I am always on the hunt for new and better ways to minimize the amount of data entry duplication, and streamline the sales process. If they can come at a price I can afford, all the better.
Chicago Human Rhythm Project has been using eTapestry for over a year now, with pretty good results. Here’s a quick breakdown
Pros:
Great for contact database management, many custom fields and ways to group customers
Great reporting and sorting of contacts
Can integrate sales in a way that automatically enters online purchase activity into the contact data.
Can do email merges and do real mail labels for any sorted lists.
Multiple users can access it at the same time.
Cons
Online sales gateways cost $50 per page (way too much if you have more than a few programs per years)
Expensive quarterly payments depending on your package. (The value is stil good for the money, but with so many open source or smaller solutions, there may be a cheaper way to do all the same tasks)
Email Marketing isn’t quite as useful as we expected (We still keep our constant contact list and use it for newsletters)
Doesn’t integrate with personal emails or allow calendaring and tracking like many “for-profit” CRM/Database solutions do.
Please share. I’m looking forward to hearing what everyone else is using.