FluentCRM 3.0: A Full Review

FluentCRM 3.0 review: Discover powerful new features, honest pros & cons, and whether this WordPress CRM is worth your investment.

In this comprehensive video review of FluentCRM 3.0, we delve deep into its latest features and enhancements. Discover how this powerful marketing automation tool can streamline your email campaigns, improve customer engagement, and boost your overall productivity. From user interface upgrades to new functionalities, we cover everything you need to know to maximize your CRM experience.

This Week’s Sponsors

Kinta: Kinta

LifterLMS: LifterLMS

Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro

The Show’s Main Transcript

[00:00:16.940] -Jonathan Denwood

Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 172. In this show, we’re going to be talking about FluentCRM. Version 3.0. It’s got some new functionality. It’s got some interesting new elements. It’s a great CRM if you’ve got a membership and learning management system and you’re looking to do marketing automation. It’s one of our more favorite products at WP-Tonic. I’ve got my great co-host with me, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners? And viewers.

[00:00:59.170] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, my name is Kurt von Ahnen. I own an agency called Manana no Mas, and we work on projects directly associated with WP-Tonic.

[00:01:07.840] -Jonathan Denwood

That’s great. I think we’re going to do a quick show here, about half an hour. We’re just going to blow through the leading updates. So, um, should be a great show. Um, they’ve got a complete redesigned UI. UI, they’ve got SMS marketing functionality. We’re going to go through all the leading elements, but before we do that, I’ve got a message from one of our leading, uh, sponsors of the show. We will be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:01:41.110] – Kurt von Ahnen

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[00:02:14.490] -Jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back, folks. I want to also point out We’ve got some great offers from the sponsors. We’ve got a great semi-discounted free course from Kirk himself that help you build a membership website. And we’ve got a load of other stuff. And to get all this free or discounted stuff, all you have to do is go over to wp-tonic.com/deals. WP-Tonic.com/deals. Wp-tonic.com/deals. Right, let’s go straight into it. So what, what if you were introducing FluentCRM to when you were giving some consultation, how would you explain what you can do and compare it to others in the market?

[00:03:06.050] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, Jonathan, that’s an interesting question. And I think if we are really honest with, with how we market you know, FluentCRM to people as part of our packages. I think to me, the thing I go to almost all the time, besides the fact it’s included with WP-Tonic hosting, um, is it’s controllable. Meaning, I don’t know how many times I’ve talked to somebody that has a CRM tool and they got it when they had 50 contacts or 75 contacts, and then the mail list grows and then it grows and then it grows. And next thing you know, they’re getting, you know, CRM bills for $1,500, $2,000 a month. When you have FluentCRM included in your hosting, it, it’s manageable. You’ve paid. Yeah, you’ve paid for the software. I recommend the pro version. So you pay for FluentCRM Pro, but that’s it, right? It’s unlimited users. Your, your budget’s not affected by that. Plus, I think there’s a certain value to having your, your marketing messaging come from your same root URL. I find value in that. I know some people would, would object, but I really like that when I send something through Mañana No Más, it comes from Mañana No Más.

[00:04:20.300] – Kurt von Ahnen

It doesn’t come from, you know, HubSpot.MañanaNoMás.com.whatever. It comes from Mañana No Más. So there’s a lot of reasons why I like the CRM in the website, and there’s a lot of reasons why I like FluentCRM as the CRM of choice, at least for, for my agency. And I know for yours as well. So mainly, like I said, controlling expenses. I think there’s too many things in business that we can lose track of or control of or get punished for when we succeed. And I like that FluentCRM is not punishing me for my success.

[00:04:58.100] -Jonathan Denwood

No, I think it’s between the 3,000 to 10,000 subscriber list where you’re going to get the most value here. And or above. But if you get above 3,000 subscribers, other platforms, especially in the SaaS world, can get rather expensive quite quickly. And with WP-Tonic, we also provide SendGrid as part of the package, and we got quite generous email sending out. Limits. Um, so as part of our hosting package, you, you can send quite a lot of email even at our microsite package. Um, so that’s quite attractive, and combining it with FluentCRM is a great solution, folks. So let’s go straight into it. So number 1, the complete redesign of the The interface now matches FluentCart’s design language. Um, so what do you think of the new UI then, Kurt?

[00:06:08.930] – Kurt von Ahnen

It’s definitely more modern. Um, I’ll be straightforward with you. When I first saw it, I was like, no, I don’t know if I like this or not. And that’s just, that’s just me, right? It’s, you get used to something and now you’ve got to make an adjustment. But, but once I took a moment and perused it, it all makes sense that all of the main topics that you’re looking for, you know, from a marketing perspective, using a CRM, all of those things are now very much noticeable in your, in your dashboard. And it’s a much more graphical experience than before. And so, so you’re able to find things, I think, pretty quickly, or things come to your attention pretty quickly the way that it’s designed. And then I don’t, I don’t purport myself to be an expert in this space, but in their press release they were saying that they redesigned the pages, redesigned the platform on a different codebase, code source, whatever. And so it’s supposed to perform much more quickly.

[00:07:11.480] -Jonathan Denwood

They’re using Vue, Vue 3, which is—

[00:07:14.860] – Kurt von Ahnen

I—

[00:07:16.000] -Jonathan Denwood

to React. Yeah, go on.

[00:07:18.140] – Kurt von Ahnen

I do feel like it is swapping pages more quickly. And I don’t know if that’s just a gut feeling. I didn’t hit a stopwatch, but it does feel snappier to go from one thing to the next inside my platform.

[00:07:31.290] -Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, well, it should be if they’re using Vue, if I’m pronouncing it correctly. On to the next one, SMS marketing, i.e., the ability to send text messaging. Now folks, um, I’ve got a bit of experience with this, not a lot. Um, a couple years ago, a lot of the phone numbers that you will want to use if you’re buying a new phone number, especially if it’s a toll-free, you’re gonna have to go with any provider, you’re gonna have to go through a checking process to check that you’re a legitimate company and there will be a charge involved. Um, Trilio have a charge. Um, so this isn’t—

[00:08:27.190] – Kurt von Ahnen

is—

[00:08:27.570] -Jonathan Denwood

they offer two mechanisms to get text messaging working with FluentCRM, and that’s with Trilio and that’s with Amazon SNS. Now, I, unless you’re very technical, I, I think you want to stay clear of Amazon SNS service. It’s really not for the light-hearted at all. Trilio is bad. It’s not easy. Um, and also you, you’re, you’re only going to get the cost savings if you’re looking at, you’ve got tens of thousands of people on your email list and you want to send text messaging to them as well, um, the Tridio is going to be the easiest. It’s going to be more expensive than Amazon, but it’s going to be simpler. But it’s not for the light-hearted either. So you’ve been playing around with this, with Tridio. What— how, how have you got on with it?

[00:09:34.420] – Kurt von Ahnen

Oh, um, there’s a Twilio add-on that works with LifterLMS, and I had dabbled my, my, my feet in the water, my toes in the water, um, years ago playing with that. And I’ll admit, back then I, I was frustrated and I thought, okay, you know, I’m just gonna focus on the things I’m good at. Um, this rolled out, so now it’s years later, this rolled out, and I thought, and I thought, oh my goodness, I have clients on FluentCRM Pro. We can do SMS now. I have some clients that are on recurring packages where we help them with marketing tasks and things like that. And I thought, what an upsell opportunity. This will be great. And so I thought, well, I better put it on Mañana No Más first and try it out. Well, it’s been 3 days and I still haven’t successfully sent a text message. It’s definitely something like, if you’re an agency, you got to sample these things before you sell these services because you want to make sure that you are able to compensate yourself or turn it into some kind of profit. I still plan on offering these services to my clients, Jonathan, but if it’s this arduous to set these things up and babysit the process, right?

[00:10:52.330] – Kurt von Ahnen

So I know that Twilio has a process, but you have to babysit that process, and you can’t, you can’t seem to fast forward it. It’s like you first you have to set it up, then you have to wait for them to say that’s okay. Then they say, do you want this number? You say, yeah, I want this number. And then they go, okay, yeah, you could probably have this number, but you’re gonna have to get verified first. And then you do the verification process, and then you try to send the text message with it, and then nothing happens, and you get a failed message. And then like the next day they’re like, oh, by the way, you probably need to buy some credits to be able to send the— use this number we gave you. So it’s a process to make it happen. I know that was a long answer, but I want people to know what they’re getting into. This isn’t like a download the plugin, click a button and start marketing, right? It’s like this is going to take— it’s going to take a few days to set up and troubleshoot and to make sure it does what you want it to do.

[00:11:44.640] -Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, definitely.

[00:11:46.580] – Kurt von Ahnen

And, but there’s cool parts. So I don’t want to miss this. I’m sorry, but FluentCRM, one of the— pardon me— one of the, one of the reasons I really love FluentCRM is setting up automation in FluentCRM. Once you get used to it, it’s just a huge blessing. Like, you can do all kinds of things. I focus on e-learning websites, and so it integrates with LifterLMS. I’m able to do a bunch of automation, messages, reminders, you know, enrollments, unenrollments, send certificates. I can do all kinds of things. But now with this SMS tool, my understanding is I’m going to be able to add SMS messaging into these contact funnels similar to like what the email funnels do. And so we’re going to be able to If you’re selling a highly capitalized product, let’s say you’re selling something that is $5,000, right? Well, you’re going to need 12 or 13 touchpoints in your funnel, in your, in your pipeline to get, to get the average person to make a purchase of $5,000. This will enable you to shorten that funnel, shorten that time span because you’ll be getting in more touchpoints and it won’t be like you’re spamming and beating people up.

[00:13:03.720] – Kurt von Ahnen

You’ll, you’ll be communicating with people the way they’re used to, but you’ll shorten that timeline, which will increase your revenue.

[00:13:11.420] -Jonathan Denwood

Right. Sorry, got reflected there. Um, it was my phone. Um, so onto the other one. So there’s great possibilities there if you really want to do it by text messaging folks, but, um, it’s not simple. Onto the next one. New Gutenberg-based email editor with autosave and reuse block patterns. It was quite basic, the email functionality with FluentCRM. It was done on purpose because different, especially web-based mail clients, could render your emails quite differently. And if you’re just sending out a few thousand, it doesn’t matter, but if you’re sending out quite a lot Um, you might get a percentage of people that are on old computers, old devices, whatever, and the email won’t render. Um, so they keep it simple, but they’ve added this so it’s much more in line with the Gutenberg experience. But one thing, you’re not going to get all the blocks that you get with a modern Gutenberg-based page builder, website builder like Kadence, GeneratePress. Ollie, something like that, you’re just not going to get that. It’s a slimmed-down group. I think you had a go at it and on one of your websites it wouldn’t, it wouldn’t really work, would it, at the present moment, would it?

[00:14:42.990] – Speaker 1

Yeah.

[00:14:43.480] – Kurt von Ahnen

So the Gutenberg editor would come up and then it would go right to editor has encountered an unexpected error and disappear. I’m still getting that. But I haven’t troubleshot it either. So I don’t know if it’s a Fluent issue, if it’s a conflict with another plugin. I really don’t know. Um, I have Fluent, I have Fluent CRM Pro. So I made sure that everything was updated and I am on the new WordPress 7.0, which could have some other side effect, right? So, cause that’s brand new. So I’m not sure what it is. I did try the email editor in, from the classic editor perspective, cause they give you the classic editor as well. And it worked like the classic editor worked just fine. I am excited to try the Gutenberg block editor, so I’m still working on that.

[00:15:34.280] -Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. Would you agree that the classic is a bit basic though?

[00:15:38.450] – Kurt von Ahnen

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The classic basic, but sure. Um, I, you know, I did get a preview of what the, uh, block editor will look like and I’m excited to use it. I do a lot with, you’re familiar with SkyPilot and they have the aircraft, which is, they call it a page builder, but it’s really like a pattern library. The idea of having like a reusable block or a pattern library that’s available to reuse for different email campaigns, that’s super attractive to me. One of the faults that I would give FluentCRM, if I had to pick one, be there were times where, uh, for clients and for myself, I would build an email template and put it in that template system they have. And then when you go to import the template, sometimes the template wouldn’t come over. It would just take you over to like the, you know, the start, start fresh from a nothing thing instead of giving you the template. Um, and again, probably my own fault because I never put in a support ticket or tried to get that fixed. But, um, I’m looking forward to a new editor and seeing if the template version of the reusable block version is more reliable.

[00:16:54.490] -Jonathan Denwood

Well, you know, it’s time to go for our middle break, folks. We will be back in a few moments where we finish off. We’ve got a few other things to go through. They’ve been busy at FluentCRM updating. Like I say, we’re going to go for our middle break. And when we come back, we’re going to continue our review. We will be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:17:15.110] – Speaker 1

This podcast episode is brought Brought to you by LifterLMS, the leading learning management system solution for WordPress. If you or your client are creating any kind of online course, training-based membership website, or any type of e-learning project, LifterLMS is the most secure, stable, well-supported solution on the market. Go to lifterlms.com and save 20% at checkout with coupon code PODCAST20. That’s PODCAST20. Enjoy the rest of your show.

[00:17:52.540] -Jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back, folks. We’re going to continue our review. Another really interesting one. Built, built-in AI writing assistant. Connect to OpenAI, Claude, Gemini API keys. Obviously we’ve got WordPress Core 7. They have introduced their like a global connector with these large learning language models. I don’t know. I haven’t had time to investigate that. Would you just be able to connect through WordPress 7 and not have to connect through here. I just don’t know. I presume you would have to connect here and you played around with this because it really should help people, you know, if they get kind of writer’s block. I would always suggest that you heavily edit the content and make it your own in your own voice. But to get over that, writer’s block, it’s going to be a tremendous aid. But you had some slight problems with this thing. Well, not problems. You think it doesn’t work with the free versions of some of these, like OpenAI Claude. You think that— I’m not sure about Gemini, but you think you could— it only works with a paid version, or you got—

[00:19:22.250] – Kurt von Ahnen

That’s an extra paid version. So I want to be like super clear. It’s like an extra paid version. So at least that’s true with Claude. So, uh, you are correct in that you connect through the WordPress 7.0, uh, connectors menu that is in settings. So if you go to settings, you know, you go in your settings menu, there’s a new, uh, menu item in there called connector. And so you click on connector and it gives you just a shortlist of AI tools that you can connect to. So, uh, ChatGPT, Claude, and the Gemini, right? That calls it Google in the list, right? But it’s Google Gemini. So let’s say that you’re on Claude and you’re paying $100 a month to Claude, you know, on a developer’s account and you’re using Claude. It’s— that’s not the account. When you go to connect Claude to WordPress, it’s going to take you to a separate page in Anthropic. And it’s going to say, hey, your API is just 60 seconds away, meaning all you got to do is put in your credit card number, charge yourself $10, and you can get access to this API that will connect to your WordPress website.

[00:20:34.940] – Kurt von Ahnen

So that was like— not going to lie, that was a little bit of a stumbling block, right? Because it’s like, wow, we’re already paying for this thing and now we got to pay for something else. But that’s, that’s life in the big city. Once you connect the connector in WordPress 7.0, any of the plugins that are on your website that are AI enabled, they come to life. And so once you put the connector into WordPress, if you’ve got an AI tool, you know, with Fluent, it’s going to come to life. If you have an AI tool with, you know, some something else, like Etch, for example, Etch is going to have a, and AI interactivity as well. So I would imagine, uh, if I had my theme or my page builder connected and my AI was already activated on my website, I’d be able to go that way. Um, it’s pretty interesting. The whole MCP thing is interesting to me. The, the first couple of things that we tried to do today, uh, I was working with Emily, you know, Emily. Um, I was working with Emily and you know, we’re playing around with making a blog post and trying different prompts.

[00:21:45.310] – Kurt von Ahnen

It has like limited prompting ability, not limited ability. Like it, um, you would have to write a fair amount of content before it will extend the content. You have to write a fair amount of the direction you want to go in before it gives you a summary or a suggested title. It’s not like when you’re in the chat window and you’re like, give me a good topic for a blog post, and it gives you a topic, and then it says expand on that and give me an outline. It gives you an outline. Then you say, write me the article on it, write you the article. It’s not like that. It’s, um, it’s, it’s a very much more human-in-the-loop experience at this stage of the game. That might change over time, but, uh, right now, today, it was much more of a human-in-the-loop experience. It was requiring much more input from us than it was giving us from the AI.

[00:22:38.440] -Jonathan Denwood

Right. Um, onto the next one, which is MCP server coming interface with FluentCRM directly through your AI tool. Well, what is an MCP? I’m going to throw over to Kirk. How would you, how would you explain an MCP server?

[00:22:58.940] – Kurt von Ahnen

So when I read these things, I’m going to admit I get confused very, very quickly. So on one hand, I’m connecting AI through WordPress 7.0. I’m paying the $10, I get the API, blah, blah, blah. But I just explained that it’s from what we see now, it’s not giving me like full chat activity with AI. It just isn’t. If I activate an actual MCP through a specific tool, in my website, it’s going to have more activity, more access, more power to do things, to enact things. And my only fear with that, John, you know how I feel about this. I don’t like the idea of people losing control of their websites or their content. And so I hesitate a little bit, but it’s like I picture them. I picture people leveraging a lot more AI input for automation tools. And a CRM is ripe for automation. So it’ll be interesting to see what really happens when they release this.

[00:24:03.800] -Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, it’s, um, seemingly, um, with, um, WordPress 7, when you go into settings and there’s a subsetting, you can actually control what, how much access the MCP server will have. Because if you give it full rights, um, through something like Culloden and Gemini and Chat. Um, these are agents. They can literally, if you give them permission and you tell them, they will just go off and do things. And, um, I’d say like what Kirk said, that could be a bit dangerous, but it should— it’s also going to really expand a lot of what WordPress can do. Um, with certain plugins, you’re gonna have much more flexibility and ability to do quite complicated optimization. My only slight fear about is that I’ve seen a lot of people spend a lot of time on too much elaborate optimizations as it is, rather than spending time build, trying to build their audience. Um, so, but we just have to see, won’t we?

[00:25:25.740] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah.

[00:25:26.940] -Jonathan Denwood

Onto the next one, which is Vue 3 rebuild, making the admin notes be faster. You, you said it is more snappier. Um, I don’t know what they were using. I presume they were using, just gone blank in my mind, React. They were using React, but maybe they weren’t, ’cause React should be quite snappy. Vue is just another JavaScript library. React was developed by Facebook, but it’s open source. Vue is totally open source. To my knowledge. And then you got Angular, which is from Google, and there’s a host of others now of these JavaScript libraries. But Vue is supposed to be pretty snappy. And I think you said that you found the backend pretty snappy, didn’t you?

[00:26:25.600] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah. Yeah. And to be more clear, like when you look at your menu for lists or tags or forms or automations, those pages all look the same. I don’t, I don’t think they’ve really effectively changed those, but the main difference is going to be in that dashboard. That front dashboard is much more graphical, broken up, colored icons, all those kinds of things. Very easy to navigate.

[00:26:49.270] -Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. Better automation reporting and manual content advancement. So did you have time to have a look at the at the reporting side of it at all?

[00:27:03.300] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, for one, the— a lot of that comes right through the dashboard now, right? So it’s going to say, what are your recent campaigns? What’s your open rate? Who are your recent contacts? What’s your active automations? That’s all right in that dashboard now, right on the front page. You know, active contacts, campaigns, how many emails are sent, how many active automations do you have? All of that is right up front on that front dashboard. So that’s, that’s all right there. When you get into actual reports, that page is also restyled like the dashboard’s restyled. It’s a little more graphical and that breaks out things for us too and gives us graphs with like, uh, contact growth or who’s opening your emails, like, like the map of the world, right? Like who’s opening your emails? Are they in Alaska? Are they in Canada? Where are they at? Um, and then it’ll tell you your top tags and your top lists. This to me, and this is where I’m going to be. I’m not trying to poo poo it, Jonathan. I get it. If I was a big company with a big list, this would really make sense.

[00:28:07.940] – Kurt von Ahnen

But let’s face facts, like top tags and top lists for most course creators in my portfolio, at least they’re only going to have one or two tags they’re using anyway, or one or two lists they’re using anyway. It’s when you get to the enterprise level is when you, when you really get to play with different automation and different things with tags and lists where that information becomes useful. And that’d be right there on your front page of reports.

[00:28:33.840] -Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. And then you got new privacy-first tracking options. Well, this applies to Europe, California, where they’ve got other states where they’ve got specific privacy laws and specifically in Europe as well and in the UK. Um, that’s, that isn’t part of Europe now, but has adopted a lot of the European regulation around privacy. So they’re supposed to improve that. And finally, um, I don’t think there’s too much. Do you want to say anything about the privacy thing?

[00:29:06.370] – Kurt von Ahnen

Not really. It’s not my bag.

[00:29:07.850] -Jonathan Denwood

No. Um, and the last thing is just, and it’s the support you get from Fluent. Obviously, um, if you’re hosting with WP-Tonic. It’s fully licensed, but you get your initial support from us and as part of your hosting package. But if we can’t fix something because they’re fully licensed, we can work with the FluentCRM team and they’re very responsive and their communities, their Facebook communities, they’re very responsive to any, any bug that’s found. It’s totally different to some corporate SaaS system. If you do find a bug and you communicate it, they will respond. And even the owner of Fluent, the whole company, is active on his own forums, which is quite amazing. And they’re a great company, aren’t they?

[00:30:08.440] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, I really like Jul. So there’s been a couple of times where I have needed to reach out to him for any related things, and I can hit him up through X. He responds back, always super positive, super nice. When you look at their activity within the community, going to WordCamp Europe and all Europe, Asia, all that stuff, I mean, they’re highly involved, highly engaged, and they’re all about the community and really putting out good products for us. I think they’re pretty strong.

[00:30:39.170] -Jonathan Denwood

Right. I think, I think we’re going to wrap it up now. So Kirk, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you, Kirk?

[00:30:50.230] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, you can always reach me on LinkedIn. I’m the only Kirk Van Onen there, easy to find. Or if it’s for business, mañana no más, or just get in touch with us through WP-Tonic.

[00:31:00.470] -Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. And if you’re looking for a great host and a lot more, We build out websites, membership learning management websites. We support them, we host them. We are your place if you want a successful membership learning management system or community website on WordPress. So go and have a look at what WP-Tonic’s got to offer. We will be back next week with some more useful information and insights. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.

[00:31:31.780] – Speaker 1

Thanks for listening to the Membership Chip Machine Show. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes and leave a rating to support the show. Until next time.

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