FluentCRM Review: All-in-One Email Marketing Automation for WordPress

Ever wished you could take the powers of your email marketing tools and CRM and put them inside WordPress? Well, with FluentCRM you can.

FluentCRM is an all-in-one email marketing automation platform dedicated to WordPress. This plugin lets you manage your leads and customers, create automated email campaigns, segment leads, manage your contacts, and more, all without having to leave your WordPress dashboard.

In our FluentCRM review, we’ll take a hands-on look at this tool and show you how you can use it to streamline and automate your email marketing workflows within WordPress.

FluentCRM Review: A High-Level Overview

FluentCRM is a feature-rich email marketing automation plugin that sits inside WordPress. It takes all the features of third-party CRMs and email marketing tools and lets you use them within your dashboard.

With this plugin, you can generate more leads, manage your contacts, send emails, create automated campaigns, and much more.

You get access to A/B testing features, along with detailed reporting data that’ll help you optimize your campaigns over time to turn more leads into paying customers.

Here are a few of the main features that set it apart:

• Easily create and manage contacts. Easily upload existing contacts, add new ones, and create in-depth contact profiles with conversation history.
• Send bulk emails and campaigns. Craft new emails, create templates to save time, and send bulk emails to segments of your list.
• Create automated sequences, funnels, and upsells. Build funnels and automated sequences that get sent out based on user actions and turn new leads into customers.
• Refine your campaigns and grow your revenue. In-depth reporting data lets you see what’s working, so you can refine your email campaigns to bring in more revenue.

An In-Depth Look at Using FluentCRM

Now that you have a better understanding of what FluentCRM does, let’s show you how you can use it to better manage your email campaigns and leads within WordPress.

Upon installation, there’s a helpful setup wizard that walks you through adding your business information and creating your first lists and tags.

Dashboard Overview

The FluentCRM dashboard gives you an overview of your contact lists and your overall email stats. It’s also your control center for managing your email campaigns and automation. To manage contacts, create emails, automations, and more simply click on the menu options at the top or left-hand side of the screen.

Here are some of the things you can do:

• Import contacts from previous lists or add contacts manually
• Create and manage your tags, lists, and segments
• Craft reusable email templates
• Write automated, recurring, or broadcast emails
• View your campaign reporting data
• Create in-depth if/then contact automations

Contact Management

The contact management interface is very clean and simple. You can view or edit existing basic contact information, along with adding or removing tags and even lists the person is subscribed to.

Like a standard CRM, you’ll be able to see all emails and interactions you’ve had with that person. There’s even a notes section where you can add notes about that individual contact.

Every lead can be flagged as a lead or a customer. Every contact will have a status that gets assigned based on their actions like subscribed, pending, unsubscribed, and more.

Finally, you have the option to create and use your own custom fields. If you need to collect and unique unique lead information, then this can be very helpful.

Lists, Tags, and Segments

You’ll find a variety of segmentation and tagging options to help you more effectively deliver an automated and personalized experience.

Here are the three ways you can refine your leads and contact lists:

• Lists. This is similar to lists on other email marketing platforms. Contacts on this list will have opted in to receive emails from you. Users can be subscribed to multiple lists.
• Tags. You can add tags manually or have automated tags apply when contacts take certain actions within your emails.
• Dynamic segments. Segments are portions of your list that users have self-selected themselves into. Your contacts will be added or removed from these segments based on what actions they take.

Email Campaigns

Every time you send an email it’s referred to as a campaign. This includes one-off broadcast emails, email sequences, and email templates you save for later campaigns.

Within FluentCRM you can create email sequences that’ll get sent out in a specific order, recurring email campaigns that get sent out dynamically, and standard email broadcasts.

After you choose a campaign type, writing an email is a pretty enjoyable process, since you’ll be using the Gutenberg editor. Overall, it’s a similar process to creating a page or post within WordPress.

Here’s what this looks like:

All you have to do is write your email subject line, pre-header, and content. Then, select which subscribers you want to receive the email, and click send.

You can also show or hide email content based on tags. This lets you send an email to your entire list, while still being able to offer highly personalized content to your subscribers.

Opt-In Forms

To start running email marketing automations you need a way to collect your lead information. You’ll find a few built-in opt-in form templates you can customize.

When you install the premium version of FluentCRM you can also choose to install the lite version of Fluent Forms, which gives you opt-in forms, contact forms, and the ability to accept payments. You have the option to integrate with other WordPress form plugins too.

Email Marketing Automations

The goal of FluentCRM is to be an all-in-one marketing automation platform within WordPress. Let’s see how well it achieves this.

First, automations are simply a series of actions that are executed based on a pre-set order of actions. Every automation has a trigger that will set that sequence in motion.

There are a variety of initial triggers you can choose from like, new user registration or sign-up in WordPress. Or, CRM actions like adding to lists, adding tags, or joining via an opt-in form on your site.

After that initial trigger, there are a variety of actions you can choose from like:

• Sending a custom email
• Starting an automated sequence of emails
• Applying a certain tag to a contact
• And more

Following your initial action there are benchmarks. These are goals within your automations and when they’re achieved that contact will move to another part of the automation.

For example, a user could join your list, and then get sent an automated sequence of emails. When they buy something they’ll get tagged as a “customer” and be removed from your welcome list and added to your buyer’s list.

This is just for simple automations too. You also can create branching automations based on conditional logic.

Best of all, these automation workflows are built visually. Simply use the funnel builder to create custom automations.

In-Depth Campaign Reporting

Your dashboard gives you an overview of your subscriber numbers. To dive deep, the campaign reporting tab shows you a detailed look at your email sending, link clicks, and unsubscribe stats.

Integrations and Addons

FluentCRM integrates with a ton of eCommerce tools, LMS plugins, membership plugins, and more. It includes built-in automation triggers, actions, and segmentation features to automate much more than just emails.

There are also a few add-ons included with FluentCRM. You can enable these within your plugin dashboard.

One very important addon to enable is Fluent SMTP. This allows you to send your emails through a third-party email service provider, so you can send emails that are fast, secure, and actually get delivered.

FluentCRM Support and Documentation

FluentCRM has a very helpful and supportive customer service team. You can feel that they truly care about your success. Not only do they help with any issues you run into, but they’re very open to future ideas of how the tool can be used.

You can reach support by creating a ticket. All of this can be managed via email or through your account on the FluentCRM website.

I also found the documentation library very in-depth and helpful. You’ll find detailed written and video content to help you set up any feature you’d like or troubleshoot any issues.

FluentCRM Pricing

FluentCRM is a simple and elegant solution for business owners who want to automate their email marketing and bring everything inside WordPress.

The fact that is does not rely on the monthly or growth-based subscription model that most other CRMs do is a game-changer for agencies and medium enterprises.

The only real difference in its pricing tiers is the number of sites you need support for. You’ll notice for your first year you also get a discounted price.

Here’s how it breaks down:

Another thing you need to factor in is the cost of an email provider to send your emails through, since you don’t want to send marketing emails through your server.

There are dozens of providers to choose from including, Amazon SES, SendGrid, Mailgun, and more. Overall, these will be pretty affordable. For example, Amazon SES is $0.10 for every 1,000 emails you send.

Let’s say you only need to support a single website and have a list of around 5,000 contacts. The total monthly cost will be around $15 dollars per month. Compare this to other email marketing automation platforms like Drip or ActiveCampaign, which cost around $100 per month for a subscriber list around that size.

You’ll also find a free version of the plugin that packs a lot of email marketing and CRM functionality.

Real User Reviews and Feedback

After spending time looking at other user reviews across other platforms, there’s nothing but positive things to say.

From small businesses, all the way up to enterprise-level companies, it’s nothing but five stars.

Take a look at their five-star reviews on G2.

Final Thoughts on FluentCRM

Overall, I’m pretty impressed by FluentCRM. It takes nearly all the features and functionality of robust third-party marketing automation tools and brings them inside WordPress. Plus, it does this at a fraction of the cost.

It offers everything you need to manage your contacts, create automated marketing campaigns, and marketing funnels. You get real-time email performance data and it’s easy to use. 

It’s worth mentioning they pay a lot of attention to their users too, especially when it comes to new features. For example, some users had requested a conditional logic feature for marketing automation, and eventually, that feature was added.

If you’re looking for a way to affordably send automated email campaigns and manage contacts, then FluentCRM is worth checking out. At the very least try out the free version of the plugin to see if it offers the functionality you need in a marketing automation tool.