Marketing to your prospects and customers in a way that automatically segments and targets, based on how they interact with your brand, is the dream for many marketing departments. For years this capability has been something that could only be achieved with expensive ‘enterprise’ style platforms that have been built with larger organisations in mind.
More recently however there has been a growth in SME focused platforms that combine the features of top of the range CRM and Marketing Automation platforms, but in a more affordable package. Some of note are Active Campaign, Nimble CRM and Zoho CRM. Over the last few weeks we’ve been trying out Agile CRM, and we might have just found the best of the lot.
What is Agile CRM?
Agile CRM combines all the best Marketing Automation features, such as auto response, automated segmentation and action based marketing, with powerful CRM features, such as lead scoring, task setting and deal automation.
This really is a very robust piece of software, and at a cost of only $15 per user, which includes unlimited emails and contacts, it is also very affordable. Although we do have to concede that the Marketing Automation features are not as user-friendly as those offered by Active Campaign, which was our February app of the month earlier this year, the CRM functionality is much better.
How to use Agile CRM for lead generation
Agile CRM helps you combine and analyse the data from contacts interacting with your email marketing, landing pages and website. This information is put into a detailed timeline view so you can see exactly how contacts are engaging with your business over time. By giving certain interactions a weighted score, Agile CRM can rank contacts based on how valuable they are to your business. Allowing you to rank and score prospects to better target those who are most likely to buy from you.
Why use Agile CRM?
Over the last couple of years we’ve analysed and tested dozens of Marketing Automation tools online, and very few have the right balance of great CRM and Marketing Automation features, at a reasonable price. Agile CRM provides all this at a cost that is a fraction of something like Marketo, Pardot or Hubspot, whilst still providing good customer support and a very easy to use software interface.
It is worth noting that Active Campaign’s marketing features are better, however Agile’s CRM capabilities are some of the best we’ve seen. So if you’re going to decide to use one over the other, make sure you know which is more important to your business goals.
Conclusion
If you’re looking for a low cost, all-in-one CRM and Marketing Automation software then you’ll struggle to find something better than Agile CRM at this price point. Agile CRM provides all the functionality needed to intelligently and automatically market to and target your customers based on how they interact with your business, at a very reasonable price.
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