FluentCRM Year in Review 2024: A Year of Growth, Simplification, and Polishment

Holidays are here and so is the new year!

We’re just 6 days from the new year and it’s time to look back at a fruitful 2024. Like every year, this year was filled with advancements, growth, challenges and polishments. And as we look back, it’s also time to set plans for 2025—to which we look at with great expectations.

Let’s get started!

We’re Now Empowering 50,000+ Businesses!

Let’s start with an achievement that we never thought would be possible when we started—FluentCRM is now powering more than fifty thousand businesses!

This might not look like a big deal for the WordPress plugin marketplace, but as soon as you look into the bigger picture, you realize we’ve come a long way.

When FluentCRM was launched, people hardly believed a CRM was possible inside WordPress. Most people doubted FluentCRM —not because we were a bad team, but because of how complex email automation or CRM could be.

Fast forward to 2024, FluentCRM isn’t just powering over 50,000+ businesses, it has also created a new category of plugins that inspired the likes of FunnelKit Automation & MailMint. Additionally, Saas-based CRMs and Email Automation platforms also got the push to focus more on WordPress-based features.

While this may mean more competition for us, it also means users are getting more for their bucks. A healthy competition will inspire newer innovations and we really can’t wait to innovate more!

Quality Updates and Polishment

In our last year in review, we promised a lot of quality updates and polishments. While we couldn’t meet them all, we’ve made most of the quality upgrades and polishments. Let’s look at how they look in action:

Abandoned Cart Module

The abandoned cart was one of the features that was holding our users back. It’s one of the most requested features since FluentCRM was born and honestly, we always felt the pressure of releasing this feature as soon as possible.

But as we said again and again, we never want to mess up our existing user’s experience. We knew we could do this feature in a smarter way. And guess what? Our abandoned cart feature is super smart!

From capturing user details in a GDPR-friendly way to triggering cart recovery automation to tracking all the abandoned carts—this feature is a complete experience!

Automation Templates

Simplicity is another keyword that we wanted to focus on this year. I mean, consider the times when FluentCRM was new and no one could tell how its automation actually worked?

Yes, we did our best to provide documentation, support, and community responses. But that takes time and not everyone can afford it. Automation templates have changed that scenario. Users can now choose a template and get started in no time!

Multi-threaded Email Sending

WordPress and performance—often one of the most prominently asked questions. When FluentCRM promised fully-fledged email marketing inside WordPress back in its early days, that became the most asked question.

From day #1, we ensured the answer was always yes. No amount of email sending of workload could cause any performance issues. But the sacrifice wasn’t that satisfying.

We knew people would try FluentCRM on any server configs. And on a cheaper hosting, you wouldn’t necessarily have a good CPU. If FluentCRM attempts to send too many emails at once, it would take up a lot of server resources and would compromise the performance of your website.

Thus, we had to rely on single-threaded performance—resulting in slower email sending performance.

Despite this limitation, people were sending hundreds of thousands of emails with FluentCRM. And that’s when many people also started complaining about the slow speed.

This year, we figured that an optional setting could allow users to use more server resources to speed up their email sending. And guess what, now you can utilize the maximum email sending speed of your provider!

Dynamic WooCommerce Coupon & Variation Product Support

This one falls under the “polishment” bracket. With FluentCRM’s advanced WooCommerce integration, people could do all sorts of automation funnels. FluentCRM’s integration helped people build all kinds of automations from welcome sequences to upsells and cross-sells and even many customer retention strategies.

But even then, some advanced WooCommerce features such as variation products weren’t supported. And while you could send product recommendations and offers, it wasn’t possible to create dynamic coupons to offer specialized discounts. Thus, we decided to polish our WooCommerce integration a bit more.

Consider the automation templates or the abandoned cart module, both new features are fairly self-explanatory. On the other hand, features like Multi-threaded sending and WooCommerce features add the necessary polishments.

Two More Pieces of the “Fluent Eco-system”

While FluentCRM created a whole new genre of plugins, we’re also steadily building an eco-system for businesses that operate inside WordPress. All our Fluent plugins do not just serve users’ specific needs well, but also bind so well together that we decided to name it the “Fluent Ecosystem”.

At its center lies FluentCRM, the plugin that lets you do a lot of business automation by binding all the pieces together. I won’t be telling you about other plugins but this year, we decided to add two more to the eco-system:

FluentCommunity

FluentCommunity is a sleek, modern community plugin that offers quick onboarding and easy configurations—making it easy to create and run your online community inside WordPress.

FluentBoards

FluentBoards is a kanban-based project management solution that simplifies project management. You can create unlimited boards, manage unlimited clients, and give your team all it needs to manage projects inside WordPress.

We have big visions for both these plugins and they already integrate incredibly well with FluentCRM. As a result, now you can automate many of your community and project management tasks without ever leaving your WordPress dashboard!

Improved Efficiency: 7700+ Support Tickets Resolved

Customer support is the single most decisive factor for many people when choosing a new tool. And for us, customer satisfaction has always been the top priority.

Whether it’s product development, product testing, or product marketing—customer satisfaction is at the very top of our priority list. This is why we put in some extra effort, despite being one of the best in the industry.

So what’s changed?

“Compared to last year, our support responses have resolved 30% more support queries and their responses have been 25% faster (12 hours) on the weekdays.”

In a world where 24-hour responses are considered very fast, our team is trying to break their own limits! Not only that, we’ve also ensured you’re getting the necessary support even during weekends. The response rate might fluctuate but you get the idea, we want to ensure you’re always supported no matter when you need!

Trendy & Informative Content Marketing

Marketing is the side where we’re against most traditional methods. Just like we’re against bombarding anyone with ads, we’re against creating content for the sake of creating content. That’s the reason we’ve created so few blog articles and videos despite the availability of AI tools.

Instead, we focus on creating content that truly adds to your experience. We try to inform trends, demonstrate product capabilities, share seasonal tips, company updates, etc.

“This year, our content team delivered 60+ blogs and videos to assist in your business journey.”

Alongside those, we also try to answer any of your questions via social media, email campaigns, communities, and any other channel we’re in. So don’t be surprised if you find out the person who’s helping you with FluentCRM on social media is a member of our marketing team! 😉

Our Own Community Home!

We’ve had our community since the beginning of FluentCRM and we love having people around us. You’re the reason we started our journey and you’re also the reason we’ve made so much progress. 

Be it our product development, support, or marketing—you either involve yourself directly or simply motivate us to do our best. And again, you wanted us to build our own community, a community where all the products could have their separate spaces and discussions so that you could access them easily in one place. 

But There Was One Problem…

We weren’t sure if people would follow us outside of Facebook.

I mean, social media is itself a very distracting place. People go there to connect with their friends and family. 

Having our business community on Facebook meant we were asking people to connect with our business through Facebook. So, if we create our own community, we’d be inviting people to embrace a completely different platform just to connect with our brands.

Despite all those, we knew Facebook limits a lot of things and people were asking for a better way to connect with our community. So we realized—

Many Other Businesses Would Also Benefit from a Community Platform!

We quickly understood we’re not the only company facing this issue. Many other businesses depend on those bigger platforms to connect with people. And that was when we knew there was a true market gap out here.

So started building our next flagship product—FluentCommunity. And guess what? FluentCommunity is now proudly powering our very own home, WPManageNinja Community which has over 4,000+ members!

So if you haven’t joined yet, I highly recommend you to join our community and if you want to build a community for your business, you should get FluentCommunity LTD!

Giving Back to the WordPress Community

I know, the term “giving back” has been controversial in recent days. But we ourselves always wanted to give back whenever possible. We feel this community has given us all we could ask for and we believe no amount of monetary or physical contribution is enough to return the favor.

But at the same time, we are contributing our best efforts to support WordPress and the WordPress community.

“All our members actively contribute to various WordPress teams in accordance with the five for the future program. And one of our notable contributions, FluentSMTP is now supporting over 3,00,000+ websites.”

Apart from that, we made various non-profit donations last year and offered an exclusive non-profit discount to help the needy.

Attending WordCamps Across the Globe

This year, we attended two major WordCamps—WordCamp Asia 2024 and WordCamp Europe 2024 with some of our team members. We also attended, organized, and spoke at our local WordCamp—WordCamp Sylhet 2024

Needless to say, these were amazing new experiences for us. We were truly blown away by the sheer number of attendees and met a lot of our users there.  We had a lot of networking opportunities and made a lot of new friends too!

What to Expect: Consistency Across All Our Activities

You all know we’ve crossed our 4th anniversary a few months ago. Honestly, we never thought we’d grow so big this early.

While growing big has its perks, it also comes with a responsibility. For us, that responsibility is to deliver what’s expected. And we do our best to do so.

Every year, we try to improve bit by bit, ensuring everything runs smoother. So far, we’ve maximized our team’s efficiency and honored maximum user requests. And this year our vision is to deliver consistent efficiency—be it in terms of product development or be it in terms of other aspects.

I won’t go into the details of those however, I can definitely share some things to get excited about!

UI Improvements

You all loved FluentCRM’s simple UI when it launched. Its sleek design made the experience very enjoyable, however, the plugin’s also grown big. Though we try to optimize the UI whenever possible, we believe there’s room for some improvement. Thus, an UI upgrade is planned next year.

Get ready for something beautiful!

SMS Marketing

Up until now, FluentCRM was only focused on email automation. But we always had a vision to make it bigger and the only tool you’d ever need for marketing automation. So hold your breath for SMS marketing integration in 2025!

Email Templates

I know, we promised email and automation templates last year. While we did integrate automation templates, email templates are still in progress. Again, this is down to our maximum efforts to ensure a smooth email template experience. But what I can tell you is we’re very close and you can expect email templates very soon!

Something Surprising Coming Soon!

I know we teased FluentBoards and FluentCommunity the same way. But this isn’t one of our usual product teases. 

“We are building the biggest WPManageNinja product ever”

No, I’m not exaggerating. We have been working on something big for over 3 and a half years now. And I genuinely believe what we are building is the biggest product WordPress has seen yet! And no, this is no waitlist, neither an announcement. But for now, all I want to say is—get ready for the biggest (and the best!)

We will make the announcement in a few days. Till then, subscribe to our blog and be the first person to know when we announce!

A Thanks is Still Due

That’s it, that was all for today! But a thanks is still due.

We have come a long way. What started as a simple email automation solution is a top marketing automation tool now. 2024 has been a wonderful year of numerous achievements. And none of this would have been possible without you.

2025 will unfold more. As we step into our 5th year, your unwavering support will keep helping us take on newer challenges and I hope you will be with us throughout our journey. Let’s make small business simpler together!

Happy Holidays and a very Happy New Year to all of you!