07/2025

CRM ≠ Email Marketing: Why Your CRM Strategy Needs to Grow Up in 2025

If your CRM strategy is treating CRM as a tool or a tactic, something is going wrong.

CRM is a cross-functional strategy. What it isn’t is email marketing, because email marketing is just one channel of many that supports your overall relationship with the customer.

It’s time to retire the mindset that CRM = email because it’s simply not true.

The often-heard phrase of “We have a CRM, but it’s not working” is indicative of this very issue because if you’re using a CRM as intended, you’re touching every customer relationship point successfully and aligning data, teams, systems, and communications.

But where do you start when it comes to redefining your CRM strategy and mindset, and how can you fix it?

Let’s dive in!

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Email marketing isn’t CRM, so let’s get it straight

For many businesses, especially those in the growth phase, customer data is often siloed on multiple, isolated channels.

What ends up happening is that CRM can quickly become an ‘email CRM’ situation because things aren’t being approached in overall alignment (the full, zoomed-out picture!).

More often than not, when the term “CRM” is used, it’s actually referring to email blasts, reaching every recipient as quickly as possible for marketing purposes.

This is already a very isolated view of CRM because email blasts are generally the marketing function of emails, so we’re not even including transactional, sales, customer support, and service emails (which are all part of the wider customer experience).

Email is just one channel in a much larger CRM ecosystem, meaning that email marketing is a CRM channel, not a CRM strategy.

Okay… so what is CRM, then?

Well, you’ll be sick of this phrase being repeated, but CRM is a core business function.

It’s central to your entire organisation because it’s a catalyst for collaboration between different teams, streamlining each touchpoint and prompting a customer-first approach.

Here’s how CRM as a business function aligns data, teams, systems, and communications:

Data-driven decision making: All customer interactions across marketing, sales, support, and service are captured in one system rather than siloed, giving a holistic view of each customer. Data can be viewed in real time, so improvements can be made backed by metrics and results.
Greater efficiency across all departments: Centralised data means easier access to integrate with other departmental software for convenient, real-time use. That means more proactive systems and processes, and the ability to automate routine tasks.
Enhances upselling, cross-selling, and customer retention: When your approach can be highly personalised, you have more sales opportunities because of the 360-degree understanding of each customer based on segmentation.
Achieve business goals: With all departments working in tandem, collaboratively and efficiently, the overall business becomes more profitable and scalable.

To find out more about how (and why) CRM is a core business function, you can read our blog on Why CRM Should Be a Core Business Function!

The TL;DR, though, is that when your CRM works properly, the customer will always feel known rather than spammed or harassed.

Why email gets misused (and what that costs you)

The short version? Email gets misused through over-sending, siloed approaches, and ignoring the full picture.

The long version?

Over-sending by marketing

The good old batch and blast approach should be gone and buried by this point, but unfortunately, many businesses fall victim to the approach of “more is better”.

In reality, frequent, one-off messages that lack personalisation and aren’t part of a wider strategy will never be as effective as sending the right message to the right person at the right time.

It’s always about quality over quantity.

Service and sales sending in silos

Say that ten times over and you definitely deserve a prize!

But when it comes to sending emails in silos, there’s always going to be the key issues of inconsistent messages, disjointed journeys, and a lack of personalisation or necessary follow-ups.

If your email marketing were a cake, it’d be like handing someone over a plate of flour and sugar instead — sharing data through a CRM makes things seamless, personalised, and unified (as it should be!).

Transactional emails forgotten (or ignored)

You know when you buy something and the email doesn’t fly into your inbox to confirm it? Yeah, it’s always disconcerting and stressful.

Transactional emails being overlooked means that people aren’t getting what they need at the right time - our email marketing mantra - which also means that your overall brand reputation suffers and customer journeys are interrupted.

No deliverability ownership

All of your email marketing efforts will be null and void without adequate deliverability processes and ownership.

Every email you send, regardless of how great the content is, could run the risk of flying right into the spam folder if you’re not using the proper protocols and monitoring.

Wrong timing, wrong message, wrong journey

Kind of an amalgamation of the points we made earlier, right? But it’s true - you need to send the right message to the right person at the right time.

Without the unified data to point you in the right direction, your email marketing is always going to miss the mark.

In summary: Bad CRM-email alignment creates irrelevant, disengaging messages that erode trust.

How to fix it: email as part of CRM, not the whole thing

Putting email marketing at the centre of your CRM means that you’re inevitably overlooking the importance of lifecycle marketing and the full customer journey (which also means you’re missing out on creating connected, personalised customer experiences!).

So, how can you fix it?

Lifecycle marketing and customer journeys

Wherever your customer is in their journey, you want to engage them and meet their needs — that’s what lifecycle marketing is all about.

From the initial awareness to purchase, onboarding, retention, and advocacy, you want to adapt to where they are to engage them as effectively as possible across all touchpoints.

For example, during the awareness phase, you’ll be focusing on building interest and introducing your brand through marketing campaigns. The retention phase requires personalisation to follow up at the right time and keep customer satisfaction high.

Each engagement with a customer should be based on their specific journey to engage them at every stage, which is why lifecycle marketing and customer journeys go hand-in-hand to fix your approach to email within the realm of CRM.

Treat external communications as a broader category

Across the customer journey, there are multiple opportunities to utilise external communications to create a more seamless customer experience.

That includes:

Marketing campaigns: Whether it’s a newsletter, product rollout or sales promotion, you’re looking to drive brand awareness, convert, nurture leads, and keep them coming back!
Transactional flows: Those all-important transactional comms we mentioned before - order confirmations, shipping updates, billing information, password resets - are all automated by customer actions and require perfect timing to really build trust. These are the emails that are generally most opened, making them a critical part of your external communications strategy.
Sales outreach: Personalised communication from sales teams is essential here, as it makes the difference between engaging a prospect and engaging a customer. Messaging around follow-ups, proposals, and demos is all integrated into comms using CRM data to keep things tailored, concise, and well-timed.
Customer service replies: You can engage customers across an array of touchpoints nowadays, including email, social media, phone, and live chat. When it comes to customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention, this branch of external communications is what makes the difference, which is why integrating these interactions into CRM ensures that service teams have all of the necessary information to give the right support.

Email without the bigger CRM picture = disjointed, siloed, disengaged customer experiences.

Email within CRM as a central hub, utilising external communications as a multi-channel ecosystem = consistent messaging and experiences, personalised touch, and relevant and coordinated outreach.

CRM-led strategy in action

What does CRM look like when done right? Here are some of our case studies.

This client was a direct-to-consumer heat pump company, with all of the key ingredients for growth — high demand, great product, decent ad spend — but zero alignment between sales and marketing.

There was:

No CRM function (just chaos in HubSpot)
No marketing follow-up or nurture
No emotional messaging or brand storytelling process

They were burning money on ads and missing huge opportunities by not nurturing or converting the leads they’d already paid for, which is why we stepped in to:

Rebuild their entire HubSpot setup from the ground up
Create a proper CRM strategy across marketing, sales, and service
Design and implement a full email and SMS marketing programme
Align their sales and marketing teams under one streamlined journey

The result?

£1.5M in revenue generated in just 6 months, and higher engagement, better close rates, and more repeat customers.

By fixing the follow-up, integrating the systems, and creating a proper customer journey, we unlocked their growth without increasing ad spend!

The takeaway: CRM is the strategy, email is the channel

Well, you don’t do CRM by sending a newsletter, so you can’t simply view CRM as email!

When you start to treat CRM as a cross-functional growth engine, you’re putting out consistent, engaging, personalised messaging that resonates at exactly the right time for the customer.

By building the strategy around the customer experience, their needs are central to the processes that are all unified under the CRM, making it easier for departments to work towards business goals effectively and efficiently.

Use email the right way - as part of a broader, aligned ecosystem - and the results will speak for themselves.

Need CRM help? Work with Beth

If you’re looking for predictable, sustainable business growth, then your CRM is the foundation to build towards that goal.

Transitioning to treating CRM as an embedded business function might seem like an uphill struggle, but it can contribute significantly to growth across your business!

If you’re struggling to assess your current CRM strategy, we’d love to help – get in touch, and we can get you on the road to driving sustainable, scalable growth!

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