6 Best CRM Plugins for WordPress

6 Best CRM Plugins for WordPress

Running an online business without a CRM Plugin for your WordPress website? Read on to learn your 6 best options to boost the efficiency of your business.  

Running your business via your WordPress website can get overwhelming. The day-to-day technical challenges that you have to face are outrageous, and it gets worse as your business starts to grow. So, to handle most of those challenges and provide the best for your customers, you need a CRM.

But of course that CRM should integrate with your other systems. There is a lot of data involved in generating and responding to customer leads, so you want the experience to be a seamless as possible.

How would you manage all the data otherwise? Excel sheets can help, but they do start showing their limitations when all of the data has to be maintained manually and it keeps increasing every single day.

Luckily, there’s an automated solution to these and other problems that your business faces when it comes to customer relations and data management.

It is a CRM.

Below is a list of the 6 best WordPress CRM plugins that we’ve put together to help you manage and grow your business in a matter of a few clicks:

Gravity Forms–Salesforce CRM Integration

Gravity Forms is the most popular plugin that developers use for integrating forms into their website.

These forms require minimal effort to create and help you get the information from the clients that you require to better your business for your customers.

The information received by these forms is crucial to the business and thus has to be stored somewhere, organized, and made easily accessible for the business. This part of the process is carried out by the Salesforce CRM: one of the first plugins to provide a cloud-based WordPress CRM solution.

With this plugin, you can link your Gravity Forms with Salesforce CRM.

This plugin is the best solution for linking Gravity Forms with Salesforce CRM. This coupled with quick and detailed customer support, makes this plugin stand out from the rest.

Contact Form 7—Bitrix24 CRM Integration

Bitrix24 CRM integration with Contact Form 7 is another option to collect forms from your users. If you are running a business, especially one that works online via your website, you will need to collect customer messages through Contact Form 7.

This plugin is easy to set up, offers operational support within two hours of submitting your query, and is regularly updated. You can test this plugin using its free demo to see if this works for you. This plugin allows you to connect multiple forms with your WordPress CRM.

This plugin, like Gravity Forms, take the information from the frontend and store it either as a lead, deal, or contact.

One more thing: you can add an action scheduler to your Contact Form 7 Bitrix24 CRM plugin to add the information into CRM with a delay. Without the action scheduler, the information would be updated instantly.

Contact Form 7–Zoho CRM  

With CodeCanyon’s Contact Form 7 Zoho CRM Integration plugin, you can transfer your data from the CF7 directly to your Zoho CRM.

This plugin operates similar to Contact Form 7 Bitrix24 CRM Integration plugin. However, it will be connecting your forms to the Zoho CRM. The remaining functionality and efficiency of the plugin remains more or less the same.

The data that is received from Contact Form 7 will be stored and organized by the CRM as either a lead, contact, or case. You can connect multiple forms to your Zoho CRM using this plugin. This plugin offers the best customer support and, even without it, it is incredibly easy to integrate within your WordPress website.

WooCommerce—Bitrix24 CRM Integration  

Running your business through your WordPress website? Does that mean you are running an eCommerce business? If so, WooCommerce is the most popular tool for creating scalable eCommerce websites, irrespective of what you are selling.

One of the biggest challenges that developers and business owners have to face when it comes to eCommerce is dealing with orders. Whether it is keeping track of all the orders that your customers are receiving from you and all the information associated with those orders or tracking the status of each and every order received by your customers, eCommerce is a hassle. However, at the end of the day, your business depends on how happy your customers are with you.

When it comes to managing data, Bitrix24 CRM gets your job done for you. This plugin allows you to connect your WooCommerce website with Bitrix24 CRM. You do need to have a minimum of WooCommerce version 3.5 for the integration to work flawlessly.

Once connected, this plugin allows you to send orders directly from your website to your WordPress CRM. It can keep track of all the orders and their statuses and keep your CRM updated with the required information.

You can also customize it to update the information in your Bitrix24 CRM as soon as the checkout button is pressed, or you can have the information added later on. If you want to send the orders back to your CRM in a bulk, you can do that too with the WooCommerce Bitrix24 CRM integration plugin.

WooСommerce—amoCRM Integration

amoCRM Integration for your WooCommerce website is great choice if you are really into making your customers happy and also are social media friendly.

amoCRM Integration helps you with keeping a record of your orders, generating leads via messaging, and automating your sales processes.

amoCRM is used for small to medium scale businesses, whereas, Bitrix24 CRM is used for medium to large scale businesses. However, as opposed to Bitrix24 CRM, amoCRM does not offer a free version.

One of the major difference between Bitrix24 CRM Integration and amoCRM Integration is that the former is capable of storing information related to vendors as well and the latter is not.

Hubspot WordPress Plugin

Integrating the Hubspot WordPress CRM plugin is the best thing that you can do for your business. From managing data to sending emails and maintaining the perfect relationship with your customers and clients, Hubspot has got it all covered for you.

One of the biggest challenges of running a business is managing data and organizing it. Hubspot has a different panel for listing and organizing your contacts, leads, deals, and all the companies that you’re in contact with. Only to make it better, the saved data can then be filtered in multiple ways making it easier for you to search a particular record.

Hubspot also prevents duplication of data while you’re making a new contact entry. It’ll search through all the available data, and if the contact is already present in the record, it’ll let you know.

Managing data is not the only feat achieved by Hubspot. It can also work as a project management system. You can assign tasks to your leads individually and it’ll shoot you an email as a reminder when any update has been made to the task.

Moving on to reaching out to your customers and clients, Hubspot has made the process of emailing much simpler. It allows you to integrate data into your email directly from your CRM database.

Conclusion

CRMs are an integral part of any business and are a much-needed tool for the business to flourish and thrive. While CRMs continue to automate businesses and make lives easier, they can still have their limitations which is why there are smaller plugins like Contact Form 7 which can be integrated with a CRM to improve businesses’ efficiency.

So, first things first, find a CRM that is best suited for the needs of your business. Then, get the other plugins as needed to better your relationship with your audience and customers. Do checkout CodeCanyon. Apart from the ones mentioned in this article, it has great plugins and is really a one-stop solution all of your WordPress needs.  

A Photographer's Guide to Contrast — How to See Light and Shadow

A Photographer's Guide to Contrast — How to See Light and Shadow

If you'd like to know more about the essential role that light plays in photography, then you’ll love our course, A Photographer's Guide to Light. In this lesson, you’ll find out what exactly contrast is, and how it works.

A Photographer's Guide to Light: Contrast

The world looks a lot different on a clear, sunny day compared to an overcast day. Why? The answer is contrast.

What is Contrast?

In photography, contrast is the difference between the light and the dark parts of an image; it is this difference in luminance (brightness) or colour that makes an object or its representation in an image distinguishable. Contrast is measurable.

A checked board — a high contrast image / David Bode

In this image, you see a checkerboard pattern with black and white squares. About half this image is as black as your display will allow and the other half is as white as your display will allow. If you were to view this on a different display you might see more or less contrast depending on the quality of the display.

The same checked board with the blacks reduced in contrast / David Bode

If we reduced the contrast then a grey tone is introduced into the blacks, as grey lies between black and white. The difference in luminance between darkest and lightest is reduced: there's less contrast.

The same checked board with the whites reduced in contrast / David Bode

A similar thing happens if we take the white squares and darken them from a bright white to a grey tone; the result is lower contrast.

If both the black squares and the white squares were pushed towards grey, then of course the whole image would become grey and you wouldn’t see any squares at all, and that shows us that contrast is really important as without it, you can't define an image.

In the real world, everything you photograph will have at least a little contrast.

Hard Light and Soft Light

Let's look at the two ends of the spectrum: high contrast and low contrast. The way to tell the difference is to look at the shadows.

An apple — high contrast / David Bode

High contrast light will result in a shadow that has a sharp and well-defined edge like the shadow in this picture of an apple. This is what you typically get with the sun on a clear day and no clouds in the sky.

These types of shadows with well-defined edges are usually called hard shadows and the lights that produce these shadows are called hard lights.

An apple — low contrast / David Bode

Let's imagine that the clouds roll in and obscure the sun. The shadowing on the object will be much different. In this situation, the sun's light scatters through the clouds and it hits the object from many different angles. This is a low-contrast light.

The result is a shadow with a smoother gradation between the area that's fully in the light and the area that's fully in the dark. This is called a soft shadow. The lights that produce these types of shadows are called soft lights.

Size Relative to Subject

The main difference between a high-contrast light and a low-contrast light is its size relative to the subject. A high-contrast light is small relative to the subject, and a low-contrast light is large relative to the subject. The sun is huge, but because it’s so far away it acts as a small lighting source.

The clouds on an overcast day are much larger relative to the objects on earth, and they diffuse the light from the sun, and bounce it around, acting like a large lighting source. The illustration of the sun and the clouds useful, as the same idea applies to photographic lights.

changing the light source and distance affects contrast / David Bode

Take a small light and shoot it through a much larger material and you get a very similar result. The light from the flash hits the material and is scattered around. This material now becomes the light source, and because it's larger, the light will hit the subject from many different angles. You can take a high-contrast light and modify it to get a low-contrast light.

To make a low-contrast light into a high-contrast light, just think of the sun. You know that the sun is huge but it's really far away. Take a low-contrast light source, like a soft box, and move it far away and it becomes a high-contrast light.

A Light Source isn’t the Only Means of Contrast…

The contrast of a light source is only one of the factors that determines an image's contrast. If you take a bare flash and use that as your only lighting source, you’ll get high-contrast shadows, but does that mean that your image will be high contrast? Not necessarily, and the reason is we don’t know how much of the shadows you’ll actually see. If the flash is very close to the camera's lens the shadows will be behind the objects you’re shooting. This means that you don't see very much of that shadowing.

Chairs taken from above — low contrast / David Bode

If the image was made up of objects that were all around the same tonal range — as above — this wouldn’t make a very high-contrast image.

Chairs taken from above — high contrast / David Bode

Move the flash away from the lens and you start increasing the contrast of the image, because now you’re seeing more of that shadowing. The same thing applies to a low-contrast lighting source. By altering the composition, exposure, and post-processing, you can get a high-contrast image from a low-contrast light and you can get a low-contrast image from a high-contrast light.

The main thing to remember is that high-contrast lights always produce hard shadows and low-contrast lights always produce softer shadows.

More Resources on Light From Tuts+

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  43 Best Light Effect Photoshop Actions, Brushes, and Photo Effects (New for 2022)

  Add more light to your photos! Check out this list of incredible premium light effects Photoshop add-ons from Envato Elements and GraphicRiver!

  

  Melody Nieves

  07 Feb 2022

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  How to Use Light Creatively in Night Photography

  Light at night has infinite variations in colour. In this article, we look at the diversity of light sources as a creative challenge in night photography

  

  Anthony James

  24 Dec 2021

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  Landscape Photography in Challenging Weather and Light: Quick Help Guide

  Don't let changing weather cancel or change what you shoot, instead you can learn to see the potential in each scenario and adjust your mindset to get the...

  

  Marie Gardiner

  30 Sep 2021

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  What is Small Flash Photography?

  In order to learn how to use a flash, it will help us a great deal to have some understanding of what a flash is and how it works.

  

  Jamie Evan

  25 Feb 2022

  Photography

About the Authors

David Bode created the video course that includes this lesson. Dave is an expert on video and audio production, and he lives in the upstate NY area. He works as a camera operator, editor, inventor, motion graphics designer, recording engineer, and studio musician.

Marie Gardiner wrote the text version of this lesson and it was edited and published by Jackson Couse. Jackson is a photographer and the editor of the Photo & Video section of Envato Tuts+.