The Best CRM for Digital Marketing Agencies in 2024

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Discover folk - the CRM for people-powered businesses

As a digital marketing agency, juggling multiple clients, tracking campaign performance, and staying on top of communications can be challenging. A powerful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system can help you streamline your processes by centralizing client data, tracking campaign progress, and automating follow-ups—all from one platform. With the right CRM, you can enhance client relationships, improve project management, and ensure your campaigns deliver measurable results. In this blog post, we’ll explore the best CRM options for digital marketing agencies like yours, focusing on tools that will help you stay organized, optimize your marketing efforts, and scale your agency successfully.

Why does a Digital Marketing Agency Need a CRM?

As a digital marketing agency, you are constantly juggling a wide range of clients, projects, and campaigns. Without a solid CRM, important information such as customer profiling, sales cycles and interactions, milestone achievements and follow-up reminders can easily slip through the cracks.

A CRM system helps to avoid these pitfalls by acting as your digital assistant, with an automated process to keep on top of your valuable data. Additionally, by keeping track of the sales cycle, a CRM system can help you forecast revenues, giving you better growth capacity and when combined with automation helps to streamline your operation and in turn drive-up profits.

Challenges without a CRM

There are a few common headaches and challenges that you might already be experiencing – especially if you don't have the right CRM in place.

Missed opportunities: Inconsistent follow-ups and overlooked leads can result in lost business.
Inefficient processes: Manual data entry and fragmented workflows slow down productivity.
Lack of insight: Incomplete data hampers your ability to make informed decisions.
Inconsistent communication: Miscommunication can lead to misunderstandings and client dissatisfaction.

Benefits of a CRM

Fortunately, the right CRM can address these challenges, and provide some extra benefits along the way that will help your team work together more collaboratively and efficiently.

Centralized information: All client data and interactions are stored in one place, ensuring easy access and management.
Enhanced efficiency: Automation of routine tasks frees up time for strategic activities.
Improved customer relationships: Better tracking of client needs and preferences enhances service quality.
Better decision-making: Comprehensive data analytics provide actionable insights for strategy development.
Increased sales: Streamlined sales processes and improved lead management boost conversion rates.
Consistent communication: Automated reminders and follow-ups ensure timely and effective client interactions.

How to evaluate and choose a CRM platform

With a lot of CRMs to go through, it can be hard to tell which one will match your requirements best. To help you with your decision making process, we've put together a mini guide that you can adapt according to your needs.

1. Define your requirements

Identifying the key features needed for your digital marketing agency is crucial. Look for functionalities such as campaign management, lead tracking, client communication tools, and analytics. Ensure the CRM can integrate with your existing tools like email marketing software, social media platforms, and project management systems. A CRM tailored to marketing agencies should streamline your workflow, improve client interactions, and provide valuable insights.

Essential features to look for in a CRM

Contact management: This is fundamental since it enables the streamlining of processes such as capturing, categorizing, and keeping track of potential and existing clients.
Automation: Automation is key in any CRM, it saves time and increases efficiency in the overall workflow allowing you to maximize your time whilst maintaining data accuracy.
Integrations: The more seamless the integration, the easier it is for the CRM system to be adopted by the team; automating task as they occur and reducing risk failure human interaction errors.
Mail merge: Mail Merge is a very important feature for any CRM since it enables the ability to communicate to larger audiences within one engagement and reduce wasted time sending communication individually.
Interaction tracking: Interaction tracking enables the tracking of marketing efforts and allows sales reps to direct their efforts to those that have had greater touchpoints, ensuring a higher overall success rate.

A Comparison of the Top CRM Software Options

1. folk

folk is the perfect CRM solution that incorporates a balance of automation, integrations, mail merge, interaction tracking and contact management to give digital marketing agencies complete control over each campaign and client.

Contact management

In folk, maintaining a well-organized contact list is a breeze. Consolidate all your current contacts from Google or Outlook with a single import, synchronizing them with your calendar and emails. Also, adding new contacts is a cinch: simply upload a CSV file or use the Chrome extension, which automatically detects and extracts contact information from any website. With just a few clicks, you can swiftly import their details straight into folk, ensuring your contact list stays comprehensive and up to date.

Once you're in folk, the power to efficiently organize your contacts is at your fingertips. You can enrich them with a click, group them, assign color-coded tags, and arrange them in customizable views. With custom fields, you have the flexibility to store any desired data about your contacts, from details of previous projects completed down to their favorite ice cream flavor. The ability to keep and share notes, as well as store documents for each contact, lets you keep a detailed record of all your clients and projects, so nothing slips through the cracks.

Automation

Duplicates, a classic CRM pain point, are a thing of the past with folk's auto-deduplication. Plus, by integrating with Zapier (more details below) you can further automate workflows, which are easy to set up in a custom drag-and-drop Kanban board. With folk's remarkable AI-powered Magic Fields, you can automate manual tasks. These custom fields blend the power of AI with your contact data in folk, giving you the ability to request a wide range of actions, from data cleansing and categorization to data enrichment and writing personalized emails at scale.

folk CRM Kanban board showing deals pipeline

Integrations

With folk's seamless integrations with Google and Outlook, your contacts and interactions are not only synchronized but also easily accessible. You can view all past interactions, including emails and calendar events, right within the contact details.

By leveraging the power of Zapier integration, you can connect with over 1000 other apps. Set up personalized "Zaps" to your favorite applications without the need for coding or technical expertise. This opens up a world of possibilities, allowing you to establish quick and hassle-free connections between folk and your preferred apps.

Mail merge and email sequences

folk's Messages function is a powerful mail merge system that lets you send out emails in bulk, that are highly personalized. You can make use of variable fields to extract data you have stored in folk (such as name, company, URL, or any other data stored in a custom field) to tailor every email to each individual. You can then get detailed reporting on delivered, bounced, opened, and clicked emails. To automate your follow-up process, use their email sequences feature to schedule your communication in advance. You will be able to set the triggers needed.

Interaction tracking

On top of the automatic syncing to your email and calendar, you can add any interaction (including offline chats like a coffee or run-in at an event) to folk so you have full context of all your interactions with clients, contractors, and more, at any given moment. folk also uniquely gives you a Company view, which gives you a global view of all interactions with all the people inside the same company. You can also easily keep shared notes with your teammates on specific contacts, and set reminders for yourself and teammates, so you never miss a follow-up again.

Animate GIF showing the Company view in folk CRM

Data insights

There are a whole host of insights within folk across various functions and which are clear and straightforward: you won't need a data scientist to help you interpret complex charts and graphs. As mentioned above, you can see detailed metrics of your email campaigns. Powerful features such as Strongest Connection automatically calculate who in your team has the closest relationship to any given contact, and you can get an overview of all people and interactions within a company at a glance.

It's quick and easy to get started on folk. There are even readymade templates for a variety of use cases to further speed up the set up. Try out folk's unlimited free CRM plan by signing up here.

Price and plans

You can try folk for free with a 14 day free trial. After that, a monthly or annual subscription plan is as follows.

Standard: $20 per user, per month.
Premium: $40 per user, per month.‍
Custom: Starts from $80 per user, per month.

2. HubSpot

HubSpot offers solid marketing automation for your campaigns; however, to some extent these are hindered by contact management features, requiring team members to manually reconcile data that's used in campaigns.