The 5 Best CRMs for Marketing and Creative Agencies

It’s not just sales and customer service teams who use CRM platforms. Marketing and creative agencies take care of a crucial part of the sales funnel, attracting customers, so should employ a dedicated CRM system to help manage their workflow.

Marketing and creative teams can hugely benefit from features such as email tracking, workflow automation and integration with existing platforms. With these features under your belt, you’ll be confident in rolling out the most effective, data-driven campaigns.

We’ve put our decade-long expertise in reviewing CRM products to good use, and shortlisted the five best options for your marketing or creative agency.

Read on for our recommendations or use our free comparison tool to find the best CRM system for your needs and receive tailored quotes.

What is a Marketing CRM?

Many teams employ the help of a CRM tool, including sales, customer service and marketing. We’ll focus on how CRM can support marketing and creative teams. CRM broadly means customer relationship management, its main aims are to offer a solution for contact and lead management and to personalize the customer experience to ensure that a strong relationship is built with the brand.

Marketing teams often work on attracting leads at the top of the sales funnel, so their use of CRM may include lead generation, campaign tracking, email marketing automation, email design, landing pages, web form creation, lead scoring and grading, and analyzing campaign metrics.

The aim is to qualify leads and move them further along the sales pipeline, where the relationship will continue to be built by colleagues in the sales department. CRM primarily serves as a centralized database for managing contacts. Since most CRM platforms integrate with your pre-existing email marketing apps like MailChimp or Canva, it’s wise to prioritize the lead management capabilities when selecting a CRM platform.

Top 5 Marketing and Creative Agency CRMs

We analysed 13 top CRM providers and whittled them down to our top five favourites for marketing and creative teams based on marketing features, user experience, customer support and value for money.

Our Top Five:

1. Freshsales – Best Overall CRM for Marketing Teams

Taking the top spot for marketing features in our independent analysis, Freshsales is the overall best CRM for marketing teams. It has all the features you expect to help your marketing team flourish and has a near-flawless usability score for being so accessible. Its plentiful email templates and preset dashboards make creating and analyzing the success of your campaigns easy.

Freshsales’ Marketing CRM Features

• Email design editor: Freshsales’ email marketing design editor stood out in our testing as it allows you to assemble campaigns with headings, footers, images, and videos. We found the drag-and-drop style makes it approachable for users without much prior design experience. If your creative juices aren’t flowing – or you simply want to save time – you can choose from Freshsales’ 169 templates, categorised by newsletter, offers, promotions and transactional.
• AI assistant: “Freddy” can help take the guesswork out of lead management by scoring the quality of contacts based on a number of factors, e.g. email open or click-through rate. While it offers the flexibility of segmenting your audience into separate ‘lists’ it does not offer an A/B testing feature for its email platform, so you cannot test your designs as you can with Keap.
• Freshsales Suite: An entire section of the platform dedicated to building landing pages and web forms. With a similar, user-friendly drag-and-drop editor you can change the font, color and layout of any of the numerous design templates including categories such as webinar, ebook, lead gen, e-commerce, events, newsletter sign-up, free download, customer success, and B2B.
• Drip campaigns: We appreciated the 24 drip campaign templates provided but it’s easy to create your own as you’ll be walked through a short tutorial at the start to get the hang of the different functions needed to set up a workflow.

Why Should You Choose Freshsales’ Marketing CRM?

As well as offering extremely user-friendly campaign builders and accessible reporting systems, Freshsales also boasts the best customer support of all the CRM systems we looked at. You’ll have expert support on hand who can build your CRM in 30 minutes, as well as 24/5 phone and live chat service, plus all the email and social media support you’d demand from any self-respecting CRM.

There’s also an impressively extensive knowledge base available online, where you can watch tutorials, read articles, and participate in tutorials to make sure you’re getting the most out of Freshsales’ system.

2. HubSpot – Best Value for Money CRM

For a free plan, it doesn’t get much better than HubSpot. If you’re not ready to commit to a paid CRM system, or not sure if it’s something your team will benefit from, HubSpot is an excellent place to start at no extra cost. If you do find it works for you, its tiered pricing makes it easy to upgrade to a fuller plan.

HubSpot’s Marketing CRM Features

• Contact segmentation: HubSpot’s free plan allows you to segment your contacts according to certain characteristics and easily switch between your segmented view and full list.
• Email campaign building: While we loved that there is a fully customizable editor, only five templates are provided which is far fewer than some of the paid plans (Freshsales and Keap). Nevertheless, the email builder is intended for marketing purposes as the templates are split into 3 categories: welcome, promotion and newsletter.
• Integrations: If you’re Canva-savvy, you’ll be happy to learn that HubSpot can integrate with Canva so you’ll also have the option to design your emails directly within HubSpot using Canva design features.
• Webform builder: Build fully customizable web forms, albeit with a few limitations for free users around changing fonts and colours and a pesky watermark, which is removed on the paid plan.
• Chatbot: With HubSpot’s free plan you can also create chatbots to offer customer service, qualify leads and book meetings – which is a rare feature, for a paid plan, let alone a free option.

Why Should You Choose HubSpot’s Marketing CRM?

If you’re a small business owner or freelancer looking to upscale your marketing efforts with a dedicated CRM system, HubSpot Free is the perfect solution. Regardless of it being free, our testing proved that the features are objectively generous and geared toward marketing teams. Its wide range of tiers means if you outgrow the capacity, you’ll easily be able to upgrade without experiencing too much upheaval.

HubSpot’s free plan does not offer social media integration or drip marketing campaigns, so if they are especially important, we recommend that you consider an alternative paid plan, such as HubSpot Professional or Freshsales.

3. Keap – Best CRM for Small Teams

Keap’s focus is all about automation, which means it takes over monotonous actions that can easily be outsourced to software, such as sending emails, segmenting leads and following up on invoices. While Keap is considerably more expensive than the other providers, our testing showed that its unlimited automation saves a ton of time and after all, time is money.

Keap’s Marketing CRM Features

• Unlimited automation: Keap is the automation MVP, with unlimited potential to create automated workflows based on specific events and triggers. While we sometimes found it complicated and time-consuming to set up automations, it’s one of the biggest benefits of using a CRM software due to the amount of time you can save and reallocate to more important matters.
• One-on-one coaching: To ensure you squeeze the most out of your CRM platform, Keap provides you with a dedicated CRM expert to help set up your software and answer any questions you may have. Keap is the only platform that offers onboarding help at no extra cost, which really stood out to us. If you’re investing in software, you want to be sure you’re using it to its maximum potential so this is a huge plus.
• Email design editor: Keap’s email design editor allows you to create personalized campaigns and send them out to contacts, who are segmented based on criteria that you assign them. This ensures that you don’t lose the human touch in your email marketing.

Why Should You Choose Keap’s Marketing CRM?

Keap works best for smaller teams or sole traders who need to save time since its plan only includes 2 users and is a little pricier than the other providers. If you fit this bill, it can act as an invaluable extra pair of hands and allow you to focus on more important affairs.

We noted that Keap does not offer integrations with communications apps such as social media platforms and is also not the most suitable platform for marketing teams that also require customer support features from their CRM software.

4. Zoho CRM – Best CRM for Integrating with Sales and Customer Service

Zoho CRM is a great all-rounder for marketing teams that need one platform that will integrate well into the sales funnel along with sales and customer service teams. It tops the rankings for its features, doing solidly across the board for marketing, sales and customer service teams.

Zoho’s Marketing CRM Features

• Social media integration: A key area of marketing is social media, so it’s incredibly helpful when your CRM integrates with your social accounts. Zoho stood out to us for this feature during testing, as it allows you to stay on top of customer interactions, get alerts within your CRM and monitor and post on your accounts.
• Website visitor tracking with Zoho Sales iQ: For a small extra cost, you can introduce Zoho Sales iQ to upscale your marketing efforts. This add-on includes live chat, chatbots, visitor tracking and lead scoring.
• Email design editor: During our testing, we enjoyed using Zoho’s user-friendly email template designer to easily achieve professional email campaigns and replicate them by creating stored templates.

Why Should You Choose Zoho’s Marketing CRM?

If you’re part of a marketing team that is seeking a one-size-fits-all platform that can easily integrate with sales and customer service teams further down the sales funnel — Zoho is your best bet. We love that it’s as fully stocked with sales and customer service features as it is with marketing and its unlimited user limit, making it an excellent choice for a centralized, cross-departmental hub.

5. monday.com – Best CRM for Customizable Lead Management

monday.com is highly customizable and is ideal for teams who want to tailor their CRM to their unique processes. Its flexibility extends to being suitable for remote and hybrid teams since it’s hosted on a cloud-based server and provides handy mobile apps to stay connected on the go.

monday.com’s Marketing CRM Features

• Collaboration and sharing documents: During our testing, we noticed that monday.com offers a generous storage limit of 100GB, which allows ample space for document sharing. It further enables team collaboration by allowing annotation within the system.
• Cloud-based: monday.com is a cloud-based CRM software which, as opposed to an on-premise system, is stored on a remote server. The benefit of this is that the software is automatically updated and maintained by monday.com and all members of your team can access it from wherever they are.
• Email segmentation: We liked that you can add a personal touch to your marketing emails by segmenting your customers based on purchasing behavior, customer preferences or other criteria. This can be done manually or automated by your software and means that your emails will be tailored to their recipients.
• Mobile app: Multi-tasking managers, this one’s for you. With monday.com’s mobile apps, you can stay connected to your team, leads and campaigns while on the train, plane, you name it.

Why Should You Choose monday.com’s Marketing CRM?

monday.com’s CRM system is mainly designed with sales teams in mind, so it’s not our number one recommendation for marketing teams as it lacks some key marketing functionalities such as email features, website visitor tracking, lead scoring and social media integration. We do love it as a collaborative solution for larger teams as it has an unlimited user limit and is the most customizable platform in this list. With a customizable sales visual sales pipeline, custom objects, fields and fully editable contact fields, you can make this CRM your own.

Why Would You Need a Marketing CRM?

If you’ve been in the game a while and managed this far without dedicated CRM software, you may think, “why now?” Of course, any investment in new software should be carefully evaluated but here are a few problems to which CRM may offer a solution.

Too small team

Perhaps you’re just getting started or you don’t want to invest in hiring extra team members. With a CRM platform, you can outsource time-consuming, repetitive tasks to software and leave your team free to work on more complex matters.

Missed opportunities

If leads seem to be slipping through the net, employing a dedicated CRM platform ensures that data is stored securely in one place. With scoring and tracking features, leads will be analyzed and actions will be suggested to offer you the best chance of conversion.

Unsuccessful email campaigns

Email marketing is notoriously thankless, with the average click-through rate often confined to single figures. With CRM’s tracking capabilities, you’ll get a better idea of what works and what doesn’t. With contact segmentation, you’ll also be able to send personalized emails with minimal extra effort.

High drop-off rate or low conversion rate

If you’re noticing your website visitors are not converting, or perhaps you’re experiencing abandoned carts, a CRM system can help track leads to see where changes need to be made.

What Can You Achieve With a Marketing CRM?

The possibilities are near-endless with CRM software as many offer a hugely broad range of features and can be highly customizable. Here are a few of the top features to look out for when choosing CRM software for marketing.

Automated Workflows

Outsource repetitive marketing tasks like sending emails, posting on socials and more by choosing a CRM platform that offers ample automated workflows. This saves time and allows you to upscale your operations without hiring extra hands.

Campaign Management

CRM platforms provide tools to easily create, execute, and track the results of personalized marketing campaigns across channels all in one place.

Lead Management

Sophisticated lead scoring, routing, and nurturing features allow marketers to focus energy on hot prospects primed for sales.

Analytics & Reporting

Detailed metrics on performance, lead quality, and ROI can be tracked within the CRM platform to optimize marketing efforts.

Personalization

Customer segmentation, profiling tools, and tracking in the CRM enable more personalized, 1:1 marketing experiences as well as tailored sales efforts.

Software Integration

CRMs smoothly integrate with other software tools used by marketing like email services, messaging apps, social platforms, and web analytics.

Centralized Data

A dedicated CRM software platform offers a central space for marketing, sales and customer service teams to collaborate and share data.