Customer database software has become an essential part of every business irrespective of its size. From startups to large organizations, everyone needs to manage the data of their customers. For this, the right tool is necessary to streamline the process of customer management. But for a small business on a budget, it is important to find software that does not break the bank. In such situations, free customer database software for small businesses can help.
Uses of customer database software
Customer data management or customer relationship management (CRM) is one of the key processes that often determines the success of a business. This is because valuable insights about customer behavior can be obtained using customer database software. By using customer data, CRM sales, pipeline tools, and marketing tools, an organization can develop email marketing strategies, create digital marketing campaigns, get access to useful customer communication email templates, send mailers with deals and offers to customers, as well as make follow-up phone calls to maintain relationships with all customers. CRM software is useful in nearly every industry including manufacturing, retail, real estate, and construction.
Features to look for
Usually, a free customer database software has limited features since there are no prices involved. These typically include lead tracking, basic reporting, and contact management. While the capability of these features is often restricted, there are many key features that can be looked out for across different free CRM software for small businesses.
Contact management
This is one of the most basic features of customer database software. With contact management, a business can store and organize all the information about customers in a single location, including names, email addresses, and phone numbers. This gives easy and quick access to every detail of customers that a business might need. This makes it convenient to maintain customer relationships.
Lead management
With this feature, an organization can keep track of potential leads. Besides, it also helps to follow up with these leads so that they can be turned into actual customers. Lead management typically includes recording customer interactions, putting in reminders for follow-ups, and tracking the status of the leads.
Sales pipeline tracking
This feature is useful to track and review the progress of various sales deals. A business can observe where each deal stands, between the first contact and the closing of the sale. With such visual representation, a business can easily identify the various bottlenecks and prioritize different tasks, which can help forecast future sales. With this, the business can always stay on top of the sales process.
Basic reporting and analytics
With this feature, a business can create simple reports using customer data. This can help to understand the progress of customer interactions and sales trajectory. Some of the common types of reports that can be generated with this feature include customer engagement statistics, sales performance metrics, and other key metrics that can help the decision makers of the small business to devise effective strategies.
Integration capabilities
Using integration capabilities, a business can connect the customer database software with other tools and processes. By connecting with tools like calendar and email apps, the workflow of the organization becomes smoother. So, a business can directly synchronize their contacts, schedule all meetings, and directly send emails to customers through the CRM. This saves time and resources, as there is no need to toggle between multiple applications.
Popular free customer database software for small businesses
There are many free customer database software that are designed to manage, analyze, and organize customer data effectively.
Klaviyo
This is a comprehensive tool that offers marketing automation solutions along with customer database software. It has been developed to help small businesses manage and use their customer data for efficient marketing strategies. Klaviyo is known for its integrations and robust features that can be used for creating targeted and personalized marketing campaigns.
EngageBay
Small businesses looking for a customer management system to address processes related to customer support, marketing, and sales can look into the features offered by EngageBay. Its notable features include contact management with a 360-degree contact view, appointment scheduling, tag management, user activity, reports dashboard, email tracking and scheduling, email and chat support, predictive lead score, autoresponders, segmentations, and live chat. Besides, it can be seamlessly integrated with other applications like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Outlook, and Microsoft 365.
Agile CRM
This is a cloud-based CRM system that businesses can use for managing sales processes and customer interactions. The tool offers popular features such as contact management, sales tracking, marketing automation, and analytics.
Mailchimp
This tool is one of the top free customer database software developed for email marketing. With this, a business can manage their email leads and directly communicate with them using engaging and interactive emails. Over the years, Mailchimp has been a popular choice among several small to medium-sized businesses, non-profit organizations, and e-commerce stores globally. It is known for its segmentation capabilities, which allow a business to make several segments of different customers based on their purchase history, email engagement, demographic data, and other subscriber behavior.