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During the 1990s, CRM started taking shape, when contact management, database marketing, and sales automation were offered by CRM software.
Compared to then, today’s CRM has grown in complexity. With the best CRM software, today’s businesses can achieve collaboration among multiple teams, and enjoy predictive analytics, insights into sales initiatives, automated marketing efforts, and much more. This helps businesses to integrate their marketing alongside customer service and sales efforts, both across offline and online channels.
However, not every business realizes or uses CRM software, which is especially true in the case of small and medium-sized businesses. So, if you are also someone who thinks that CRM software is only for big players, or you are looking to understand CRM software, you have come to the right place.
This blog explores the lesser-known features of the best CRM software, alongside analyzing how these features can help a business despite its size to become successful.
What is Free CRM Software?
CRM software for free as its name suggests is a free version of the CRM platform that allows you to use different features of the software without asking you to make any purchase.
If you are thinking that CRM software for free just sounds too good to be true, or it might be bait, the straight answer to this question is no, there is no free CRM.
But the good news is, even though some available CRM software for free just allows you to test the features of the software and evaluate its benefits before you make a purchase, there is some CRM software that provides similar tools to the costly ones for free of charge. However, these best CRM software might ask for nominal charges if you want to try out their advanced features, which you may need once your business grows and becomes complex.
This however cannot be called bait, as to be honest what do you get for free in today’s market?
So, without further delay, let’s check the lesser-known features of CRM software for free that make this tool worthy of your time and money.
Lesser-Known Features of Free CRM Software
The lesser-known features of CRM software for free that make them the best CRM software include:
1. Lead Management
The best CRM software for free comes with a lead management feature. The feature of lead management includes lead capturing and lead nurturing, which empowers businesses to increase conversion. Lead generation is the first step in the sales cycle, An appropriate CRM software for free will enable you to capture lead details from different channels such as social media platforms, emails, phone calls, and much more. This lead management functionality will ensure that you do not lose any leads that you have scored and qualify the leads correctly. The best CRM software can enable your sales team to identify hot leads for converting prospects into customers. It also tracks the progress of leads through the sales cycle and helps you to decide your marketing initiative for nurturing the leads.
Key questions to consider when choosing the CRM software for free: How many leads can you score? Is there any option to analyze and visualize leads? Can one create custom rules to qualify leads?
2. Contact Management
There are many CRM software for free that provide contact management features, which enable you to record customer details like name, phone number, social media handle, and address. What makes CRM software the best CRM software is its capacity to not only collect customer data from different channels but clean and store this data under a unified database, which can be accessed at any point in time to personalize customer interaction. This will enable you to create an integrated client profile while saving the time and effort that salespeople often have to spend remembering customer details or searching customer details in multiple databases.
Key questions to consider when choosing the CRM software for free: Up to how many contacts can you store? What are the additional charges for increasing contact storage? Which customer details does the software capture?
3. Email Marketing
Even though different channels like WhatsApp and Facebook have evolved over the years, email continues to be one of the most preferred channels for communicating with businesses and customers. An appropriate CRM software for free provides well-designed email marketing features, with which you can send mass emails, track email conversations, plan drip email campaigns, and send automated emails for events like birthdays, and anniversaries or simply for sending them updates about their orders. This will help you keep your customers engaged and achieve customer satisfaction.
Key questions to consider when choosing the CRM software for free: Are customizable email templates available? Does the software provide predefined email marketing campaigns? Can the software be integrated with Gmail or Outlook?
4. Reporting Analytics
In today’s market, you need reporting and analytics across all major business functions. A well-designed CRM software for free will provide you with reporting and analytics functionality for your sales, marketing, field service, e-commerce, and many more functions. With appropriate CRM software for free, you can track metrics like profitability, rate of customer retention, and the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Besides, the best CRM software also enables its users to share reports with different teams about their progress to make collaborative data-driven decisions.
Key questions to consider when choosing the CRM software for free: Are the reports interactive? What reporting features and analytics can you avail in the free version?
5. Pipeline Management
The Best CRM software increases the visibility of the sales cycle. So, you will be able to identify where a customer is exactly in the sales funnel. It also allows you to sort and filter deals and perform bulk actions like sending emails to sales customers. If you are selling different products, this feature will allow you to create multiple sales pipelines and compare sales volume across products. With the pipeline management feature of the best CRM software, you can tally your sales with revenue and decide your future actions.
Key questions to consider when choosing the CRM software for free: What interactive elements and drill-down options does the software support?
Getting Started
The Best CRM software apart from providing features like lead management, contact management, email marketing, reporting and analytics, and pipeline management also provides options for workflow automation, forecasting, and document management. These features can boost your growth efficiently.
But when choosing the CRM software for free remember to consider its scalability and reliability apart from its cost effectiveness.
