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Consistent contact keeps sales prospects interested, customers engaged, and vendors happy. Given the variety and volume of contact data now collected by companies, however, consistent contact becomes challenging.
The solution? Contact management software. Here are 14 tools to help your sales, marketing, and service teams stay in touch.
Keep reading to learn more, or jump ahead to the section you’re looking for:
- What is contact management software?
- Contact Management Software vs. Customer Relationship Management System
- Benefits of Contact Management Software
- 14 Contact Management Software Tools to Try
What is contact management?
Contact management is the process of collecting, storing, organizing, and managing contact data. This data comes from customers, leads, and other business connections.
Efficient contact management helps businesses effectively use their contacts. It enables personalized communication, better customer service, and improved sales opportunities.
What is contact management software?
Contact management software is a tool that offers businesses a central space to organize customer information.
“Contact management software” is a catch-all term for data management software.
This software lets you track prospect, customer, and vendor contact information. This can include data like:
- Addresses.
- Individual employees.
- Associated companies.
- Open quotes.
- Orders.
- Sales history.
It's a resource that can improve your sales efforts by simplifying communication and creating a single source of truth. Contact management software can also help streamline processes like outreach and lead qualification.
Contact Management Software vs. Customer Relationship Management System
Contact management software and customer relationship management (CRM) systems both handle data management and communication. But, CRMs can also help businesses manage sales, marketing, and customer service. A CRM can give a business a clear overview of the customer experience for advanced analysis, forecasting, reporting, and outreach.
In short, contact management software manages individual contact data, while a CRM system manages the full customer journey to drive business growth.
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The Case for Contact Management
For almost a decade, I worked in law enforcement. One of the most important lessons I learned early on was that consistent contact made my job much easier. Why? Because police work and customer service have a lot in common.
On a typical day, I might field questions from the public about traffic law, arrest processes, or follow-ups on existing cases. I might need to contact police members from other divisions or from specialized units, get in touch with witnesses for more information, or liaise with other agencies for assistance.
The result? A notebook full of names, phone numbers, addresses, and other details I needed to do my job. The challenge? Losing that notebook became the stuff of nightmares. Contact management software would have made my job much easier.
Thankfully, technology has evolved to fill the gap.
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Benefits of Contact Management Software
Key benefits of contact management software include.
You can do more with less.
Some businesses use spreadsheets to organize contact data or let employees have their own system for keeping contacts. Besides creating chaos and bottlenecks, this approach silos information. A central space for contact management can:
- Save your employees' time.
- Increase productivity.
- Give your team a more streamlined workflow.
It also enables you to add automation and other time-savers to your contact processes.
You can improve customer relationships.
Every conversation with every customer matters. A central source of customer data can make unique details available to the team members who need them. This helps your business meet expectations, nurture customer relationships, and personalize communication.
So, I've found that contact management software can improve the customer experience for greater satisfaction and loyalty.
You can enhance sales performance.
Contact management software often includes tools to:
- Manage sales leads.
- Keep track of sales activities.
- Analyze sales performance.
These tools can help your team find the best opportunities and use data to improve the sales process. These improvements can lead to higher win rates, shorter sales cycles, and better sales performance.
According to HubSpot’s State of Sales survey, 34% of sales teams say the biggest benefit of these tools is tracking leads, while 28% highlight improved customer retention.
You can enable team collaboration.
A central platform for contact details keeps customers from getting passed from department to department when they have a problem to solve. It makes it easier for teams to share the work it takes to keep your customers happy.
Improved collaboration means better results for your customers and your business. Check out this guide for more tips on how you can make the most of your contact management software.
14 Contact Management Software Tools to Try
Best Contact Management Software for Small Business
- HubSpot
- BIGContacts
- Nextiva Customer Relationship Suite
- Jotform
- ActiveCampaign
- Freshworks
- Moosend
- Keap
1. HubSpot
Price: Free forever
Get HubSpot's Completely Free CRM
HubSpot‘s free CRM is a contact management tool, plus so much more. You’ll never have to manually add or update contact records — HubSpot will take care of that for you after every interaction you have with a contact. Plus, contact records are enriched automatically with data from over 20 million businesses.
The CRM and contact management system is easy to get started with, use, and navigate.
In addition to contact management, other notable features include:
- Pipeline management.
- Reporting dashboards.
- Company insights.
- Deal tracking.
- Email tracking and notifications.
- Prospect tracking.
- Meeting scheduling.
- Live chat.
The CRM is entirely free forever, but you can upgrade at any time to a paid plan for more features as your business scales.
Useful customer feedback: “Managing hundreds and thousands of contacts is next to impossible without a CRM, and HubSpot makes the job very easy with all the automation and reporting available. It's perfect for organizing and transmitting all sales materials…”
What I liked: Sure, I’m biased because this piece lives on the HubSpot blog — but that doesn’t change the fact that HubSpot is a stand-out CRM with great contact management features.
The biggest benefit for businesses is the automation that comes standard with HubSpot. While it’s great to have a contact management tool that lets you input relevant customer, lead, and vendor data, it’s even better to have one that does it automatically, letting you focus on the next task at hand.
2. BIGContacts
Price: Free plan and plans starting at $9.99 per month for 1000 contacts
BIGContacts CRM simplifies contact management to help small businesses build customer relationships. The tool offers a detailed view of contact records, including their phone numbers, location, emails, previous touches, transaction history, notes, and upcoming interactions.
You can store extra information under custom fields as well. Then, use these comprehensive contact records to personalize various outreach communications and campaigns.
BIGContacts allows you to capture data from web forms automatically, eliminating manual effort and potential errors. The platform brings contacts and tasks to one place, making it easy to stay updated with upcoming activities.
The contact management CRM provides the functionality to tag and sort contacts through static and dynamic contact lists to improve segmentation.
The tool integrates with several business applications, such as accounting, analytics, and marketing software. This makes it easier to manage everything related to your contacts from a single platform. BIGContacts also provides remote access, allowing you to keep tabs on your contacts from anywhere.
Useful customer feedback: “Adjusting to working with the software is very easy. Users can share information and view each other’s activities related to certain job tasks.”
What I liked: I like free things. You like free things. We all like free things. BIGContacts offers a “Forever Free” account that includes contact management and marketing campaigns for up to 100 contacts per month. Need more? It’s $9.99 per month for 1,000 contacts and additional features.
Speaking of features, I’m a big fan of BIGContacts import spreadsheets option and their automated follow-up tasks, both of which reduce the amount of manual effort required of sales and marketing teams.
3. Contact Boss
Price: Plans starting from $10 per user per month
Contact Boss is a CRM solution for small businesses. The name makes it clear: Contact Boss is all about helping businesses effectively manage their contacts. Features include legacy data transfer of existing contacts into Contact Boss’ cloud-based CRM solution, along with the ability to create contact reminders and quickly search for contact information.
Not sure if Contact Boss is for you? Start with a one-month free trial and see if it’s a good fit.
Useful customer feedback: The best thing about CRM Database Manager is how easily we can manage visitor and call logs, plus the flexibility the product offers is amazing.
What I liked: Creating contacts was — as you’d expect — easy with Contact Boss. What I really liked was the ability to either create a contact from scratch by inputting all relevant data or use the “Quick Create” to fill in key details and then update contact info as time permits.
4. Jotform
Price: Free, and plans starting at $34 per month; custom pricing is available for Enterprise
Experience the power of Jotform, an exceptional online application that empowers you to create and manage custom online forms for any occasion. The intuitive drag-and-drop user interface, combined with a no-code building tool, enables you to design forms, build apps, collect e-signatures, generate reports, and efficiently manage form data.
Enhance your workflow with Jotform's vast platform, offering hundreds of valuable tools and widgets for seamless integration with various applications. Connect with CRM, project management tools, payment processors, analytics tools, and more.
Jotform Enterprise is a versatile and powerful solution that elevates your company's productivity and efficiency.
What I liked: Forms are a great way to capture targeted customer data. JotForm lets you easily build your own forms so you can capture exactly the data you want, the way you want it. This means less time spent combing through data for relevant information — since you make the form, you can make sure it’s capturing exactly what you need.
5. ActiveCampaign
Price: Plans starting at $26 per mo.
ActiveCampaign is a customer experience automation platform with a range of contact management features and capabilities.
ActiveCampaign pairs its contact management capabilities with your customer lifecycle.
The process begins with reaching and engaging your audience, then nurturing and educating them, followed by converting and closing them, and lastly, supporting their growth. To begin the process of contact management, the tool will have you create a contact list.
From there, simply add existing email contacts and then organize your contacts by list, tag, or custom field.
ActiveCampaign will prompt you to build segments for your customers to allow you to target and personalize content for them. This contact management solution will help you segment based on communications like emails and forms, too. Then, it'll identify and pull out behavioral actions that will teach you more about customers in those segments.
ActiveCampaign also provides case studies. This can help you learn about the ways that other companies like yours are using the software's contact management tools and how they segment their customers.
Useful customer feedback: “With ActiveCampaign…you can schedule appointments, add notes to contacts, and send them direct messages. To improve the overall user experience, you can send personalized messages to your website users.”
What I liked: It’s no easy task for your sales teams to find qualified leads and close deals. What stood out to me about ActiveCampaign was its use of intelligent automation to streamline the contact capture process.
For example, if a contact visits your webpage, the tool automatically updates their status to “Interested.” If potential spend meets or exceeds the value you set, a task is automatically created to call the customer. If not, automatic leading nurturing is implemented to help engage potential buyers.
6. Freshworks
Price: CRM plans starting at $9 per user a month
Freshworks is a CRM and contact management system that helps you manage and nurture your contacts to create strong and lasting relationships with them. It automates contact data entry for you and provides 360-degree views of individual customers.
Freshworks tracks sales activities, manages sales tasks and appointments, and allows you to place calls or send emails without having to leave the tool. You can integrate with Google Workspace to access Gmail, Google Docs, Google Drive, and more, all from Freshworks.
Useful customer feedback: “Users can efficiently manage their contacts, track interactions, and maintain a comprehensive view of customer details, such as email conversations, phone calls, and social media interactions.”
What I liked: Freshworks doesn't just work to improve your contract management — it does so in a way that makes this data easier to track, view, and manage. Drag-and-drop cards combined with clean sign-board interfaces make it easy to see what’s been done, what needs doing, and who’s doing what.
7. Moosend
Price: Plans starting at $9 per month
Moosend is an email marketing automation platform with advanced audience management features to keep your contacts organized. Moosend’s CRM capabilities will let you easily manage your contacts through the contacts dashboard, monitoring who is active and who bounced to optimize your strategy.
The platform’s advanced segmentation capabilities help you collect in-depth customer data. And you can easily tag your subscribers based on different criteria and information to create tailored content.
For example, Moosend’s custom fields personalize your subject lines and content based on your customers’ names, birthdays, locations, and more.
Moosend’s lead generation tools will also help you expand your mailing lists by converting newsletter sign-up forms and landing pages. You can automate your contact management through marketing automation by creating specific automated workflows that will keep your list clean and engaged based on user actions.
Useful customer feedback: “This platform targets the required audience itself. This platform allows users to schedule different campaigns. It is quite a useful feature because the user does not have to remember the time and date for starting them.”
What I liked: It’s worth mentioning that the Moosend logo is a cow with an envelope in its mouth. What’s not to like about that?
Thankfully, that’s not the only great thing about Moosend. This contact management tool stands out in the ability to see data about all of your contacts simultaneously and filter data based on custom criteria.
8. Keap
Price: Plans starting at $159 per month
Keap is a CRM and sales and marketing platform with a client management solution for small businesses. The platform offers a central location for client activity and communications. Plus, the tool automates follow-ups, contact record creation, and contact record updates for you.
You can also quickly personalize communications with contacts (such as forms, emails, and sales follow-ups) using the contact data that's stored in Keap.
Integrate Keap with Gmail or Outlook, so all your email interactions are automatically updated in the associated contact's record. There is also a wide variety of other business tools and software you can integrate with Keap. All your data is up-to-date and accessible from a single location.
Useful customer feedback: “Keap became much easier to use as we got to know the right ways of doing things starting from tag naming conventions, right ways of using Goals, Campaign links, etc.”
What I liked: Keap lets you keep everything in one place but doesn’t restrict where your contact information comes from. Data can be automatically collected from custom-built lead forms, landing pages, or social media campaigns.
Plus, contact pages aren’t static. You can take quick actions directly from records either on Keap desktop or the mobile app.
9. Bigin
Price: Free and paid plans starting at $7 per user a month
The value of Bigin is in its simplicity — it's easy to operate without sacrificing power or functionality. It allows you to manage your contacts with a comprehensive view of any communication you have with those people.
Emails, tasks, and notes specific to your individual contacts are all accounted for and easy to access. It also features tools that help you apply the information gathered during those communications to your sales efforts.
The most basic version of the platform is free to use and can accommodate 500 contacts for an individual user. That plan is ideal for small businesses, startups, and freelancers. Meanwhile, Bigin's paid subscriptions offer more flexibility and features.
Useful customer feedback: "We use Bigin to completely manage the contacts of clients, which makes it effective when we want to make some communications with them. Furthermore, Bigin makes workflow management more effective, after identifying the business opportunities for growth."
What I liked: Bigin has a simple philosophy. The best way to use spreadsheets for contact management is not using them at all. It’s both clever and correct — while spreadsheets are great for static data, they’re a poor choice for managing customer contacts.
Bigin offers a lightweight contact management solution that’s cost-effective, works on any platform, and easily integrates with more than 5,000 apps.
10. Bitrix24
Price: Free and paid plans starting at $49 per month
Bitrix24‘s contact management software’s suite of features offers standard contact management resources, including a centralized database for collecting and tracking prospect and customer contact information.
The tool also automatically logs and records all phone calls reps place or receive. The same goes for email communications — if you sync your email address with the platform, your entire history of email exchanges will be stored in your Bitrix24 contact manager.
If you‘re interested in a free solution with functionality that generally isn’t available with standard contact management software, Bitrix24 may be worth considering. As your business grows and you want more out of your contact manager, Bitrix24's paid plans can accommodate your needs at reasonable price points.
Useful customer feedback: “We needed a system that allowed for unified communication, contact tracking, document management, and office setup. Bitrix24 allowed us to get up and running quickly.”
What I liked: Bitrix24 is all about AI-powered CRM. This isn’t the kind of AI that sounds great on paper but doesn't really deliver.
Instead, it’s the functional kind of AI that lets you capture contact information from websites, forms, live chats, calls, or social messages and automatically add them to your CRM. Plus, you can create customized triggers based on contact actions that help you keep in touch.
11. Streak
Price: Free and paid plans starting at $49 per user a month
Streak's contact management tools can be integrated into your Gmail inbox, working alongside all other Google Workspace applications. The software also allows you to both maintain and share a timeline of customer contacts and communications. This can include data about email records, call logs, files, notes, and tasks.
Streak offers custom views of your sales pipeline. You can search, filter, group, and sort your contact data in any configuration, save those results in custom views, and share that data with your team.
Streak is an accessible software, designed to easily integrate with your Google applications. It's free for personal use, but there are also paid professional and enterprise-level plans.
Useful customer feedback: “Some additional features worth mentioning are that you can track the openings of the emails shared, associations of specific contacts with specific deals, and best of all, setting up the pipeline as you wish.”
What I liked: Streak integration with Gmail makes data capture easy, but in the contact management space, that’s par for the course. Where Streak really stands out is Streak AI, its “ultimate CRM co-pilot.”
With Streak AI, you get automatic data entry, custom email creation, and the ability to get answers using plain-language questions. No more talking like a robot — just ask, and Streak AI will answer.
12. Pipedrive
Price: Plans starting from $14.90 per user a month
Pipedrive CRM is decidedly sales-oriented, and its contact management resources reflect that. The contact management features are meant to enable hard sales with data and automation. They add a new degree of insight and intelligence to a company’s sales efforts by gathering smart contact data and automatically pre-qualifying leads.
The platform includes tools that can retrieve web data about your contacts from online sources like LinkedIn. Using this information, the platform can give you insight into the viability of pursuing the leads you gather.
Useful customer feedback: “The UX/UI is simple. I repeat, it is simple and perfect for sales guys. The deal view and the contact/company views are just simple and easy to work with. Anyone can just customize or add new fields if required.”
What I liked: Customization is central to Pipedrive. Instead of being forced to use pre-built CRM and contact templates, Pipedrive lets you build custom views that give you snapshots of relevant customer data on-demand.
13. Nimble
Price: Plans starting at $24.90 per user a month
Nimble CRM’s contact management features allow you to access all your contacts — across any mobile, cloud-based, or desktop records — in a single relationship manager.
Nimble’s prospecting tool automatically displays all contact information and company details for prospects and customers, including all emails, social interactions, messages, notes, and calendar events you may have exchanged with them.
The platform works seamlessly with Google Workspace and Office365 and features over 100 app integrations. It’s a powerful, versatile tool for keeping tabs on your contacts, how you reach them, and how they might fit into your overall sales efforts.
Useful customer feedback: “The system is organized, and you don't tend to get lost in the small details with contacts. The ease of use and the possibility of linking more than one company to one person is a great advantage. It is flexible and easy to configure.”
What I liked: Nimble lets you create contact records from anywhere. This could be your email inbox, your LinkedIn profile, your website forms, or anywhere else on the web.
Even better? It “automagically” creates a contact list that uses your existing contact list as a starting point and builds out this base with social and business data.
14. Nutshell
Price: Plans starting at $16 per user a month
Nutshell acts as a central repository for all your company’s customer knowledge and data. It's a single location for you and your team to store and reference contact details, call notes, and email conversations with customers.
The tool's contact management infrastructure — paired with its powerful sales automation tools — can help you streamline your sales process and easily qualify leads.
Nutshell also integrates seamlessly with applications like Slack and Google Workspace and is designed to suit the needs of businesses of every size.
Useful customer feedback: “Nutshell's functionality, support, and cost made it an easy and smart choice. Reminders for follow-up are well designed and can be set according to your cadence, making it easy to keep track of your contacts.”
What I liked: In a nutshell, Nutshell helps you find the contact data you need, when you need it. No more searching through records just to discover the data you have isn’t up-to-date. Instead, Nutshell always gives you the most recent data for every person and every business your teams interact with.
Cultivating Consistent Contact
Consistent contact helps prioritize prospects, engage customers, and keep vendors happy. Given the volume of contact data now collected and used by companies, however, manual processes simply can’t keep pace.
Contact management tools provide easy access to essential contact data, letting companies focus on what matters: Building reciprocal relationships.
Ready to cultivate consistent contact? Try out the tools above and find your best fit.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in February 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness. This article was written by a human, but our team uses AI in our editorial process. Check out our full disclosure to learn more about how we use AI.
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