CRM Vs Email Marketing: Which Is More Suitable For Your Business? (2024)

Marketing tools easily come to mind when you think of how to scale your business. One of the challenges is the ability to figure out which is suitable for your business especially if you have little or no idea of what they do. CRM and email marketing tools are popular choices.

While some compare to settle for the best, others dig deep to identify a CRM email marketing tool that'll offer both solutions. 81% of small businesses depend on email marketing as their main customer acquisition channel. For companies that use CRM tools, the Return on Investment is $8.71 for every dollar spent.

Are you confused as to exactly what each of the two marketing software does? You don’t have to because that's what I’ll show you in this piece. The aim is to keep you informed so as to choose the best CRM email marketing software.

Let’s go into details.

Difference Between a CRM tool and an Email Marketing Software

It is important that you understand the difference between the two marketing tools. That’ll give you a clear view of what you want in them.

CRM tool is designed to help you manage and improve the relationship between you and your customers. With it, you can launch marketing campaigns, save the contact information of your customers and potential customers, spot sales opportunities in your business and take note of issues that happened in the course of delivering service to your customer.

All geared towards helping you make a marketing decision for every customer you come across. Email marketing tools have some attributes of a CRM tool but aren't the same..

It is mainly designed to build an email list, launch email campaigns with the motive of driving sales. However, some digital marketers use either of them to generate B2B leads.

What differentiates the two?

CRM and email marketing are related when it comes to reaching marketing goals in business. This makes it difficult for some people to see the difference in them. But hey, the difference is clear. CRM focuses on helping you manage the relationship with your customers - both current and prospective. While an email marketing tool is focused on automated marketing and helps you reach customers cost-effectively. An email marketing tool feeds data to the CRM.

By automated marketing, I mean guiding a customer from the awareness stage till the final stage of the marketing funnel when he/she converts to sales. Take, for instance, a potential customer who lands on your business blog and found your content helpful. Such a person can be captured through an email sign up on your blog.

It becomes a lead and you use your automated email marketing to follow up with the potential customer until he/she purchases your product or service. Basically, the marketing funnel cycle has been completed. Next will be how to manage your business relationship with such customers and that’s what CRM tools do.

CRM Vs Email Marketing: Why are they Necessary?

Now that you've known the difference between Email marketing tools and CRM tools, let’s look at why they are necessary and the advantage of using either of them.

If you are still contemplating whether to choose any of the CRM tools, here are a few ways it can benefit your business.:

1) Automate your daily tasks

Sales don’t just happen. Even to get customers to spend their hard-earned money on your products or services isn't easy. There are a lot of tasks that will lead to it and they need to be carried out properly.

Filling out forms, sending reports, making custom proposals, creating an invoice, sending payment reminders, scheduling meetings and other micro-tasks are key. They’re time-consuming and need an automated process that CRM tools offer.

For example, using a CRM as a growth engine that helps agencies and freelancers manage their entire client lifecycle - from managing leads to proposals to invoices and payments to meetings and to finally getting paid.

This will make the burden less for your staff allowing them to focus on closing more leads and providing assistance to customers.

2) Enhanced reporting and data analysis

Reporting and analyzing data is a problem for some businesses. They sometimes under or over report marketing activities in their business which affects the outcome of their marketing analysis. With a CRM, all your data is stored in one place for easy analysis.

Such data can easily be transformed into a report with some automated tools that integrate with CRM tools. The outcome is getting your report in a personalized dashboard where you will locate key information with which you can make a decision.

3) Better organizational information

The information available to your organization about your customers can go a long way in improving your relationship with them. That’s why you need to identify, document, record, and store every interaction you have with them.

This will help you know your customers more and offer solutions to their problems which will lead to sales. But achieving this has to be with an automated approach. Not the outdated idea of having different paper files on different shelves.

This is where CRM tools come to play. They don’t just automatically store relevant information about your customers which your organization needs. They also make it available through cloud storage anytime they are needed.

Advantages of Email Marketing Tools

Email marketing is one of the digital marketing methods businesses use to scale their marketing. There are some benefits it provides which you need to know.

1) Build email lists

This is the commonest benefit of using email marketing tools. Businesses want to capture as many customers as possible in their email list. The aim is to build trust and relationships with them and in turn convert them to sales. Building email lists could be in the form of sign-up or pop forms on your blog or websites which promise to deliver value.

2) Reach out to target audience

The worst thing that can happen to any business is to deal with the wrong audience. With email marketing tools, you reach out to people target audiences who are interested in what you offer.

Take, for instance, you run an ecommerce store in the fashion and beauty niche. People who will sign up to receive emails from you are those who are interested in beauty and fashion. That way you know that you’re dealing with the right audience.

3) Cutting cost on ad campaigns

Businesses that have built large email lists won’t spend much on ads all the time. They have already done a hard job by convincing potential customers to join their email list. They don’t need to spend huge amounts of money on Facebook, Google, Bing ads in order to make sales. According to Content Management Institute, 87% of B2B marketers agree that email is one of their top free organic distribution channels.

Make use of awesome pre-built email templates many email marketing software offer to launch that winning email campaign. With the level of trust and relationship built already with subscribers, getting them to take action on your emails won’t be so difficult.

Customer relationship management ( CRM) software plays a significant role in achieving marketing goals. It starts by capturing leads after monitoring the online activities of potential customers at first interaction with businesses through websites or social media platforms. These leads are nurtured through sales pipeline management to identify quality leads which the sales team will follow up with in order to close a sale, cross-sell customers, ensure their satisfaction and work towards earning their loyalty.

What about email marketing?

Through email marketing, you can identify and target the right audience who are interested in your offers. This will inform you of the right product to promote to them and the email marketing strategy to sell to them over and over again. This strategy might be to cross-sell them. Cross-selling means promoting products that are related to the ones they purchased in the past in a manner that they will be tempted to take action. For a small business that wants to measure how customers react to products related to the ones they previously bought, cross-selling might be the right idea.

CRM Vs Email Marketing Software Functionalities: What to look for?

What makes a CRM tool and email marketing software are the key features they offer. These features are what you need in a CRM email marketing tool to effectively generate leads, drive sales process and same time manage your relationship with your customers.

1) Lead Management

This is a feature that allows you to manage a potential customer who has already shown interest in your products and services. Here, your sales team follows up through a sales flow that will guide potential customers until they convert to sales.

2) Email Integration

Having known that there is a difference between CRM tools and email marketing software, some businesses will want to connect both. Any robust CRM tool should be able to integrate with some email marketing software like SendX, GetResponse, Aweber, etc. This is because some businesses will want to use CRM tools to grow their sales with customers they already have on their large email list.

3) Contact Management

Contact Management is a core functionality of any CRM tool. This feature allows you to store customers’ contact information like social media accounts, names, and addresses in a database that can easily be accessed.

What are Some Examples of CRM Tools?

There are popular Customer Relationship Management tools that businesses and organizations use to scale their sales. Some of them are Insightly, Microsoft dynamics 365, Salesforce, Zoho CRM, Freshdesk, Pipedrive, and fully customizable CRM tool Monday.com

Key Functions to Look Out for in an Email Marketing Software

1) Email Templates

These are samples of a pre-built email templates developed by an email marketing company. They are key in email marketing because a template decides the outlook of any launched email campaign. There’re different templates for different email campaigns.

So it’s important to be sure that any email marketing software you choose has a library of templates.

2) Landing pages

Whether you’re a small business or someone who make money online, you need a landing page. This is a core functionality of any robust email marketing software. With it, you can create and design static web pages meant for sales purposes.

3) Analytics

The performance of any email campaign you launched is key to achieving your marketing goals. And it is the analytics function that will help you measure any email marketing software you choose. Click-through rate, bounce rate, deliverability rate, unique open rate, etc. are some metrics you should track and analyze.

What are Some Examples of Email Marketing Software?

There are a lot of email marketing software used by businesses to build email lists, generate leads, and drive sales. Some of them are SendX, Aweber, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Mailerlite, Getresponse, or Activecampaign.

Wrap Up

CRM and email marketing tools are important for you to go far in achieving your marketing goals. I trust by now you know the difference between the two and what they do. It now depends on you to choose any that you think is more important in your business.

However, some businesses want a CRM email marketing tool. You can achieve this by integrating email marketing software with a CRM tool. A perfect example is Pipedrive (CRM tool) integration with SendX which is an email marketing software.

FAQ's

1. What is the difference between a CRM tool and an email marketing software?

CRM focuses on helping you manage the relationship with your customers - both current and prospective. While an email marketing tool is focused on automated marketing and helps you reach customers cost-effectively. An email marketing tool feeds data to the CRM.

2. What are the advantages of using a CRM tool?

The following advantages can be derived from using a CRM tool:

• You can automate your daily tasks
• Enhanced reporting and data analysis
• Better organization information.