What is Contact Management?
Contact management involves gathering, storing, arranging, and handling contact information from various sources such as customers, leads, and business connections. Efficient contact management optimizes communication, enhances customer service, and boosts sales opportunities. Softwares that are created for this purpose, provide a centralized platform for organizing customer data, as well as facilitating better organization and management of customer information. This software falls under the category of data management tools.
This tool enables tracking of contact details for prospects, customers, and vendors, including addresses, individual employees, associated companies, open quotes, orders, and sales history. It enhances sales efforts by centralizing communication and establishing a reliable source of information. Additionally, contact management software streamlines processes such as outreach and lead qualification, contributing to improved efficiency and effectiveness in managing contacts and sales activities.
Contact Management Software vs. Customer Relationship Management System
Contact management software and customer relationship management (CRM) systems share similarities in data management and communication functions. However, CRMs offer broader capabilities, including sales, marketing, and customer service management. They provide businesses with comprehensive insights into the customer journey, enabling advanced analysis, forecasting, reporting, and outreach. In essence, while contact management software handles individual contact data, CRM systems oversee the entire customer journey to support business growth.
Benefits of Contact Management Software
Efficiency and Productivity:
Centralizing contact data saves time, enhances productivity, and streamlines workflows, reducing chaos and bottlenecks often associated with different systems.
Customer Relationship Improvement:
Access to comprehensive customer data allows for personalized communication, meeting customer expectations, nurturing relationships, and enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Sales Performance Enhancement:
The software includes tools for lead management, activity tracking, and sales analysis, leading to higher win rates, shorter sales cycles, and improved overall sales performance.
Team Collaboration:
A centralized platform fosters teamwork by preventing customers from being passed between departments, resulting in better customer outcomes and business success.
10 Contact Management Softwares to Try Out:
1. HubSpot
HubSpot’s free CRM is more than just a contact management tool—it automates contact record updates after every interaction and enriches records with data from over 20 million businesses. Easy to use and navigate, it includes pipeline management, reporting dashboards, deal tracking, email notifications, prospect tracking, meeting scheduling, and live chat. The CRM is free, but upgrades to paid plans for additional features are available.
2. BIGContacts
BIGContacts CRM simplifies contact management for small businesses, offering a detailed view of contact records including phone numbers, location, emails, transaction history, and more. It allows for storing additional information in custom fields, aiding in personalized outreach and campaign efforts.
Additionally, the platform automates data capture from web forms, reducing manual effort and errors. By combining contacts and tasks, it ensures you stay on top of upcoming activities. Tagging and sorting contacts improves segmentation for better targeting.
BIGContacts integrates seamlessly with various business applications like accounting and marketing software, providing a centralized platform for managing all contact-related activities. Its remote access feature enables monitoring contacts from anywhere, enhancing flexibility and efficiency.
3. Contact Boss
Contact Boss is a CRM solution designed for small businesses, focusing on effective contact management. It offers features like legacy data transfer, contact reminders, and quick search functionality for contact information. Not sure if it suits your needs? Take advantage of the one-month free trial to explore its capabilities and determine if it aligns with your business requirements.
4. Jotform
Jotform is an advanced online application offering custom form creation and management. Its intuitive drag-and-drop interface and no-code building tool allow you to create forms, and apps, collect e-signatures, generate reports, and efficiently manage form data.
With hundreds of tools and widgets, Jotform seamlessly integrates with CRM, project management tools, payment processors, and analytics tools, as well as, enhancing your workflow and productivity. Jotform Enterprise offers a powerful solution tailored to elevate your company’s efficiency and productivity, making it a versatile choice for businesses of all sizes.
5. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a comprehensive customer experience automation platform offering robust contact management features. It seamlessly integrates contact management with your customer lifecycle stages, from audience engagement and nurturing to conversion, support, and growth.
To start managing contacts, you create contact lists and add existing email contacts, organizing them by lists, tags, or custom fields. ActiveCampaign facilitates segment creation, allowing targeted and personalized content delivery based on customer interactions like emails and form submissions.
The platform also provides insights through behavioral tracking, helping you understand customer actions and preferences within segments. Additionally, ActiveCampaign offers case studies to showcase how businesses leverage their contact management tools, offering valuable insights for optimizing your own customer engagement efforts.
6. Moosend
Moosend is an email marketing automation platform offering advanced audience management features to organize your contacts effectively. Its CRM capabilities allow easy contact management through a dedicated dashboard, monitoring active contacts and optimizing strategies based on bounce rates.
The platform’s advanced segmentation tools help gather detailed customer data, enabling you to tag subscribers based on various criteria for personalized content creation. For instance, custom fields personalize subject lines and content using customer information like names, birthdays, and locations.
Moosend’s lead generation tools aid in expanding mailing lists through newsletter sign-up forms and landing pages. Furthermore, you can automate contact management using marketing automation features to create specific workflows that keep your list engaged based on user actions.
7. Keap
Keap is a comprehensive CRM, sales, and marketing platform tailored for small businesses. It provides a centralized hub for managing client activities and communications efficiently. With Keap, you can automate follow-ups, contact record creation, and updates.
Personalizing communications, such as forms, emails, and sales follow-ups, is easy using the stored contact data in Keap. Integration with Gmail or Outlook ensures seamless updates of email interactions in the corresponding contact records. Keap also offers extensive integration options with various business tools and software, ensuring all your data remains up-to-date and accessible from one location.
8. Bigin
Bigin stands out for its user-friendly design and robust functionality. It provides a straightforward yet powerful way to manage contacts while offering a comprehensive view of all communications associated with each contact.
Features such as email tracking, task management, and note organization make it easy to access and utilize information effectively for sales efforts. The free version accommodates up to 500 contacts, making it suitable for small businesses, startups, and freelancers. Paid subscriptions offer enhanced flexibility and additional features to meet evolving business needs.
9. Bitrix24
Bitrix24 offers a comprehensive suite of contact management features with free and paid plans starting at $49 per month. Its centralized database efficiently collects and tracks prospect and customer contact information. The software automatically logs phone calls and email communications, providing a complete history for effective management.
For those seeking a free solution with advanced functionalities not typically found in standard contact management software, Bitrix24 is a valuable option. As businesses grow, Bitrix24’s paid plans offer scalability and additional features at reasonable prices, ensuring it remains a viable choice for evolving needs.
10. Streak
Streak provides contact management tools that seamlessly integrate with Gmail and other Google Workspace apps. Its software enables the tracking and sharing of customer contacts and communications within your inbox, including email records, call logs, files, notes, and tasks.
Furthermore, with Streak, you can create custom views of your sales pipeline, allowing you to search, filter, group, and sort contact data as needed. These custom views can be saved and shared across your team for efficient collaboration. Streak offers free personal use, along with paid plans for professional and enterprise-level needs, making it a flexible choice for contact management within Google applications.
Final Thoughts
Establishing regular contact is crucial for managing prospects, engaging customers, and maintaining vendor relationships. With the increasing amount of contact data in use, manual processes are often insufficient.
Contact management tools offer a solution by providing quick access to vital contact information. This allows companies to concentrate on building meaningful relationships rather than getting bogged down in administrative tasks. If you’re ready to enhance your contact management practices, consider exploring the mentioned tools to find the one that best suits your needs.