What does a customer relationship management or CRM solution for a business mean and what benefits does it bring? Well, aside from nurturing leads and having all your contacts in one place, a CRM will help you improve teamwork and collaboration, and accentuate your marketing efforts.
For a large enterprise with thousands of clients, hundreds of employees, and numerous deals in the pipeline, a CRM may require complex automation tools supporting multiple workflows, powerful analytics and integrations.
But for small company sizes, a great CRM should be simple, user-friendly, and scalable. BigContacts, shown below, is the perfect example of a powerful CRM and email marketing software tailored for small businesses to fully capture sales opportunities.
In this review, you’ll learn why BigContacts is one of the most effective contact management and email marketing solutions for small businesses available today.
Features of BigContacts
BigContacts is an effective web-based CRM in the areas of lead nurturing, contact management, team workflows, and email marketing automation. It is also a robust sales funnel software that is bound to improve your business performance.
Let’s dive deeper into each of the main features comprehensively.
Contacts Management
One of the best features of this CRM is its ability to capture contacts easily and keep contact flow organized through different sales stages, thus allowing better lead nurturing. The contacts tab has a wide variety of fields that can be customized. An example of the BigContacts dashboard with the contacts tab selected is shown below.
BigContacts performs squarely in terms of consolidating all your contacts in one place. Each contact field can be expanded to reveal a depth of other information including pending tasks, crucial items plus time frame, customer activity, and notes from previous meetings.
Email Marketing, Automation, and Lead nurturing
Besides contact management, BigContacts also offers email marketing functionality. If you are a SaaS/B2B, email automation goes hand-in-hand with your marketing plan for SaaS, especially in terms of lead nurturing. You can do this on BigContacts by sending personalized marketing emails, email tracking, auto-responding, or recurring emails.
From the screengrab above, you can see from the ‘Marketing’ tab that there are three campaigns that can be created. These are personalized emails, drip campaigns, and automated emails. There are templates for these different types of email campaigns.
If you’re reaching out to warm and hot leads, you can set up a drip campaign in BigContacts as shown in the next screengrab. Besides this, BigContacts provides webform templates that you can deploy to capture further leads.
Overall, the BigContacts email automation functionality allows you to do a wide variety of things. These include crafting custom emails, scheduling emails, and automating replies in your email editor.
Team Workflow Management, Scheduling, and Reporting
Workflow management is another core part of a CRM. While BigContacts isn’t designed for large firms that operate complex workflows, the app allows small teams to collaborate effectively thus improving team performance.
The most important team management features are sales pipeline tracking (shown in the next screengrab) and assigning tasks to team members. You can also view any upcoming activity easily and recurrent tasks from typical customers. Team members will instantly get notified of any incoming emails.
From the image, you can see a typical sales pipeline with different customizable fields. You can click on a lead and view more in-depth information about that particular deal, for example, the team members involved and the pipeline value.
You can also view task status and to-do items, including the assigned team member(s) and the urgency of the task. In the screengrab below, red indicates overdue tasks, green indicates tasks that are due on the day view, and black denotes future tasks.
With reporting, you can use advanced searches to generate custom reports based on the type of deal, the customer, or your preferences. The screenshot below shows some of the report types the feature can generate.
However, one of the features BigContacts is missing compared to other CRMs is advanced reporting visualization in terms of graphs and charts to complement its powerful sales reports.
Pricing of BigContacts
BigContacts is one of the most affordable CRMs out there for any small business looking for the right combination of features and power. The pricing plan scales from single-user at $5 per user per month to enterprise users who need a custom quote.
The most popular user tier is the “BIGGER” plan, priced at $15 per user per month. This offers benefits such as additional integrations and more powerful sales reporting features. However, typical users just starting their agency or business and who don’t need complex tools or the entire suite of a CRM such as Salesforce will find the $5 starter pack sufficient.
BigContacts: Pros and Cons
BigContacts performs robustly for a budget CRM and comes highly recommended for individuals or small agencies. However, every software has pros and cons which we’ve summarized.
Pros
BigContacts pricing and its robustness contribute significantly to its high ratings. But besides the two, here are a few other benefits to keep in mind:
- Easy learning curve with plenty of onboarding assistance, an extensive knowledge base, and helpdesk support.
- Intuitive UI which ensures exceptional user experience
- Customization of contact fields is easy.
- Adding custom data fields is easy and intuitive – you can also take notes, and enrich contact data by adding tags.
- Regular updates have fixed most of the bugs that hounded BigContacts initially.
- GDPR-compliant.
- Easy to create automatic email drips, and solid email tracking capabilities.
BigContacts offers API integrations such as Skype, MailChimp, and Google Calendar, with more integrations being added. Users of BigContacts have given an overall review of 4.3/5 on SoftwareAdvicbe.com with an overall positive customer experience.
Cons
Here are some limitations that users have experienced with BigContacts:
- Duplicate records are created when contacts are merged. The process to eliminate these duplicates is unclear.
- The search tool only recognizes exact search queries. For example, “Hills and Co,” and “hills and co.” are essentially different queries on BigContacts.
- The CRM lacks lead scoring features.
- Limited functionality on APIs and integrations.
- Small bugs occasionally hit the app. For example, deleting wrong email attachments within BigContacts is difficult.
- Little graphical visualization of the sales pipeline.
Overall, BigContacts’ pros outweigh the negatives, thus getting our thumbs-up.
In Closing
Having the right CRM is an essential part of your marketing and sales team optimizing customer relationships and growing revenues. For a small business that’s still scaling, BigContacts offers the right mix of features, ease-of-use, and pricing.
With BigContacts, you’ll get powerful contact management features and an intuitive dashboard that helps you quickly track opportunities. BigContacts will provide detailed task lists, coupled with powerful reports and other sales and marketing automation features. BigContacts is also priced effectively, with a single-user account with basic features offering a $5 starter package.
Overall, BigContacts is powerful but not too overwhelming. It offers the right mix of lead nurturing and marketing automation tools for a small business.
