Free CRM Software for Small Businesses

As a small business, you might think there’s no room in the budget for customer relationship management software. Many CRM tools are more affordable than you might have thought, such as our CRM through EngageBay. It’s always free to customers, even if you don’t use our other services.

It’s very important for small businesses to prioritize CRM. This way, before your business grows, you’ll have a solid grasp on how to manage your customers. By importing all your customers into one list, you can see who’s who, sort and filter them for targeted campaigns, and even do lead scoring.

With CRM, you can also make your customer service more efficient as you answer customer queries faster. This improves the satisfaction of your customers and bolsters your company’s reputation in the process.

Also, you can use CRM to shape your sales and marketing techniques. Very importantly, your software acts as a revenue tracker, reviewing the sources of income your campaigns generate as well as how much. Every last cent matters to a small business, so seeing what comes in lets you plan better for your financial future.

As a busy business owner, time is at a premium. Luckily, a CRM system can put a lot more free time on your schedule.

For one, you can sync your company’s email to your CRM software. This lets you spearhead your email marketing in new and interesting ways. As an example, you can now automate welcome emails, follow-ups, pre-order reminders, abandoned cart emails, and countless other crucial messages.

With mobile CRM, there’s no need for your coworkers to be tethered to their computers around the clock to get things done. If these staff members have to travel, meet with clients, or leave the office for any other reason, they can still stay up to date on what’s going on with the company.

The analytics your CRM software provides can also be a big help. You can use this handy data to make more accurate predictions about which tactics and campaigns will leave the biggest mark the next time. This saves you major time and money since you can immediately discard methods you’re sure won’t work.

Through implementing sales CRM, your sales team can majorly benefit. Automation through the software means your team can stop wasting time on menial admin tasks that take away from finding new leads and closing deals.

Through lead scoring, contact list segmentation, and related methods, it’s possible to understand your prospects and customers better. You can then make customer avatars or profiles that act as a blueprint to rely on when selling.

Syncing such data as emails, document templates, and calendars lets the whole sales team stay abreast of what’s going on at the office, even if they’re not all in the same place. This way, no two sales team members try erroneously selling to the same person.

Through CRM, your sales team can generate weekly reports revealing sales statistics. If you have a superstar seller, they can continue gaining momentum. Others who maybe didn’t have the best week can make changes using the above data to streamline and improve their selling process.

Sales are critical for a small business, as failing to get enough could mean shuttering your doors (even if those doors are only digital). Through your CRM, you can set up several revenue streams that can increase your sales. Let’s talk about a few of these now:

• Referrals: A referral network can keep adding more and more business on your plate, thus increasing revenue. An automated series of emails that encourages your customers to refer your company to others can be all you need to get the referral ball rolling.
• Suggestion selling: If your customer just bought a camera, can you also sell them a carrying bag or a charging cable? Through cross-selling and upselling, the additional products your company carries can net you more money beyond that initial sale.
• Long-term relationship-building: By using CRM to nurture and engage with your audience, you maintain their trust and interest. This keeps them buying from you again and again, boosting your sales.

CRM has proven crucial to salespeople, but what about marketing CRM? It’s just as necessary. Those same customer profiles or avatars your sales team uses to make more targeted sales can also help your marketing team. They can review a customer’s interests, pain points, and needs and then create a targeted campaign that seems tailor-made just for the customer.

Also, your marketing team, should they get to leads before your sales professionals do, can segment and filter these leads. The raw leads then get sorted into categories like prospects and even marketing-qualified leads. Once a lead reaches that point, they’ve shown a certain receptivity to the efforts of the marketing team.

The marketers could then send this lead along to the sales team. Since they’re more willing to take advantage of a sales offer, these qualified leads can increase sales. It’s a win-win for the entire company.

A customer service team plays a very important role for a business of any size. CRM tools can make the lives of this sales team easier as they can do their job even more efficiently. It is called customer relationship management software for a reason, after all.

For one, your customer service reps can manage their customers with ease, relying on email templates, automation, and even chatbots to provide customers with the immediate answers they want. It also becomes possible to manage every last customer with CRM so no one falls through the cracks. This maintains your company’s customer base and keeps them happy, too.

From email to chat, phone, and more, your customer service team has plenty of options for staying in touch with customers, maybe more so than ever before.

You’ve decided a CRM is best for your small business. The challenge now is selecting the right one. How do you go about doing this? Keep the following factors in mind:

• Features: Reading to this point has made you realize you need a slew of features for your own CRM software. Once you identify those key features, don’t renege on them as you browse through all your CRM options. You want to keep shopping around until you find a tool that has everything you need. If you don’t, then you’ll have to turn around and drop more money for extra software to fill in the gaps.
• Pricing: You also don’t want to spend an arm and a leg on your CRM. As a small business, you can’t afford to. While CRM can be expensive, it isn’t always. You do want to think of this as an investment, though, one that can pay back what you spend in spades.
• Customer support: Should you have a question about how the software works, how long will it take you to get a response? The CRM’s customer support team should be fast and answer customer queries in a reasonable time. Even if you happen to know your CRM inside and out, glitches, crashes, and other technical issues can interrupt your workflow. Your CRM’s customer support team should be able to pinpoint and resolve the problem right away.
• Scalability: Your company may be small now, but it won’t always be. When you grow, can your CRM grow with you? How difficult is it to onboard new employees? How many accounts can you have before you’re charged more money? Keep all that in mind as you choose your CRM.

If you’re still looking for a CRM for your small business, we recommend EngageBay. Our CRM is free to use, making it convenient for small businesses to get started with us today. When you sign up for an EngageBay account, you can take advantage of our sales CRM as well. Through this feature, you can manage contacts, score them, and even create your own custom filters.

You also can manage your active and past campaigns, make and use templates, and create and edit landing pages and forms. It’s very simple to toggle between sales and marketing campaigns as well, keeping both teams working together seamlessly.

Other features include:

• Customer reports based on the criteria and metrics that matter most to you and your company.
• Sales gamification, including sales team leaderboards.
• Automation through contacts, email marketing, newsletters, sales, and so much more.
• CRM calling, such as auto-dialing and call broadcasting to as many or as few contacts as you want.
• Scheduling appointments, which are all done automatically so your sales team can stay focused.