In today’s fast-paced business environment, small businesses must leverage every tool at their disposal to stay ahead. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) apps have emerged as indispensable tools for enhancing customer engagement and streamlining business operations. This guide explores the top 10 CRM apps that are set to elevate small business success in 2024, highlighting key features to look for and how to choose the right one for your business.
Why Invest in a CRM App for Your Small Business?
Enhancing Customer Engagement
CRM apps are more than just organizational tools; they are a gateway to building deeper, more meaningful relationships with your customers. By centralizing customer interactions and data, CRM apps enable personalized communication and services, significantly enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Streamlining Business Operations
The best CRM apps go beyond customer management; they offer a suite of tools to automate and optimize various business processes. From sales pipelines to marketing campaigns and customer service, CRM apps bring efficiency and order, freeing up valuable time for businesses to focus on growth.
Key Features to Look for in the Best CRM Apps
Ease of Use and Integration
A CRM app should be intuitive for your team to use and easy to integrate with your existing business tools, such as email, calendar, and accounting software. This ensures a smooth workflow and maximizes the utility of your tech stack.
Scalability and Customization
Your chosen CRM should be able to grow with your business and be customizable to fit your unique needs. Look for apps that offer modular features or add-ons that you can adopt as your business evolves.
Top 10 CRM Apps for Small Businesses in 2024
Zoho CRM: best free CRM app
Zoho CRM helps teams work faster by keeping all essential customer relationship activities in one central place. The free version of Zoho CRM lets you use the app’s key features at no cost for up to 3 users, making it ideal for small teams on a tight budget.
The app’s simple home screen shows all your activities for the day, like upcoming meetings, tasks that are due, and call history with customers. Right from this home screen, you can schedule new meetings, calls, and tasks with one tap.
Beyond simplifying your day, here’s what makes Zoho CRM a great choice for small businesses:
- Comprehensive contact records. You’ll get a detailed communication history for every customer, and can attach notes and files to their contact record. You can even send customers a new email directly from the contact record.
- Lead management. Capture leads from forms on your service website landing pages, scan business cards from the mobile CRM app, and send targeted email campaigns to turn leads into customers.
- Editable sales pipeline. Create a deal containing all the customer data you’ve collected and add that deal to your sales pipeline in Zoho CRM. Then easily move them along your pipeline and update information as you go.
While the free version of Zoho CRM doesn’t offer sales forecasting, certain types of reports, and mass email—you can integrate it with most other Zoho services, like their marketing campaign software and survey tools.
Freshsales: best for sales pipeline management
Freshsales (formerly known as Freshworks CRM) is great CRM software for sales teams with more complicated and lengthy sales processes. The deal pipeline in Freshsales offers helpful visuals of your sales process and breaks it down into actionable tasks.
You can build a sales pipeline around your typical sales process, with each deal card showing the details you choose to see. Either click and drag each deal across a Kanban-style board, or manage deals in a funnel, a timeline, or list view.
Freshsales CRM also allows every office admin and sales rep to:
- Complete admin tasks on the go from a simple home screen, like booking meetings, adding contacts and companies, and starting phone calls.
- Set up a team email inbox where anyone in the team can answer emails from your customers within the CRM.
- Make calls directly from the app, and Freshsales saves those conversations for you to refer to later.
- Route calls to one specific person or to the whole team by setting up rules on who gets which calls (and when to send calls to voicemail).
- Create workflows that send out communications when a contact completes a certain action (e.g., ‘When a contact fills out this form, send them a welcome email).
When you click on a contact record, you get a snapshot of their lifecycle stage and a score that tells you how ready they are for the sale.
Pipedrive: Best For Prospecting
Pipedrive CRM is the best CRM software for finding prospects who could become your customers. Like Freshsales, it’s designed to simplify sales and customer relationships with customizable pipelines and easy task management.
What sets it apart is its LeadBooster add-on that includes Prospector, a tool that helps you find high-quality outbound leads. Using Prospector, you can:
- Access a database of over 400 million profiles and 10 million companies gathered from high-quality sources
- Use easy filters to locate your ideal customers based on criteria like job title, location, and industry
- Get suggestions for the best potential leads with help from an AI tool that verifies each prospect
Once you have prospects, contact them directly through Pipedrive instead of hopping from one tool to another. Pipedrive’s contact management and storage, like their Leads Inbox, will help you organize every contact and convert them to customers faster.
Mailchimp: Best Marketing CRM
Mailchimp is our top pick for managing relationships with marketing contacts. It’s the best CRM software to store and organize leads to send marketing emails and updates on your products and services.
The audience dashboard in Mailchimp is a clean and organized location for your customer data. Using this dashboard to keep a pulse on your audience engagement can help you find new and better ways to communicate with them.
Build better relationships with your audience in Mailchimp by:
- Keeping all important customer data in one place, including top locations, common tags, and customer lifetime value (CLV)
- Creating your own segments and tags to filter audience data however you need to
- Setting up automated messages to trigger based on specific segments or tags
Mailchimp also integrates with Jobber to give you powerful, easy-to-use marketing automation in the same place you manage your work.
Monday sales CRM: Most Customizable
When you need customer records, pipelines, and communication customized to fit your exact needs, monday sales CRM might be the best CRM solution for your small business.
Monday Sales CRM is built to be flexible across multiple industries and team structures. Here’s how you can customize the CRM to work for your business:
- Create customizable dashboards—from scratch or with pre-built templates—that help you manage customer relationships
- Build a pipeline that matches your sales cycle by editing deal stages and adding as many columns as you’d like
- Choose how you view your sales data, whether you prefer Gantt charts or Kanban columns
- Update contact and company details without leaving the pipeline view
- Connect the CRM with your communication channels, including email, social media, and text messages
Copper: Best For Google Workspace Users
Copper is a unique CRM solution that’s specifically designed to integrate with Google Workspace tools and applications, including Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Sheets, and Data Studio.
Its Basic plan is the best fit for small business users and includes features for pipeline and contact management, team collaboration, and Google integrations. Keep in mind that many of Copper’s more advanced features—like lead scoring, reporting, and workflow automation—are only available in more expensive plans.
Key Features:
- Recurring task and notification automation
- Customizable pipelines for deal tracking
- Customizable reports
- Google Workspace CRM capabilities through integration
- Contact enrichment
- Task management
- Deal management and opportunity slippage
- Reminders, mentions, and comments
- Note-taking and activity logging
- Web, Chrome, and mobile apps
Keap: Solid CRM Option For Small Businesses
Keap is a solid CRM option for businesses that want small-business-friendly automation, communication, and contact management features all in one place.
It’s known for having a user-friendly interface as well as advanced marketing capabilities and tools. However, despite Keap being advertised as an SMB CRM solution, it’s important to note that it’s one of the most expensive options for this market. The most basic package starts at $159 per month and goes up in price if you need more than two users or 1,500 contacts.
- Email and text marketing
- Sales and marketing automation
- Sales pipeline with built-in analytics
- Quotes, payments, and invoicing
- Automated lead capture and follow-up communication.
- Landing pages
- Lead scoring and source attribution
- Appointment scheduling
- Contact segmentation and tagging
- Automated appointment reminders
HubSpot CRM: best for custom analytics and reporting
Use HubSpot as your CRM app if you need robust reporting that’s still user-friendly and easy to set up. In HubSpot, you can create detailed reports on sales and customer service activities, marketing engagement, revenue, and productivity.
HubSpot reports are great at capturing engagement trends from all your contacts. Multiple view options let you choose between list views, charts, numbers, and more—whichever visuals work best for you.
Improve your decision making with these other analytics and reporting features in HubSpot CRM:
- Access a massive report library with intelligent, pre-built reports that give you precise analytics on contact activity, sales performance, revenue, marketing engagement, and customer service, and more.
- Create multiple dashboards that host reports for different purposes. Your team will get a glimpse of customer activities and company performance right when they enter the CRM.
- Manage permissions to decide which team members can view or edit each analytics dashboard.
- Analyze activities with individual contacts. HubSpot’s contact records are packed with detail. Every profile shows which of your emails, links, and documents your contact has opened, with exact timestamps.
Maidprofit: A Top CRM App and Software for Small Business
Key Features and Benefits of Maidprofit:
- Intuitive Interface: Maidprofit offers a user-friendly platform that simplifies customer management and engagement.
- Automated Scheduling: Streamline appointment setting and adjustments, reducing the administrative burden on staff.
- Customizable Templates: Tailor your communication and service offerings with customizable templates, ensuring each customer feels valued.
- Dynamic Pricing Models: Adapt your pricing strategy based on service complexity, frequency, or customization level.
- On-Site Estimations: Utilize the mobile app for accurate on-site service estimations, enhancing customer trust and satisfaction.
- Integrated Communications: Keep in touch with customers through automated reminders and personalized messages directly from the platform.
Nimble: best CRM software for integrations
Using apps to manage your accounting, marketing, scheduling, website management, or e-commerce? Try Nimble, a CRM platform that integrates with thousands of other apps, to keep you connected with the best tools.
On its own, Nimble helps you organize contacts into segmented lists, track your team’s activity, manage your sales process, and communicate with customers strategically.
Its strongest feature is its ability to unify contact data from multiple apps into a single platform that’s easily accessible everywhere you work. Nimble offers integrations with 160+ apps, including:
- Mailchimp
- Evernote
- Shopify
- Gmail
- ActiveCampaign
- Google Sheets
- Google Calendar
- Zendesk
- QuickBooks Online
How to Choose the Right CRM App for Your Business
Assessing Your Business Needs
Evaluate your business's specific requirements and challenges to select a CRM app that offers the most relevant solutions.
Considering Cost vs. Value
Balance the upfront and ongoing costs of a CRM app against the potential ROI it can deliver in terms of efficiency gains and customer loyalty.
Implementing Your Chosen CRM App Successfully
Best Practices for CRM Implementation
Ensure successful CRM adoption by planning the rollout carefully, training your team thoroughly, and migrating data securely.
Measuring CRM Success
Track key performance indicators (KPIs) related to customer engagement, sales conversion, and operational efficiency to gauge your CRM's impact.
Conclusion
Investing in the right CRM app can revolutionize how small businesses manage customer relationships and operational workflows. By choosing a tool that aligns with your specific needs—like Maidprofit for those in the cleaning industry—you set the stage for enhanced efficiency, deeper customer connections, and sustained growth.
FAQs About Best CRM Apps For Small Businesses In 2024
What is the average cost of a good CRM app for small businesses?
Costs vary widely depending on features and scale, with options ranging from free basic plans to premium services with advanced capabilities.
How long does it take to fully implement a CRM app?
Implementation times can range from a few days to several months, depending on the complexity of the CRM system and the size of your business.
Can CRM apps integrate with social media platforms?
Many CRM apps offer social media integration, allowing businesses to track customer interactions across platforms and gather more comprehensive insights.