The 7 Best CRM Software for Marketing

We’ve researched, ranked, and rated the seven best marketing CRM systems for UK businesses. 

Marketing has never been particularly easy. Even the idea of it is almost crazy – sending unsolicited messages to people you don’t know, enticing them not only to open your email, but to read it, click it, and (hopefully!) end up making a purchase.

Nope, marketing has never been easy at all. Unless, that is, you’re using the right CRM software.

Even cheap CRM software enables you to target customers with campaigns tailored to their tastes and habits. You can create forms to capture leads on your website, and turn browsers into sales-ready leads. Better still, you’ll be able craft sequences of stunning emails, and send them in bulk to a custom audience – then monitor their performance to optimise future campaigns.

So, which marketing CRM is right for your business? Let’s find out.

Best marketing CRM for UK businesses

According to our research, the best CRM for marketing teams is HubSpot Marketing Hub. Making up the rest of the top seven are Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Freshworks CRM Marketing Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing, Zoho, SugarCRM’s Sugar Market, and monday CRM.

How did we decide, exactly? Jump to our methodology to find out.

1. HubSpot Marketing Hub

With full marks for features and a superlative 93% customer approval rating, HubSpot is our top CRM pick for marketing teams. Also registering strong help and support scores, HubSpot is only let down by its price point, which reaches a hefty maximum of £2,624.

HubSpot Marketing Hub for marketing teams: feature analysis

We investigated whether each supplier offers the five following features that are important for marketing CRMs, and how well it can do them.

Web forms? Yes.

Campaign design? Yes, on HubSpot’s Pro plan and above.

Batch email marketing? Yes, although the number of emails you’re permitted to send per day will be determined by the email server you’re using. Handily, HubSpot alerts you when you’re near your daily limit, allowing you to reschedule any overspill to a day when there’s less on.

Email tracking? This feature is available across all of HubSpot Marketing Hub’s plans.

Customer targeting? Yes.

To find out more about what these features do – and how they can benefit your business – jump to our section titled ‘How we rated the best marketing CRM software‘ below.

2. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement (formerly ‘Marketing Cloud’)

Though registering strong ratings across the board for features, customer approval, and help and support, Salesforce suffers from a complicated, expensive pricing structure that may exclude marketing teams with more modest budgets.

*Let’s talk pricing. There are many elements that make up the special case that is Salesforce’s marketing product. Each module is priced individually, so the total cost could, theoretically, be any combination of prices.

Basically, Salesforce is a system offering huge scope for your marketing team… but at an equally hefty price!

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement for marketing teams: feature analysis

Web forms? Yes.

Campaign design? Yes – all of Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s plans include a drag-and-drop email builder for marketing campaigns.

Batch email marketing? Yes, however, Salesforce limits you to 5,000 email sends per day, per account. It doesn’t exclude duplicate email addresses, either – so you’ll need to make sure your mailing lists are ‘clean’ before launching your next campaign, in order to avoid wasted sends.

Email tracking? You can activate tracking for emails across all of Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s plans.

Customer targeting? Yes.

3. Freshworks CRM

Starting at an accessible £39 per month, Freshmarketer (formerly Freshworks CRM Marketing Cloud) also boasts some of the finest help and support of all the marketing CRM systems we looked at. It sports the third-highest customer approval scores, too, though its more modest array of features prevents it from an assault on the top two.

Freshmarketer for marketing teams: feature analysis

Web forms? Yes.

Campaign design? A basic email builder is available with Freshworks CRM’s free version, though this grows to a more sophisticated drag-and-drop composer when you upgrade to the paid packages.

Batch email marketing? Yes. Though Gmail and Outlook cap your daily send totals at 300 emails, Freshworks CRM uses its own servers to deliver batches beyond those limits. How much you’re entitled to depends on the plan you select.

Email tracking? Available across all Freshworks CRM’s plans, but you’ll need Freshsales – Freshworks CRM’s tailored module for sales teams – to benefit.

If you know you’ll be requiring both sales and marketing features, though, you can opt for Freshworks CRM’s ‘Customer-for-Life Cloud‘. It combines the best of Freshworks CRM’s sales and marketing automation features with chat and telephony, combining everything your business needs into a single, convenient, and affordable package.

Customer targeting? Freshworks CRM Marketing Cloud offers this functionality, though the level of granularity with which you can target specific customers depends on how much you’re willing to spend.

Basic lists and segments are available with the Growth plan, allowing you to organise your audience based on email activity, contact fields, lists, and journeys.

The more pricey Pro plan, however, allows for more complex targeting. This feature leverages behavioural analysis, enabling you to target customers based on their movement throughout your site, such as cart abandonment.

4. Dynamics 365 for Marketing

Dynamics 365 registers middle-of-the-road scores across all of our metrics – so it’s fitting that it’s also smack bang in the centre of this list. Solid scores for features and help and support are matched by a good customer approval rating, though its fixed £1,192 price will be a bridge too far for many marketing departments.

* Reduced to $750 (£596) if you already use another Microsoft Dynamics product, and have a minimum of 10 users

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for marketing teams: feature analysis

Web forms? Yes – Dynamics 365 for Marketing also syncs with LinkedIn lead gen forms, allowing you to pull contact data straight into your CRM database, and easily measure the effectiveness of your LinkedIn campaigns.

Campaign design? Yes. Dynamics 365 enables you to build emails, campaigns, and landing pages with an intuitive drag-and-drop builder. 

Batch email marketing? Yes. Your email send limits are set monthly, and are capped at ten times your quota of marketing contacts (or 1,000 sends per month, if you’re on a trial).

Email tracking? Yes, Dynamics 365’s ‘Insights’ feature provides a detailed breakdown of your customers’ interactions with your emails, such as open rates and clicks.

Customer targeting? Yes, although you’re capped at 5,000 contacts per marketing segment.

Cloud-based vs on-premise… what’s the difference? Check out our guide to the best cloud-based CRM for small UK businesses to find out.

5. Zoho

It’s a familiar story for Zoho. Though it boasts an excellent rating for price (starting from just £10 per user, per month, it’s the cheapest on our list) Zoho’s features are a tad more simplistic than most of the other CRM systems here. That said, it’s easy to set up, and is still one of the most user-friendly pieces of software we’ve come across.

Zoho for marketing teams: feature analysis

Web forms? Yes; the higher the pricing tier, the more forms you can create.

Campaign design? Available on all of Zoho’s paid plans. In addition to this, Zoho has a separate campaign builder product (Zoho Campaigns). Pricing for this starts from as low as £5 (for 250 credits, on a pay-per-email basis), or is available on a yearly subscription for £43.20.

Batch email marketing? Available with all paid plans. Your daily send limit will depend on the plan you’ve selected:

• Standard: 250 sends per day
• Professional: 500 per day
• Enterprise: 1,000 per day

Zoho’s Enterprise and Unlimited editions also enable you to set up auto-replies to your batch emails.

Email tracking? Yes, on all plans.

Customer targeting? Yes.

6. Sugar Market

Sugar Market offers a wealth of features, including analytics and marketing automation functionality that ranks among the industry’s best. It’d almost certainly be higher up our list, if not for an indifferent customer approval rating, lacklustre customer support, and opaque pricing.

Sugar Market for marketing teams: feature analysis

Web forms? Yes.

Campaign design? Yes.

Batch email marketing? Email sends are supported, though your daily send limits will be determined by your email server.

Email tracking? Yes, using a separate email tracker module, which works like a plugin.

Customer targeting? Yes.

7. monday CRM

Though suffering from a dearth of features, average customer approval ratings, and less-than-stellar help and support, monday CRM is the joint-most affordable (with Zoho) system we have come across. As a gateway to the bigger, more powerful marketing CRM providers, monday CRM is a great entry point into the CRM space.

monday CRM for marketing teams: feature analysis

Web forms? Yes.

Campaign design? No – monday CRM offers campaign tracking only.

Batch email marketing? monday CRM integrates with email platforms such as Gmail and Outlook to enable batch email sends. However, it doesn’t offer this feature in-house. Any batch send limits will thus be determined by the email service provider you choose to integrate the CRM with.

Email tracking? No.

Customer targeting? No.

How we rated the best marketing CRM providers

To rate each CRM supplier on its effectiveness for marketing teams specifically, we extended our explorations to include five key features that a good marketing CRM system has got to do well. This included honing in on functions for marketing teams only – we’ve looked at CRM for sales teams, and the best customer service CRM in separate pages.

So, in addition to the basics (customer support, price, contact limit, and whether there’s a free trial), each marketing CRM software below is ranked per its ability to perform each of the following crucial functions:

• Web forms
• Campaign design
• Batch email marketing
• Email tracking
• Customer targeting

Web forms

You can have the best-looking website in the world – but if it’s not turning your site’s visitors into potential customers, it’s not reaching its full potential. 

That’s where web forms come in. With the right marketing CRM software, you can create and embed a lead capture form into your website. By collecting the name, number, and other demographic details from your website’s users – and sending them straight to your CRM – web forms empower you to turn your website’s traffic into potential deals. 

Campaign design

Whether you’re designing a one-off email to capitalise on Black Friday or a drip campaign to build your brand, it’s crucial that your marketing looks good.

With a marketing CRM tool, you can build emails that echo your business’ values, with powerful CTAs and an engaging design. And it’s easy – most marketing CRM software runs on simple drag-and-drop functionality. 

You don’t need an eye for design, either – most CRM software for email marketing provides a range of highly customisable email templates to get you started.

Batch email marketing

CRM software is all about optimising your marketing team’s processes – reaching more customers in less time, with the most effective messages.

And batch email marketing is a good example of this at its finest – after designing your emails, you can send them en masse, to a specific list of prospective customers. 

Email tracking

Of course, it’s not just about sending emails out into the ether and forgetting about them. To grow your business, you need to know how effective your email marketing campaigns have been; that is, how many people are opening, reading, and clicking your emails. 

There’s a few ways in which you can do this, but using marketing CRM software is by far the most straightforward.

Plus, when you use a CRM system to track your sent emails, you can monitor exactly which parts of your messages are getting the most engagement from recipients. Which CTAs (calls to action) are most enticing? Which images scream “CLICK ME!”? Which subject lines do your customers struggle to resist?

Customer targeting

At its most basic level, marketing CRM software acts as a contact database.

As well as providing a safe place for your customers’ names, occupations, and contact details, a CRM system can store a whole range of important client info – which you can use to create smarter, more tailored marketing campaigns, and produce more effective results.

With the right marketing CRM, you can target customers by:

• Their buying preferences, including previous orders and total spend
• The nature of their previous visits to your website, or interaction with your brand
• Demographic information, such as age and gender

Lapsed customers? Re-engage them with a deal or a discount that’s too good to turn down. New customers? Let them know you care, by personalising an email with their name in the subject line. Marketing a product for women only? Filter out the men in your email list to ensure you’re not wasting precious email sends on the wrong audience.

Our Methodology: How We Rank CRM Systems for Marketing

Next steps

Which marketing CRM software provider is best for your business? Let’s recap. 

Small teams are well-catered to by low-cost options such as Zoho, Freshworks CRM Marketing Cloud, and monday CRM.

Sugar Market, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement, and Dynamics 365 for Marketing are all designed for medium-sized to large enterprises that have more complex marketing requirements.

And of course, there’s HubSpot Marketing Hub, which we recommend for everyone.

As we said at the beginning, marketing isn’t easy – and neither is picking the right marketing CRM supplier. You have to balance the level of features your team requires, while keeping within the constraints of your budget, and ensuring you’ll get the top-class help and support you deserve.

Basically, you’ll need to compare quotes from multiple CRM providers to get the best deal. And, thanks to our free quote-finding service, this part is easy.

Simply provide us with some details about your business, answering three straightforward questions about your team, requirements, and the type of marketing CRM software you’re looking to implement. 

You’ll then be contacted directly with tailored quotes from several of the industry’s leading marketing CRM providers, providing you with all the info you need to compare and contrast suppliers, at your fingertips.

It takes less than a minute, and is free for UK-based businesses.