Easier CRM by Andrew Hill
Keep contacts, tags, notes and follow-up tasks in your own WordPress dashboard. Forms and newsletter activity can appear on each person’s timeline.
Free core; Pro adds deals, automations and newsletter automation steps.
Install and start
Upload and activate your edition through Plugins → Add Plugin → Upload Plugin. Open CRM and review Settings. Activate your Freemius licence if you use Pro. The CRM can work independently; the Forms and Newsletters plugins supply additional activity when present.
Add and organise contacts
Open Contacts and create a contact with an email address and the details you need. Choose a stage such as Lead, Prospect or Client, add tags and record a useful note. Use custom fields for information specific to your business. Keep tags consistent: use one agreed spelling rather than near-duplicates. Open a contact to see their details, activity and follow-up work together.
Plan follow-up
Create a task with a due date and a clear action, such as Call about the quotation. Review the dashboard and Tasks screen for work due today. Mark completed tasks so they stop appearing as outstanding. A timeline is a record of activity; use a task when a person needs to take action.
Connect Forms and Newsletters
In CRM Settings, review automatic contact creation from forms and newsletters. Submit a test form with your own email and inspect the resulting contact and timeline. Forms Pro provides per-form field mapping, tags and stage controls through its integrations. Newsletter subscribers and sent/open/click activity can also appear. Contacts and newsletter subscriptions are different records: recording someone in the CRM does not itself give permission to market to them.
Import and export
Use Settings → Import & export for CSVs, past form entries and newsletter subscribers. Try a small sample first, check column mapping and counts, then import the rest. The ActiveCampaign importer can reuse a saved ActiveCampaign connection and copy supported tags, contacts and notes; Pro adds supported deal data. ActiveCampaign must allow API access. An inactive or unpaid account can return an error even when the saved connection is correct. Keep the source export until you have reconciled the results.
Pro: sales pipeline
Open Deals to track opportunities by stage, value and outcome. Create a test deal, move it through your pipeline and check totals before entering live opportunities. Mark deals won or lost when appropriate. Contact stages and deal stages serve different purposes: one describes the person, the other a particular opportunity.
Pro: automations
Choose a recipe or create an automation with a trigger and actions. Begin with a small workflow, such as a form submission adding a tag and creating a call task. Configure waits and conditions deliberately, test using your own contact and inspect the timeline. Newsletter actions can add a person to a list or tag that starts a sequence in Newsletters; compose and manage those email sequences there. Imports pause automation triggers to avoid firing a workflow for every historical record.
Data and troubleshooting
Back up before imports and updates. Export a contact sample to confirm you can read the CSV. If form activity is missing, check both plugins are active and automatic capture is enabled. If newsletter activity is missing, verify the subscriber address matches the contact and the relevant action happened after integration was enabled. Check the Pro edition and licence when Deals or Automations shows an upgrade screen. Review destructive contact actions carefully; the contact screen explains their effect on linked form and subscription records.