The CRM vs. CMS debate pits two software tools against each other. These tools are a customer relationship management system and a content management system.
CRMs are treasure troves of customer data and insights. CMSs, on the other hand, are the backbone of your website, digital content, and SEO strategies. Both solutions play a key role in ecommerce success — so which one should you choose?
Or should you implement both?
This article will explain the differences between CRM systems and CMSs. We’ll delve into their benefits, features, and use cases to help you understand whether you need one — or both — of these powerful digital tools.
CRMs bring all your customer data into one system. At the same time, they track, integrate, and analyze interactions across various platforms, including your website, phone, email, and social media.
They’re similar to candidate relationship management systems, which store recruitment data. But they’re not the same.
CRMs give businesses a complete view of each customer. This helps teams build and maintain strong relationships at every stage.
Salesforce CRM is currently the most popular product used by companies worldwide. Regarding popularity, it’s followed by CRMs from HubSpot, Zoho, and Microsoft.
Image sourced from hginsights.com
Alt text: A bar chart showing the top ten CRM products with Salesforce CRM being number one with 202.1 thousand companies using it, followed by HubSpot with 145.1 thousand companies. Zoho comes in third place, with 84.7 thousand companies having it installed.
Let’s quickly look at what you’ll find in a CRM and how these features are used.
CRMs are home to your customer data, including their contact details, demographics, previous interactions, and open tickets. This data is collected from various platforms. It’s then combined into one system for easy real-time access.
To simplify the sales process, CRMs offer powerful tools like:
Sales teams use CRMs to:
Marketing features like lead management and performance tracking help marketers improve campaigns. They also help them attract more customers. CRMs store customer data that you can use to segment customers and personalize experiences.
To help you create digital marketing reports, CRMs automatically track:
CRMs are renowned for their ability to enter and update customer information automatically. This eliminates human error in manual data entry workflows.
Beyond data entry, they automate routine tasks to simplify:
CRMs don’t just collect data — they track and analyze it, too. They turn data into real-time visuals and reports. This provides insights into customer behavior and campaign performance.
This helps you:
Leading CRM platforms easily integrate with your favorite tools, such as:
Connecting a CRM with a contact center gives agents quick access to customer profiles. This allows for personalized responses.
It also lets agents call customers directly from the CRM using their business phone number.
Why do businesses use CRMs? In this section, we’ll touch on a few of the main benefits you get from integrating a CRM into your tech stack.
To help you understand your customers better, CRMs gather valuable insights on:
For example, they track the:
You can use this data to personalize customer experiences throughout the entire customer journey. According to Forbes, 81% prefer companies that offer personalization.
Image sourced from business.adobe.com
Alt text: A bar chart showing the percentage of consumers who value personalized experiences at various stages of their journey.
With the help of CRMs, you can offer:
This helps show customers that you truly care.
CRMs eliminate data silos by putting all of your customer data in one place. All of your teams can quickly access real-time data, streamlining collaboration.
Sales teams can use marketing data to find and focus on the most promising leads. Examples of this marketing data are email open rates and conversions.
At the same time, marketing teams can use sales and customer service data to better understand customer needs. These insights also allow them to design more effective campaigns.
Manual data entry, forecasting, and lead scoring take up valuable time and slow business growth. But with a CRM, you can automate some of these time-consuming tasks.
Take email automation, for example. With a CRM, sales teams can automatically send follow-up emails to customers one week after purchase.
This lets you continue nurturing customer relationships while freeing up employee workflows. So, they can spend more time on strategic, customer-facing activities.
Customer service agents must provide quick, personalized responses to customers.
Many businesses turn to CRMs to help their agents meet this need. 35.4% say improving customer service is their top reason for using one.
Image sourced from freshworks.com
Alt text: An infographic about the primary reasons businesses implement CRM systems. The most cited reason is to improve customer service, with 35.4% of respondents citing this as the reason they implemented a CRM.
CRMs help agents deliver better customer service by giving them instant access to key customer details. These details include:
With this information, agents can reduce transfers, resolve issues faster, and personalize responses.
Integrating a CRM with a contact center makes it even easier. Customer service teams can see customer profiles before answering calls. This allows them to prepare relevant responses and provide quick, effective support. This boosts satisfaction and loyalty.
A Content Management System (CMS) is a powerful tool that simplifies website and content management.
It lets you create, edit, manage, and publish digital content without any coding skills.
To understand the differences between CRMs and CMSs, let’s explore five key CMS features that set the two technologies apart.
A CMS helps you manage complex content workflows from creation to publication.
Most CMSs have a backend to manage digital assets like:
They also usually have a frontend for creating, editing, and publishing content together.
A key CMS feature is its pre-built, customizable templates and themes, which simplify website design.
Screenshot taken from wordpress.com
Alt text: The WordPress website showing a selection of themes that users can choose from.
Most modern CMSs include website analytics to track content performance. These analytics also guide data-driven content strategies.
From an integrated dashboard, you can view metrics like:
If analytics aren’t built into the CMS, you should be able to access them via plugins and integrations.
Plugins are software add-ons that seamlessly expand the features and functionality of your CMS. WordPress offers over 59,000 free plugins for ecommerce, such as ones for:
A good CMS improves your website’s search rankings with built-in search engine optimization (SEO) tools like:
A CMS has unique benefits and use cases that make it a valuable tool for ecommerce businesses.
Building a website from scratch isn’t easy, which is why so many businesses opt for a CMS. A huge 43.5% of websites currently run on WordPress according to the latest W3techs data. Other CMS platforms, like Shopify and Wix, have also gained significant popularity.
Image sourced from wpzoom.com
Alt text: An infographic showing that 43.5% of all live websites are powered by WordPress.
A CMS makes it easy to create a professional, on-brand website without technical expertise.
With ready-made templates, customizable themes, and drag-and-drop tools, CMSs help startups launch faster.
And if you want to add new or advanced features, this can be done quickly and easily using plugins. So, there’s no need to redesign your whole website if you want to add custom contact forms or shopping cart capabilities, for example.
With a CMS, content creation is as easy as collaborating in Google Docs. Plus, it comes with powerful content management tools.
You can set up workflows for creating, editing, approving, and publishing content. Built-in content editors allow real-time collaboration when editing digital content. Version control lets you revert to older drafts. Embedding multimedia is simple.
Plugins make content creation even smoother. For example, Wordable lets you export Google Docs documents to WordPress in just one click. And you can rest assured that your formatting will be kept intact.
Screenshot taken from wordable.io
Alt text: The Wordable website showing that you can import from Google Docs, apply export settings, export docs to WordPress in one click, and then save export settings as a template and use one-click exports to publish over and over again.
With a CMS, you get a variety of SEO tools, plugins, and analytics to boost on-page SEO. It helps you:
Optimized templates and themes ensure your website loads fast, runs smoothly, and looks great on any device.
Don’t underestimate how important this is for SEO. The average loading speed for Google’s top ten results is extremely fast at 1.65 seconds.
Image created by the author. Data sourced from backlinko.com
Alt text: An infographic showing that the average page loading time for Google’s top ten results is 1.65 seconds and that speeds significantly below that will be downranked.
Leveraging a CMS is a cost-effective solution that can fit into small business and corporate budget planning. There’s no need to hire a whole team of web developers and designers to build or update your website. Plus, you can even save on SEO thanks to built-in tools.
So, we’ve discussed the key features, benefits, and use cases of CRMs and CMSs, but how do they differ from each other? The table below illustrates the key differences in each solution’s purpose, business goals, and features.
| CRM | CMS | |
| Purpose | Software that centralizes customer data and generates customer insights | A platform that lets businesses build their own website and manage content — no technical skills needed |
| Primary goals | Improve data access and gain customer insightsStrengthen customer relationshipsOptimize marketing campaignsBoost customer satisfaction and retention | To streamline website design and content creation and to generate SEO insights to boost traffic and SEO performance |
| Main features | Contact management, sales and marketing campaigns, workflow automation, integrations, and analytics. | Content management tools, templates and themes, SEO tools, website analytics, and plugins |
| Used by | Marketing teams Sales teams Customer service teams It enables these teams to improve campaigns and enhance customer experiences. | To build professional websites and simplify content creation, it’s used by: Web developersContent creators Bloggers |
| Data stored | Customer and prospect data, such as demographic data, purchase histories, and previous interactions | Digital assets, such as text, images, and videos, along with website performance and SEO data |
| Performance metrics | Tracks customer behavior insights along with sales, marketing, and customer service metrics | Tracks website and content performance metrics, such as traffic volumes, page views, and bounce rates |
| Primary automations | Automates data entry, sales forecasting, lead scoring, campaign tracking, and reporting and analytics | Automates content creation, editing, publishing, and organization along with SEO and analytics |
CRMs and CMSs aren’t competing solutions. They’re complementary ones.
A CMS is used to build websites, create content, and track SEO performance. A CRM is used to collect, track, and analyze customer data.
Modern companies need an SEO-friendly website that ranks well and drives conversions. It also needs to cater to their customers’ unique preferences.
So, not only do you need both a CRM and a CMS, but you want them to be tightly integrated to maximize data accessibility.
Luckily, both solutions are designed for effortless integration. For example, you can use WordPress CRM plugins to integrate your customer data with your WordPress website’s activity.
This streamlines data flows to give you immediate access to valuable insights. Plus, it provides a unified view of customer journeys.
With this integrated data, you can enhance everything from:
A CRM and CMS are different, but both are essential for ecommerce success. They work together like puzzle pieces.
A CMS makes content creation easy, helping you create on-brand, SEO-friendly content that ranks well.
A CRM helps you deliver the critical customer insights that inform the content you create.
The data gathered by your CMS enriches CRM data to provide you with a 360-degree view of your customers.
With the CRM vs. CMS debate cleared up, it’s time to decide how to integrate the technologies to maximize the benefits of each.