GSD 219: What’s The Difference Between Marketing Automation vs. CRM?

Welcome to today’s GSD Daily. We’re going to talk about marketing automation versus CRMs. Now, a lot of people think they’re the same thing, right? CRM and marketing automation are the same things, and in reality, they are not, they are not. Marketing automation is more of an action, and CRM is more of a thing. So there are lots and lots and lots of different types of CRMs. A CRM is a customer or client, customer relationship management software. So anything that manages your relationships with customers is a CRM. And there are many, many, many different shapes and sizes you can get from a pipe drive, which is more like a sales workflow CRM to an Infusionsoft or a Keap. Infusionsoft is what we old heads still call Keap.

Keap is a CRM tool with very sophisticated marketing automation campaigns and workflows, but they’re both CRMs. You can have a very simple CRM, Sugar CRM is an open source, or at least it used to be, free CRM that could manage your customers. And that’s all that a CRM does. A couple of years ago there was a CRM that Basecamp had, it was called High-Rise, I think, no, it was Campfire. So Basecamp, they had a sister company called, I think it was… I’m pretty sure it was Campfire. And Campfire was a very simplistic CRM. It was meant for the solopreneur who would just have a first name, last name, and email. You could customize some of the data. It didn’t do any of the marketing automation, but it was like your Rolodex. That’s all the CRM was. And that is the definition of a CRM.

A CRM is a Rolodex. Rather than putting it on your desk and flipping the cards or pulling the index cards out to dial the phone number, you’re going to the CRM, pulling it up on your screen, searching for that person, seeing the phone number, and then calling. That’s what a CRM does. Now, marketing automation adds another layer on top of the CRM. Marketing automation is where you can start doing stuff, like sending emails, sending text messages, doing push notifications, and sending voice broadcasts out through marketing automation. So what you can do is say, to Joe, I want Joe on day one to receive this email. And then on day two, receive this email. And on day three, get this text message. And day four, receive this voice broadcast. The marketing automation-based CRM will do all of those things and you can configure it, and that’s a big difference, right? So a CRM is customer records, and that’s it. And then your marketing automation is all of the stuff that you can do for or do with those customer records automatically.

So what I want to do is show you inside one of our favorite CRMs, which is Ontraport. Ontraport we’ve been with for many, many, many years. So we have lots and lots of different groups and segments inside this CRM. You can do so many different things, but how it’s all broken down is, you have your contacts. Now, your contacts are the CRM. So if we go into a customer record, this is just my customer record, for instance, just a test customer record, we see that there are lots of different fields. So this CRM appends every new piece of data into the customer record as it finds it. I never gave it a physical address, but it pulled it out of some public data. It also pulled my… I think I did give it to my phone number at some point. I filled out a couple of surveys from a testing standpoint.

So there are lots of different ways that I’ve customized this in the last 10 years that we’ve been using it. You will see that at some point I turned to just transactional only. So this particular email address is no longer receiving bulk emails. Originally, this was a referring page for the email. And I’m in lots of different sequences, tags, and automation. The customer record itself is just this, it gives you all the data about the customer that you know. So you can pick up the phone and say, “I’m going to call me. I’m going to email me, I’m going to send an email.” Whatever. And you have some tasks up here that you can do. So you can log a phone call and send an email or an SMS all in line. And then down below we start to get into what has been done.

So this is the contact log. This is every email and every text that has been sent to this email address from now back to when they signed up to be a customer. Then we have our automation log. This is everything that happened in the contact record. You can see a tag was changed, a sequence was changed, and there was a field changed. So there was a page title, and some landing page was changed. So there’s lots of information here inside the CRM that it’s cataloging at all times. And we can go all the way down into notes. Every person has different notes. We have purchases of the memberships that I’m a part of here, the referral information, the coupons that I “clipped”, all of that is available inside the customer record.

Now, none of this though is marketing automation. Marketing automation is where you start to put together the emails, the text messages, all the marketing things, and the tags moving from somebody from one sequence to another sequence to another sequence. All of that stuff is what is made up of marketing automation. Inside the automation is where you get to see the automation. Now, the automation is mostly workflows, so here’s one, they come into automation, we change a tag, we wait, we send an email, then we wait some more, then we send an email. It doesn’t get too crazy. We can also pull in a bunch of other different elements. So here we have 318 people who are in this automation today, and we added them to a sequence. And that sequence is here. So it’s just a different kind of automation. So that’s right here, and the sequence is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 emails. There are a couple of tag changes and stuff, but this is the way they used to do it, and then they went to the more graphical sequence.

So there are a lot of different ways to do it, but the marketing automation element is very much separate from the CRM itself. Every CRM has different abilities when it comes to marketing automation, Ontreport, Infusionsoft, and ActiveCampaign, those are going to be your real good CRMs, the ones that can move folks back and forth from an automation standpoint. MailChimp, Salesforce, and ConvertKit have less functionality when it comes to marketing automation and being able to tie a bunch of stuff together. So it’s just one of… Our preferred for newer business for a business doing less than maybe a million dollars a year is ActiveCampaign. Above that, we might go to Ontreport or Infusionsoft, but it just depends on what your needs for the system are.

If you have any questions at all, make sure to ask them down below this video. If you got value from this video, like and share it, please, it helps us expand our audience a little bit. And if you have any questions at all, if you’d like to jump on an action plan call where we talk through your business, and your inbound marketing funnel, go to DoneForYou.com/start and we will jump on a call and talk through it. I’ll talk to you soon, all right? Thanks, bye.