9 Best CRM Software for Marketing Agencies

Two important objectives for marketing agencies are to improve customer experience and boost sales. To help reach their goals and manage client expectations, businesses often enlist the help of customer relationship management (CRM) tools. Since you are here, you might be wondering, What is the best software for CRM?

The best CRM software helps marketing agencies capture valuable insight into what your clients want so that you can provide them with better services. Since managing customer relationships is crucial to business success, it’s no surprise that a study by Grand View Research found that over 91% of companies with more than 10 employees use CRM systems. 

With dozens of CRM tools available, figuring out which one can take your small business to the next level can be difficult. In this article, we discuss the most important elements to look for in a CRM and then share with you our picks for the best CRM software for marketing agencies in 2023. Let’s take a look!

What Is CRM Software?

CRM software is a customer relationship management tool designed to help businesses build better relationships with their audiences and offer customers a seamless and unique experience. CRM software analyzes customer data such as contact information, purchases, service requests, and quotes/proposals. 

The system then allows you to access the data and understand what occurred at each touchpoint. As a result, you can develop a complete customer profile and build solid, lasting relationships.

Most Important Elements To Look For in a CRM

Choosing the right CRM for your marketing agency isn’t always straightforward, but it’s easier if you know what you’re looking for.  Here are the most crucial CRM features to check:

Collaborative Features

A good CRM solution must have three core collaborative features: Contact management, interaction tracking, and lead management. It should also simplify workflows and processes through organizational hierarchies and structures. 

A CRM system with collaborative features can help you interact and exchange concepts, workloads, and ideas with employees and superiors. 

It should also automate client interactions, back-office operations, and business management, resulting in greater transparency across organizational teams and the ability to scale your agency.

Great User Experience and Design

CRMs can sometimes get cluttered with a lot of information. For example, you might have CRM software with all the features you need, but it’s painfully slow and requires too much clicking to get anything done. 

Before buying CRM software, make sure it’s user-friendly. Can you use it effortlessly? Can you find features quickly?

If you’re having difficulty using it, your marketing and administrative team will have a more challenging time. It’s better to have a CRM with significantly fewer features but a simple interface.

Integration With Other Agency Tools

CRM tools are all about tracking and managing customer information, and integration is one of the crucial features to look for. 

Some crucial integrations a CRM software should have include:

• Email marketing
• Web analytics 
• Social media management 

Look for CRM software that integrates with other agency tools like time-tracking apps and invoicing software. That’ll help your team do everything in one place.

That said, here are nine of the best CRM software for marketing agencies:

1. Best Overall: HubSpot

HubSpot is a free and powerful CRM software with a centralized database that lets you organize valuable details about your leads, partners, and clients. 

HubSpot CRM allows you to create email templates and tags, schedule calls, and more. You can use the platform as a communications tool and a data warehouse.

Since HubSpot has a marketing hub, you can keep data at the forefront of everything you do. You can use this data to segment and target specific audiences, create consistent content, nurture contacts, and maintain consistent brand messaging across all marketing channels. 

As a result, you can align your marketing and customer service efforts to offer best-in-class experiences to clients.

Key Features

• Over 1090 integrations to get more functionality from the tools you’re already paying for
• Marketing automation tools to track results with built-in analytics reports
• Live chatbot to connect with website visitors in real-time

Pricing: Free with limited features. Premium plans start at $45 per month per 1000 contacts.

2. Best for Creative Agencies: Monday.com

Monday Sales CRM is a highly customizable, robust platform that helps you streamline your workflows and monitor all aspects of a client’s interaction with your agency — from lead generation to post-project support. 

The dashboard is divided into folders and boards — with up to 50 columns for managing groups such as projects “To do” or rejected leads, for example. 

You can also create custom pipelines for your projects based on your specifications and develop workflows to get the most out of your data.

Key Features

• Has everything laid out to quickly identify any potential problems in your client’s sales cycle
• Easily customizable to monitor all elements of the sales process
• Has native integrations with tools and apps you already use, such as Gmail, Excel, and DocuSign

Pricing: Free with limited features. Premium plans start at $10 per user per month.

3. Best for Managing Opportunities: Capsule

Capsule CRM enables users to manage opportunities in the sales pipeline and organize their projects and client-facing activities.

It gives you a quick summary of opportunities through the sales dashboard. These opportunities include potential values, where they are in the sales pipeline, and what you need to do next.

Capsule is reliable if you want robust integrations with accounting tools like QuickBooks, Xero, and FreeAgent.

Key Features

• Stores and monitors all contacts, including opportunities, vendors, leads, and customers
• Offers a complete view of the sales pipeline and manages sales opportunities
• Allows users to create teams and opportunities and assign new leads to chosen sales reps for easy project management

Pricing: Free 30-day trial with limited features. Premium plans start at $18 per user per month.

4. Best for Pipeline Management: Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a sales-focused CRM that automates repetitive tasks and manages client projects and leads. It’s an excellent CRM solution for companies that need a good visual sales pipeline with data visualizations and at-a-glance information.

It also has the Smart Contact Data feature that pulls known work and social data for contacts with a single click. 

Pipedrive also has a powerful mobile app that helps you engage with team members and customers on the go.

Key Features

• Sales and lead management capabilities to track sales and leads from chatbots, forms, and other sources
• Communication tracking to set your schedule in real-time
• Visual sales pipelines to create custom stages by team members or project managers

Pricing: Free 14-day trial with limited features. Premium plans start at $9.90 per user per month.

5. Best for Businesses on Google Workspace: Copper

Copper CRM helps users track client interactions, automate core operations, communicate with employees, and manage leads. It’s ideal for businesses that already use Google Workspace tools and want a CRM that can integrate with those apps and processes.

Copper also has an excellent user interface and seamlessly captures and connects all project tasks, files, and calendar invites so that you don’t miss any details.

Key Features

• Lead management to capture leads and nurture them to become clients
• Workflow automation to help managers focus on managing leads and opportunities
• Task management to improve team collaboration and create automatic to-do lists

Pricing: Free with limited features. Premium plans start at $29 per user per month.

6. Best for Analytics and Reports: Insightly

Insightly CRM gives you extra control over sales and project management operations by offering a unique relationship-linking feature. 

The CRM platform offers a dynamic and customizable solution for small teams that can’t manage all aspects of the sales process. You can build your ideal personal dashboards to highlight specific contexts, workflows, and metrics.

Key Features

• Lead routing to track the most relevant lead information
• Third-party integrations with applications such as Gmail, Dropbox, and Outlook
• Pipeline management to help you track client pitches to identify where they are in the sales funnel

Pricing: Free with limited features. Premium plans start at $29 per user per month.

7. Best for Work Communication: Podio

Podio is a CRM platform that helps users track leads and clients easily. Use its integrated webforms to capture contact information, monitor who’s responsible for each lead, and understand key touch points like when the lead was last contacted.

You can integrate the platform with Citrix content collaboration tools to add context and conversations to files. In addition, you can also integrate with third-party file-sharing modules such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and Evernote.

Key Features

• Attach files, assign tasks, and discuss details within the CRM platform
• Project budget tracking and automation of your sales pipelines and workflows
• Visual dashboards that offer an overview of your business

Pricing: Free with limited features. Premium plans start at $7.20 per employee per month.

8. Best for Marketing and Sales Automation: Keap

Keap is a CRM tool for businesses starting out with CRM software. It has a user-friendly interface and a simple setup.

The Keap CRM platform centralizes all of your client’s activity and automatically adds all customer interactions. You can automate contact management from customer activities across multiple platforms to improve your team’s ability to offer efficient support. 

Key Features

• Email marketing tools to nurture leads, generate revenue, and keep clients in the loop.
• Reporting and analytics to improve marketing effectiveness and customer engagement
• Customizable dashboard to manage the sales pipelines and track leads and existing customers

Pricing: Free with limited features. Premium plans start at $129 per month per 1500 contacts.

9. Best Value for Large Teams: BenchmarkONE (Formerly Hatchbuck)

BenchmarkONE is a cloud-based CRM solution enabling users to automate many business processes surrounding customer relationships. Notably, it’s best suited to large marketing teams due to its affordable pricing model and deployment availability.

With this CRM, you can easily boost retainers, build campaigns, and duplicate processes across client accounts to fast-track work.

Key Features

• Robust integrations with Gmail and Zapier to enable access to over 1,000 different services and applications
• Built-in analytics to score campaigns and analyze progress 
• Email marketing tools to send personalized emails using customized templates

Pricing: Free with limited features. Premium plans start at $29 per month per 500 contacts.

Final Thoughts: 9 Best CRM Software for Marketing Agencies

We hope the CRM software options above will help you determine the best solution for your business needs. Most importantly, choose a CRM software that fits your budget and helps you build solid relationships with your clients.

Which solution do you consider the best CRM software for marketing agencies? Share the post with your answers!

About Autumn Witter

Autumn, a graduate of the illustrious Howard University, is an SEO Strategist on HubSpot's Link Building team. When she's not talking link building or SEO, you can find her in the recording studio making R&B hits, traveling, or studying for law school. Keep up with Autumn on Instagram or LinkedIn.