Do any tools exist to combine template based transactional email with CRM?

Question

I am between a rock a hard place right now with a decision relating to CRM capabilities and general email marketing for our company. We have simply used very basic (think Gmail contacts, outlook, excel spreadhsheets) customer relationship management tracking to date but have some ambitious sales goals ahead and want to get serious about our methods. We currently use Google Apps for our email provider and I have done some research into most of the big names in the CRM game (that have links with Google Apps Marketplace) and think I have at least narrowed down our choices to the following:

• Zoho
• Insightly
• Pipedrive
• Nutshell
• SalesForce

All have their benefits and we aren't quite sure which will choose so far but pricing is certainly a factor as we are a small company. Unfortunately, our sales people can be a bit thick-headed at times and fail to follow instructions. Our goal is this:

1. Create an HTML formatted email with some basic customizable fields (name, email, small text clip)
2. Sales person can enter the name of the contact they are trying to reach out to (ideally this is a contact already entered in one of the CRM systems mentioned before) along with the custom message field included in each email.
3. Once the system recognizes it is a new lead email (doesn't have to be automatic, manual selection is fine), it will pull the HTML email content, populate with the fields entered or selected and send off to the prospect.

I want to make sure the client cannot modify the template content in anyway. I know I could accomplish this by setting up a web-form on any of our existing sites for our agents and allow them to enter the information then send through a transaction email API (we currently use Mandrill but SendGrid/Mailjet/etc would all work) but looking for something with tighter integration with a CRM and something that goes ahead and forces our sales reps to enter the contact in before sending a blank canvas email.

I have looked at something like Yesware but I would prefer the email origination comes from the CRM because it does not look like I can mandate the email used the "new prospect template" from such a tool.

Are there any tools which can accomplish this currently?

Answer 1

You missed on of the strongest CRM's to integrate with Google Apps: Solve360

It has email template features: http://goo.gl/2zioR

We have worked with deployments of Salesforce, Insightly and Solve360 and done evaluation on a number of other packages.

Salesforce can be made to do anything. Highly customizable it is the gold standard... meaning it has all the features and costs a lot of gold. Love working with it but many smaller companies find it too expensive.

Insightly is very inexpensive and does the core functions many smaller businesses want -- at a low price. Integrates nicely with Google Apps. Has an API so you can build the system you want.

As a company, we use Solve360 because of its integration with Google Apps and our other apps: FreshBooks (invoicing), Zendesk (help desk management) and MailChimp (e-mail marketing). Each contact (person or company) can be linked to a FreshBooks and/or Zendesk account so all the invoices, estimates and tickets will show up in the contact's history. MailChimp integration is better... it matches email addresses and records campaign history directly in each contact.

Answer 2

So you forget the most incredible CRM System: Microsoft CRM Dynamics :D . I think if you gonna choose a CRM System you have to think in future you want extend the default behavior. So which language you or your team or any partner like play? .NET choose Dynamics CRM, if is APEX choose Salesforce, or PHP choose vtiger or sugarcrm. Hope this helps and not confuse more.