When new clients come to us at ZBrains, we often hear one of two things – either they have faced significant challenges with a previous CRM software they have used and they’re ready to move on, or they have just signed with Zoho and are unsure where to start. With these two challenges, you could say that we’ve heard it all – from A to Z; so, you can be sure that we have answers to your common CRM issues.
After thousands of conversations with various clients, we’ve wrangled our experts at ZBrains to tell us their top 3 most common CRM issues from new clients. If you’re brand new to CRM management or perhaps you have questions about your current CRM, we’re sure you’ll identify with one (or more) of the challenges below.
Here are the top 3 common CRM issues (and their solutions).
Challenge: I can’t access my CRM on-the-go.
Imagine you want to access a client contact history while en route to a meeting, or away from your desk – but you can’t access your CRM through your phone. Ugh.
Solution: Discover a CRM that works on-the-go.
Challenge: My team does not know how to use my CRM properly.
Whether it’s because of lack of process or lack of training, your team just doesn’t understand or know how to use the major features of your CRM, it can be difficult to get your employees on-board entirely with your CRM.
Solution: Educate, Track, Customize.
Save time by tracking everything- from emails to phone calls, and meeting logs in between. Zoho has it all – enabling your team to make the most of your CRM. Have a program that educates your team on the benefits and use-cases before diving in head first. In our experience, this has truly made a difference in overall adoption and usage. Develop a solid process for your team and have customizable solutions for your business processes. Get started on the right foot by signing up for one of our Zoho implementation plans.
Challenge: My CRM doesn’t integrate with the software I use every day.
Are you always flipping through tabs, browsers, applications and spending far too much time logging-in, or recovering lost passwords?Is it just another application that you need to manage?
Solution: Find an all-in-one solution.
This is especially true for sales and marketing teams, who certainly use many, many applications on a daily basis. From CRM to email, social media posting applications and more, it can be a challenge to keep track of it all. Zoho One has 35+ integrated applications that encompass everything from CRM, email newsletters, documents, inventory, and more. Here at ZBrains, we offer additional add-ons and custom integrations for your favorite business products, such as QuickBooks, Magento, and more.
It’s important to find a CRM that can integrate with a variety of solutions to optimize the potential of your business. It will keep you on-track and ready to close more, win more, and earn more.
From employees using your CRM (properly) to finding software that works for all teams in your company, these are our top 4 common CRM issues and their solutions. They’ve been compiled by our Zoho certified consultants here at ZBrains who are here to help you with your burning questions. Feel free to drop us a line!
The evolution of marketing and business development has grown leaps and bounds over the last few years. As software has offered increasingly more features and benefits, the days of disconnected CRM software and email management systems are over. You can now have information, data, and reporting at your fingertips through multi-platform accessibility. Zoho Campaigns, for one, has not only grown with the evolution – it has led the way in terms of features and functionality. From creating emails with beautiful customizable templates to tracking and reporting what content your prospects are engaging,
Zoho Campaigns allows you massive insights into your email marketing campaigns. Best of all, the integration with Zoho CRM offers unparalleled visibility into those engaged with your content and pipeline.
Here are 4 reasons why you’ll love the power of Zoho Campaigns and CRM integration
1. Reach out to your leads, prospects, and customers with ease.
With Zoho Campaigns and Zoho CRM integration, you can track engagement and email exchanges all-in-one. Your entire marketing team can use Campaigns to send email messaging through a multi-user account, which means that visibility into all activities is second-to-none.
Efficiency is key when it comes to this integration. If you have customer lists in Zoho CRM (of course you do!) you can see these campaign results within each prospect record – so the next time you’re on a sales call, you won’t need to switch between multiple applications to find answers to your prospect’s questions. Everything is in one record through your CRM.
2. You’ll know how well your campaigns performed against your sales contact list.
When deciding who to actively prospect and who to set aside, for now, the data and subsequent decisions will be right before your eyes. Email marketing provides a detailed look into who’s interested – and who isn’t. After all, for every $1 spent, email marketing generates $38 in ROI. Now that’s impressive.
Within Zoho Campaigns, you can also customize your lists to reach the right audience. You can segment your lists based on specific criteria, such as business type. This makes custom, targeted engagement a very simple task.
3. Your data will always be up-to-date.
The advanced sync between Zoho CRM and Zoho Campaigns allows users – you – to maintain up-to-date versions of contact and lead information. When a prospect engages, this data will pull into your CRM. When a prospect opts-out, they will be automatically unsubscribed from your mailing list and you will receive a notification. You won’t be working with old data, meaning quality will be assured every single time.
4. Your sales staff won’t need to toggle between various software.
Your sales staff have other, more important tasks to worry about – like closing deals. That’s why they won’t spend time toggling between various pieces of software. They won’t need to pull open your CRM alongside your email marketing software while trying to make sense of the data. Instead, Zoho Campaigns gives your sales team one unified platform to monitor and provide all of the information in one place, making them more efficient – and closing more deals – in the meantime.
We love the integration between Zoho Campaigns and Zoho CRM – and we are sure you will, too. To learn more about how this will work for your business you can contact us. Or you can enable your team today by signing up for a private Zoho CRM training support session! Lastly, for even more great, integrated marketing features, we strongly recommend checking out Zoho Marketing Automation, the latest marketing funnel management app from Zoho.
When it comes to security with online software, you’ve likely heard it all. “Change your passwords“, says your Information Technology group. “Don’t connect to public Wi-Fi“, your colleagues suggest. Yet, with your CRM – Zoho, specifically – we are lucky that the platform has built-in, ready-made capabilities that will protect you and your business. Particularly, Zoho’s system security capabilities are second-to-none for Tech and Marketing teams alike.
But, why should your business even care about security?
Well, let us tell you a story about a little ol’ company named Sony.
Sony created a globally popular movie, The Interview, featuring Seth Rogan and James Franco. The Interview depicts two friends who run a popular tabloid show; these two friends pitch and land an interview with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. During this time, they are recruited by the CIA to turn their trip into an assassination mission. Naturally, North Korea (in real life) wasn’t impressed with this storyline. As the story goes, hackers who claimed to be from North Korea hacked Sony Corporation in one of the most popular cyberattacks in entertainment. From releasing salaries of Sony’s executives to spoiling the release of upcoming movies, to distributing medical information about Sony employees – the consequences of the hack were felt far and wide.
Yet, it was Sony Corporation who wasn’t prepared, and were completely unaware about what could happen if a company disregards security through online software. Needless to say, Sony changed their practices immediately, and focused on safety and security of their online software.
Now, your business might not be as large as Sony; but the principle remains the same. Safety and security of your online information is integral to the reputation of your business.
So, with that said, if your team uses Zoho, you can sleep well knowing that you are in safe hands with this software. Below, we’ll show you the system security capabilities you need to know, along with where they can be found in Zoho. Some features are through Zoho Vault, the online password manager for teams, and others are built right in Zoho CRM.
Zoho’s Security Capabilities: What You Need to Know
Passwords are encrypted with the strongest encryption standard (AES-256), which means that you can securely store passwords through the software without worrying about changing them frequently for safety and security.
There are many password solutions out there – from OnePass to Security Server Online. Yet, many are clunky and – to be quite frank – a pain to use. After all, who wants to log-in to multiple platforms only to reach one?
Zoho’s system security capabilities gives you the ability to securely store passwords should keep your Tech team at rest.
If your company sends an email, tweet, updates a lead or tracks an opportunity, you want to track who does what, and when. For example, if your Marketing team creates a lead and your Sales Representative needs to know who performed this action, Zoho will tell you. Similarly, if you need to assign or re-distribute a password, your Tech team can see how and when this was done.
Tracking user actions allows your teams to see how and what changes were made, helping identify potential breaches if they are taking place.
Within your team, you might share passwords through email, text or over the phone. But, you don’t need to worry when it comes to Zoho.*
You can define access privileges through the platform, meaning you can share passwords with team members quickly and easily online.
*PS: Never share private or sensitive information (like passwords) over email! This is integral to Zoho’s system security capabilities.
4. Database security.
Application used: Zoho CRM
Hackers attempting to reach CRM systems and databases happen frequently. Much like the example of Sony Corporation above, it’s important to have security systems and checks in place.
With Zoho’s CRM database, encrypted data (AES-256 bit) is always sent over the internet. In addition, the connection is through SSL. This makes safety and security a priority and focus within Zoho.
Zoho makes it easy for big teams to securely share passwords and access. Instead of sharing passwords or providing access to 100+ individuals on just that – an individual basis – Zoho allows uses to provide passwords to users and groups in bulk and deny access when a user is removed.
By using Zoho CRM, Campaigns, Vault and more, it’s clear that safety and security is a priority when it comes to this software. Whatever the case might be, and regardless of your company’s industry, security needs to be at the forefront of all business decisions.
The cloud-based Insightly has a variety of easy-to-use sales features designed to make office life a bit easier than you might be used to when it comes to fussing with a CRM system. And, when comparing it to Zoho, it seems a battle of Insightly vs Zoho CRM might be the closest thing we’ve seen to a draw yet. Both of these cloud-based CRM systems seemingly have it all: great sales tools, marketing automation abilities, social integrations, and, of course, the ability to sync with other programs.
So, how do we determine a victor?
We’ll take a deeper dive into the specifics of Insightly vs Zoho CRM so we know exactly what’s going on. Come on down!
Round One: Sales Tracking
A CRM’s sales monitoring capability is its bread and butter, so, it’s very important for your customer relationship management system to come with a fully stacked system. In this regard, both Zoho CRM and Insightly are no exception.
Both Insightly and Zoho CRM have basic sales modules like Leads and Contacts, as well as built-in calendars for viewing appointments and other events, the ability to search your entire CRM for any bit of text, file sharing, and – of course – custom fields.
To augment its powerful CRM-wide text-searching tool, Insightly packs a great feature, contact tagging, which is exactly what it sounds like: It allows users to tag CRM contacts with text of their choosing, making finding contacts that fit in a certain group or have certain characteristics all the easier to find – and reach out to – in your system. Zoho CRM does not have a feature like this.
And, to answer Insightly’s specialized tagging feature, Zoho CRM gives its users the ability to create entire custom modules, allowing for customized functions (and fields) and, for that matter, a truly unique workflow experience. Insightly users can’t create custom modules.
Both Insightly and Zoho CRM contain another useful feature called feeds, which sets the normal CRM engine in a collaborative, social network-like environment. This allows users to follow certain tasks and contacts, and allows users to communicate easily with each other through commenting and tagging.
All other things being equal (and, they do seem to be that way), it’s difficult to compare the value of contact tagging to that of custom module creation, as different types of businesses will clearly require different functions from their CRMs. For that reason, this round is a tie.
Round Two: Marketing Automation
Second only after keeping track of sales, marketing automation is a huge part of what value a CRM system can bring to a business. As sales tracking allows the business to take in information, marketing automation allows that business to reach out to groups of its customers without much work on the part of a salesperson at all – hence the word automation.
Both Insightly and Zoho CRM provide for themselves similarly well in this arena. Both systems provide users mass emailing capability, the ability to create email templates, and web-to-lead capability in the form of customizable webforms. These are fairly standard features of a CRM system.
Zoho CRM and Insightly can each integrate to social networks as well, giving its users access to those networks (and the ability to see which networks its clients and prospects use) without having to navigate between multiple windows. In this regard, Insightly comes out on top, boasting integrations to many social networks, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Twitter, while Zoho CRM only provides integration capability for Facebook and Twitter.
Zoho gets a leg up on Insightly, however, with its Zoho Campaigns add-on, which doesn’t have an equivalent in Insightly. Zoho Campaigns allows for mailing list synchronization straight from Zoho CRM, and houses email templates designed especially for marketing campaigns. The Zoho Campaigns engine also provides detailed analytics on individual campaign performance, allowing users to know exactly how effective their marketing efforts are.
Although Zoho Campaigns ends up adding to the overall price of Zoho CRM, the fact that users can organize automated marketing campaigns at all inside Zoho CRM gives this round to Zoho.
Round Three: Project Management
Project management capability inside a CRM is key for service companies involved in budgeted or fixed projects, whose members often collaborate with each other. The project management arm of a CRM can house data imported right from the CRM itself, and vice-versa; it provides a more detailed view of projects and the amount of work (and hence productivity) applied to each project.
For something that provides such value, it’s important that any competitive CRM have this sort of function. And, thankfully, both Zoho CRM and Insightly have project management capabilities.
Aside from standard task listing and team member assignment functions, both Zoho CRM and Insightly can keep track of project milestones (smaller tasks within tasks), can be programmed to send out email reminders when certain tasks are approaching their due dates or when someone adds to a conversational thread. Both Insightly and Zoho CRM allow users to view past completed projects – but, Zoho CRM only allows this functionality for an additional fee. (Zoho users can still access Zoho Projects in a more limited capacity for free.)
Obviously, price is important in the grand scheme of things. (We’ll cover price as a whole later in this article.) For that reason, Insightly wins the Project Management round.
Round Four: Mobile Power
In today’s business climate, the ability to take your business outside the office is just as important as working at your desk, if not more so. By using mobile apps that connect to their CRMs, business owners and salespeople can perform most any task they would in the office from the palms of their hands, making CRMs that have mobile capability much more accessible at trade shows and other out-of-office situations.
Both Zoho CRM and Insightly have mobile apps associated with them, making them perfect for those sorts of scenarios. Zoho CRM has a family of mobile apps, including Zoho CRM itself, a Leads app, and a dedicated Card Scanner app for business cards. (You can read more about all three of these by looking at this Zoho mobile CRM apps page.) Insightly has a fully functional mobile CRM app itself (found here) that has a built-in business card scanner – and, the whole thing can be viewed as a widget, adding convenience that Zoho’s mobile app doesn’t provide. For this reason, the mobile round is a tie.
Insightly vs Zoho CRM Bonus Round: The Cost
Product cost notwithstanding, Insightly vs Zoho CRM has been quite an even match; both CRMs provide a great assortment of features, both are very customizable, and both have robust sales and marketing tracking features.
Bearing that in mind, one would think the deciding factor in the match to be the cost of the products. Let’s take a look at some real numbers:
To include the features listed here, Zoho CRM costs $20 per user per month*. This also includes unlimited CRM records.
For the features listed here, Insightly costs exactly the same: $49 per user per month.
With these two products so evenly matched, it seems we have our first bona fide tie. While Zoho CRM emphasizes customization and plasticity to draw in customers, Insightly emphasizes ease of use and consolidation – and, in this case, both products succeed.
However, before jumping to conclusions, it’s important to note that Zoho offers an entire suite of business apps for less than the cost of Zoho CRM – only $37/user/month when paid annually*. This offering, called Zoho One, contains 40+ apps under the Zoho umbrella, and the number grows nearly every month. Apps include not only the aforementioned CRM, Campaigns, and Projects, but Zoho Books as well. This variety of apps to use, all with the ability to integrate to each other as needed, lends much more power to Zoho as a choice overall. (The only caveat to this choice is that all of your organization’s W-2 employees are required to use Zoho One, so it isn’t a good fit for everyone – but it does help in many cases.) *Pricing updated June 2021
Before you make a decision about which CRM, Insightly vs Zoho CRM, to implement with your business, note that this article doesn’t compare things like ease of use or quality of customer support, which are quite subjective. Do your due diligence before jumping into anything and you’ll be better off than you were before because of the knowledge you will have gained.
Whether you have questions or you’re ready to get started, feel free to connect with one of our Zoho Certified Consultants anytime!
This matchup of SugarCRM vs Zoho is interesting because, although SugarCRM is more expensive than Zoho CRM (seemingly) as a rule, SugarCRM Professional Edition (PE), a mid-level business program, costs roughly the same per user as Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition (EE), a higher-level business program. We won’t rush to conclusions yet, because words like professional, standard, and enterprise are all quite subjective terms. We’ll take a look at actual product specs to see how these two really match up.
SugarCRM vs Zoho Round One: The Costs*
As aforementioned, we’ll be comparing two different-tiered programs similar in pricing: Zoho CRM EE comes in at $50 per user per month and SugarCRM PE at $52 per user per month.
It costs roughly $6000 to board 10 users of either Zoho CRM EE or SugarCRM PE for a year.
For the sake of comparison, it costs $10,200 ($85/user/mo) to board ten users on SugarCRM EE, the supposed equivalent to Zoho CRM EE. That won’t be factored into our decision at the end of this bout, but, keep it in mind.
Another thing to keep in mind: Zoho CRM offers a monthly pricing plan (truly $50 per month) whereas the price per user for SugarCRM is still $52 per month, but, it can only be paid in one sum annually. Thus, you have slightly less flexibility with SugarCRM’s payment plan. However, this won’t affect every business owner.
As the price is dead even between SugarCRM vs Zoho CRM in this round, we’re calling it a tie.
*Pricing updated June 2021
Round Two: Tracking the Sales
Sales is the bread and butter of most businesses, so, having a robust system for tracking sales is of utmost importance. Both SugarCRM and Zoho recognize this; SugarCRM packs the ability to track Leads, Contacts, and Opportunities, plus the ability to generate Sales Forecasts and Quotas. While this is a sizable list of features in itself, Zoho CRM packs all these and the ability to track competitors, sell as a team, create macros, and keep track of certain activities using a feature called feeds.
Feeds is a feature that turns Zoho CRM into a sort of social network, giving users the ability to track (or “follow”) certain users, tasks, or records, and lets users communicate about those items by adding comments to them. This is an especially useful communication method for larger or disconnected offices; comments left this way are searchable inside Zoho and linked to specific activities, making looking up past conversations a bit easier than searching through multiple email threads about the same subject.
Because of Zoho CRM’s added features for the same price, this round goes to Zoho.
Round Three: How Social do you wanna get?
In today’s business climate, having a presence on social networks is absolutely key to engaging prospective customers and keeping current clients in the loop about your goings-on. That said, in the battle of SugarCRM vs Zoho CRM, both programs have a share of social interaction options.
SugarCRM PE lets its users interact with followers via Facebook and Twitter with integrations to both programs. By itself, this is a fine starter pack of sorts for social networking, but, that’s all SugarCRM offers in that regard. Zoho CRM EE offers the ability to monitor social mentions, making it easier to track customer interactions (or places where you’ll want to engage a customer who calls on you publicly), as well as a built-in tab for both Facebook and Twitter.
Overall, Zoho CRM gives users more social networking capability. Being able to track social mentions would seem worth paying an additional price by itself, but, as Zoho CRM is still the same price as Sugar CRM, this round also goes to Zoho.
Round Four: Wanna Automate that Marketing?
Marketing automation is key for businesses that want to reach a wide audience quickly while also managing email and marketing campaigns. Marketing automation as a concept seems to have evolved at a perfect time, as social media and other electronic marketing channels are more important than ever to the health of – at the very least – any tech-minded business, and many other kinds as well.
That said, hopefully your answer to that question above is a resounding yes.
Both Zoho CRM EE and SugarCRM PE come out of the box with a host of marketing automation tools, from web-to-lead capturing ability to mass emailing, email templates, and tracking campaigns themselves. Zoho CRM comes with one extra tool: autoresponders, which send messages to mailing lists based on time or click-through statistics. Some businesses may find this tool extremely useful, but, I don’t think its inclusion alone is enough to push Zoho over the top; thus, this round is a tie.
SugarCRM vs Zoho CRM Bonus Round: What About Workflow Management?
For those not in the know, workflow management is simply a term for when your CRM reminds you or prepares you to do certain tasks in order. The tasks you can program a CRM with workflow management capability to carry out are limitless, from simple email reminders upon moving records from one stage to another, to making certain information appear inside custom modules upon modifying a record, to programming a particular action to occur a certain time after another event has occurred. (It’s kind of like having your own personal assistant.)
Zoho CRM EE comes with all those abilities, including automatic lead assignment, case escalation (which prioritizes certain activities above others in certain circumstances, which you may set), and completely customized functions. This round is a bit of a mismatch, as SugarCRM PE doesn’t contain any of the marketing automation abilities listed (and none others, either). This makes Zoho the unequivocal winner of the round.
Who’s the champ in SugarCRM vs Zoho CRM?
Determining the victor between SugarCRM vs Zoho CRM was simple. For the price, Zoho CRM EE offers more features than SugarCRM PE, plain and simple. Based on this alone, we dub Zoho CRM the winner of this bout. As always, this review doesn’t take into account things like ease of use, general Zoho consulting services, or Zoho support plans, which can be very subjective topics. Be sure to schedule a walkthrough of the CRM that interests you most before you make any big decisions.
Bonus Round: There’s even more to Zoho than meets the eye
Just when you think the bout is over and you’ve decided the victor in this Sugar CRM review with Zoho, hang tight! There’s still one more thing to consider. We’re admittedly a bit biased over here, as we’re Zoho consultants, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that by choosing Zoho over Sugar, you’re not only gaining access to all of Zoho’s apps aside from the CRM, but you can also tap into Zoho’s extensive network of partners – including us. You can use your Zoho partner’s expertise to figure out the best way to solve your business problems using Zoho now, and also put together a sort of road map for the years to come, that way there’s no reworking of your system and no abandoning ship after a small handful of years.
Aside from the CRM, Zoho offers a help desk app (Zoho Desk), as well as a finance app (Zoho Books). Zoho’s platform as a service (Zoho Creator) can be used to improve the functionality of existing Zoho apps, or create entirely new ones to suit your business needs. If you were considering something like Sugar CRM to begin with, chances are its malleability caught your eye. Zoho offers that same sort of feature in Creator, and Zoho’s partners can help with this, too. All of these apps are available as part of Zoho One, a suite of 40+ apps available for $35/user/mo.
Published on: September 30, 2015Category: Zoho Campaigns, Zoho CRMLast Updated: May 16, 2023 Comments: 0
ACT CRM vs Zoho CRM Review
Is picking ACT? such sage advice?
This isn’t a typical CRM comparison in that if you find yourself comparison ACT CRM vs Zoho CRM, you’re probably deciding whether to keep ACT or move to Zoho CRM. If we were to make an analogy, this would be like pitting a heavyweight against a lightweight in the boxing arena – but, as you well know, it’s not always a throwaway match. Heavyweights, while powerful and visible, can be a little slow in the ring; and, lightweights, while not quite as potent at times, can be extremely agile and nimble.
If the comparison isn’t immediately apparent, the older ACT is the bulkier heavyweight, while cloud-based Zoho CRM is the lighter fighter. So, who wins this particular mismatched battle? Read on for the skinny on Zoho, as well as a ACT CRM review…
Round One: The Price
This battle won’t actually be quite as mismatched as I’ve led you to believe. Zoho CRM Professional Edition (PE) is very similar in price to ACT! Expert:
It costs $420 to board a single user on Zoho CRM PE for one year.
It costs $540 to board a single user on Act! CRM Expert for one year.
Not too much of a difference there at all, so this match is a tie!
The real differences are in the features of each product, though.
Round Two: Tracking the Sales
At the onset, both Zoho and ACT appear evenly matched, both providing a typical number of modules like Leads, Contacts, Accounts, Opportunities, Sales forecasts, and the ability to import data from old CRMs. The real difference is in what Zoho provides in addition, though, that Sage does not:
Competitor tracking
Sales quotas
Feeds
The first two are self-explanatory, but, feeds is a feature that turns your CRM into a social network of sorts, allowing members to track or follow certain activities or records in the CRM, adding comments as they see fit. This style of communication is advantageous because it’s in a format most modern tech-minded (or generally younger) workers are used to, and, comments can be traced back to specific events or records easily, making it a much easier communication solution than starting an email thread (or multiple threads).
That said, the winner of this round is Zoho.
Round Three: Integrating the Social Aspect
Having an online presence – especially in social media – is one of the most important things a business can do nowadays. Sage clearly recognizes this and equips ACT! Pro with all sorts of social media integration options: Facebook and LinkedIn, built-in tabs for both of those networks, and ways to monitor mentions of your company on those social media platforms. Zoho CRM PE, which only sports integrations to Twitter and Facebook, seems a bit behind in this aspect. For that reason, Sage wins the social media integration round.
Round Four: Automating your Marketing
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get your CRM to help you with your marketing? Indeed, you can. Many CRMs are equipped with marketing automation tools – but, as we’re finding out, not all of these tools are distributed equally. Zoho CRM comes with a variety of standard marketing automation tools: Available email templates, mass emailing ability, an email campaign manager (Zoho Campaigns), and, the ability to transfer web leads directly into your Zoho CRM. Sage, on the other hand, provides mass emailing and campaign tracking ability – and web-to-lead conversion, but at an increased price. Overall, Zoho wins this round, as it simply provides the user more marketing options, and at an ostensibly reduced price.
ACT CRM vs Zoho CRM BONUS ROUND: Inventory Management
For a bonus round (even a self-described one), this one is certainly no contest. In short, if you need a CRM with inventory management capability and you’ve narrowed your search down to ACT Expert and Zoho CRM PE, you should choose Zoho CRM PE.
Zoho CRM PE allows users to track and modify Sales Quotes, Sales Orders, Products, Price Books, Invoices, Vendors, and Purchase Orders – and, it comes with integrated order procurement and fulfillment capabilities.
ACT! Expert packs none of these features.
And, the winner of ACT CRM vs Zoho CRM is…
For the rounds we took into account, the clear winner seems to be Zoho CRM Professional Edition over ACT! Expert. However, it’s worth noting that you may want to do additional homework before making a final decision on a CRM. Paired with its lightweight quality, Zoho is unequivocally the cheaper option, but, that fact and this analysis don’t account for factors like customer support, Zoho consulting, or UI, which are quite subjective. In any case, we hope this has provided you the information you need to ultimately choose the CRM that best fits your unique business.
One more thing about ACT vs Zoho
A final thing to consider when comparing ACT and Zoho is that aside from Zoho’s dedicated apps for managing inventory, projects, and your books (Zoho Books, to be exact), Zoho offers even more functionality at only a fraction of the price of a single app, in some cases. This offering is called Zoho One, and it’s a collection of over 40 different Zoho applications, available for only $45/user/mo, or $37/user/mo when paid annually*. The only requirement to use Zoho One is that all of your W-2 employees use the suite. Obviously, this isn’t a good choice for all companies – but, it tends to help very many. *Pricing updated June 2021
Still not sure which direction to go in? We’ve helped many companies in your situation before. Contact us to get started, or keep reading for more helpful information.
Published on: January 26, 2015Category: Zoho Campaigns, Zoho CRMLast Updated: May 16, 2023 Comments: 0
Learn How to Create a Zoho Email Campaign
Mass email strategies w/ Zoho Campaigns
Sending out a mass Zoho email campaign with Zoho Campaigns looks like this in a 1-2-3 step process:
Prepare the campaign
Send the campaign
Evaluate the results
Experience shows that a little bit of planning ahead can greatly improve the results of your campaign. Also, setting some time aside to evaluate the results (which is very easy with the flood of statistics Zoho Campaigns provides) can help you optimize your campaign strategy.
The following scenario will assume that you are using Zoho CRM integrated with Zoho Campaigns.
Preparing the campaign
Zoho Campaigns needs a one-time setup when you first sign up:
Verify the sender email addresses
Do you have access to DNS records? This is required to verify the domain ownership, and avoid being marked spam
To have the right account settings, you also need to consider:
How many recipients per month?
How many emails (=campaigns) per month?
How many email variations (=template)?
Then for each campaign consider the following pre-flight checklist:
Who will be the SENDER of the emails?
Which contacts/leads will be the RECIPIENTS?
Who will provide the copy and the design for the campaign?
For an email campaign you will need:
The CONTENT – which can be created as free format HTML -or- by using a reusable template. You may build your own templates or simply use one of Zoho’s preexisting templates (reference below) from a library provided by Zoho.
The list of RECIPIENTS – this data comes from your Zoho CRM through the data sync. The synchronization between Zoho CRM and Zoho Campaigns happens in the background, automatically (after the one-time setup) pulling all of your Leads and Contacts to generate a list of emails to market to.
Sending the campaign
Once you have these ingredients, you then have to put on the finishing touches:
Designate the sender address (the person the Zoho email campaign will appear to be coming from)
The subject line – this is where brevity and relevance matters a lot and will have a significant impact on your open rates.
Have the content reviewed by Zoho – this is their security measure to prevent potentially objectionable content to be sent from their system.
Schedule your campaign to go off at the specified time.
A few tips for designing good a Zoho email campaign:
Have permission to send mass emails to your recipients or run the risk of being penalized for unwanted emails.
Be relevant – design your subject line and your content to speak to your audience, as they will open your email only if they find it interesting. Error on the side of simplicity, keep it short and to the point with your messaging.
Use a Call To Action – Your reader will think “I have read your email, now what?”… You want to explicitly tell them what action they should perform next after reading your email.
Evaluate the results
Zoho Campaigns offers a lot of statistical insights for your Zoho email campaign.
The key metrics you definitely want to monitor are:
Bounce rate – this tells you about the quality of your recipient list
Open rate – which measures whether your subject line was successful to capture the attention of your recipients (the sender’s account also has an impact on this)
Click through rate – which measures the appeal of your Call To Action
Obviously, the Unsubscribe rates should stay at a minimum, but it’s another stat to keep an eye on.
To sum it up, executing a successful email campaign through Zoho Campaigns will take time, testing and persistence. No campaign is ever perfectly executed the first time, but if you follow the steps mentioned above, you’ll surely be on your way to building a profitable Zoho email campaign strategy.
Do even more with Zoho Email Campaigns: Use the Zoho CRM Campaigns Module
Zoho Corporation has come out with a new update to the Zoho CRM Campaigns module that allows the user to do even more with email campaigns in Zoho. If using the Zoho Campaigns app isn’t quite your speed, or you just want something a little more streamlined, Zoho’s Campaigns module makes setting an email campaign straight from the CRM fairly straightforward. You can use related lists to send or exclude members from campaigns, check out fairly detailed analytics, and even set up something close to an autoresponder. You can read about this in more detail in this Zoho CRM Campaigns module blog post.
Ready to see even more about what Zoho can do for your business?
As always, we’d love to hear your opinion of the strategies expressed in this article. Please feel free to contact us if you’d like our team of Certified Zoho Experts to come by your side and help you build your Zoho Campaigns strategy and then train your team. It is our pleasure to offer services and support that meet your everyday Zoho needs.
Challenge: I can’t access my CRM on-the-go.
Challenge: I can’t access my CRM on-the-go.
