WordPress CRM – Integration with Highrise, Salesforce, Wufoo and Gravity Forms

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a generic term for systems that help manage your interactions with customers. This might simply be a tool to help track leads, quotes and sales or it might extend to managing customer & prospect contact details and history.

WordPress websites can include contact/enquiry forms that form the initial point of contact for new leads. If you get more than a few leads, integrating WordPress with your CRM can really help streamline your processes.

There are lots of ways you can integrate CRM processes with your WordPress website. I’ve chosen to highlight in this article options that:

• are focussed on small business
• offer a simple approach without full bells & whistles automation
• work with standard WordPress

According to a popular paraphrase of an Albert Einstein quote, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” I wish CRM for small business was simpler.

Gravity Forms

The Gravity Forms plugin adds a form builder to your website that lets you create a wide variety of forms. These might include sales enquiries, quotation requests, event bookings or course sign ups.

When visitors to your site fill out forms, you get an email notification immediately, and the entry also gets stored in a database for you. You can review the list of entries, and add notes to each item. And you can quickly export them if you want to load them into a spreadsheet or other system.

You can integrate Gravity Forms with PayPal to have Buy Now or Subscribe facilities to go with your form.

Once a form is filled out, you can redirect visitors to a confirmation page. This confirmation page can be used in Google Analytics to track completed Goals, or in Google AdWords to track conversions.

Gravity Forms is exceptionally easy to use, your information is all stored in your own website database with no 3rd party systems required.

If you configure Yoast’s Gravity Forms add on plugin, you can track the referring website and, if the referrer is a search engine, the keywords that were used to find your site prior to the enquiry being completed.

If you want to use an email marketing tool, Gravity Forms has a plugin to enable integration with Campaign Monitor. So on your enquiry forms you can allow visitors to opt-in to your email lists, and their details will automatically be passed in to your Campaign Monitor account.

The strength of Gravity Forms is that it gives you so much flexibility to create new forms with all sorts of special fields (such as checkboxes, radio buttons and lists). Compared to other CRM systems, the entry tracking facilities are basic.

Gravity Forms is available free of charge to OM4 customers, or $39 for a single site license.

Check out Gravity Forms.

Video Overview
(skip to 3:45 if you just want to see the Manage Form Entries section)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqRjKT086Ao

Wufoo

Wufoo is a hosted form builder that lets you integrate forms into your WordPress website. When visitors fill out forms, they are stored in your Wufoo account, where you can act on them.

Wufoo integrates with PayPal and other payment systems so you can integrate payment buttons into your forms.

Like Gravity Forms, Wufoo allows you to redirect visitors after filling out a form to a confirmation page on your website, so you can integrate with Google Analytics and Google AdWords.

Free account (1 form) available, or $15/mth for up to 10 forms and $30/mth for many forms.

Check out Wufoo
And the WordPress Wufoo Integration plugin

Campaign Monitor

What is an email marketing system doing in a review a CRM solutions? Well, Campaign Monitor lets you create forms and collect enquiries from your website, recording not just email addresses (with opt-in permission) but also additional custom fields to record information such as contact details and business information.

The strengths of Campaign Monitor lie in the integration with your email marketing list. So if you do a lot of email marketing this could be a good option to explore.

But it doesn’t have the same form building features as Gravity Forms, or the contact features of Highrise. Which is probably why you can integrate Campaign Monitor with both of these systems.

Check out Campaign Monitor

You don’t really need a plugin to integrate WordPress with Campaign Monitor, as you can easily create a form and paste it in to a WordPress page or sidebar. If you are on a WordPress Multisite website, you’ll need to get the right privileges to be able to insert the code snippet as it incorporates a <form> tag.

Highrise CRM

Highrise is one of the world’s most popular CRM systems, from the folk at 37 Signals. Using the WP Highrise plugin allows you to connect your contact forms up to Highrise. Drop the Highrise shortcode into a page to use the Highrise contact form.

Highrise has a very basic free plan, and the paid plans start at $24/month.

The strength of Highrise is in its ease of use and email integration. You can use a Highrise dropbox email address to forward / cc emails, and the email gets filed against the correct person. Highrise tracks contacts, companies, cases and goals, and there are Highrise Apps that give access to your phone contacts on your iPhone or Blackberry.

While the Highrise shortcode is convenient, it does not have much flexibility in the type of fields you can use, and does not allow redirection to a confirmation page. There is however a Highrise extension available to Gravity Forms that allows you to use Gravity Forms to build all your forms, and then have them sent to your Highrise account.

Check out Highrise
And the WordPress Highrise Contact plugin

Salesforce CRM

Salesforce is another popular CRM system, better suited for larger small businesses or medium sized business. Use the Salesforce WordPress to Lead plugin to connect your website contact form up to Salesforce.

Drop the Salesforce shortcode into a page to use the Salesforce contact form. But like the basic Highrise integration, the Salesforce shortcode does not allow redirection to a confirmation page. If you are prepared to modify the plugin with some Javascript, it is possible to set up a redirect.

Basic Salesforce contact management costs $5/mth and entry level CRM costs $25/mth.

Check out Salesforce
And the Salesforce WordPress to Lead plugin and Yoast’s Salesforce Plugin intro

Other Systems

This is not an exhaustive list of CRM options for WordPress, let alone for small business. You may also check out addtional options mentioned in 8 WordPress CRM Solutions for Your Business or Nonprofit, or look at SugarCRM. If you think there are other good options that meet the criteria I’ve used for this article, let me know about them.

I haven’t included systems like RoloPress (replaces WordPress), WP-CRM (requires a special theme), vTiger (integration only for the technically minded) or WordPress CRM Plugin (no recent activity).