CRM vs CMS: How to Use Both for Your Business

eCommerce business owners must understand the differences between CRM vs. CMS to choose one or both for their company. These software platforms may sound similar, but that's where the confusion comes in.

Acknowledging how each one works and the benefits they provide organizations can save proprietors time, money, and frustration.

Content Management Systems (CMS) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms serve different purposes. CMS assists in the management of digital assets, online stores, marketing efforts, and websites, while CRM helps manage customer relationships through a sales pipeline.

This CRM vs. CMS article explores the difference between these platforms, showcases their features, highlights the benefits, and discusses integrating your CMS with a CRM platform.

CMS vs CRM: Core Differences Explained

A CMS and a CRM often sit side-by-side in a tech stack, but they serve completely different roles. Here's a quick breakdown to make the contrast clear at a glance.

What Is a CMS (Content Management System)?

A CMS, or content management system, is software used to create, manage, and publish digital content, mainly website pages, blogs, images, and landing pages.

It's not designed for lead tracking or relationship management the way a CRM does, which is why CMS vs CRM comparisons often highlight their different strengths. A customer management system CMS setup focuses on content, not sales pipelines or customer interactions.

Features of a CMS

A robust customer management system CMS offers a range of tools designed specifically for digital publishing and website maintenance:

• Web content publishing: Provides a user-friendly editor (often WYSIWYG: What You See Is What You Get) to draft, edit, and publish pages and blog posts directly to the live site.
• Media and file management: A central library to organize, store, and optimize digital assets like images, videos, and documents for website use.
• Plugins and templates: Allows users to easily change the site's look (via themes/templates) and extend its functionality (via plugins/extensions) without touching the core code.
• Basic user roles and permissions: Enables the assignment of different access levels (e.g., author, editor, administrator) to control who can create, review, or publish content.
• SEO and metadata management: Built-in tools to optimize content for search engines by controlling elements like page titles, meta descriptions, and alt text for images.

Benefits of Using a CMS

Adopting a CMS brings significant operational and strategic advantages to content teams:

1. No coding required to update web content: This is perhaps the biggest benefit, democratizing the website by allowing anyone on the team to make timely updates without needing a developer.
2. Streamlines marketing and content publishing: Provides structured workflows and scheduled publishing tools, drastically reducing the time it takes to get fresh content online.
3. Enables non-technical users to manage websites: empowers marketing and content specialists to take ownership of the digital presence, leading to faster iteration and responsiveness.
4. Collaboration and version control: Allows multiple team members to work on content simultaneously and maintains a history of changes, making it easy to revert to prior versions if needed.

Pricing Overview

Finding the right CMS often involves balancing desired functionality with budgetary constraints. While the software itself might be free (as is the case with many open-source options), the total cost of ownership can vary widely.

This distinction is critical to consider, especially when thinking about how your CMS vs CRM platforms will interact and share data.

Top CMS Providers

The CMS market is vast, but these five platforms represent the diverse options available, ranging from highly customizable open-source tools to all-in-one SaaS builders.

Choosing the right one depends heavily on your team's technical skill, budget, and integration needs, particularly how well it can talk to your customer management system CMS or a separate CRM.

What Is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management System)?

A CRM is a customer management system that helps businesses track leads, nurture customer relationships, automate communications, and manage sales workflows.

While CMS vs CRM comparisons often highlight content vs customer focus, a CRM system is built specifically to organize interactions, boost sales efficiency, and keep every touchpoint visible across the team.

Features of a CRM

The core capabilities of a CRM are designed to provide sales, marketing, and service teams with a single, unified view of the customer:

• Lead management: Tools to capture leads from various sources (like the forms on your CMS website), score them based on engagement, and automatically assign them to sales reps.
• Drip campaigns and automation: The ability to create sequences of automated tasks, emails, and follow-ups to nurture prospects and customers without manual intervention.
• SMS, VoIP, and email tracking: Integrates with communication tools to log, record, and track all customer interactions directly within the customer's profile, providing a complete conversation history.
• Sales reporting and forecasting: Generates real-time reports on pipeline health, sales activities, conversion rates, and allows managers to accurately forecast future revenue.
• Mobile access and integrations: Offers mobile apps for field sales and crucial integration capabilities with your other business software, such as email clients and, importantly, your CMS.

Benefits of Using a CRM

The strategic use of a CRM translates directly into bottom-line benefits, far beyond just keeping contact lists organized:

1. Streamlined customer communication: Ensures every team member has the full context of a customer's history, leading to personalized and consistent service.
2. Better lead tracking and segmentation: Helps teams focus on the most valuable prospects, with reports indicating that sales teams implementing a CRM can see lead conversion rates increase by up to 300%.
3. Improved speed-to-lead and ROI: Automation drastically reduces response times, helping to close deals faster.
4. Team collaboration and visibility: Creates a transparent, shared platform for tracking deal progress, preventing miscommunications, and improving handover between marketing, sales, and service.
5. Automation of repetitive tasks: By taking over tasks like data entry, follow-up reminders, and reporting, CRM boosts sales productivity by up to 34%.

Pricing Overview

The cost of a CRM often follows a user-based model and scales with the features needed, making the financial model quite different from that of a CMS.

Top CRM Providers

The CRM landscape is dominated by solutions that cater to different business sizes and needs, from all-in-one platforms to niche tools focused on specific functions like communication.

Here's a quick comparison of popular CRM platforms.

Why Businesses Often Need Both a CRM and CMS

While your CMS is essential for creating compelling content and attracting visitors, your CRM is crucial for converting those visitors into customers and nurturing them over time. You need both because the CMS = better content, and the CRM = better communication. This synergy allows you to turn anonymous site visitors into known contacts and provide them with personalized, relevant experiences.

How Combining Systems Leads to Personalization at Scale

When your customer management system CMS and CRM are connected, you gain a 360-degree view of your customer journey, enabling personalization at scale:

• Triggering drip campaigns from content downloads: When a visitor fills out a form on your CMS to download an e-book, the CMS immediately passes that lead to the CRM. The CRM then automatically enrolls the new lead in a targeted, relevant email (drip) campaign.
• Syncing contact forms: Any lead information collected via forms on your landing pages (built in the CMS) is instantly recorded and tracked within your CRM, ensuring no lead falls through the cracks.
• Content personalization based on CRM segments: The CRM can inform the CMS about a visitor's status (e.g., "Lead," "Customer," "High-Value Prospect"). The CMS can then dynamically display different content, calls-to-action, or pricing specific to that segment, improving conversion rates.

How to Integrate a CRM and CMS Effectively

Integration ensures that content and customer data flow seamlessly, improving marketing efficiency and lead conversion.

1. Use APIs or middleware like Zapier: Connect systems without heavy development work.
2. Sync form fills to lead workflows: Every submission in the CMS automatically becomes a CRM contact or lead.
3. Assign content by customer lifecycle stage: Tailor what users see based on whether they are prospects, leads, or existing customers.
4. Enable smarter drip campaigns: Trigger emails or SMS sequences based on content interaction, like downloads or page visits.
5. Track conversions from blog/landing pages inside the CRM: Measure content ROI and optimize campaigns based on actual sales data.

Conclusion

Customer relationship management tools and content management systems help businesses boost their online presence while managing clients throughout the sales process. These tools have become invaluable resources for anyone who owns an online business.

Although these technologies have some primary differences, their foundation is to help create a better experience for a company's customers.

Look for a CRM that connects to your CMS through clever plugins, extensions, or APIs. Software like Ringy is perfect for getting started with CRM vs. CMS incorporation. Request a demo to see how Ringy changes how you handle customers and their expectations.