eLearning learndashOne of the greatest trials of having your own business is the amount of e-paperwork you have to keep track of. From customer emails, inventory lists, and membership indexes, to sales analytics, accounts, and documentation, there are tons of things that require your attention. Besides, there is only so much you can delegate, right?

Over time, as your business grows, you find yourself focusing more and more on business expansion, which is natural and admirable. However, this tends to push your customer interaction a bit to the sidelines. Consider this, how much time do you spend every day, talking to your clients? And by that, I mean genuine interaction, not a brief, on-the-go reply.

It is evident that maintaining a one-to-one relationship with your clients helps you retain them for a longer time. However, how that can be done is another matter. For most of us, the primary mode of business communication is the email.

However, it becomes difficult to keep track of every single conversation you have had with the client, over emails. It is hardly feasible to pull up every email related to the client every time, at short notice. More than that, it can be time-consuming and frustrating, as new threads keep popping up every time!

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system helps you in streamlining this process. The CRM system tracks all of your emails, calls, meetings, presentations, and discussions with the client, which can be accessed at a moment’s notice through your dashboard. All of the information is located centrally so that all you have to do is give a single reference to get the data right away. Essentially, a CRM system does what it says; it simplifies tasks for efficient management of customer relationships!

WordPress is a massive platform today, powering over 19.1 million live sites across the world. When it comes to WordPress, integrating a complete CRM system helps you leverage the power of flawless customer management, in addition to WordPress’ other, native advantages. There are several plugins available for CRM on WordPress. Some of these are integrations with popular CRM platforms like HubSpot and Infusionsoft, while others are plugins that add the CRM software on top of your WordPress core.

Here we will be focusing on the latter, as the scope of third-party platforms for CRM is very vast. So, without further ado, here are the top 5 CRM plugins you can use for WordPress in no particular order!

#1 Presspoint CRM

Presspoint is one of the earliest CRM plugins developed for WordPress. It creates a single, integrated profile for each of your customers, incorporating all data pertaining to that client. This includes all your and your team’s interaction, giving you all relevant information at one place. Presspoint offers extensive features like,

• Flexible customer profile templates
• Dynamic Smart Lists for instantly pulling up references
• Restricted access to the customer based on Smart Lists
• Comprehensive search options
• Email auto-responders and bulk campaigns sent through its MailChimp integration,
• Support for purchases and donations
• Workflow management for narrowing down potential leads and following them through till a deal is closed

Presspoint also has an integrated event management functionality that automatically connects events and relevant customers, and tracks user registration in real time. User directories can be created, with optional updation of information at the customer end.
Presspoint supports WordPress versions 4.4.2 and above and works on an Add-on module system. The core plugin is priced at $550 per year, while the Events and Opportunities add-ons are priced at $100 each for a yearly, single-site license.

Presspoint is a comprehensive CRM plugin, that ensures effective tracking and management of all customer related data. The various functionalities offered can help you connect to and interact with your customers quickly and easily.

#2 WP-CRM System

WP-CRM System is a relatively new CRM plugin for WordPress, and as the name suggests, offers substantial features to create a complete customer relationship management setup. It goes slightly off the beaten track from conventional CRM plugins, offering a Freemium model, with the core plugin available in the WordPress repository, and additional individual extensions to be downloaded as necessary. This gives you more flexibility in terms of selecting add-ons as you need not download an entire bundle just to avail a couple of functionalities.

With WP-CRM System, you can:

• Custom data tracking for fields relevant to your business
• Complete project management from website Dashboard
• The in-built invoicing system integrated with the Stripe payment gateway
• Diverse form creation using Gravity Forms and Ninja Forms
• Multiple campaign creation and management options
• Extensions to import fields, tasks, campaigns, and more
• In-built project tracking and reporting functionality

One drawback of the plugin is that it does not have extensive documentation. In addition, the plugin depends on its MailChimp, Zendesk, Slack, Gravity Forms, and other integration extensions for providing some of the core functionalities, which increases the issue of potential incompatibilities with the other plugins on the website.

WP-CRM System has a unique pricing policy. It does not charge users based on the number of contacts. Instead, it has varying pricing plans based on the number of extensions available in the package. The extensions are categorized as Starter and Pro. The four pricing plans vary from $49-$499 as per the plan selected.

eLearning learndash#3 UpiCRM

UpiCRM is a free, easy-to-use plugin for WordPress, downloadable from the WordPress plugin repository. The plugin integrates leads from your existing website to create an exhaustive database and pulls contact-related information from it in the future. In addition, it offers various other features such as:

• Easy import of contact data from existing databases
• Three-way approach to tracking leads through a type of form submission, referral source detection, and URL tagging
• Detailed tracking of lead at every stage of the customer interaction cycle and quick sending of the lead to the relevant department of the company for further follow-up
• In-depth marketing campaign analysis using Google Analytics
• Interactive Dashboard and key process indicators to check process status in real time
• Multi-user support with 5 levels of hierarchies provided
• Easy export of all data for independent analysis

UpiCRM is one of the CRM plugins that is built completely from the WordPress perspective. However, it currently only supports integration with Gravity Forms, Ninja Forms, and Contact Form 7. Additional customization and support is required for integrating other contact form plugins with UpiCRM. One shortcoming of the plugin is its relative lack of documentation.

A 30-page User Guide on the home website alleviates this to an extent, but for more complicated customization you need to either create an issue on their WordPress.org page or purchase a Support ticket.

#4 WP-CRM

One of the most popular CRM plugins for WordPress, WP-CRM has long enjoyed a dedicated fan base. The free plugin is developed by Usability Dynamics Inc. and offers a host of features that are generally seen with premium plugins. These include:

• Dynamic Control Panel with the customizable organization of Users
• Extensive fields and filters for comprehensive data search
• Advanced options for notification management
• Easy import/export of User data
• Exhaustive tracking lists for a total follow-up of leads and campaigns

WP-CRM also has an add-on for integrating the Group notifications functionality into the CRM system, which costs $50. A major point in the plugin’s favor is its documentation. Detailed information about setting up and working with the plugin is offered on the parent website,  including that about the integrations supported. Several videos showing contact form creation or lead filtering and management are also available.

#5 WordPress Leads

The WordPress Leads CRM plugin for WordPress is created by Inbound Now and has over 10,000+ installs on WordPress. If you are thinking that this seems to be a plugin for merely generating and tracking leads, you are right.

However, WordPress Leads offers you scope far above and beyond a conventional lead generation plugin. This is useful in identifying potential conversions and getting in touch with those leads, which ultimately helps improve customer relations. Some of the best features of WordPress Leads are:

• Checking of leads by location, the number of pages viewed, area of interest, etc.
• Collection of information about the visitor’s website, social media profiles
• Access to User’s job history
• Creation of detailed report of the pages visited and items searched for on the website
• Integration with 3rd-party CRM plugins
• Complete Zapier support
• Bulk management of leads’ information
• Easy-to-use interface

WordPress Leads is available free of cost in the plugin directory. Comprehensive documentation of the plugin can be obtained from the Inbound Now website.

This completes our round-up of the top 5 CRM plugins for WordPress. Each of these offers several sets of functionalities that can be leveraged to get in touch with your existing and potential customers, and stay in touch with them.

On a final note, remember to implement a CRM data cleansing strategy to keep your database clean and up-to-date.