What would be the most effective software to help us accomplish customer life cycle management (CRM+Customer Service+ Drip Email + Live Chat)?

At Gun.io we're about to replace our legacy home-grown system for these items with Hubspot. So far we are happy with it. It doesn't do _everything_ but it does enough and it's easy enough to use for non-technical staff. We got it up and running with about a month of dedicated work, mostly on developing the content.

Take a close look at Agilecrm.com we are using it for a couple of clients and it has most of the Hubspot features, enables automatic tagging (buyers and sellers) and you can set up automations for your ebook download etc as you detail in your question.

You will be able to get rid of your email automation software as it's included in the tool. And the service pricing is about 80% lower than comparable other services plus has more features. Take a look at this page where they run detailed comparisons to Hubspot and other popular services https://www.agilecrm.com/compare

Have you explored intercom.io? Based on what you have listed, it can fulfill all the use cases but yes depending on your size, it can be an expensive proposition beyond a certain customer base.

This is what I have used to fulfill the above use cases -
1. Lead capture - through different channels automated using zapier, integromat, automate.io - basically spread your use cases across different automation and then add the lead data to a single crm automation system. I prefer customer.io and sendx.io
2. I use customer.io to basically use it for existing customer or atleast who have already shown interest
3. I use sendx.io for cold mail, drip campaigns to them
4. Not using live chat at this point. But if I use this, again would prefer a tool that have a webhook which I can then use to send the data to either senx.io or customer.io.

Hope the above helps.