Improper contact management results in declining sales, and everyone knows how risky it is for business health. We are in an age when there is a lot of competition, and the lifespan of attention is reducing. In such a situation, if we don’t pass the information quickly to our customers, we lose them forever. In the current business scenario, the inevitable fact is that contact management cannot be done using spreadsheets. Managing contacts in a systematic manner is a highly significant task to ensure a successful sales process in an organization.
Imagine spending a lot of money on designing an email marketing campaign, but what if you don’t have the list of the right email recipients on hand? In this case, your campaign might get delayed, or the wrong audience might be targeted. Failing marketing efforts can result in no returns on investment.
Contact management software can help resolve this issue, as it works as a centralized hub for the contact information of your customers, suppliers, leads, prospects, etc. Moreover, it can help you select the target audience based on your offerings. Besides that, you can track your sales, schedule appointments and meetings, manage leads, generate performance reports, and perform many more tasks that can help you enhance your customer acquisition and retention.
Here, we have listed some of the best free and open source contact management software which you can consider executing for your business. But, before you go through the details of this software, let us understand the basics of contact management software, its purpose, and the features to look for while selecting one.
What is Contact Management Software?
Contact management software is a tool that can manage your sales and marketing workflow efficiently, resulting in high conversions. It is a database that includes names and complete contact information, such as addresses and emails of your customers and prospects. It also gives you clear visibility over communication logs and important follow-up dates to ensure the high-end effectiveness of your marketing efforts. It helps you to ensure that you don’t miss out on any of your sales opportunities by providing all the information relating to your customers, and communication is done with them at your fingertips.
Contact Management Software Users
Benefits of Using Contact Management Software
Are you tired of missing sales opportunities because of targeting the wrong audience or negligence in follow-ups? A contact management software can rescue. Besides that, it can be beneficial for your business in the following ways -
The benefits of contact management software almost depict why most companies these days use contact management software. Still, let us have a look at what happens if you don’t use contact management software -
Now that you know how contact management software benefits a business, let’s examine what features to look for before selecting one so that you can get the most out of it.
Features to Look for in Contact Management Software
Ability to Integrate
The contact management software you choose should be able to integrate with your other business applications, such as a mail client, accounting, and billing software. This can save you the costs involved in investing in different software.
Customization
You should be able to customize the contact management software according to your business requirements, such as adding new fields and records to the systems that can help you complete tasks exactly as you want them.
Appointment Scheduling
Your sales team should be able to schedule their appointments using the contact management software and send emails to the contacts regarding their upcoming appointments. This will ease their job and avoid missing appointments with important leads and prospects.
Exporting Information
The contact management software you select should allow you to export information from spreadsheets or any other software you use. This will eliminate the manual data entry of the contact details.
Generating Reports
You should be able to generate insightful reports that clearly show you the leads, conversions, etc., helping you launch automation processes for the future, which can benefit the organization’s profitability.
With the features to look for in your contact management software clarified, let us move to information about the top 9 free and open-source contact management software, which will help you select the one that best fits your business.
The Top 9 Free and Open Source Contact Management Software
#1 Espo CRM
Espo CRM is an open source web application that helps you view, enter, and evaluate all the contacts associated with your organization. Whether it is about people, companies, projects, or opportunities, everything can be managed from a single, easy-to-use platform. More than 50,000 companies in 163 countries are using Espo CRM. Its open source CRM is free to use, and there are no limitations on database size.
Key Features
- Fully customizable, and so can suit any business type
- Includes BPM and Workflow toolsets allowing companies to automate their business processes and operations
- Includes CRM’s security features and thus is high-end secure, allowing you to protect your customers’ data easily
- It helps you monitor your sales performance with its reporting and analytics feature
- Easy-to-use dashboard, which will enable you to view complete information at a glance
- Allows you to organize appointments and enhance productivity
- Helps in organizing and tracking customers’ emails from one place
- Includes activity stream allowing users to view the list of activities performed
- Enables you to leverage the highest level of support to your customers
- Keeps marketing campaigns and database organized
If you have already used Espo CRM, please feel free to share your reviews here.
#2 Zurmo
Zurmo is an open source CRM application that is a perfect blend of marketing automation, sales software, and project management tools. It is a gamified solution that helps users turn their work into play. It is highly user-friendly and requires no training. A modern and fresh interface converts even boring sales and marketing tasks into interesting ones. This helps users to adapt this software quickly and motivates high productivity and data security in an organization.
(Key Features
- Provides a full view of contact details
- Manages meetings, appointment scheduling, tasks, notes, etc., from one place
- Can track sales pipeline and manage opportunities
- Includes drag and drop feature to manage workflows
- Ability to create, schedule, and send email marketing campaigns
- Can create and manage product catalogs
- Can customize fields, layouts, labels, dashboards, etc.
- Can integrate with Restful API, Google Maps, Email, etc
- Android and iOS platform-friendly
If you have already used Zurmo, please feel free to share your reviews here.
#3 CiviCRM
CiviCRM is an open source relationship management software that can also be used as a CRM. It can be used independently or integrated into Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, or Backdrop. It is primarily used by nonprofits and organizations to manage the contact information of leads, customers, prospects, suppliers, or anyone associated with them. Thousands of people around the world support this software because it is fully customizable and expandable.
(Key Features
- Stores contact details at one easily accessible place
- Open Source license allows customization and configuration as per your business requirements
- Users can manage their membership easily on their own
- Can integrate with your accounting software
- Allows creating and managing case workflows
- Includes tools required to manage events
- Can create and manage bulk email lists, and monitor statistics
- Includes 40 different reports and allows creating custom reports to evaluate the performance of the organization
If you have already used CiviCRM, please feel free to share your reviews here.
#4 SuiteCRM
SuiteCRM is one of the best open source CRM software millions of people use daily. It is highly powerful, customizable, and user-friendly, including hundreds of extensions and integrations. It is extremely rich in features and provides the freedom and flexibility of open source at substantially lower costs, so it is considered an excellent alternative to Salesforce. You can build relationships and boost sales with the help of this highly easy-to-use software and grow your business.
(Key Features:
- It plays the role of a central vault of all your customer data
- Provides freedom to customize and configure as per your business requirements
- Can integrate with REST API and CRM with core business systems, resulting in increased productivity
- Its Open Source model includes a vibrant community that can provide constant improvements, documents, and testing abilities.
If you have already used SuiteCRM, please feel free to share your reviews here.
#5 FeatCRM
Feat Systems CRX is a powerful open source contact management solution that helps you track your leads and opportunities seamlessly. It has a clean and well-structured interface, providing visual information about everything you need to know about your organization. Whether it is a customer’s message or a list of the sales activities conducted for a particular campaign, Feat Systems CRX keeps you on top of everything. It is a final destination providing information about your opportunities and expected revenues.
Key Features:
- Can create and manage leads from the emails received
- Helps in organizing opportunities in a systematic manner
- Can integrate with email accounts and automate email marketing campaigns
- Can integrate with social networking platforms
- Provides a list of activities pending and accomplished in a visual form
If you have already used FeatCRM, please feel free to share your reviews here.
#6 Odoo CRM
Odoo CRM is free and open-source ERP and CRM software and an all-in-one solution for many tasks in an organization, including sales, marketing, and operations. It helps track leads, close opportunities, and access accurate forecasts to make better decisions for the future. By referring to monthly targets, you can get to know the organization's performance and systematically organize your work to achieve desired goals.
(odoo.com)
Key Features
- Includes an intuitive dashboard providing a better overview of the sales activities
- Allows importing leads from other tools
- Automates sending emails personalized as per the lead segment and activities
- Helps in organizing activities for each opportunity
- Allows tracking, logging, and analyzing the activities of the team
- Provides 360-degree visibility over leads and opportunities management
- Can manage and share the address book of the customers
- Allows creating email templates to ease the job
- Analyze opportunities, sales, and marketing activities with the help of reports generated.
If you have already used Odoo CRM, please feel free to share your reviews here.
#7 Vtiger CRM
Vtiger is a unified CRM that improves coordination between marketing, sales, and support teams to provide comprehensive information about your customers. It is an all-in-one integrated solution that helps companies deliver outstanding customer experiences by streamlining all the tasks relating to lead and opportunity management. Basically, it provides everything you need to increase your sales and manage your team.
Key Features
- Manages your sales team’s pipelines effortlessly
- Helps in scheduling appointments
- Allows one-click emailing and calling
- Easily shares documents within the team
- Build and sends quotes and convert them into invoices
- Analyze sales team performance and design future strategies accordingly
If you have already used Vtiger CRM, please feel free to share your reviews here.
#8 OroCRM
OroCRM is open-source CRM software flexible enough to address any business workflow or requirement. It is well known for optimizing conversions, helping grow sales, and improving customer satisfaction. It also enables you to track leads converting to opportunities and opportunities converting to customers. It provides an entire overview of the customer journey, resulting in an outstanding customer experience.
Key Features:
- Provides complete control over managing accounts and contacts
- Helps in capturing and nurturing prospects and converting them into customers
- Provides a complete view of the customer details, including product views, email conversations, etc
- Includes dashboard displaying sales and marketing performance
- Includes powerful reporting engine that provides complete insights into your business
- Can integrate with 3rd-party platforms
- Includes workflow and productivity tools for all types of businesses
- Helps you in analyzing your top customers, how frequently they buy, and how much they spend
If you have already used OroCRM, please feel free to share your reviews here.
#9 Zoho Contact Manager
Zoho ContactManager is versatile contact management software that helps you organize contacts, tasks, and deals in one place. Using this software, you can maintain your customers' address books from a centralized location accessed by your team members, making communication and collaboration easier. Moreover, you can track your deals and organize your to-do tasks efficiently and accurately.
(zoho.com)
Key Features
- Allows you to access your business contacts at your fingertips
- It helps in managing your tasks and deals efficiently
- It enables you to categorize your contacts and tasks
- Includes email templates to help you send emails quickly
- It provides an intelligent search facility that allows you to search your contacts easily
- Can integrate with social networking platforms
- Includes web-to-contact form, which helps you convert your website visitors into customers
If you have already used Zoho Contact Manager, please feel free to share your reviews here.
Those mentioned above are the brief details about the top 9 free and open source contact management software. If you are still confused about which one is the best from the above-mentioned list, you can go through the chart below, which will help you compare their features at a glance.
The Top 9 Free and Open Source Contact Management Software Comparison Chart
Are you looking for some advanced features in contact management software that are not available in these free ones? We recommend you go through one of the most popular contact management software: Funnel CRM. It is a user-friendly, cloud-based Sales CRM solution with versatile contact management features that can help businesses by eliminating all the pains relating to managing contacts manually.
Funnel CRM
Funnel CRM is versatile CRM software that helps track leads and manage follow-ups. It is considered one of the most popular software for streamlining contact management. It never lets you miss closing a deal or lose track of customers. At each level of the buyer journey, it helps you be as efficient as possible with your sales process.
Key Features
- Captures customer information automatically and creates a dedicated workspace outside the email inbox
- Helps in creating and embedding a contact form on your website
- Can categorize emails based on customer preferences and journey
- Maintains your customer database efficiently
- Can integrate with Gmail account
- Includes professional templates helping to send practical proposals to the customers
- It helps you organize, manage, and prioritize tasks and activities
Conclusion
Contact management software is a handy tool for securely storing customer information and communicating with them effectively. But, with so many options available, it might be overwhelming to select one. We hope this article has helped you to a great extent in choosing the contact management software.
We recommend trying freemium and paid contact management software like Capsule CRM, LiveVox, SalesBabu, Freeagent, Sumac, Hyperoffice, Blitz, and Pobuca Connect to widen your choice. These solutions may require investment but can prove to be worth it in the long run.
Also, you can go through the complete list of contact management software curated by the GoodFirms team.
If you have used any contact management software mentioned above, please leave valuable feedback here.
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