How To Build Your Own CRM With Rowy (2023): A Complete Low-Code Guide

A product or service without customers is default dead―acquiring and retaining customers is the lifeblood of any business. But keeping track of all your customers can be a challenge. That’s where a Customer Relationship Management tool, CRM for short, comes in.

A CRM is a software application that helps businesses manage and analyze customer interactions throughout the user journey, to improve the quality of your relationships with your customer relationships and ultimately increase your sales.

There are a variety of CRM options available, ranging from simple standalone tools to more comprehensive, integrated systems. Some popular examples include Salesforce, Zoho CRM, and HubSpot CRM. No matter what your business goals and needs are, there is likely a CRM solution that can help you achieve them. If you don't have much money to spare or want a simple system you can customize to fit your needs, we’ll take a look at how to build your own CRM with low-code in this article. Let's dig in!

How To Build Your Own CRM With Low-Code

Let's build a CRM to reach out to customers by sending them cold emails. We'll use Sendgrid to send emails and Rowy to build our CRM.

1. Add columns

Create a new Rowy project and add a new table. In this example, we'll call it crm.

If you don't have an account, you can sign up for free and get started in a few minutes or self-host a Rowy instance yourself.

We'll need the following columns in our table:

• email - an email type field
• firstName, lastName, company, and role - all short text type fields

Rowy works just like a spreadsheet, so you'll obtain something like this:

Now, we need to get data. We can either import data from a CSV file or add data manually. For this example, we'll use the import feature.

2. Import data

Rowy makes it easy to import any tabular data via a CSV file. Most tools containing customer data provide a way to export the data as a CSV file. For example, we can export our contacts from Mailjet, Stripe, or even Linkedin. In Mailjet:

In Rowy, all you have to do is to click on the import button and select your CSV file to upload:

Rowy will ask you to map the CSV columns to the table columns. In our example, we can only import email data from Mailjet:

It'll only takes a few seconds to finish the import:

Once you have your life of customers ready, you can start doing interesting things with this data. A word of caution though: you should always ask for permission before sending cold emails to your customers―or anything that relies on private data for that matter―so stay mindful.

3. Send cold emails with Sendgrid

One of the most common use cases of a CRM is to send cold emails to your leads. We can use email APIs to send emails from our CRM by setting up an Action column. When you click on an Action button in Rowy, you can run a custom script. To do this, just create a new Action column like you did in step 1, but pick the Action type:

In the settings section, you can bring your own code. We'll use Sengrid's API to send cold emails. You can use any provider you like, but we'll use Sendgrid for this example:

const API_KEY = rowy.secrets.SENDGRID_API_KEY

const name = row.firstName + ' ' + row.lastName

await fetch("https://api.sendgrid.com/v3/mail/send", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: {
    "Authorization": `Bearer ${API_KEY}`
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    to: [
      {
        email: row.email
      }
    ],
    from: {
      email: your_registered_email_address,
      name: your_company_name
    },
    subject: 'Hello from us',
    content: [
      {
        type: 'text/html',
        value: '<p>Hello from us!</p><p>%open-track%</p>'
      }
    ]
  })
})

This code can be pasted into a function in the action column settings. In this function, you get access to several parameters to get data from the database, like column values for each row. You can also use the rowy.secrets object to store app secrets, like your Sendgrid API key.

You can run the function by simply clicking the action button:

4. Send follow-up emails

Similarly, you can create more columns for different actions. One could be to send follow-up emails:

const API_KEY = rowy.secrets.SENDGRID_API_KEY

const name = row.firstName + ' ' + row.lastName

await fetch("https://api.sendgrid.com/v3/mail/send", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: {
    "Authorization": `Bearer ${API_KEY}`
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    to: [
      {
        email: row.email
      }
    ],
    from: {
      email: your_registered_email_address,
      name: your_company_name
    },
    subject: 'Follow up',
    content: [
      {
        type: 'text/html',
        value: "<p>Hey, we've tried to reach but didn't receive any answer. Let me know if you have any question.</p><p>%open-track%</p>"
      }
    ]
  })
})

You are only limited by your imagination: advanced features could include using Gmail's API to retrieve emails from customers and sending automated replies using OpenAI, or classifying emails using machine learning to automatically assign leads to sales reps when the email is positive.

Check Out More Demos

Building your own CRM with Rowy is a cost-effective and efficient solution for small businesses looking to streamline their customer relationship management. Firebase offers features including custom cloud functions, user authentication, and flexible data storage. The solution ensures your CRM can grow and evolve with your business needs, from no-code to low-code.

Check out more demos on Rowy’s website, including how to interact with other no-code tools like building an ecommerce store with Webflow or importing data using Airtable.