10 Best CRM Solutions for Freelance Writers in 2021

How to manage multiple clients without sacrificing customer service

What is your writing business’s most valuable asset? Typically, for freelance writers, the biggest asset is our clients. However, building and maintaining strong relationships with those who hire you is more complicated than it seems. As your business grows, you may need help managing multiple clients. That’s where customer relationship management (CRM) systems come in handy.

CRM software is essential to properly nurture the relationship with your clients. With a CRM, it’s possible to gather and organize your data in one place — things like emails, phone numbers, webpages, and purchase history. Read on to learn how the best CRM for freelance writers can be a tool for your business’s success.

What Is a CRM?

CRM stands for customer relationship management. These systems can automate processes and facilitate business tasks like data analysis, team integration, and strategy. With all the information about leads centralized in one place, you can boost sales and strengthen relationships with your clients.

A reliable CRM can optimize your operations, giving you more time for complex activities that generate greater results. These tools can help you manage processes, track metrics, and analyze your sales funnel. You can also use simple features like chats and task assignments.

The benefits of using a CRM are endless, as they can help you with these processes:

• Setting your sales goals
• Finding new clients
• Analyzing your clients’ preferences and behaviors
• Managing emails and phone numbers
• Evaluating your weekly, monthly, or yearly results
• Defining your buyer persona (AKA, the perfect client for your business)
• Tracking all relationships on a single platform
• Following-up communication with valuable email marketing strategies
• Creating alerts and reminders to return calls, send messages, or compile quotes
• Monitoring after-sales and customers’ opinions regarding this stage of service

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The Best CRMs for Freelancers

CRMs are a great tool to have when running a small writing business, just as they can help an experienced freelance writer with many clients. Check out some of the best CRMs for freelance writers:

1. HubSpot

HubSpot is a well-known CRM software and definitely a marketing giant, with 100,000 customers in 120 countries. It’s known for offering tons of solutions for businesses of all sizes. HubSpot marketing tools for freelance writers are powerful, and many of them are available for free.

This platform helps you organize, track, acquire leads, and monitor your tasks in an easy-to-use dashboard. HubSpot CRM tracks customer interactions automatically, whether by email, social media, or phone calls. It also offers real-time notifications about your leads’ behaviors.

You can integrate Hubspot with popular apps like Salesforce, Shopify, and Google Suite. HubSpot also gives its customers access to educational resources. Beginning marketers can learn the latest best practices via blog posts, ebooks, guides, certifications, and free courses.

The free plan from Hubspot includes many useful features like unlimited contacts, notes, scheduling tasks, integration with Gmail, CRM app for mobile, chatbots, and more. You can use these powerful features to manage relationships with dozens of clients for your writing business. To experience HubSpot’s full potential, get the Starter Plan for $45/month or $540/year.

2. Salesforce

Salesforce is another exceptional CRM for freelance writers, with solutions for large corporations, as well as small businesses. Like HubSpot, Salesforce provides helpful guides to get you started in the world of CRMs.

The Salesforce platform is quite easy to use, as it was designed to solve the most common problems of business owners. It can be particularly beneficial for those in finance, healthcare, communications, media, retail, and non-profit businesses.

Its system is based on the cloud — that is, you can access Salesforce from any PC or smartphone (Android or iOS). To support its strong features, Salesforce has some of the best customer service on the market. They offer quick initial setup, easy customization, contact management tools, lead generation, and reports.

You can purchase Salesforce for $25/month per user (billed annually) and access a 14-day free trial to get started.

3. Insightly

Insightly helps you categorize all your clients’ information to personalize your offers and close more deals. The platform’s features are designed around the belief that today’s clients prefer closer relationships. With Insightly’s tools, you can connect with your clients by delivering exactly what they want.

This platform includes the basic functions of a CRM, presenting them in a friendly and easy-to-understand way. It is intuitive and useful, providing a wide range of features and various integrations with popular apps for writers like Mailchimp, QuickBooks, Gmail, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, and Zapier.

The free plan allows you to create two users. But, if you need stronger functionalities, the Plus Plan costs $29/month (billed annually). Try out the 14-day trial to decide which plan suits your needs.

4. Zoho

Zoho is a terrific CRM for freelance writers due to its comprehensive platform. With Zoho, you can access features like phone calls, emails, online live chat, and control of your social media channels to nurture relationships with your clients. You can also easily track visitors to your website.

Make your CRM work for you by using Zoho Books for bookkeeping tasks or planning your projects with Zoho Projects. If you’re new to CRMs, Zoho Academy can train you on marketing best practices with lessons and downloadable materials.

Users can choose from a free edition or upgrade for $12 per month. Get started with a 15-day free trial to decide which plan is the best for you.

5. Bitrix24

Bitrix24 is a complete platform with several tools to increase your productivity as a freelance writer. You can replace multiple services with the Bitrix24 ecosystem, and you won’t miss any customer interactions. It has HD video conferences to contact your clients, and its website builder can help you promote your writing services — and it’s SEO-friendly!

Available in 18 languages, this CRM software has intranet functions and project management. With it, you can generate reports, track time, schedule and announce events, and message via private or group chats.

The free version of Bitrix24 allows you to add unlimited users, assign tasks, manage your internal communications, chat and host video calls, and utilize 5 GB of data storage. In case you need more advanced features, Bitrix24 has its Start+ Plan for $19/month. With it, you can add up to 20,000 leads and access 10 GB of storage.

6. SalesRabbit

SalesRabbit is a cloud-based CRM designed to help teams manage sales and generate leads at a low cost. With it, you can access multiple resources for your marketing education. Its webinars and other videos can help increase your knowledge of useful sales techniques that can help grow your business.

This platform has the necessary tools to manage your team of writers, improve their performance, and automate the sales process to save time. You can install SalesRabbit on Windows and iOS operating systems, as well as on your mobile device (iOS and Android). You can integrate many other CRMs with SalesRabbit, like Zoho, Hubspot, and Salesforce. That way, you can move your data to this tool quickly and accurately.

The Team Plan costs $22 per user per month (billed annually). To explore their plans before you buy, you can schedule a demo. If you need a feature-rich CRM for freelance writers, SalesRabbit is what you’re looking for.

7. Freshworks

Freshworks is a CRM focused on improving your relationship with clients and increasing your reach. It uses artificial intelligence to enhance features like email automation, lead management, lead scoring, and lead classification. This tool is like having a virtual assistant automating your work and optimizing your client management.

This program has hundreds of integrations to increase its effectiveness. It integrates with the most common apps for businesses like Google Calendar, Trello, HubSpot, Asana, Google Contacts, Facebook, Shopify, and Magento.

FreshWorks is free for up to 10 users, but with some limitations. If your business grows quickly, you can get the Growth Plan for $29 per user per month (billed annually). Enjoy its long trial period of 21 days to make sure you’re enjoying all the features.

8. Pipeline

Pipeline is a sales management tool that helps writers make their business processes more efficient. Its setup process is simple and the CRM system is fully customizable. You can manage your sales funnel, email integrations, goals, tasks, and projects easily.

With Pipeline, you can access great US-based customer support. If you don’t understand any of the features, you have unlimited calls, chat, and email support whenever you need them.

Pipeline offers over 100 integrations with different systems and apps. You can also customize your dashboard and organize the panels as you want, or even create your own catalogs of products linked to Pipeline.

This all-in-one CRM is great for freelance writers and small writing agencies. Each of its plans offers a 14-day free trial that you can try without a credit card. Then, check out the Pipeline basic plan at $25 per user per month (billed annually).

9. Less Annoying CRM

Less Annoying is a powerful CRM that specializes in small businesses. It provides everything you need to keep and nurture relationships with clients. And it only costs $15 per user per month after a free 30-day trial. No matter what you do or what you need, your subscription costs the same. That means there’s no need to analyze a complicated pricing structure.

This flexibility makes Less Annoying an ideal CRM for freelance writers. It will help you drive traffic and grow your small writing business because you can change the number of users at will without having to change your plan. For example, if you have a team of two writers to manage 10 clients, with Less Annoying, you won’t need to change plans if you need to hire two extra writers to accelerate your sales.

10. Agile CRM

Agile CRM is an all-in-one CRM solution that includes functions like sales automation, customer service, and marketing. It allows you to promote your business with newsletters, landing pages, web forms, web popups, and text messaging. Then, you can access its CRM analytics to monitor your progress.

This CRM also features a one-click call system and voicemail automation, facilitating your communication with potential clients. You can also automate the creation of meetings through an online calendar and control multiple integrations. All these functionalities will help you keep up with your clients and nurture more leads for your writing services.

Agile CRM has a free plan with limitations, but you can enjoy all of its features for just $8.99 per month. With its basic plan, you’ll get benefits such as email campaigns, web engagement analytics, form builder, landing page builder, marketing automation, social monitoring, and mobile marketing.

Engage Your Clients by Using the Right CRM

These powerful CRM solutions offer many real benefits for writers and writing agencies. They can help you gain insights to make better management decisions and reach more potential clients. In fact, when your clients’ data is analyzed in a CRM, you can better understand their behaviors and focus on meeting their needs.

Using a CRM can increase productivity in your writing business and save you time by automating tasks. Consider selecting two or three of your favorite CRMs from our list. Then, test them to decide which one works best for you.

Originally published at https://jenniferberube.com on March 3, 2021.