Greenrope CRM Review

Greenrope CRM & Marketing Software

 

Greenrope began its journey in the email marketing industry, where it started as Cooler Email, and expands upon this foundation for unique positioning in the competitive CRM and marketing automation software industry. The company's moniker is reflective of another application strength. Green references sustainability. Rope refers to strength. The more strands that are woven together the stronger the rope. To this point, Greenrope brings together many otherwise disparate CRM and marketing features into a central application.

 

The Greenrope customer target market is the SMB (Small and Midsize Business) space with a sweet spot for companies around 100 employees or less. With an overarching theme of simplicity and integration, and an objective to deliver a 'Business Operating System' which includes most of the application software a company needs to conduct business, the scope of Greenrope software includes Customer Relationship Management, marketing automation, project management, website content management system (CMS) and a portfolio of related productivity tools. For purposes of this Greenrope review, we focused only on the CRM, social CRM and marketing software.

 

The CRM customer accounts act as the system of record for most business processes throughout the application. The CRM software includes the traditional features for lead/account/contact/activity/opportunity/case management but also goes further to include tightly integrated marketing processes as well as broad website integration. The business benefits of this approach are clear—a unified application that shares data in real time among processes and people, decreases cycle times and facilitates improved reporting. A less clear but no less important benefit is that the complete business software suite is significantly less costly than comparable applications which must be assembled from multiple vendors.

 

 

The integrated marketing software gives Greenrope a unique position. E-mail marketing is flexible and feature rich. E-mail distributions may be created from templates using flexible target lists, may include components such as surveys, RSVPs and count down timers (to invoke a sense of urgency for increased responses), and upon distribution may simultaneously send content to social networks. Basic e-mail testing using previews and spam detection from SpamAssasin can improve deliverability rates and conversions.

 

Greenrope is also ahead of the curve in facilitating events management. The marketing software can profile event-based campaigns and permits payment processing (through PayPal) for event registration, redemptions, coupons, event check-in and attendance tracking.

 

Sales lead scoring covers the basics well, such as assigning point values to individual website pages, but doesn't go as far as some of the advanced scoring capabilities such as multiple lead scores, placing caps on scoring activities or depreciating scores based on disengagement or periods of inactivity. As the business software application is a unified CRM and marketing system (which is unusual among cloud CRM and marketing automation systems), lead transfer of qualified leads is seamless and supports Alert notifications (for example, based on a lead's activities occurring in a 24 hour period).

 

Greenrope continues to expand its social media and social CRM integration. CRM contact records link the contact's profile with his or her social network profiles thereby permitting sales and support staff to view the contact's social activities and behaviors and better understand the contact and their social conversations.

 

The application supports social media management, including scheduled posts and updates to social networks, and a social media dashboard with a view of social activities and separate tabs for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn which display more details, such as activity streams, direct messages, searches and trends. These views also allow users to perform keyword searches in order to identify relevant conversations and engagement opportunities. The social dashboard also displays social media performance metrics such as conversations (measures replies), amplification (retweets and shares), applause (likes and favorites), impact (a weighted sum of factors) and interest (volume of clicks shared).

 

Overall, Greenrope's social CRM approach is well designed for its SMB market. However, one shortcoming we hope may be resolved is the capability to automatically extract relevant attributes from social profiles and activity streams, append that data to contact or account profiles, and use that data for account segmentation, marketing campaigns, account profiling and important metric calculations such as CLV (customer lifetime value)—which includes not just current or future financial value, but also influencer, advocate and referral value.

 

Greenrope competitive advantages include include a broad customer relationship management system that can aid SMBs in transitioning from many disparate systems to a unified application, one of the best integrated marketing software applications in the cloud CRM market, a relatively short deployment and quick time to value, a CRM application that is tightly integrated with social CRM tools, and a low total cost of ownership (TCO).

 

Top Greenrope weaknesses include a User Interface (UI) that doesn't deliver a user experience comparable to consumer or social applications, weak mobile and offline capabilities, lack of Platform as a Service (PaaS) tools for integration or software customization, and a company brand that very often doesn't get noticed in a very competitive CRM software marketplace.

 

When evaluating Greenrope or identifying and recommending the most relevant and direct Greenrope competitors for comparison purposes, we typically first consider the customer's sales and marketing focus, then align specific company objectives to Greenrope software functionality (to assess fit) and finally consider company size, user count, user types/roles, industry, geo-locations, internal resources, constraints such as cost and technical considerations such as system integration and software customization.