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Lead nurturing software are typically CRMs or marketing automation software that help sales and marketers attract, qualify, and engage leads to turn them into customers. The top software offer features like contact management, pipeline management, automated follow-ups, and drip marketing campaigns to guide prospects through the sales funnel and optimize conversion rates. To help you choose the right one for you, we’ve evaluated the best available options.
Here are the six best lead nurturing software:
Per our evaluation, Zoho CRM emerged as the best lead nurturing software, offering the best scoring the highest for core features and customization and tying for cost and third-party integrations. Read more to see each option’s key features, pricing plans, and primary use case, or skip down to learn how we scored each lead nurturing software across six categories.
Note: All per-user prices are with a one-year commitment unless noted otherwise.
Helps capture and nurture leads from multiple sources, such as email campaigns and websites.
Zoho CRM is sales software known for its multichannel marketing features that help generate and nurture leads. Its robust marketing integrations notify you when a lead engages with your social media, emails, or website, enabling you to respond immediately. You can identify leads who are most likely to convert using Zia AI, then build a relationship on their preferred platform, making Zoho CRM ideal for businesses that connect with leads via various online channels.
Although Zoho has robust core features and customization options, its user support isn’t top-notch. If you’re needing reliable customer service, try EngageBay, which won in this category.
Allows businesses to engage, attract, nurture, and close leads using robust automations.
Freshsales is our top-rated CRM that helps improve lead nurturing by tracking and engaging leads throughout the sales pipeline. Automate and personalize your lead outreach via email, phone calls, and SMS, or run targeted campaigns for idle leads with its sales sequence feature. Set up time-based automations to send promotion emails on specific days or customize your nurturing efforts based on your leads’ activities and interactions with your website via Freddy AI.
While Freshsales has powerful workflow automations, it lacks the advanced marketing features that other CRMs offer. If having a free plan with robust sales and marketing tools is important for your team, look into Zoho CRM.
Offers free sales and marketing tools to nurture leads with the ability to upgrade.
HubSpot CRM is our best free CRM offering marketing and sales software with robust contact management features. Qualify leads through calls, emails, and live chat, and set up chatbots to automatically ask website visitors discovery questions. Track which channels drive the highest engagement with built-in analytics so you can optimize pages, offers, ads, and traffic sources. Upgrade to paid tiers for advanced tools like predictive lead scoring and automatic lead rotation.
Even though HubSpot’s free plan is flush with sales and marketing tools, upgrading to higher tiers can be expensive, and you’ll need to pay more for additional users. For a robust free version with affordable paid tiers, try Zoho CRM, which won for features and tied for pricing.
Provides reliable after-sales guidance via 24/5 live reps, plus phone and email support.
EngageBay is all-in-one software for sales, marketing, and service that offers stellar customer support for salespeople and teams. It has great reviews from real users for having a responsive support team that you can talk to via 24/5 live chat, email, and phone. It also provides onboarding assistance to new users and has a comprehensive knowledge base with detailed documentation, tutorials, and FAQs so you can troubleshoot common issues.
While EngageBay has support solutions, you need to upgrade to more expensive tiers to get the best of its automation tools. If you’re looking for a CRM with robust sales at a lower price point, consider Freshsales.
Provides easy-to-use lead nurturing tools and a color-coded sales pipeline.
monday sales CRM is easy-to-use and customizable software offered by monday.com. It features unlimited custom pipelines, which you can manage simultaneously to visually track the leads in your sales process. Edit deal stages and add multiple columns using its colorful kanban-style boards, and share them with your team. You can use its sales pipeline templates to forecast revenue, generate insights, and learn where to focus your lead nurturing efforts.
While monday sales CRM has highly visual pipelines, it lacks AI-powered features for robust automation and customization. For user-friendly software packed with AI tools, check out Freshsales, which offers Freddy AI.
Helps you launch robust drip campaigns with top-of-the line marketing tools for email nurturing.
ActiveCampaign is a lead nurturing email marketing software with marketing automation in one interface. Businesses can run highly effective, targeted email campaigns using templates and segmentation, which trigger automated, personalized emails to nurture leads. The platform also comes with built-in A/B testing so users can see what’s working in their campaigns, so ActiveCampaign is great for companies that nurture their leads largely through email.
While ActiveCampaign is a great automation platform and offers basic CRM functionality, it lacks the advanced features that true CRMs have. If your team needs a fully featured option, try Zoho CRM, which is one of our top email marketing software.
The top CRMs for lead nurturing offer these core features:
Store, organize, and track your leads’ information in a centralized location so you and your sales team can access it anytime.
In our evaluation, we first identified the six weighted categories important to lead nurturing software and assigned each category key subcriteria. From there, we assigned each subcriteria a score out of five and summed them all together to give each option an overall score, including the identification of use cases. Take a look at our evaluation criteria below:
We first looked at each lead nurturing software’s core features, such as lead management, activity tracking, and CRM analytics, followed by their cost. Next, we looked into ease of use, customization, and third-party integrations. Customer support rounded out our scoring to ensure users have the information and help they need.
With this category, we considered features like account and contact management, lead tracking, sales and marketing automations, and other functionality central to effective lead nurturing.
We evaluated each software based on subscription plans and billing options, including whether it provides a free plan and/or a free trial across available tiers.
We looked at real user reviews on Capterra, TrustRadius, and G2 regarding each option’s usability and looked at how comprehensive their knowledge bases are.
We assessed whether each lead nurturing tool allows users to tailor and personalize features—like deal stages, reports, dashboards, and pipelines—to their needs.
We evaluated whether (and how well) each option interacts with other third-party apps for email campaigns, calendar syncing, and social media management.
We considered feedback from verified users on G2 and Capterra and whether each option provides support and after-sales service to users via phone, email, and live chat.
Lead nurturing is essentially customer relationship management, but businesses can’t afford to waste time focusing on the wrong leads. Lead nurturing software zeroes in on the right leads, then enables teams to engage their audience with tailored lead-to-customer journeys. The top six lead nurturing software help you drive potential customers through the sales funnel. To know more about converting leads into customers, read our article on lead nurturing.
Eze is a New Orleans-based writer, business software expert, and technologist holding a Master's Degree in communications. Apart from writing comparison guides, his multifaceted writing includes topics as wide-ranging as DevOps, cybersecurity, and more. He is a sports enthusiast who once considered a career in professional sports but says his talents never quite matched his ambitions.
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