The Best CRM with Email Marketing for 2024

If you have any experience running a business today then you understand just how valuable the integration of customer relationship management (CRM) and email marketing tools are to your efforts. That’s why finding the best CRM with email marketing capabilities is crucial for any business today.

With all the elements that companies have to juggle to maintain their edge against the competition, a robust solution to efficiently manage operations, customer interactions, and effective marketing campaigns is no longer a luxury but a necessity. 

However, with an array of options to choose from, identifying the top CRM with integrated email marketing capabilities can be a daunting task.

This article aims to simplify this process by providing a clear, detailed evaluation of the leading CRM platforms that incorporate strong email marketing features. We will consider top platforms, assessing their strengths, weaknesses, and unique selling propositions. Regardless of your business size or the industry you operate in, this guide will equip you with the necessary insights to make an informed decision about the CRM and email marketing platform that best aligns with your strategic goals.

List of The Best CRMs with Email Marketing

1. Brevo

Best Overall CRM with Email Marketing

As a crucial player in the CRM space, Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) steps up to the plate by offering businesses a robust suite of tools to establish and strengthen relationships via well-crafted email campaigns, transactional emails, and a highly nuanced email automation system.

Key Features & User Experience

Brevo presents an advanced email automation system, sitting at the core of its toolset, that has been designed with a focus on adaptability. Key features include:

• Personalized workflows: This functionality allows for the efficient management of contact lists, in addition to the targeted dispatch of emails based on specific user behaviors, like website page visits.
• Unread email response: Brevo provides an innovative solution for unread emails, enabling businesses to automatically resend campaigns to contacts who didn’t open them initially. This ‘second shot’ at customer engagement can potentially amplify interactions and, in turn, bolster returns on email marketing efforts.
• Send-time optimization: This data-driven feature uses an algorithm to determine the most strategic dispatch times for your email newsletters, thereby increasing the likelihood of open rates.
• User-friendly resources: Brevo enhances user experience with a myriad of built-in resources aimed at streamlining workflows. The platform’s library includes over 40 email templates and 8 automation blueprints that cater to a wide range of business needs.
• Easy integration: Brevo syncs effortlessly with various CMS platforms, eCommerce tools, and other business applications, weaving seamlessly into your existing digital infrastructure.

This platform is a well-known CRM with email marketing functionality. However, it does have potential drawbacks, including potential complexity for first-time users and limitations in customization options. A thorough evaluation of these factors, relative to specific business needs and resources, is crucial to determining whether Brevo is the right fit for your CRM and email marketing needs.

2. ActiveCampaign

Best All-In-One Option

Earning its place among the heavyweights of CRM tools, ActiveCampaign presents businesses with a comprehensive marketing automation platform. It’s a veritable one-stop-shop for automating email marketing campaigns, contact management, and refining post-sale processes, serving over 150,000 businesses worldwide.

Key Features & User Experience

ActiveCampaign shines with a suite of intelligent features, integrated for a comprehensive marketing experience. Key functionalities include:

• Integrated Email and Messaging: Seamlessly combined with marketing automation tools, along with a built-in CRM equipped with sales automation, these capabilities provide a comprehensive marketing workflow solution.
• Efficient Monitoring: ActiveCampaign facilitates effortless tracking of activities across multiple touchpoints. You can monitor various marketing channels, establish multi-channel marketing workflows, and automate follow-up sequences for a streamlined marketing process.
• Extensive Integration: As a strength of ActiveCampaign, the platform integrates with over 870 apps, spanning analytics, landing page builders, and accounting. Key integrations include Shopify, Unbounce, Thinkific, Jotform, Pipedrive, and more.
• Email Content Personalization: A standout feature of ActiveCampaign is the ability to tailor email content for each contact using conditional content. This allows businesses to display different images or text blocks in an email based on the contact’s behavior, such as the pages they view on your website.
• Intuitive Visual Builder: ActiveCampaign simplifies the often complex process of creating automation workflows in marketing platforms with its intuitive drag-and-drop flowchart tool. Additionally, the platform offers split testing for subject lines and email content, helping businesses identify the most effective strategies.

ActiveCampaign’s primary advantages are its integrated suite of intelligent features, broad app integration, and user-friendly visual builder for automation workflows. However, it’s important to consider potential drawbacks, including the learning curve associated with mastering the numerous features and potential limitations in customizability or scalability.

3. Benchmark Email

Best Easy-to-Use Option

Renowned for its simplicity, Benchmark Email is an email marketing platform offering a streamlined CRM feature, equipping businesses with an easy-to-use suite of tools designed to maximize their email marketing efforts.

Key Features & User Experience

Benchmark Email champions simplicity without skimping on functionality. It offers an intuitive drag-and-drop email editor that eases the email creation process. Other notable features include:

• Comprehensive Toolset: The platform comes with an array of templates, forms, landing pages, and automation tools, all designed to bolster your email marketing strategy.
• Seamless Integration: Benchmark Email integrates effortlessly with over 1500 business tools, including prominent names like LiveChat, Stripe, Shopify, and WooCommerce. It also offers a dedicated WordPress plugin for easy addition of forms to your site, eliminating the need for copy-pasting codes.
• Robust Automation: Automation is integral to Benchmark Email. Using triggers, the platform can dispatch automated email sequences in response to user actions, such as sending a welcome email to new subscribers, thereby streamlining communication efforts.
• Lightweight CRM System: The software includes a CRM system that offers contact profiles coupled with email engagement data, helping businesses keep tabs on their customer interactions.
• Additional Features: These include A/B testing, contact list management, real-time reports, polls, surveys, and social media integration, rounding out a comprehensive toolkit for your email marketing needs.

The platform’s main advantages include its simplicity, user-friendly interface, extensive integrations, robust automation, and strong customer support. But for larger or more complex operations, Benchmark Email might fall short in depth and sophistication. Some users may also encounter limitations in customization or scalability.

4. Keap

Best for Management of Data

Boasting a legacy of twenty years in the CRM industry, Keap (previously Infusionsoft) offers an integrated CRM solution renowned for its robust automation capabilities. Having catered to over 200,000 clients, Keap has certainly carved a niche for itself with its intuitive organization and efficient management of customer data.

Key Features & User Experience

Keap establishes itself as a powerful platform, offering a range of tools for SMS, email, landing pages, and payment handling. Key features of this comprehensive tool include:

• Lead Capture and Conversion: Keap proves its worth by allowing businesses to design funnels, create segments, and automate marketing campaigns with ease, capturing and converting leads effectively. Additionally, it excels in nurturing bottom-of-the-funnel activities with customizable email templates for impactful follow-ups, accelerating the payment collection process.
• Unified Customer Data Dashboard: Arguably one of Keap’s strongest assets is its capacity to consolidate all customer data into a single, intuitive dashboard. This facilitates an organized and accessible view of your business’s customer interactions.
• Sales and Marketing Automation: Keap comes packed with a wealth of features designed to automate routine tasks, saving businesses precious time. This includes setting up reminders, creating drip email series, and following up after purchases.
• Personalization: An integral part of Keap’s offering, the platform facilitates tailored messaging using segmentation and automation conditions, adding a personalized touch to customer interactions.
• Reporting and Analytics Dashboard: Rounding off its functionalities, Keap’s reporting and analytics dashboard offers a diverse array of reports covering sales, marketing, lead generation, and revenue. Visual representation of these data sets provides valuable insights, enabling businesses to stay attuned to their operations.

While Keap’s primary advantages encompass its great automation features, robust data organization, customizable templates, and comprehensive reporting and analytics, some downside include the learning curve associated with mastering its numerous features. To that end, it might pose some limitations in terms of customization or integrations. Additionally, there are potential scalability issues for larger businesses. These factors should be considered in the context of your specific business requirements.

5. Engagebay

Best for Analytics

Engagebay makes a mark with its comprehensive suite of offerings. The platform offers CRM, marketing automation, helpdesk software, and live chat software. Established in 2018, Engagebay caters to over 12,000 customers with its integrated package or a la carte functionalities, making it easily customizable depending on your needs. 

Key Features & User Experience

Engagebay provides a free CRM rich with features, making it an attractive option for businesses seeking efficient customer relationship management solutions. This tool offers:

• Comprehensive Functionality: Features include workflow automation, targeted marketing, email templates, pipeline visualization, and automated data entry. Its streamlined interface facilitates easy capture and organization of contact details, enabling businesses to act effectively on accumulated data.
• Extended Functionalities in Paid Plan: The paid plan further enhances its offerings, providing multi-currency support, sales automation, contact management, and custom report generation.
• Marketing Automation: Engagebay shines with its marketing automation capabilities, allowing businesses to automate tasks, emails, workflows, lead generation, and lead nurturing. The platform’s automation workflows are intuitive to design, thanks to its drag-and-drop builder, which allows for swift setup of powerful workflows.
• Predictive Lead Scoring and Smart Segmentation: Engagebay offers predictive lead scoring and smart customer segmentation, empowering businesses to prioritize leads and effectively target customer segments.

Engagebay’s strength stems from its comprehensive feature set, enabling businesses to consolidate their marketing, sales, and support tools. The platform is user-friendly and offers many of its tools for free, ensuring smooth migration from other tools. However, despite its extensive offerings, the free version may lack some advanced features found in other paid CRM solutions. Users might find customer support responsiveness a little slow, and the CRM interface may seem slightly outdated to some users.

6. Hubspot

Best for Drip Marketing Automation

Known for its comprehensive toolset, HubSpot brings together marketing automation, a CMS, and sales features within a single CRM platform. This eliminates the need for additional software, providing a convenient, all-in-one solution. However, as your email list and needs grow, you may find HubSpot’s costs rising as well, prompting some users to consider alternative solutions.

Key Features & User Experience

HubSpot shines as a comprehensive marketing automation tool with a myriad of integrated functionalities that simplify workflows:

• Reliable Marketing Automation: HubSpot makes setting up integrated workflows easy, with a specific focus on email drip marketing automation. This feature enables businesses to automate email campaigns that effectively guide prospects through the marketing and sales funnel.
• Workflow Templates: Standout features of HubSpot include workflow templates, which allow businesses to automate a broad spectrum of tasks. These tasks encompass managing bulk data, sending emails, creating tasks, and scoring leads.
• Comprehensive Analytics: Beyond automation, HubSpot also excels in its analytic capabilities. It offers detailed reporting to track the performance of various marketing channels and customer segments.

HubSpot provides robust marketing automation capabilities coupled with comprehensive analytics. As an all-in-one solution, it can streamline numerous tasks, making it a valuable asset for many businesses, including e-commerce. That said, HubSpot’s pricing structure could be a deterrent for some. As businesses grow, the cost of using HubSpot may increase, potentially making it less cost-effective for certain users. Should cost become a limiting factor, alternatives might need to be considered despite the range of functionalities offered by HubSpot.

7. Freshworks

Best for Global Operations

Freshworks, a cloud-based software catering to various business functions, has earned a global footprint since its inception in 2010. The company’s CRM platform, Freshsales, serves over 50,000 customers worldwide, standing out for its user-friendly interface and affordability.

Key Features & User Experience

Freshworks is a multiproduct, scalable software solution that caters to the diverse needs of commercial businesses. Its five products offer comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) support across customer service, sales, marketing, IT, and HR. With its generous free offerings and a short setup time, Freshworks emerges as a compelling choice for budget-conscious businesses, particularly solopreneurs and small businesses.

• Freshdesk (Customer Support): Provides multi-channel customer support with features including a team inbox, automated workflows, and performance reporting.

• Freshsales (Sales): A sales CRM with features for managing leads, contacts, and deals, including automatic email tracking and sales forecasting.

• Freshmarketer (Marketing): Offers tools for email marketing, funnel analysis, A/B testing, and conversion rate optimization to create personalized customer experiences.

• Freshteam (HR): Supports HR management with features for applicant tracking, onboarding guides, and an employee database.

• Freshservice (IT): An IT service management tool offering a ticketing system, knowledge base, IT project management, and a service catalog.

For small to medium businesses, Freshworks’ free offerings present an appealing option. Despite being free, these offerings provide ample functionality to meet the needs of small businesses or solopreneurs. Another standout feature is the relatively short setup time of Freshworks; it’s ready for use within around 48 hours. This is a marked contrast to many competitors that could take weeks or even months to set up.

8. Pipedrive

Best Affordable Option

Regarded as an intuitive yet powerful sales CRM tool, Pipedrive has carved a niche for itself by enabling businesses to streamline their sales campaigns, foster customer relationships, monitor sales performance, and automate repetitive tasks.

Key Features & User Experience

Pipedrive is a platform that aids in planning sales strategies, establishing customer connections through email marketing, and tracking sales performance. It also offers predictive analytics tools and report generation capabilities, providing businesses with actionable insights for growth.

Key features of Pipedrive include:

• Campaigns: This built-in email marketing software distinguishes itself with its simplicity and intuitiveness. Businesses can effortlessly create templates using the drag-and-drop editor and launch campaigns. Additionally, with over 40 professionally-designed templates, crafting visually appealing emails becomes easier. The Campaigns feature also provides segmentation and analytics, comprehensively understanding your customer base and enabling tailored marketing efforts.
• Integration: Pipedrive boasts over 250 integrations, including landing page builders, marketing platforms, email marketing tools, scheduling apps, and lead generation software. This seamless integration makes Pipedrive a versatile tool in your marketing arsenal.
• User-friendly Interface: Pipedrive’s award-winning interface, named the top CRM for small businesses in 2022, ensures a smooth user experience, enhancing productivity and effectiveness.

Pipedrive’s strengths lie in its ease of use, extensive integrations, powerful email marketing capabilities, comprehensive language support, and mobile apps, which all lend themselves to its reputation as a top CRM for international sales teams. But while Pipedrive excels with its sales-centric functionalities, it might not fully cater to businesses needing a CRM with extensive marketing or service functionalities.

9. Zoho CRM

Best for SMEs

Renowned for its effective lead management, workflow automation, and marketing automation, Zoho CRM is an email marketing platform ideal for small to mid-sized businesses. With its user base sprawling across 180 countries, this multi-lingual CRM solution is the tool of choice for 250,000 customers.

Key Features & User Experience

Zoho CRM is a platform well-regarded for its user-friendly sales automation features, enabling simplified tracking and closing of deals. Businesses can effortlessly capture and score leads with Zoho, forming a solid foundation for a robust sales funnel. With leads in the system, Zoho’s automation tools can then be used to send nurturing emails and track lead engagement. Key features of Zoho CRM include:

• Deal Management: Zoho CRM excels in managing deals by providing a transparent view of the customer’s buying journey stage. This critical information enables sales representatives to reach out to customers at the most opportune moments, thus maximizing the potential for conversions.
• Customer Segmentation: With its powerful segmentation tools, Zoho CRM enables small to medium businesses to create highly targeted campaigns, resulting in better customer engagement.
• Google Ads Integration: A unique feature of Zoho CRM, this integration allows businesses to compare sales against their advertising campaigns, offering valuable insights into which campaigns are performing well and which ones need improvement.

Zoho CRM’s strengths lie in its comprehensive suite of features tailored for lead management, marketing automation, and workflow automation. Its user-friendly interface and extensive language support cater to a diverse range of businesses worldwide. However, while Zoho CRM stands out in these areas, it may not be suitable for businesses seeking a comprehensive CRM solution with advanced customization options or extensive third-party integrations. Additionally, some users may find that Zoho’s offerings become insufficient as their business grows and evolves, necessitating a switch to a more advanced CRM platform.

What to Look for in the Best CRM with Email Marketing

When evaluating the best Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool with email marketing capabilities, there are several key aspects to consider that will ensure the platform meets your specific business needs.

1. Email Marketing Capabilities

Not all CRMs are created equal when it comes to email marketing. Some only offer basic email functionality, while others provide more advanced tools. Look for a CRM that offers customizable templates, segmentation options, A/B testing, and analytics to measure your campaigns’ success.

2. Integration

A CRM should seamlessly integrate with your existing tools and systems, whether that’s your website, social media platforms, or third-party applications. This allows for streamlined processes, centralization of data, and better overall performance.

3. Automationr

Automation features can save a significant amount of time by reducing repetitive tasks. These might include automated email responses, drip campaigns, lead scoring, and task assignments. A good CRM will allow you to automate these processes, so you can focus more on strategy and less on manual tasks.

4. Scalability

Your business will grow and change over time, and your CRM should be able to adapt to these changes. A scalable CRM will allow you to add more users, increase your email volume, and upgrade features as your needs evolve.

5. Ease of Use

Even the most feature-rich CRM can fall short if it’s not user-friendly. An intuitive interface and easy-to-use features will make it easier for your team to adopt the platform and use it effectively.

6. Price

Lastly, consider your budget. The cost of a CRM can vary greatly depending on its features, the number of users, and the size of your contact list. While it’s essential to find a CRM that fits your budget, remember that a higher upfront cost might pay off in the long run if the platform offers a greater ROI.

Best CRM with Email Marketing FAQs

Choosing the Best CRM with Email Marketing

CRM with integrated email marketing capabilities has become an essential tool for maintaining and nurturing customer relationships, automating workflows, and enhancing overall marketing efforts. The right CRM platform can streamline your operations, provide insightful data for decision-making, and ultimately drive growth.  To browse through options, be sure to compare and review different CRM platforms available to find the features you need.

Remember, the best CRM for your business will depend on your specific needs, size, and budget. By assessing your objectives and utilizing free trials where available, you can find a CRM that not only meets your email marketing needs but enhances your overall customer relationship strategy.