is right for you.
Hootsuite (best social media management tool overall)
Hootsuite is a pioneer as a social media marketing and management platform. It was first developed as an in-house solution when no other social media management tool existed.
Today Hootsuite remains a top contender. It syncs up social media accounts from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, and Pinterest. It lets you plan and schedule posts. You can field messages from all social channels in a unified dashboard. Monitor online trends and get social analytics. Hootsuite has mobile apps and a Chrome browser extension.
Hootsuite is best for:
Professionals
Small businesses
Large Businesses
Scheduling posts
Social media analytics
Marketing campaigns
RSS feeds
Buffer (best social media management platform for startups)
Buffer is a small company with a distributed workforce. The platform is light and easy. It's divided into two products. One for publishing content and one for analyzing it. The platform can also be installed as a browser extension.
Buffer Publish has social media tools for marketing campaigns. It's good for team collaboration on marketing strategy. You can schedule content across multiple social channels. It's great for Instagram. Buffer Analyze lets marketing teams know how well they're doing. It shows you Instagram, Facebook and Twitter in one single dashboard.
Buffer is best for:
Individuals
Startups
SMEs
Team collaboration
Social media scheduling
Digital marketing
Facebook pages
Sprout Social (best for small businesses owners)
Sprout Social comes across as a very professional social media management platform. There are loads of robust features. It may take time to learn but the results are worth it.
It all takes place in a unified social inbox. There's an emphasis on letting you monitor social media engagement in real-time. Sprout Social has tools for planning and scheduling content at optimal times. The analytics and reporting tools of Sprout Social are very in-depth. For this it uses Google Analytics. You also get good trend forecasting and other business insights for planning more marketing campaigns.
Sprout Social is best for:
SMEs
Enterprise
Agencies
Marketing campaigns
Social media analytics
Scheduling content
Sendible (good tool for agencies)
Sendible is a social media management platform built specifically for agencies. It aims to help marketing agencies and brand strategists streamline their services for their clients.
There are many social media management tools offered by Sendible. A unified dashboard is great for managing social media engagement across LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and more. It also lets marketing teams collaborate on planning and publishing social content. Sendible does social listening to offer insights. There's decent analytics too. They also have mobile apps for iPhone and Android.
Sendible is best for:
Agencies
Startups
Social marketing
Trend forecasting
Social media content
Influencer marketing
Agorapulse
Agorapulse is an easy way to manage social networks. The interface is clean and intuitive using mostly drag and drop functionality. It also has built-in CRM functions.
The core features of Agorapulse cover most social media manager functions. It lets you engage with fans across many social accounts. You can do decent content curation and plan your social media posts on a content calendar. The CRM tools and social listening give you deeper understanding of your customers. Agorapulser also makes neat reports with just one click.
Agorapulse is best for:
Small teams
Startups
Small businesses
Marketing tools
Reporting
Social media strategy
Tailwind
Tailwind is a social media manager that focuses on visual content. It has an official partnership with Pinterest and Instagram. This focus makes Tailwind a winner in its niche.
Tailwind lets you know the best times for posting content on Instagram. It gives you hashtag suggestions too. Tailwind also offers a community of influencers. When it comes to Pinterest, Tailwind streamlines multiple pins with one click. There are tools for re-sharing and re-using social content. With Tailwind Tribes you can easily expand your contact list.
Tailwind name is best for:
Small teams
Startups
Ecommerce
Instagram
Pinterest
Social media scheduling
TweetDeck (good tool for managing Twitter)
As the name suggests, TweetDeck is just for Twitter. It was an independent platform for better Twitter management and now it's owned by Twitter. It's like a premium version of the Twitter interface.
TweetDeck splits up the dashboard between posts, notifications, messages and trending. It also makes it easy to see and use trending hashtags. What's most useful about TweetDeck is the ability to manage many Twitter social media profiles in a single dashboard. It also has superior filtering and searching than the standard Twitter interface.
TweetDeck is best for:
Twitter accounts
Startups
Individuals
Small businesses
Hashtags
Social media presence
CoSchedule (good tool for managing blogs)
CoSchedule is a suite of social media marketing tools. The bulk of the tools are divided into packages that start with a simple blog calendar. The next packages are a marketing calendar and a marketing suite.
The blog calendar is great for WordPress. It also covers the major social media platforms. With easy drag and drop tools you can manage your Google Docs, WordPress, Facebook and Twitter accounts in a single dashboard. The CoSchedule Marketing calendar lets your team plan and schedule social posts. There are also tools for content curation and an asset organizer for media files.
CoSchedule is best for:
Small businesses
Startups
Marketing teams
Blogging
Content calendar
Social marketing
eclincher
eclincher has been around since 2012 but is recently becoming a more popular option for social media management. It's got a clean look and feel, with loads of features.
One of the unique aspects of eclincher is how it lets you automate your social media posts. You plan your posts and eclincher automatically knows when to publish. This is great for bulk upload and recycling past popular content. Team members get a unified inbox for engaging with fans and customers. Social monitoring, analytics and post-optimization are also part of eclincher's platform.
eclincher is best for:
Startups
SMBs
Team collaboration
Auto posting
Social analytics
Real-time monitoring
MeetEdgar
MeetEdgar is a good social media manager for brand management. It's a hip looking platform well suited to the needs of cool startups. The goal here is to take over the routine task of monitoring your social media accounts.
Automation is a big part of MeetEdgar. It can automate when posts get published, but it also automates writing posts. It does this by finding trending texts and quoting them into your posts. MeetEdgar also lets you A/B test content. Users of MeetEdgar can get weekly reports sent to their emails. Finally, MeetEdgar offers great user support to its subscribers.
MeetEdgar is best for:
Individuals
Startups
Brand agencies
Automation
Scheduling tools
A/B testing
What are the best free social media management tools?
Here are the best free social media management tools:
Hootsuite - Free plan for 3 social profiles
TweetDeck - Always free just for Twitter
Later - Instagram scheduler free for 1 social profile
Over - Video and graphics curator
Canva - Drag and drop graphic social content
Zoho Social - Free for 1 team member or 1 brand
Google's Campaign URL Builder - Works free with Google Analytics
Social Blade - Social profile analytics for YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, and Twitter
SocialOomph - Free post scheduling tools for 1 user
Choosing the best social media management software apps for your needs: key takeaways
Social platforms are great tools. They go well beyond the simple functions of any individual app like Twitter or Facebook. They help turn the average social profile into a powerful marketing platform.
What's more, social media management tools are necessary for team collaborations. Most companies and organizations will use social media management platforms to bring together people from marketing, sales and customer service.
Without such platforms, you will miss a lot of insightful data that goes on in the social media landscape. This includes analytics on your own social posts as well as wider trends and hot topics. Some social media marketing tools help you target the right audience. They show you the best place and the optimal times for publishing posts.
In the end, it depends on your needs. If you just want a social media management platform to unify all your social profiles into a single dashboard then take your pick. This basic set of tools is the core of social media management.
If you are looking for something more robust, then we hope the above picks help narrow down your search. Some platforms are great for social marketing. Others are great for content curation. While others help analyze your activity and trends. Finally, some platforms are geared for expanding your follower base.
You've probably heard of Hootsuite, Buffer and Sprout Social. It's no surprise that these top our list. But we hope that less known names like MeetEdgar, Sendible and eclincher have also caught your attention. Then there are platforms like TweetDeck or Tailwind with their tight niches in Twitter, or Instagram and Pinterest.
Crm Tools Ppt
Maybe you think you should try something for free before you buy. This is always a good idea, and we've offered a quick sum-up of some free platforms too. However, even the paid platforms often have free trials.
Crm Tools Free
The quality of your social content is still tied to the creativity of your team. But you also need the right set of social media tools. This is how you bring great content to the greatest number of people. It's the socially-optimal way to be a modern brand.
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