The Easiest Way to Organize Your Contacts

Twice a month, we’ll be featuring a success tool or resource we personally use in our business that may also help you.

One of the biggest challenges for small businesses (us included!) is finding a simple, yet full-featured contact management system.

I can’t begin to tell you how many different systems we’ve demo’d over the last couple of years.

The Criteria

For us, we had several core criteria and must-have features that had to be met. It needed to be:

• Web-Based: So we can access it from anywhere.
• Features: Calendar, task list, detailed info for contacts, groups, integrate with our website, multiple lead capture forms.
• Fast learning curve: I don’t know about you, but if I have to take a class on how to use my CRM, then it’s not simple enough.
• Affordable: If my CRM costs more than my web-hosting, then it’s not affordable.
• Integrate with Email Marketing

We looked at:

Oprius (clunky calendar & more than what we needed)
Act Online (too complicated)
Big Contacts (not enough features)
Salesforce (overkill for most small businesses)
HiRise (no calendar)
ContactMe (what we use)

The Winner

Calendar: I a visual person, so having a clean, easy to read calendar and overview of all my events and tasks simply was a must whether by day, week or month.

Contacts: I absolutely love the ContactMe buttons that integrate with our website. You can see it on the left-middle side of the screen. When a visitor clicks on that button, fills out the web form, they are automatically entered into the ContactMe system.

Email Marketing Integration: ContactMe integrates with MailChimp, our email marketing tool. I can easily import our newsletter subscribers into ContactMe as a group.

Simple to Learn: The dashboard is very intuitive, so we were fully-functioning with ContactMe really fast!

Very Affordable: After our 14 day trial, we went with the Biz Pro account, which at the time of this writing, is only $89 a year (paid annually). Some CRM’s we looked at charge $49 a month.

You can see a full list of features on this page: ContactMe Features

The Wish List

There are a couple of features that we wish the ContactMe system had, and we’ve submitted suggestions I hope they will implement.

Repeatable Tasks and Events: This really is a no-brainer and should be a standard feature. We’re hoping they implement it this year. We have a few repeatable events and tasks in our company and having a way to add repeatable events would make things so much simpler than having to manually add them each time.

Calendar Printing: While you can export your calendar to Google calendar, I want to be able to print a monthly calendar so I can take it with me for those times that I’m in a location without wi-fi.

14-Day Risk Free Trial

So, for us, ContactMe is a great option that we thought we’d share. If you’re searching for a simple contact management solution, ContactMe may be for your business. You can test it out for 14 days without having to enter any credit card information, so it’s definitely risk-free.

Get all the details and more info at: www.ContactMe.com

P.S. ContactMe does not have an affiliate program, so there is no monetary gain for us if you decide to use the service.