The 15 Best CRMs for Marketing Agencies (Free and Paid)

If you’re running a marketing agency, you know why contacts make a difference. Which is why picking the best CRM for marketing agencies is a long-term investment.

However, it isn’t always easy to find the ideal solution. Some are full workspaces, others integrate with your current workflow. A few options offer productivity tools and resources, while others opt for a streamlined interface.

In this article, you are going to learn how to choose the best CRM software to cover all the needs of an agency, and also find 15 CRM solutions that are a great fit for agencies.

Whether it is to manage your own clients or your clients’ leads, CRM software is an essential part of any marketing agency’s workflow.

What is CRM software?

CRM is short for Customer Relationship Management, and it is literally every kind of communication you maintain with clients and leads. While CRM software is any system with the purpose to manage your organization’s interactions with customers, and also the potential ones.

Generally, teams use this kind of solution to automate their processes and improve profitability.

What features are important in a CRM for marketing agencies?

When you’re looking for CRM software for marketing agencies, you need to pay attention to a few key details. While most CRM apps come with the basics, you should pick based on the tools you need the most. For example:

Data reports

It’s pretty important to keep data about your marketing campaigns. This data allows you to understand what works (and what doesn’t), so that future strategies have a guideline. However, collecting reliable data isn’t easy.

That’s why some of these CRMs for marketing agencies offer data analytics and data reports. With them, you can track and monitor changes to your customer interactions, user performance, and sales rates. Then, check for any inconsistencies and trends so that you get a full view of your workflow.

If you find any concerns, you can adjust your workflow accordingly to create and manage better marketing campaigns.

Flexibility

Of course, not all industries or companies follow the same CRM needs. Depending on the products and services your team markets, they need specific information on their contacts. For example: a wholesaler needs contacts to have their role and location listed on their profiles since they often deal with multiple contacts at the same stores.

The best CRMs for marketing agencies include flexible options, such as custom fields, tags, document uploads and so on. With these, you can add extra information to contacts on a need-by-need basis. Besides, if your CRM environment is flexible, you can customize your workflow to your team, which helps productivity.

Drag

Drag is an all-in-one software that helps teams to manage their entire workflows in Gmail. It means that it can be used for multiple purposes, such as CRM, Help desk, Project Management, and Task Management.

Since most deals start and end as emails, Drag makes you stop switching between Gmail and a Sales CRM. Moreover, you can share group emails such as [email protected], and collaborate with your team in real-time.

With Drag, your emails become task cards. There, you can add notes, give deadlines, assign your team members and even add files. That way, your inbox becomes an adaptable digital workspace, with all you need at a glance.

Copper

Copper is a CRM for small agencies that need to manage sales leads and grow their customer relationships. It’s a simple tool that eliminates repetitive tasks and manual entries with automations. Copper also integrates with Gmail and other Google Apps.

Besides, it’s possible to view and manage sales and relationship essentials from email threads. Moreover, it offers reminders to reach out to contacts and follow up on deals, so you never miss any opportunity.

Nimble

Nimble is a CRM that works with Office 365 and Google Workspace Suite, allowing teams and individuals to manage their contacts and close more deals faster. It also integrates with productivity software (email inboxes and calendars) to help business teams close more deals faster.

Therefore, Nimble is ideal for agencies that need to nurture their business relationships across email, social networks, and other third-party applications.

Streak

Streak is a Gmail-based CRM tool for marketing agencies that helps teams organize their conversations. With a click, your marketing agents can check the entire pipeline, which allows them to understand the clients better. With Streak, you can see the details of your contacts as you read the conversations.

It’s a Gmail extension, which makes it easy to implement and start using.

Capsule

Capsule is a great CRM for marketing agencies because it connects with multiple channels, including Gmail. You can get a full view of all your contacts through this platform. With custom filters and social search, you can also find better, more responsive ways to interact with your client base, a potential marketing growth.

Nutsales

If you’re looking to implement AI in Sales and Marketing, Nutsales is the CRM option. This platform is another Gmail extension that brings your contacts to the next level.

You can manage multiple conversations at once, with notes and private comments, which your team collaborators can check later. Nutsales sends them real-time updates to stay aware of what’s happening on each conversation – no more CC and BCCing.

The generative AI feature helps you summarize conversations, add tags and predict sales scores.

Thryv

Thryv is a CRM built for small businesses to help them automate tasks and put customers first. It also makes it easier for teams to reach more customers, stay organized, get paid faster, and automatically generate reviews. Moreover, it’s possible to engage with customers easily and instantly, receive reminders, send texts and emails, and schedule appointments.

Insightly

Insightly is a platform to help agencies engage with customers, manage projects, and align sales and marketing goals. Besides, it also offers ROI calculation on marketing spend and the possibility of accelerating pipeline growth.

Creatio

Creatio is a global software company that provides a low-code platform for process management and CRM. It includes solutions for marketing, sales, and service. So you can either acquire them as standalone products or all of them on a single platform.

Spiro

Spiro is a relationship management platform that automatically creates contacts, organizes and prioritizes opportunities, and recommends your sales pipeline’s next steps. Managers can benefit from intelligent reports to help their team convert more sales.

ConvergeHub

ConvergeHub is a CRM that offers Sales, Marketing, Support, and Billing features. Between the activities you can perform on this software are lead attraction, prospect nurturing, closing sales, support ticketing, contract generation, document storage, sending quotations, creating invoices, and many others.

ConvergeHub also offers customization and automation so teams can build the workflow as they see fit.

EngageBay All-in-One Suite

EngageBay is a simple and powerful all-in-one CRM, offering a complete solution on marketing automation, sales CRM, Helpdesk, and even live chat. It’s a tool made for agencies that need to centralize the processes of acquiring, engaging, nurturing web visitors, and converting them in just one place.

Hubspot CRM

Hubspot offers free CRM software with a visual dashboard that provides a clear view of your sales pipeline. Furthermore, you can generate reports on sales activity, productivity, and individual performance, so you can understand how your team is leading work.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaing is a multichannel marketing solution that helps you monitor your entire workflow from the same app. You can collect data from email, social media and ecommerce, along with multiple other integrations, to create and manage segmented client lists.

When there’s an update on an established contact, your sales team is notified via email or Slack message. So this tool is a great way to connect multiple part of your company into a well-developed workflow. You can also create custom pipelines with stages that make sense for your products and services, which give an outline of your progress.

Brevo

You can use Brevo, a marketing and sales platform, to develop better relationships with your clients. With a 360-view of each contact, productivity resources, automation and compliance, this app can help you manage campaigns while creating segmented lists. With Brevo’s analytics, you can download reports and use them to develop future marketing campaigns.

The main selling point is that Brevo is user-friendly, allowing your whole team to work on each step of the marketing and sales pipeline.

Wrapping up

Finding the best CRMs for Marketing agencies may not be so easy, but with the tools above, you can make an informed decision.

After looking into the features you need and which CRMs for marketing agencies include them, you should make a complete analysis by visiting tool directories such as Capterra or G2 and looking for user reviews.

If your top picks have demos and free trials, you can use them to test their user-friendliness before committing to a plan. That way, you can make sure the software is the best fit for your needs.

In the meantime, you can also look into our software guide for Marketing Agencies and find more resources that enhance your workflow.