All-in-one marketing software for agencies is a single product that combines a customer list, web pages, emails, text messages and a booking calendar, which a marketing agency runs for many small local businesses under the agency's own brand. It is sold mainly in the United States, where small businesses such as dentists, gyms and plumbers hire agencies to find them customers. Much of the best-known product of this kind is built by engineers in India.
A small business needs several tools to win a customer. It needs a CRM, short for customer relationship management, which is the list of customers and every contact with them. It needs a funnel builder, which makes the web pages that lead a visitor step by step from an advertisement to a booking. It needs email and text campaigns, and a booking calendar. Buying five separate tools is expensive and confusing for a dentist. So the agency buys one product that does all five.
The product is white-labelled. This means the agency puts its own name and logo on it. The clinic logs in to what looks like the agency's own software. The agency pays the software maker a fixed monthly fee, often a few hundred US dollars, and then charges each of its clients a monthly fee of its own. The more clients it adds, the more it earns, because the fixed fee does not rise with each new client. The agency pays extra only for usage, such as the text messages and emails it sends, and it can charge these costs on to its clients.
Imagine a three-person agency in Ohio, in the United States, that looks after 25 dental clinics. For one clinic, it runs a social media advertisement: a first cleaning and check-up for $79. A person who clicks reaches a one-page funnel with a short form. When she fills it in, her name and phone number go straight into the clinic's customer list. Within a minute, she receives a text message with a link to the clinic's booking calendar. She picks Thursday at 10 am. The day before, she receives a reminder text. If the clinic asks for a deposit, she pays it through a payment gateway linked to the booking page.
In the United States, businesses usually reach customers by SMS, not WhatsApp. Elsewhere, the same product can send messages through the WhatsApp Business API instead. Salons and spas that need staff rotas and stock as well often use dedicated salon and spa software.
This product is different from a customer engagement platform. An engagement platform sends messages to millions of app users for one large brand. All-in-one software handles a few thousand contacts each, for many small businesses at once. It is sold as SaaS, so the agency rents it rather than installing it.