If you are running a business and you want to communicate with your customers it's essential for you to use a CRM or an Autoresponder. A CRM is an abbreviation for a customer relationship management system. So as a business owner or marketer, how do you know when to choose a CRM vs Autoresponder and what are the differences between the two?
There are some remarkable differences between a CRM service and an Autoresponder. In this post we highlight some of the main differences, so you can make an informed decision to determine which service is right for you and your business.
How to Use CRM's and Autoresponders?
First of all, I want to mention that, both services are designed to grow your customer base and keep in touch with your customers on a one on one basis using email marketing. A CRM service however, may include to use of SMS as well, to communicate with customers.
These services are softwares that have a very intuitive user interface, that automates the process of sending pre-written emails to multiple customers all at once and at various intervals. Your emails can be set up, to notify customers of the results from the customer's experience with your service. It can also set up for the promotion of new products you have for sale.
CRM's vs Autoresponders ---What you should know?
Autoresponders are the basic email marketing tool that is used to send bulk emails to your customer or newsletter subscribers. All your customers are grouped in a "email list" and they are continually sent the same generic email, like everybody else. With an autoresponder it is hard to determine in detail how each customer or subscriber interacts with your emails.
For example if " You have a email list of people who are interested in shoes " and by sending an email with a promotion for a Nike female shoes, you can determine :
- how many users open those emails
- who open those emails
- who did not open those emails
- how many users who did not open those emails
- who bought Nike female shoes (if a 3rd party tracking was installed)
With the above example its easy for an autoresponder to segment your list based on the above criteria.
The autoresponder is limited in terms of the number of data points you can obtained from users interaction with your email.
As a small business owner or beginner an autoresponder might be all that you need to get started , however if you need to get more data points from a user on your email list you might want to use a CRM instead.
CRM's are general for more advance businesses or anyone who want to make the most sales from their email list. CRM has a wide range of list segmentation, trigger, auto tagging and automation capabilities. When all of these data points are analyzed in your CRM dashboard you will gain lots more insights of each of your subscribers buying habits.
Below is a screenshot of a CRM's dashboard showing a users activity.
Let's analyze this data a bit......From the example above the user showed interest in Men's Apparel and on Jan 28, 2018 he made a purchase. He viewed 8 pages on the website and got free shipping for his purchases. He also took a discount.
The takeaway here is that the CRM data from the above example, can be used to make informed business decisions which can essentially increase sales. Since the customer is interested in men's apparel sending more promotions to this customer relating the men could increase sales.
Conclusion
Autoresponders are a good option if you are just starting out and you just need to build an email list . They have a few automation workflows that work well for the solopreneur and small business.
However, any business that requires advance automation workflows, email builders, email campaigns, segmentation, content customization, custom conversion tracking, purchase intent marketing, should consider using a CRM.
A CRM offers automated tagging, custom fields, and events from each of your customer’s. Custom tagging is one of those integral features of a CRM you will want to used to keep track a customer's activities ... that will make you more money.
One option for an autoresponder is this platform , but if you are looking for a good CRM to use you might consider this one.