MBA2366 Q&A Wednesday: What's the difference between a CRM and an Email Marketing software?

0:08Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show, because a better business begins with you. That's why we deliver practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenhom. I'm also the co-founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started back in 2014. And today's episode is Q &A Wednesday, where we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you've got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at omar at 100mba.net. Today's question is from Adam, and Adam asks, Hey Omar, I'm new at online business, and I've only been doing it for about six months.

0:44And I'm a bit confused about the difference of a CRM versus an email marketing software. What's the difference? What do I actually need if I'm just getting started? And will I regret choosing one over the other if I grow and expand quickly? Thanks for your help. Thanks, Adam. I love this question because in business, there's so much jargon out there. There's so many acronyms, CRMs and pipelines and all this stuff that you hear and you're not really sure what it means or what's the difference between one thing versus the other. And I love the fact that Adam is just asking the question. And I will answer it in today's lesson.

1:20There is a difference between a CRM and an email marketing software. And it doesn't necessarily mean one is better than the other or one is good and the other is bad. It really depends on what you need or what you perceive you will need in the future. And I'll give you a little insight on how to figure that one out, too. I want to set you up for success and make sure you're investing your money in the right thing. And not only your money, but your time, because it's going to take you some time to learn how to use a CRM versus email marketing software. So let's sort you out. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

1:52I want to start out by just flat out explaining what a CRM is and an email marketing software. CRM stands for customer relationship management or manager, while email marketing is primarily commonly used to nurture your leads, capture your leads first, I should say, and then nurture your leads so they can become a customer. This is email newsletters. This is email automations, email courses, whatever you want to do to get somebody to become a buyer. You also may want to use your email marketing to send emails to your actual customers, like a customer newsletter. And the best way to look at this is email marketing software is not going to serve you as much as a CRM.

2:32A CRM is basically relationship management for your customers from A to Z. From the moment that you capture the lead, you nurture the lead, they become customer. Even after they become a customer, do they buy other products from you? Do they book calls with you? How many times have they reached out to you or been on your website? Whatever it might be. So it's the total record of communication and actions your customer takes throughout the buying journey. Well, email marketing is more like a one-way type of situation where you're marketing to somebody to become a customer. Once you become a customer, email marketing really is not really used that much other than maybe sending bulk emails to customers.

3:10Examples of email marketing software are like MailChimp or ConvertKit or SendFox or MailerLite. These are really primarily to send out newsletters, automations, that type of thing. And they're not bad software. They're actually really good at email marketing, and that's why they're so popular. We use ConvertKit ourselves in our businesses because of that, because they're really good at that. A CRM is more like an infusion software, what they're called KeepNow or HubSpot or Intercom even, where all your customer communication is stored and tracked. Typically, CRMs are more expensive, are more expensive than email marketing software.

3:46Now, why would you use an email marketing software over a CRM? Well, you might be in the situation that we're in, right? We use both. We use email marketing, ConvertKit in our case, to market and to turn leads into sales. But once they become customers, we manage them inside of Intercom. That's our CRM. All the customer service emails go through there. All our communications, we see what they buy, what they didn't buy, how they upsells, downsells, upgrades, the coupons they use. All that kind of stuff happens inside of Intercom. We can see that. Any automations we create for the customer happens inside of Intercom.

4:21So you might be saying, well, why don't you just use Intercom? Well, there's a lot of reasons. Number one, email marketing is really well done by some of the professional softwares like ConvertKit, like MailChimp. They specialize in this and they do it better than Intercom. So when it comes to marketing, which is a big part of our business, we want to use the best. So that's why we use ConvertKit to market. The second thing is that cost. It's really expensive. It can get really expensive with the CRM software. where if you put your whole list, leads and customers, in your CRM. Most businesses, their leads versus customer ratio is like 1 to 5 or 1 to 10, meaning they're going to have 10 times as many people on their email list that are leads versus customers, which will bloat the list and make your CRM bill really expensive.

5:09So a lot of people separate this and just keep their customers in their CRM, pay a reasonable price. and since email marketing software is not as expensive per contact, they'll put the bulk of their email list, which is leads, in the email marketing. A little bit of a pro tip insight tactic there for you. So let's get into why would you use one or the other at what stage in your business? First of all, I want to say you may want to check out how your website is managed, what software you're using for your website. You might have a built-in CRM already in your website. You might be using a tool like Shopify if you have an e-commerce store, and there's kind of built-in CRM aspects in there.

5:47Or maybe using something like ClickFunnels that also has kind of CRM qualities in there, too, so you don't really need to buy a CRM. So that's the first thing I would say is to contact your website provider or the software you're using and find out, is there a CRM in there or maybe an add-on that's not that expensive? It'll save you some time and effort and, of course, money. The second thing is that what is the nature of your business? How much back and forth are you going to have with your customer from a transactional point of view? For example, if you're in the services, you have a service-based business, you're an agency, and you're billing your customer month after month, maybe you have different kinds of projects, different price points.

6:25They're going back and forth with you with milestones on the project. They're emailing you. They're sending you information. There's a lot of data to manage, really. And a CRM is really important here to manage this properly. But on the other hand, if you are a business that sells one or two products, maybe they're informational products, online courses, maybe a coaching program, and you're really providing a product and not a service, maybe you don't need a CRM at the start. When we started Webinar Ninja, we only had email marketing for the first few years. And then once we started to grow and expand, we needed a CRM and we just added it to our suite of tools.

7:02It wasn't like something I had to switch to. It was just in addition to our email marketing. This episode is brought to you by The Jordan Harbinger Show. This is a podcast you need to add to your rotation. It's smart, it's interesting, and it's by far, in my opinion, the best interview podcast out there. It's hosted by my buddy Jordan Harbinger. I've known him for years. And in a lot of ways, I look up to Jordan. He's one of the best podcasters I know because he does his research. His episodes are really well done. He asks his guests questions that other shows just don't ask. It's almost like he's predicting what I want to hear from the guest and what I would ask him if I was in front of him.

7:42The Jordan Harbinger Show won Best of Apple in 2018, and it's for good reason. Let me give you some of my favorite episodes to get started with. I absolutely love his interview with T-Pain, the rapper. It's more than meets the eye. It's hilarious and such an education on how to live life. His interview with Matthew McConaughey was incredible, as well as his chat with Terry Crews. I also love his Sunday episodes. They're called Skeptical Sundays. The one he did on 5G was so, so good. I'm a huge fan of the Jordan Harbinger Show and Jordan himself. You can't go wrong by adding Jordan Harbinger Show to your rotation.

8:15It's incredibly interesting. It's never dull. Search the Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Here's the other thing, cost. Don't buy something you can't afford. If the CRM software that you need is expensive and you can only afford an email marketing software, go with the email marketing software because that's really essential. You need to market so you can have customers. You can actually manage your customers to some degree with your email marketing software, along with spreadsheets or other project management tools that are less expensive. Don't buy into the fact that, hey, I got to buy something expensive if I want to do it right.

8:53No, there are ways to do it right without spending a lot of money, especially when you can't afford it. Hey, before these softwares exist, people just did this in spreadsheets. That's not broken. You could still do it. It's not really ideal. It's not as efficient, but it's still doable. And if you can't afford that versus a CRM, go with that. Next, when you're choosing a CRM or an email marketing software, look at what it looks like as you grow. Play with their pricing on their pricing page. How much is going to cost when your business doubles, triples, quadruples in terms of number contacts, sales, whatever their value metrics, whatever the pricing is based on, play around with that and figure it out.

9:35Say, okay, my business right now, I'm dealing with, let's say, 20 customers or 20 clients, and I have an email list of 2 ,000 people. How much is that going to cost me now? What if I double in the next year? How much is that going to cost me? Is it worth it when I double in terms of my profit margins to pay that amount? Or is it going to get really tight? What about when it triples or quadruples? This is a good way for you to forecast and see if this is a good company for you to invest in and build your customer relationship management needs on. Lastly, all these tools, CRMs, email marketing software, they have free trials.

10:11Sign up, okay? Make sure you play around with the software. If you're going to use it yourself, make sure that it's user-friendly. Make sure that you like the style. Make sure what you want to do with your emails and all that kind of stuff, your automations, it can do for you. Sometimes you can't tell by the website or the features page or whatever. Just get your hands dirty, spend a weekend figuring this out, take some notes on each of them, and then make a decision on which one you like to use the most. Listen, if you like to use it, if it's enjoyable, if it's not a pain to use, you will use it more, which means your business will grow.

10:42You'll market more. You'll manage your customers better. If there's somebody else that's going to be doing this in your team, get them involved in this decision because they're going to be doing this. Make sure that they have some buy-in. Put it in your calendar when the trial is up so you can cancel. if you don't like it before your charge. And that's simple. Keep the one you like. Lastly, if you don't know what to choose or how to take action, just take action. Start with the email marketing software. You can't go wrong. We recommend ConvertKit. If you go to 100mba.net slash ConvertKit, you can get a free account up to 2 ,000 contacts.

11:13It's going to do enough for you to get the ball rolling. Inaction is not an option here. Take action, move forward if you're not clear on which to choose. And then as you start doing and working and building, you'll realize, okay, this is what I need, or I need something else, or I might need to upgrade my plan, whatever. But you're really not going to know until you start actually doing the actions and the work you need in your business to see if the software will fulfill those needs. Thanks so much for listening to The Hunter on B.A. Thanks, Adam, for the great question. If you've got a question you want to ask, just like Adam, go ahead and email me over at omar at 100mba.net.

11:46Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Remember, all software is, is a tool to leverage your efficiency and velocity in your business. These softwares are supposed to help you, not hurt you. They're not the end-all and be-all. It helps you take action. It's not the actual business. It's the thing that helps you do the things, the work that you need to do in your business. It's a way for you to communicate regularly with your customers so that they can buy more of your products and services. It's a form of leverage. It's like AI, right? It's basically automation. That's what these softwares do.

12:19They automate a lot of the work. So just choose the right tool that you need right now and then expand as you grow. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Friday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

12:48Thank you.