The Best CRM for Email Marketing – Top 10 Best Email CRMs Compared for 2023

Getting the best CRM for email marketing for your company can help you launch engaging campaigns and attract new customers. These tools offer numerous advanced features for creating, automating, and deploying impactful email campaigns. In addition, their centralized nature means you’ll have all your customer data in one place, improving your customer relationship management and ability to drive engagement.

Finding email CRM software that offers the best value for money isn’t a simple task. In this article, we’ll focus on the best email CRM tools that are easy to use and offer feature-rich plans for businesses of all sizes. Read on to learn how Salesforce, Pipedrive, and HubSpot stack up as the best CRMs for email marketing this year.

The Top 10 Best Email Marketing CRMs Ranked

Here, you’ll find our top picks for tools that combine email marketing with a CRM, ranked based on their best features, pricing, and pros and cons.

  1. Salesforce — Overall, the best CRM for email marketing in 2023, with feature-rich plans and exceptional lead management capabilities.
  2. Pipedrive — Budget-friendly solution for businesses looking to simplify task management and visualize sales processes.
  3. HubSpot — Comprehensive free CRM email marketing plan with in-depth email health reporting.
  4. Act! — All-in-one solution that excels at contact management and helps you maintain positive customer relationships.
  5. Oracle NetSuite — Exceptional email marketing automation that minimizes your administrative hours and streamlines sales engagement.
  6. Zoho — Establish workflow rules even with its cheapest plan and set up personalized auto-replies and follow-up emails.
  7. Freshsales — Gain a 360-degree view of your customers, understand visitor intent, and identify high-quality leads.
  8. Maximizer CRM — Emphasize your brand with Maximizer’s targeted promotions and apply a personalized touch.
  9. SageCRM — Scalable email marketing tool with exceptional CRM capabilities and real-time insights into your customer database.
  10. Engagebay — Robust email campaign scheduling features and zero-cost onboarding and migration.

Is Email Marketing Still Worth It?

While the importance of social media marketing is undeniable, email marketing remains a vital part of any digital marketing strategy. Despite the growth of social media platforms, they haven’t managed to replace email marketing as a leading source of new customers and sales driver.

That’s because email marketing is more cost-effective than any other type of digital marketing and allows for direct and personalized communication with your clients.

However, finding the right email marketing tool for your business is crucial, as it needs to give you enough control over its features to ensure campaigns are effective and allow you to craft email templates that reflect your brand.

Your campaigns depend on following best practices, complying with privacy regulations, and maintaining an engaged email list, but it’s the quality of your email marketing campaign that determines its results.

With the right marketing CRM tools, you’ll also have access to detailed email marketing analytics, providing in-depth insights into click-through, open, and conversion rates. This data can help you understand what works for your audience, enabling you to refine your campaigns.

In addition, most email marketing providers on our list provide automation tools that can save you time and increase efficiency by eliminating repetitive tasks.

Why You Need a CRM With Email Marketing

The best CRM email marketing tools can help you address issues related to data management, email campaign effectiveness, and customer segmentation, all using a single platform.

Deploying an email marketing tool without a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system can result in several challenges. The main issue is data fragmentation, which makes customer data harder to track as it isn’t brought together on a single platform.

The lack of a unified customer view will lead to missed opportunities for personalized communication and engagement, so you’re more likely to have to resort to generic, one-size-fits-all emails, which are less likely to engage recipients.

On the other hand, opting for the best CRM software for email marketing provides numerous advantages. It centralizes customer data, giving your sales and marketing teams access to the same information, so they can improve their processes.

These tools often allow you to access customer interactions and history, improving the precision of your personalized email content, which drives higher conversions and engagement.

In addition, CRM email marketing tools can help you create sales funnels and improve conversion rates by allowing you to set up automated email sequences triggered by specific customer actions. Using a CRM for automated lead nurturing can also provide valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences.

Comparing the Best CRM Email Software on the Market

The master table below provides everything you need to compare the best CRMs for email marketing based on their pricing, top features, use cases, and more.

CRM Email Marketing Tool Best For Starting Price Contacts on Starter Plan Free Version Top 3 Features
Salesforce Best Overall $25/user/month Unlimited 30-Day Free Trial – Mass Email
– Campaign Management
– Activity Feed
Pipedrive Small Businesses $9.90/user/month Unlimited 14-Day Free Trial – Deal Reports
Email Analytics
Email Tracking
HubSpot Free Users $20/month 1,000 Free-Forever Plan – Forms
– Shared Inbox
List Segmentation
Act! Contact Management $30/user/month Unlimited 14-Day Free Trial – A/B Testing
Surveys
Social Sharing
Oracle NetSuite Marketing Automation Custom Unlimited N/A – Real-Time Analytics
Single Data Source
ROI Calculator
Zoho Workflow Automation $14/user/month Unlimited 15-Day Free Trial – Auto-Responders
Anomaly Detection
– Process
Blueprints
Freshsales Lead Generation $15/user/month 1,000 Free-Forever Plan, 21-Day Free Trial – Multichannel Campaigns
Task Management
Marketing Lists
Maximizer CRM Marketing Reports $65/user/month 100,000 N/A – Proactive Notifications
Lead Tracking
Automated Drip Campaigns
SageCRM Large Businesses Custom N/A N/A – Real-Time Tracking
Integrations
Compliance Management

The Top 10 CRM Email Marketing Tools Reviewed

We’ll now go into the details of each CRM email marketing tool on our list to provide all the information you need. You’ll learn more about their best use cases and features and see how they compare for businesses of different sizes.

1. Salesforce — Overall, the Best CRM for Email Marketing in 2023

Salesforce is a comprehensive CRM platform with diverse email marketing features that are suitable for businesses of all sizes. It’s an ideal pick for users looking for an all-in-one solution that handles everything from lead optimization to lead scoring and customer retention.

Although Salesforce has a slight learning curve, meaning new users may need some time to get used to its interface, we were impressed with how it organizes data, especially regarding removing duplicate entries.

Unlike most of its competition, Salesforce offers a variety of add-ons and integrations with software for industry-specific needs, making it an ideal pick for small and large businesses looking for customizable solutions.

best crm for email marketing

Best For Starting Price Contacts on Starter Plan Free Version Top 3 Features
Best Overall $25/user/month Unlimited 30-Day Free Trial – Mass Email
– Campaign Management
– Activity Feed

That means you can quickly customize its platform to suit your needs by modifying its data fields and modules so it’s easy for your team to transition to Salesforce.

During our hands-on test of its Sales Cloud packages using its 30-day free trial offer, we were quickly impressed by the massive amount of features Salescloud offers.

While you’ll need one of its more expensive plans for the most advanced CRM features, like workflow automation and advanced pipeline management, we found an exceptional set of email marketing features even on the lowest-cost plan. Here are the features that impressed us most.

Features

  • Mass Email — This feature lets you create separate email lists for events or high-value customers and automatically tracks which leads and contacts received and interacted with them.
  • Campaign Management — This allows you to see the impact of your email marketing campaign on your sales pipeline. This results in more informed business decisions, as it tracks your performance across all channels.
  • Activity Feed — A centralized, well-designed space for all your customer activities that gives you a complete overview of customer engagement. This feature is ideal for businesses looking to improve their sales and marketing team’s communications.

Salesforce offers the best value for money if you’re looking for a well-rounded CRM email marketing solution, and while its add-ons may be pricey, they make it a scalable pick for growing businesses.

However, if you’re looking for an email marketing tool that offers first-class analytics or low-cost lead scoring, consider subscribing to Zoho CRM or HubSpot.

Pricing

Salesforce has a complicated pricing structure as it spreads its features across a range of business-oriented tools. We found its Sales Cloud packages to offer an ideal blend of CRM and email marketing features via plans compatible with its advanced add-ons.

You’ll find most of its email marketing features on its cheapest plan, but unlocking its AI-powered lead scoring and campaign influence features will require one of the more expensive plans.

best crm for email marketing

Thanks to its 30-day free trial period, you can try Salesforce risk-free today.

Pros 

  • Frequent software and security updates
  • Provides a unified view of customer engagement history
  • Well-designed mobile apps
  • Customizable reports and dashboards
  • Scalable and flexible

Cons 

  • Slight learning curve

2. Pipedrive — Fully Featured Budget-Friendly Solution

Pipedrive is an exceptional pick for small businesses with a limited budget looking to improve their data management and launch their first email marketing campaign. It offers an easy-to-use platform that’s ideal for first-time users and incorporates action-based sales features with email marketing.

One of our favorite things about Pipedrive is its drag-and-drop email builder, which lets you use and customize its pre-made templates to launch professional-looking campaigns.

Besides email campaigns, Pipedrive simplifies pipeline management to help you move deals across stages. This means you can automate growth using Pipedrive while you build out the stages of your sales funnel and track progress.

best crm software for email marketing

Best For Starting Price Contacts on Starter Plan Free Version Top 3 Features
Small Businesses $9.90/user/month Unlimited 14-Day Free Trial – Deal Reports
– Email Analytics
– Email Tracking

Pipedrive will help you identify opportunities to close more sales, allow you to segment your audience, and even provide revenue forecasting based on performance. This makes it ideal for users looking for in-depth insights into their business’s health and marketing results.

Although it may not offer as many features as Salesforce, we found it to be a more user-friendly tool that fits well for small teams. Pipedrive makes data visible via its at-a-glance dashboards that you can share with team members or clients via shareable links.

In addition, we like how it simplifies task delegation and admin task automation, which can significantly improve team collaboration. Here are the features that caught our attention when we tested the platform.

Features

  • Deal Reports — Pipedrive makes it easy to view revenue by account and the deals your sales reps win and lose daily.
  • Email Analytics — It stores all campaign data in a centralized database and provides information about open rates, unique clicks, and other key email marketing campaign metrics.
  • Email Tracking — Pipedrive will immediately notify your team when a prospect opens an email or clicks on a link you’ve sent them.

Although Pipedrive is one of the cheapest CRM tools, opting for just its CRM plans gives you a limited set of email marketing features, as most of its advanced features require the Campaigns add-on.

Although it offers fewer add-ons than Salesforce, Pipedrive integrates with hundreds of third-party apps, which include the best accounting software and business-oriented tools that may already be in your stack.

Pricing

Pipedrive splits its pricing plans into five tiers, which are suitable for small-to-medium businesses. Although its starting plan is one of the cheapest in the industry, we suggest opting for Advanced to gain access to features like email scheduling, customizable email templates, and automations.

In addition, you can expect to pay $13.33/month for its Campaigns add-on, which lets you launch professional email marketing campaigns.

best crm software for email marketing

Thanks to its 14-day free trial period, you can try Pipedrive risk-free today.

Pros 

  • Deal rotting notifications
  • Merges duplicate data
  • Shareable dashboard links
  • Intuitive desktop and smartphone interface
  • Affordable

Cons 

  • Custom onboarding only with its most expensive plans

3. HubSpot — Comprehensive Free CRM Email Marketing Plan

HubSpot conveniently integrates email marketing with CRM and sales management features to suit the needs of small and large businesses. It’s also the best free CRM with email marketing capabilities. We suggest giving its free plan a try if you’re a beginner, as it has a steep learning curve.

The platform lets you nurture your customer relationships with its specialized “Hubs.” While its Marketing Hub features help you attract customers, the Sales Hub will simplify customer support and improve customer retention.

email marketing CRM

Best For Starting Price Contacts on Starter Plan Free Version Top 3 Features
Free Users $20/month 1,000 Free-Forever Plan – Forms
– Shared Inbox
– List Segmentation

During our experience working with the platform, we found that it’s an excellent pick for users looking to create personalized content, such as landing pages with call-to-action buttons. Here are the features we liked the most while testing this all-in-one CRM email marketing tool.

Features

  • Forms — HubSpot lets you create standalone, embedded, or pop-up forms to collect customer details.
  • Shared Inbox — It lets your team use a shared inbox to address incoming emails and live chats generated by your marketing campaigns.
  • List Segmentation — Create static or dynamically updated contact lists to power personalized email campaigns.

While HubSpot may not be as user-friendly as Pipedrive, it offers a similarly intuitive feel while customizing email layouts for your campaigns. However, you’ll need to opt for one of its paid plans to remove HubSpot branding from your campaigns, blogs, and live chat.

Pricing 

HubSpot offers three paid pricing plans you can tailor to your needs, which alters their end cost. For example, its Starter plan costs $20/month if you need only two user seats and 1,000 marketing contacts, and increasing those will also increase the price.

Adding users costs $25/user/month, and HubSpot will charge you an additional $50/month for each 1,000 marketing contacts you add to the account.

email marketing CRM

You can try HubSpot risk-free today, thanks to its comprehensive free plan.

Pros 

  • Customizable plans
  • Numerous third-party integrations
  • Excellent customer service features
  • Email health reporting
  • Numerous social media management options

Cons 

  • Expensive and for larger companies

4. Act! — All-in-One Solution to Boost Customer Relationship Management

Act! is an easy-to-use small business CRM with email marketing features integrated into its platform. It’s ideal for businesses looking to improve customer relationship management by leveraging its lead-scoring and CRM features.

The platform is also one of the only CRM email marketing tools to offer professional training and guidance for a per-hour fee to help beginners improve their email marketing campaigns.

best crm with email marketing

Best For Starting Price Contacts on Starter Plan Free Version Top 3 Features
Contact Management $30/user/month Unlimited 14-Day Free Trial – A/B Testing
– Surveys
– Social Sharing

Act! is one of the most straightforward services we’ve tested, and its transparent pricing is a refreshing sight. It simplifies contact management by providing detailed relationship timelines for each contact to provide a complete picture of each relationship.

Adding new contacts is a breeze, and Act! automatically follows up on interactions with your email marketing campaigns and websites, adding relevant information to contact notes, such as their social media profiles, secondary contacts, and more. Here are some features we found impressive while testing its platform.

Features

  • A/B Testing — Included with its most expensive email marketing plan, A/B testing allows you to test the outcome of campaigns to determine your most impactful content.
  • Surveys — Act! lets you create online surveys and polls to gather information about your customers and prospects. It’ll automatically map the responses for richer customer profiles.
  • Social Sharing — It makes it easy to publish your campaigns to social websites like LinkedIn or Facebook to engage your company’s social networks and expand their reach.

Although Act! can effortlessly handle a large volume of contacts and help you maintain relationships with them with its numerous automation features, it’s not the best pick if you’re looking for advanced email marketing analytics.

However, its ease of use and exceptional customer support teams make it a better choice for beginners than most services on our list.

Pricing

Act! has a straightforward pricing structure that consists of two pricing tiers – on-premises and cloud. In addition, you can get the best of both worlds by paying a slightly higher monthly fee.

After you’ve picked its deployment method, you’ll need an email marketing plan, which comes in four tiers. Act! Marketing Automation (AMA) Basic is included with the on-premises and cloud plans, while its other AMA plans require an additional fee.

Although each plan lets you send marketing emails to unlimited contacts, you’ll need a more expensive plan to send more than 2,500 emails monthly.

best crm with email marketing

Thanks to its 14-day free trial period, you can try Act! risk-free today.

Pros

  • Intuitive smartphone apps
  • Excellent email templates
  • Beginner-friendly dashboards
  • Campaign calendar
  • Responsive customer support

Cons 

  • Outdated interface

5. Oracle NetSuite — Exceptional Email Marketing Automation

Oracle NetSuite is a comprehensive cloud-based business management software with numerous modules, including email marketing with CRM features. Its powerful automation features can help companies automate entire marketing processes, making it an excellent pick for large businesses.

NetSuite can help you avoid the complexities of lead qualification and conversion by automatically identifying when a lead meets known buyer-readiness conditions that you’ve set for your marketing campaigns.

best crm email marketing

Best For Starting Price Contacts on Starter Plan Free Version Top 3 Features
Marketing Automation Custom Unlimited N/A – Real-Time Analytics
Single Data Source
ROI Calculator

Once a potential customer becomes a highly qualifying lead, NetSuite will automatically notify your sales team, eliminating repetitive tasks and improving your business’s efficiency. Amongst its numerous advanced features, these left the best impression on us.

Features

  • Real-Time Analytics — Oracle NetSuite lets your marketing and sales teams measure the email campaign’s engagement and conversion metrics and see how they compare with your company goals.
  • Single Data Source — It provides a single view of a customer across all channels, resulting in complete visibility into all in-store, online, and phone transactions and communication.
  • ROI Calculator — It lets you track lead-to-revenue to measure the ROI of lead-generation programs, giving you complete financial insight into your marketing efforts.

Unlike Act! and the others on our list, NetSuite doesn’t disclose its pricing publicly, and most of its modules require an additional fee.

However, it’s hard to find a more comprehensive service than NetSuite, which makes it an ideal pick for large businesses looking for some of the best workflow management software solutions, HR tools, and other business-related apps.

Pricing

Oracle NetSuite doesn’t disclose its pricing publicly, as it requires your business’s details to tailor its services to your needs, so you won’t lack any modules your business requires. That means you’ll have to contact its sales team for a quote. In addition, it charges a one-time fee for the initial setup of its software.

Pros 

  • Feature-rich CRM email marketing platform
  • Excellent customer support
  • Superb automation features
  • Scalable and flexible

Cons 

  • Doesn’t publicly disclose its pricing

6. Zoho — Establish Workflow Automation Rules for Rapid Growth

Zoho can help you create, launch, and manage visually appealing email campaigns without technical expertise, thanks to its intuitive drag-and-drop builder.

In addition, it lets you include interactive elements within the emails, such as polls or videos, to engage your audience. It’s also one of the best picks for businesses looking to improve their ecommerce email marketing or run a newsletter.

crm for email marketing

Best For Starting Price Contacts on Starter Plan Free Version Top 3 Features
Workflow Automation $14/user/month Unlimited 15-Day Free Trial – Auto-Responders
– Anomaly Detection
– Process Blueprints

Zoho leverages artificial intelligence to provide in-depth analytics of your business’s performance and the quality of your email campaigns. That allows you to leverage accurate and reliable sales forecast suggestions to make informed decisions while trying to achieve your company goals.

In addition, you’ll have access to workflow rules with each of its plans, including the cheapest one, which allows you to automate the day-to-day activities of your sales team. Here are some of its features that caught our attention during our hands-on testing of its platform.

Features 

  • Auto-Responders — Zoho lets you set up automatic replies and follow-up emails when your customers and leads interact with your email marketing campaign.
  • Anomaly Detection — It will automatically notify you if it detects unusual trends in your business, allowing you to identify potential bottlenecks and resolve them quickly.
  • Blueprints — You can create step-by-step guides for each step of your marketing and sales processes, ensuring your employees are on task.

Like Salesforce, Oracle NetSuite, and HubSpot, Zoho offers its CRM email marketing services as a part of a comprehensive all-in-one business solution. However, unlike the tools listed above, its CRM natively integrates with one of the best project management solutions, Zoho Projects.

Pricing

Zoho has a straightforward pricing structure that consists of four pricing plans. If you’re interested in Zoho’s AI-powered analytics, forecasting, and auto-responders, you’ll need to opt for one of its two more expensive plans.

It offers more features on its cheapest plan than most of its competition, though, and you’ll find multiple pipelines, custom reports, email insights, and other advanced features without breaking the bank.

best email crm for small business

Thanks to its 15-day free trial period, you can try Zoho risk-free today.

Pros 

  • Superb workflow automation
  • In-depth business performance analytics
  • Sales forecasting, even on the cheapest plan
  • Budget-friendly

Cons 

  • Steep learning curve

7. Freshsales — Gain a 360-Degree View of Your Customers

Freshsales can help you streamline your marketing and sales processes to attract visitors, understand their intent, and drive repeat purchases. It’s one of the best CRM software solutions for businesses looking to improve their lead generation and close deals more reliably.

While most marketing CRM tools provide customizable email templates, Freshsales goes a step further with numerous landing page templates and over a hundred block types designed for conversion.

marketing CRM

Best For Starting Price Contacts on Starter Plan Free Version Top 3 Features
Lead Generation $15/user/month 1,000 Free-Forever Plan, 21-Day Free Trial – Multichannel Campaigns
Task Management
Marketing Lists

That means you can edit your landing page using a simple drag-and-drop builder to create a high-converting landing page and ensure the success of your marketing campaign.

Besides simplifying email campaigns and landing page creation, Freshsales offers numerous advanced email marketing features. Here are some standout features that solidified Freshsales’ spot on our list.

Features

  • Multichannel Campaigns — Besides email campaigns, Freshsales helps you expand your reach and contact your customers via their preferred channels, including WhatsApp, SMS, Instagram, and more.
  • Task Management — You can create tasks, appointments, and reminders to avoid missing opportunities and get an overview of upcoming marketing activities.
  • Marketing Lists — Freshsales lets you build new marketing lists, import existing lists, and group your contacts based on marketing campaigns or other conditions.

Freshsales has a modern, well-designed interface that immediately left a good impression on us. It’s also more user-friendly than most of its competition, and it’s free for the first 21 days, thanks to its free trial. However, if you’re looking for the best free CRM email marketing software, you’ll be better off with HubSpot’s free plan.

Pricing

Freshsales lets you use its services for free, as long as you don’t need more than three users and 100 marketing contacts. Opting for any of its three premium plans unlocks its workflow automation features, multichannel marketing, and AI-powered contact scoring.

However, you’ll need to opt for one of its more expensive plans to establish multiple sales pipelines and set custom roles.

crm email marketing

Thanks to its 21-day free trial period, you can try Freshsales risk-free today.

Pros 

  • Beginner-friendly interface
  • Advanced AI forecasting
  • Kanban view for contacts, accounts, and deals

Cons 

  • Customer support could be better

8. Maximizer CRM — Emphasize Your Brand and Get the Most from Your Database

Maximizer CRM helps you stay professional with branded email templates for whole marketing campaigns or simple announcements. Its highly customizable templates allow you to insert custom fields, headers, and footers or include signatures to elevate your brand’s look and feel.

Like our other picks on this list, Maximizer CRM offers advanced email marketing features to help you promote your services and attract new customers. However, its reporting capabilities stood out while we tested its functionalities.

small business crm with email marketing

Best For Starting Price Contacts on Starter Plan Free Version Top 3 Features
Marketing Reports $65/user/month 100,000 N/A – Proactive Notifications
Lead Tracking
Automated Drip Campaigns

It excels at combining the reports for customer support, marketing, and sales teams, which allows you to identify up-selling and cross-selling possibilities.

That’s because it centralizes customer information, allowing your teams to focus on what matters to each customer. Here are some other standout features that are worth mentioning.

Features

  • Proactive Notifications — Maximizer CRM ensures you’ll never forget a customer’s birthday, anniversary, or scheduled follow-up call. It will also automatically notify you about changes in the overall customer experience.
  • Lead Tracking — It will track the performance of your email campaigns and deliver detailed reports to help you make data-driven decisions.
  • Automated Drip Campaigns — Maximizer CRM lets you schedule a series of pre-planned emails your leads or contacts receive at specified intervals. This feature is invaluable for nurturing and guiding prospects through the sales funnel.

Maximizer CRM can elevate your brand’s image, making it an exceptional pick for SMBs in the business-to-business (B2B) sector, aiming to enhance lead generation, sales efforts, and customer relationship management.

However, its pricing structure and high starting price may make it less attractive to small businesses on a strict budget compared to its competition.

Pricing

Maximizer CRM has two pricing plans, Base Edition and Sales Leader Edition. Its entry-level plan, Base Edition, requires at least three users and offers most of its email marketing features. Opting for the Sales Leader Edition unlocks productivity insights and forecasting, making it a better choice for large businesses.

small business crm with email marketin

Pros 

  • Excellent customer support
  • Ideal for massive customer databases
  • Powerful lead and opportunity management tools

Cons 

  • Relatively expensive

9. SageCRM — Scalable Email Marketing Tool to Drive Results

SageCRM offers a versatile set of features that empower businesses to drive growth and foster customer engagement. It also offers numerous other business solutions via native integrations, including one of the best payroll management systems, inventory tracking tools, and more.

The platform delivers an all-in-one product that simplifies processes for your sales, marketing, and customer service teams, ensuring customer satisfaction. That means you can track your prospects’ journeys from the first email you send them to answering their tickets when they become customers.

crm email software

Best For Starting Price Contacts on Starter Plan Free Version Top 3 Features
Large Businesses Custom N/A N/A – Real-Time Tracking
Integrations
Compliance Management

This level of centralization ensures your team members avoid duplication of work tasks, empowering them to work more efficiently and providing real-time insights into the customer journey.

Features

  • Real-Time Tracking — SageCRM lets you monitor marketing campaigns in real-time and track their progress, ensuring emails are reaching the right audience.
  • Integrations — The platform integrates with popular business software, including Mailchimp, one of the best email marketing platforms. Integrating SageCRM and Mailchimp lets you send emails to 2,000 list subscribers per month.
  • Compliance Management — SageCRM emphasizes security, ensuring businesses comply with industry standards and avoid potential legal issues related to email marketing.

While SageCRM’s email marketing capabilities are impressive, it has a steep learning curve and doesn’t have a transparent pricing structure. That means small businesses with limited budgets may find more budget-friendly alternatives.

Pricing 

SageCRM doesn’t disclose its pricing publicly, meaning you’ll have to contact its sales team for a quote. However, that means you’ll get a tailored package of features that suits your business needs, making it an exceptional choice for medium and large businesses.

Pros 

  • Impressive marketing campaign management features
  • Feature-rich
  • Numerous third-party integrations and native add-ons

Cons 

  • Steep learning curve

10. Engagebay — Robust Email Campaign Scheduling for Long-Term Planning

Engagebay is the best pick for businesses looking for a reliable solution for launching multiple email campaigns at different times. It lets you schedule email campaigns by date, allowing you to plan for holiday marketing, anniversaries, birthdays, and similar occasions.

In addition, you can send geography-focused campaigns at the best times for their time zones, making it an excellent pick for global businesses.

email crm software

Best For Starting Price Contacts on Starter Plan Free Version Top 3 Features
Campaign Scheduling $12.74/user/month 500 Free-Forever Plan – Automation Triggers
– Site Messaging
Predictive Lead Scores

The first thing you notice when you log into your Engagebay account is how polished and well-designed its interface is. We were particularly impressed with how easy its A/B testing is to use, which other providers often complicate.

That makes it an exceptional pick for beginners who’d like to compare two variations of their email campaign and see which performs best.

What we like about Engagebay is that it automatically returns the results of the tests, highlighting the winning version and allowing you to launch it immediately. Here are some other features that we found impressive while testing its platform.

Features

  • Automation Triggers — Engagebay simplifies automated workflows by allowing you to initiate them when your customers activate “triggers.” Triggers include actions like website visits, form submissions, email interactions, and more.
  • Site Messaging — This feature is a live chat and messaging tool that allows businesses to interact with website visitors, enabling immediate customer support and lead generation.
  • Predictive Lead Scores — This advanced feature uses data analysis to assign scores to leads based on their engagement, behavior, and attributes. That means you’ll always know which leads are most likely to convert.

Like HubSpot, Engagebay offers a comprehensive free email marketing plan with limited customer service and CRM features. However, we prefer HubSpot’s free version because it lets you add more contacts, while Engagebay limits you to just 250.

Pricing

Engagebay offers its services via a free plan and three premium plans. We suggest opting for its most expensive plan if you’d like to add unlimited contacts or the Growth plan, which lets you add 5,000 contacts.

The cheapest plan limits your marketing campaigns to just 500 prospects, which makes some other services on our list a better choice from this perspective.

email marketing with CRM

Pros 

  • Excellent value for money on its more expensive plans
  • Form and email editors are easy to use
  • Excellent customer support

Cons 

  • Limited email and landing page templates

What’s the Best Free CRM With Email Marketing Tools?

Although a few CRM email marketing tools on our list offer comprehensive free plans, HubSpot is the best choice we’ve seen. It provides a solid set of CRM and email marketing features at no cost, making it a good pick for micro-businesses, startups, and budget-conscious organizations.

While a free CRM email marketing tool like HubSpot can help those looking to learn and experiment in the CRM and email marketing space, free tools have several limitations. We suggest opting for a paid solution to handle your business’s CRM and email marketing requirements if you want to scale.

Premium tools offer more advanced features, including analytics, automation, integrations, and more, making them a superior choice for businesses of all sizes.

How to Choose the Best CRM for Email Marketing

We suggest browsing through user reviews that describe first-hand experiences with the CRM’s customer support. Having a reliable, knowledgeable customer support team you can contact is also crucial, especially if you’re a first-time user.

Picking the best CRM email marketing tool for your business can be challenging, as there are many factors to consider. The effectiveness of your customer engagement, lead nurturing, and email campaigns largely depends on the CRM software you pick.

In addition, opting for an all-in-one tool means it will affect other departments in your company, so you’ll need to align its capabilities with your business’s goals and requirements.

Here are some crucial factors to consider before you make your decision:

  • Budget and Scalability — Assess your budget and the CRM’s scalability to determine if it aligns with your growth potential long-term. Consider solutions with feature-rich, customizable plans, even if you don’t need to opt for their most expensive solutions from the start.
  • User-Friendliness — An intuitive interface and easy-to-use features can make a CRM system more accessible to your team, leading to a better experience with the tool and eliminating performance drops.
  • Deliverability — Consider the CRM’s email deliverability rates. High deliverability rates ensure your emails reach the inbox and avoid spam folders, improving the campaign’s performance.
  • Customization — Ensure your future CRM email marketing tool allows you to create personalized email templates and messages that align with your brand identity. In addition, look for solutions with customizable landing pages and custom fields.
  • Segmentation — Evaluate the CRM’s contact segmentation capabilities. Segmentation allows you to target specific customer groups with tailored content, increasing the relevance of your emails.

CRM Guides and Resources

In addition to this guide, we’ve created a range of resources exploring the best CRM software available today, including:

Conclusion — What is the Best CRM for Email Marketing in 2023?

Renowned as an all-encompassing CRM solution, Salesforce delivers an exceptional suite of tools and capabilities for businesses seeking to improve their email marketing efforts and customer relationship management – and we rate it as the overall best CRM with email marketing.

After our experience with each tool on the list, we’re confident Salesforce stands out as the best pick for businesses of all sizes. It allows you to create personalized customer journeys, excels in email automation, and offers integrations with numerous third-party applications and in-house add-ons.

Although it faces tough competition this year, Salesforce has an exceptional deliverability rate, ensuring high engagement. While you may want to opt for a more affordable option if your business has a strict budget, we suggest trying Salesforce risk-free using its 30-day free trial.

Email CRM FAQs

What is CRM in email marketing?

Can you use a CRM for email marketing?

What is the difference between CRM and email marketing?

Can you use Gmail as a CRM?

Can I get an email CRM free?

What is the best email CRM for small businesses?

References

Ilijia Miljkovac

Ilija Miljkovac is a Technopedia writer with 7 years of experience covering all things tech. He writes about everything from cybersecurity to ISPs, ensuring businesses and customers are educated about the latest products and services. He's written for publications such as Business2Community, TheTechReport, Comparitech, and more. When he's not maniacally hacking away at his keyboard, Ilija spends his time either hiking in nature or holed up in his apartment gaming.