EngageBay stands as a powerful all-in-one CRM software, integrating robust products for marketing, sales, and customer service. Launched in 2017, it has rapidly grown to serve over 29,000 clients, providing all the essential tools businesses need to thrive online—all at a competitive price. This platform is ideal for startups, as well as small and medium-sized B2B and B2C enterprises. Designed to attract and retain customers, this in-depth review explores every detail and tests the software firsthand to determine if it truly meets diverse business needs.
EngageBay Software Overview
- Onboarding is straightforward; you’ll get familiar with the software in a day.
- The free plan is robust, offering 500 contacts and essential tools for email marketing, customer support, and sales.
- While not perfect, EngageBay firmly positions itself as a strong alternative to HubSpot.
- Its marketing and sales products are designed for seamless collaboration.
- Customer support is available via phone, email, or live chat, with Pro plans benefiting from a dedicated account manager.
EngageBay offers exceptional value if you’re seeking an all-in-one platform for marketing, sales, and customer service. You can explore a free EngageBay account to get CRM, email marketing, live chat, landing pages, and more.
What We Love About EngageBay
EngageBay truly functions as an “all-in-one” platform, covering the entire customer funnel. It provides all the necessary tools to attract website visitors, convert them into loyal customers, and offer exceptional support. The best part is that this comprehensive suite comes at a highly affordable price. With EngageBay, you’ll discover:
- A feature-rich CRM & Sales Bay: Encompassing everything from deals and tasks to multi-currency support and advanced sales automation.
- Effortless Email Marketing Campaigns: Easily create and send emails, conduct A/B tests, and build powerful automations.
- Integrated Landing Pages, Pop-ups & Forms: These tools directly integrate with sales functionalities and the CRM, creating a unified sales channel with diverse reporting capabilities.
- Live Chat & Helpdesk: Essential tools to assist your website visitors and provide robust customer support.
- Simplified Sales & Marketing Automation Setup: The automation builder provides extensive conditions and actions, allowing for sophisticated workflows.
EngageBay: CRM, Marketing Automation & Customer Support Platform Overview
EngageBay is structured around four core products, or “Bays,” as they call them: the Marketing Bay, the CRM & Sales Bay, the Customer Service Bay, and the All-in-One Bay. Let’s dive into what each offers.
EngageBay CRM & Sales Automation Features
Upon signing up for a free account, you’ll first encounter the default dashboard. Following the “Getting Started” steps on the panel will quickly familiarize you with EngageBay.
The dashboard is fully customizable. You can remove panels or add new reports by clicking the “Add Reports” button in the top right corner. EngageBay offers 26 distinct reports, including:
- Sales performance statistics
- Team leaderboards
- Sales forecast charts
- Productivity statistics
Creating and Managing Sales Opportunities
The “Deals” tab features a Kanban board that visually represents your leads. Here, you can monitor the progress of any sales opportunity within your sales process.
Add new deals to your process and sort them by status. For example, once a client is won, simply drag the card to the “Won” column.
Deal cards contain all practical CRM information, such as contact/company details, deal value, and task deadlines, helping you track and stay on top of your opportunities.
Sales often involves teamwork. In the “Tasks” section, you can assign responsibilities and coordinate sales opportunities effectively.
Creating tasks mirrors the process for opportunities. Update task statuses using the intuitive drag-and-drop Kanban board. Each task is linked to an opportunity and scored for importance and priority.
Sales Automation Capabilities
When dealing with numerous contacts, tracking opportunities and tasks can become complex. This is where EngageBay’s sales automation proves invaluable. We tested its functionality by creating a prospecting automation sequence and were thoroughly impressed.
The setup was quick and easy. Our automation triggers when a salesperson moves a contact to the prospect column in our pipeline. This automation automatically assigns a “Proposal” tag, which helps in managing and filtering email lists.
Next, an automated email is sent to the sales team, assigning them the task of scheduling a video call with the prospective client.
Typically, this would involve numerous emails and extensive coordination. Now, it’s all automated by simply dragging a card—an incredible time-saver!
The automation builder can create new events and notes, assign tags, send emails, and open or close tasks. It also uses conditions to check if a contact has a specific tag, if someone is assigned a task, if the contact has opened an email, and more.
The combined power of actions and conditions is immense. Sales automation saves time and keeps the sales engine running smoothly.
The Sales Bay also includes features for calendar management, workflows, email sequences, and SMS/call logs.
Sending Emails with EngageBay
Email marketing is a core component of the Marketing Bay. EngageBay truly excels in all critical email marketing functions; email sending, the email editor, automations, and templates all work exceptionally well.
Email Sending Options
You’ll find three primary ways to send an email within EngageBay:
The Regular Send is perfect for sharing product updates, company news, newsletters, and general announcements.
The A/B Send is ideal for testing variations of your emails to discover which version performs best. For instance, you can test different subject lines, images, or email copy.
RSS to Email allows you to automatically share your blog posts as emails whenever a new article is published.
After selecting your sending type, the drag-and-drop email editor activates, enabling you to design and edit your content.
The email editor includes 10 widgets to add elements such as buttons, videos, text, images, and more.
You can easily change your email’s layout by adding blocks and columns.
From the “Body” tab, you can edit universal settings like link colors, email width, and fonts.
Personalize your emails with recipient names, company names, their personal account manager’s name, or any data from your database. Add dynamic content based on subscriber behavior, such as their last download or purchase. You can also include products, offers, calendar events, and more directly into your emails.
Personalizing emails requires minimal effort. Simply click any text block and choose the desired fields.
Quickly browse through personalization fields using the dropdown menu. Add any field for which you have data.
Once you’ve finalized your content and design, review your email. EngageBay allows you to quickly preview your email and check for any missing elements.
You can send the email immediately, schedule it for later, or send it in batches. It can also be integrated into an automation based on opens or clicks. This feature is particularly useful for building follow-up sequences.
To track the performance of your email statistics, you’ll see:
- Status
- Send Date
- Recipients
- Emails Delivered
- Opens / Open Rate
- Clicks / Click-Through Rate
- Unsubscriptions
These are the default options, but you can customize column views to add more useful statistics.
By adding more columns, you can track bounces, spam complaints, performance statistics for A/B test variants, and more.
Finally, exporting reports to a CSV file is quite straightforward.
Email Sequences
EngageBay features drip campaigns, which send emails in a “drip” fashion over time.
Add as many emails as you need. While these emails are primarily text-based, allowing for formatting like bold and italics, you can also design HTML emails for your sequences.
You can personalize subject lines and email content with any information you’ve collected about your recipients.
Set email delays as specific as you require. You can exclude days when you prefer not to send emails, such as holidays or designated “Email-Free Mondays.”
To stop email sequences when a contact replies to an email within a sequence, navigate to Automation. Create a new automation, select your sequence as the trigger, then add a “Subscriber Replied” condition. Finally, add an “Remove from Sequence” action and select your sequence.
EngageBay Email Marketing Templates
EngageBay offers over 70 email templates categorized into four groups:
- General
- E-commerce
- Events
- Celebrations
Most templates fall under the E-commerce category, while only three are found in the Events category. The email templates generally look good, featuring formatted headlines, CTAs, placeholders for logos, and styled links. However, they lack a true “wow” factor and appear somewhat outdated, suggesting they could benefit from a refresh. This shouldn’t be an issue if you use them as a starting point.
You can always create an email in the editor and save it as a template, or use an external email editor, copy its HTML code, and save it in EngageBay.
EngageBay Marketing Automation
EngageBay’s marketing automation comes equipped with all the features you’d expect from an all-in-one marketing software. To create automations in EngageBay, you can start from scratch or select from pre-built templates.
Automation templates are available for:
- Follow-up emails
- Follow-up tagging
- Lead qualification
- Lead scoring
- GDPR double opt-in compliance
For this EngageBay review, we tested the “Add Score on Form Submit” template.
You begin with a basic template. Here, we added a few actions and conditions to enhance its functionality:
Let’s create an automation! This one is designed to:
- Add a score of 20 to contacts who submit the form.
- Tag them as “Interested” and send a follow-up email after one day.
- Add a contact to a different drip sequence if their score is above 30 (indicating previous engagement).
Done! This creates a basic lead scoring flow, demonstrating its effectiveness for qualifying leads and sending follow-up emails. You can build similar sequences to add leads to your sales pipeline and tag them based on their interests.
Creating and editing automations is similar to sales automations, which is great as it means you only need to get accustomed to one automation builder.
For performance analysis, you can get insights into contact, SMS, and email performance. Email reports include delivery, open, and click rates. SMS reports show recipients, sent messages, and failed messages. Other sales and revenue data are found within an integrated e-commerce platform or the Sales Bay.
Lead Generation in EngageBay
EngageBay’s CRM software also includes useful list-building tools. This includes:
- Landing Pages
- Online Forms
- Pop-up Forms
Landing Pages
To start creating landing pages, choose from one of the 87 available templates.
You can preview the templates and select one that suits your needs.
The landing page builder offers 14 widgets, which you’ll use to add forms, carousels, buttons, images, videos, and custom HTML. There are also pre-designed sections called block templates that you can drag and drop onto your landing page. Save any block for future reuse.
For optimal viewing across all devices, a preview function for mobile and desktop is available. If you need to refine anything in the mobile view, you can edit it directly within that view.
Once you’re satisfied with the design, proceed to Settings.
Here, you can assign a title to your page, edit the URL, favicons, and meta description. You can also craft your thank-you page messages. Choose double opt-in email settings to ensure your landing page newsletter subscriptions are GDPR compliant.
Once your landing page is active, statistics will display visits, unique visits, contacts, and conversions. You can download your landing page’s HTML and add it to any page of your website’s CMS. Alternatively, if you have multiple EngageBay accounts, you can copy landing page templates between them. A/B testing variants can also be created to test elements of your landing pages.
Forms and Pop-ups
Online forms in EngageBay come with 12 templates, and the form editor is intuitive to use.
You begin by selecting a template, then make adjustments to the text, images, padding, and colors. Add or remove fields to capture the information you need. Once complete, manage settings for double opt-in, thank-you messages, redirections, and team notification options.
EngageBay forms also include options to ensure your list remains healthy. Activate ReCaptcha to block bots. You can block specific email domains, exclude IP addresses, or prevent registrations from free email accounts like Gmail or Yahoo. You’ll be able to create a form in just about 5 minutes.
Editing pop-ups is similar, with the primary difference being that you start by choosing the rules for displaying your pop-ups. Next, select a call-to-action, a theme, and then proceed with the design.
Display your pop-ups only on the pages you desire. For example, one pop-up on your blog and a different one on your pricing page. The AND/OR conditions are invaluable for quick setup. Pop-ups can be further customized to display after a user scrolls down, after a set amount of time, or upon exit intent.
Analytics display impressions, unique impressions, and conversion rates. A/B testing for pop-ups is not yet available.
Contact Management in EngageBay
EngageBay offers efficient contact management, starting with a central database that allows you to segment contacts using lists or by brands/companies.
Dynamic lists group your contacts based on common data points, helping you stay organized and target customers more effectively. There are two types of lists: static lists and smart lists. Smart lists automatically update with new contacts matching filter criteria and remove those that no longer do. In contrast, static lists do not update dynamically.
Create segments using AND/OR conditions for any field in your database. This allows for highly specific targeting, especially if you use tags for interests.
During import, a very useful integrated email validation feature ensures all emails are correct and deliverable, though this requires purchasing credits.
Merge duplicates to keep your list clean and reduce software costs. In each individual contact’s profile, a timeline provides essential information such as deal status, email responses, call logs, and more. You can edit individual contacts, add notes, entries, and scores to keep all contact information up-to-date.
Provide Customer Support with EngageBay
The Customer Service Bay will help you serve clients, resolve their issues, and convert website visitors. We appreciate that EngageBay offers customer service features, eliminating the need for separate live chat or ticketing software. Furthermore, having integrated customer service and sales streamlines support and even facilitates upselling to existing clients. Let’s take a closer look.
Customer Service Bay Features
The Customer Service Bay includes live chat, ticket management, macros, and ticket automation. Similar to the Sales Bay, you have a customizable dashboard.
Open the “Tickets” tab to view all your support tickets. You can filter to see only open tickets, or by keyword, assignment status, urgency, and source. Each ticket is assigned an urgency and an origin.
Accelerate your ticket management process with service automation. There are 5 standard automation templates, which you can edit to add additional actions, conditions, emails, or delays.
This feature is incredibly powerful, for example, for notifying stakeholders when a new ticket is created.
Another useful feature is macros. A macro is a pre-made response or action that agents use to manage customer service requests. Reduce response times for common customer requests with macros that can be answered with a standard reply.
Four reports are available, alongside a “Getting Started” Dashlet. Gain insights into:
- Request count
- Ticket status, priority, and type
- First response time
- Close time
With these analytics, you can understand the types of requests customers have, your team’s efficiency in resolving them, and areas where customer service levels can be improved.
EngageBay Live Chat
Enhance customer satisfaction and boost conversions by offering instant support with live chat. The live chat panel includes four useful reports:
- Total chats
- Chat duration
- Chats by country
- First response time
Using web rules, you can automate actions based on visitor behavior on your website. For instance, if visitors land on your pricing page, you can display a message with a limited-time discount coupon in the chat widget.
Choose which pages to display the live chat on. You can even define display options, such as scroll percentage and delay time.
The chat widget can feature your own greeting message and display images and colors. Choose where you want it to appear on your site and specific pages. The best aspect of EngageBay’s chat widget is its ability to qualify individuals and gather their information before they even start talking to a representative. Once they connect with your sales team, the representative will already know which pages the prospect has visited, what they’ve subscribed to, and much more.
Other Noteworthy Features
EngageBay is packed with features. We’ve reviewed those that will have the biggest impact on your business; here are some others you’ll find useful:
- Social Media Suite: Stay on top of social media marketing by monitoring all your accounts within EngageBay.
- SMS Sending: Set up SMS broadcasts in minutes. You can even personalize the text and preview content.
- Push Notifications: Engage with customers and visitors in real-time by sending them custom-designed push notifications via the Marketing Bay.
- File Repository: Securely store all your uploads and utilize them in customer communications.
- WhatsApp Integration: Receive and respond to WhatsApp messages with EngageBay’s integration. Communicate with your customers on their preferred platform.
- Call & SMS Logs: Track cellular communication, measuring conversation duration, timing, and effectiveness.
EngageBay Integrations
EngageBay directly integrates with 30 applications, including popular marketing applications and sales applications like Salesforce, Shopify, Zapier, and WordPress.
If your specific application isn’t among the direct EngageBay integrations, you can leverage Zapier to integrate with over 4,000 third-party applications. Zapier connections can create, update, and tag your contacts based on activity in other apps.
EngageBay Customer Support
Contacting the EngageBay customer support team is very easy. Service is available 24/7, with an average email response time of 30-60 minutes. You can reach them via email, phone, or live chat.
EngageBay also maintains a dedicated customer support page featuring product videos, guides, and practical how-to articles. When you first start using EngageBay, you’ll find prompts and explanatory videos integrated throughout the software to help you get started quickly.
The help articles are concise and to the point, allowing for quick information retrieval. Many knowledge base articles also include GIFs, which makes following instructions much easier with visual cues.
EngageBay Pricing & Plans
EngageBay offers flexible EngageBay plans. You can opt for the complete All-in-One suite, or choose any combination of the Marketing, CRM & Sales, and Customer Service Bays. Let’s break down each plan:
All-in-One Plans
- Free Plan: Includes email marketing tools, lead generation, CRM, helpdesk, and live chat. Offers 500 contacts and 1,000 branded emails per month.
- Basic Plan ($14.99/month): Features lead scoring, social media suite, tag manager, SMS marketing, and the landing page builder. Comes with a limit of 1,000 contacts and 3,000 branded emails per month.
- Growth Plan ($39.99/month): Provides access to push notifications, marketing automation, and custom domains. Includes 10,000 contacts and 25,000 branded emails per month.
- Pro Plan ($99.99/month): Offers role management, custom reports, and a dedicated account manager. Includes unlimited contacts and 50,000 branded emails per month.
Marketing Bay Plans
- Free Plan: Allows sending emails, using landing pages, and live chat. Includes 500 contacts and 1,000 emails per month.
- Basic Plan ($12.99/month): Adds SMS marketing, tag manager, and lead scoring. Includes 1,000 contacts and 2,500 branded emails per month.
- Growth Plan ($34.99/month): Features email A/B testing, custom domain, and marketing automation. Includes 10,000 contacts and 20,000 branded emails per month.
- Pro Plan ($69.99/month): Offers web analytics, a dedicated account manager, and phone support. Includes a limit of 30,000 contacts and 30,000 emails per month.
Sales CRM Bay Plans
- Free Plan: Includes contact management and basic sales functions like deals and tasks. Comes with 500 contacts and a limit of 1,000 emails per month.
- Basic Plan ($12.99/month): Adds multiple deal pipelines, predictive lead scoring, and a tag manager. Includes 1,000 contacts and a limit of 2,500 emails per month.
- Growth Plan ($24.99/month): Features an email scheduler, multi-currency support, and sales automation. Includes a limit of 20,000 contacts and 20,000 emails per month.
- Pro Plan ($49.99/month): Provides access to custom reports, goals, and an auto-dialer. Comes with a limit of 30,000 contacts and 30,000 emails per month.
Customer Service Bay
- Always Free Plan: Includes helpdesk and live chat features.
EngageBay Discounts
We’ve secured a special 20% discount on any plan for our readers, in addition to other existing offers. Discover all available EngageBay discounts. Furthermore, you’ll receive a 10% discount when you subscribe to an annual plan, and an extra 20% discount with a 2-year plan.
Pros & Cons of EngageBay
What We Liked
- Seamless integration of CRM, marketing automation, sales, and customer service functionalities.
- The free plan is perfectly suited for any business starting its online journey.
- Offers excellent value for a comprehensive suite of features.
- A truly affordable alternative to HubSpot, making it accessible for many businesses.
- The form and email editors are straightforward and easy to use.
What Could Be Better
- Limited variety of email editing widgets.
- Some email templates appear slightly outdated and could benefit from a refresh.
EngageBay Review: Is This the CRM & Marketing Automation Platform for You?
EngageBay is a powerful platform featuring a user-friendly interface that consolidates marketing, sales, and customer service tools. Here is our final score for this EngageBay review:
Ease of Use: 4 / 5
Value for Money: 5 / 5
Editor & Templates: 3.5 / 5
Features: 5 / 5
Sales & Marketing Automation: 4.5 / 5
Customer Support: 4 / 5
Total Score: 4.4 / 5
EngageBay truly stands out for its exceptional value for money. Its automation capabilities are impressive and can easily become the central hub for all your business software.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is EngageBay used for?
EngageBay helps attract and retain customers through landing pages, forms, email marketing, and marketing automation. It manages sales via deals, pipelines, tasks, and automations. And it serves customers through tickets, macros, and live chat.
What is EngageBay CRM?
What is customer relationship management software?
EngageBay Alternatives
EngageBay vs. HubSpot
A significant difference between EngageBay and HubSpot lies in their pricing. EngageBay’s most expensive plan costs only $99, whereas an average HubSpot subscription can be around $900. HubSpot surpasses EngageBay with its 15 million contact storage limit across all paid plans. Other features exclusive to HubSpot include invoicing, advanced automations, and forecasting. For more on its features, pros, and cons, read our HubSpot review. Similarities include excellent campaign management tools, free live chat, and landing page builders. EngageBay remains an affordable HubSpot alternative.
EngageBay vs. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is primarily an email marketing tool with powerful automation capabilities. Like EngageBay, it also offers CRM, SMS marketing, and live chat messaging.
EngageBay provides a free plan, while ActiveCampaign only offers a free trial. ActiveCampaign features more advanced functionalities such as split automations and attribution reports.
EngageBay vs. Pipedrive
The main difference between EngageBay and Pipedrive is that Pipedrive offers lead generation features as add-ons, whereas these functionalities are included in all EngageBay plans. Pipedrive’s pricing is similar to EngageBay, with its highest plan at $99 per month, but expect to pay more with add-ons.
Where Pipedrive excels is in the number of direct integrations it offers—over 500 compared to EngageBay’s 30. You can offset this difference by utilizing Zapier for third-party app connections, allowing you to connect with more than 4,000 applications.