Unique Requirements, Looking for a New CRM

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We’re looking for a new CRM. We run a tradeshow and so have 2 very distinct groups of customers, Attendees and Exhibitors. We have about 120K attendee customers on our attendee list and around 6K customers on our exhibitor list.

With Attendees, we are simply sending newsletters, reminders, show updates etc. – all via email, so they are housed in our email sending platform, Mailjet. We do not typically engage with attendees via email one-on-one, we communicate en masse only, with some segmentation/personalization of emails. We like Mailjet for its simple but powerful email editor. The biggest struggle is segmenting. Since Mailjet’s built in segmenting is based on e-commerce (abandoned shopping cart, last purchase, etc.), we don’t really get to realize the full benefits (our “product” is sold just once per year, no ecommerce, etc.). Mailjet has a rule “1 campaign, 1 list”. This makes it so that we have to build out multiple campaigns in order to hit our segmented lists or an entirely new list for a new campaign. Not ideal, but we’ve made it work.

With Exhibitors, we use BMO/BenchMarkOne (formerly Hatchbuck) for all customer contact, tracking, etc. The email editor is more limited than Mailjet and definitely does not have the same email-specific capabilities/functionality. We are moving away from BenchMarkOne for our exhibitor CRM and considering Hubspot, Pipedrive, or Brevo (formerly SendInBlue). We’ve used Hubspot free for about a year and it meets our needs. We are considering buying into the paid version for automation, but are considering Pipedrive for cost considerations.

My questions:

  1. Is there a platform where we could potentially combine both distinct customer types so that we can achieve the segmentation we lack on the attendee side, while maintaining the CRM functionality on the exhibitor side, and have really great email template building capabilities?

Please note: Primary concern here is cost since the attendee side has 120K contacts. This is why we have kept attendees separate and managed more as a newsletter subscriber. We send attendee newsletters monthly throughout the year, and then weekly or more for the 2 months immediately before our show (~800K emails the final month).

  1. If it does not make sense to combine the lists into 1 CRM, do you have a recommendation for a CRM that would meet our needs?

submitted by /u/LuckyInTucky
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