I need a basic email based CRM for cold emailing...

outseta.com - Free for the first 250 customers

Hey Kevin,

Nice to meet you. I'm a Co-founder of Outseta (www.outseta.com). Our platform integrates CRM, subscription billing and management (just insert your Stripe secret key), and email marketing as well. You can create a free account to check it out for yourself here: https://www.outseta.com/get-started/. Or feel free to reach out to me directly any time at geoff(at)outseta.com. Goodluck!

Geoff

I have done the CRM search twice, with different requirements. The thing is that you almost need to have committed to using the CRM in order to understand it fully.

As an example, the CRM I use is Agile CRM. Its fine for us, but we keep hitting our limit on the number of campaigns or nodes within the campaigns that we can have on our plan. It was only after deciding on it and getting stuck in, that became apparent. I would still recommend it though.

I think its best to choose one that has enough flexibility and features for you to grow to use. Rather than choose one that has just the limited set that you need now.

And using a popular CRM has the benefit that other apps/wordpress plugins/ SaaS integrate with them out of the box. So later your Shopify store, or your Lead Pages page will seamlessly pop data into your CRM.

For those reasons I think something like HubSpot or Infusionsoft would be the best options.

Depends on the level of complexity you are looking for, I have a small SQLite database with customer information, I use Python+Jupyter notebooks to interface with the SQLite, with some functions defined to send e-mails using templates, etc. And since the e-mail volume is very small, it is comparable to yours, I use the e-mail of my hosting provider, Dreamhost. It took me no more than 1 hour to set it up in a convenient way and I am very satisfied.

For larger e-mail volumes, I would suggest you to use Amazon SES. It is a breeze to setup, the only thing that takes longer (around 3 working days) is to get the approval for sending real e-mails to customers and not just test e-mails to yourself.

https://app.startinfinity.com is quite good to keep track on sale funnels.

I would recommend sendgrid for sending the actual emails. I really like their dashboard and their editor.

I just did a search for CRMs and Capterra has over 650 results. I didn't look at features or pricing but that's sure a lot of options.

I wish I could offer some experience but I've never used one. I just released a "Contacts" web app this week. It has a "Notes" input. If that's all you really need to track what you want something like that's also an option. If you code you can easily modify it. It's designed to make that easy.