# CRM & Marketing Automation for Tutoring & Coaching Businesses

Capture every inquiry as a lead, work it on a pipeline board, reply from one inbox for email, SMS, and calls, and automate follow-up with branching journeys.

Canonical URL: https://gigpie.com/features/crm-marketing-automation

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A parent finds your site at 9:40 on a Tuesday night and fills out the contact form. The notification arrives between a Stripe receipt and a coach's time-off request, and you star it to answer after Friday's sessions. When you finally reply Saturday afternoon, she is polite about it. She has also already booked a consult somewhere else, with the company that answered within the hour.

The follow-up didn't fail because you don't care. It failed because it lived in four places: form fills in email, texts on your personal phone, the call-back list on a legal pad, and the nudge for last month's inquiries somewhere in your head. Gigpie's CRM runs the whole loop in one system: inquiries become leads on their own, leads sit on a pipeline board that shows their age, every conversation stays on the lead's record, and journeys keep sending while you teach.

## From Inquiry to Pipeline Card

Connect your website forms and ad platforms to Gigpie's lead intake and each submission arrives as a lead with its source attached. Every source gets its own intake token, submissions are rate limited, and each arrival is checked against your existing leads: duplicates merge instead of stacking three copies of the same parent, and a conflict gets logged when two sources disagree about a field. Texting works the same way. An SMS from a number Gigpie doesn't recognize creates a lead by itself, so the parent who texts instead of typing into a form still enters the system.

Each lead becomes a card on a Kanban board showing its owner, its open-task count, and how long it has sat in its current stage, computed from the stage history rather than a date someone remembered to update. Tasks attach to the lead itself and surface on the board, so "call her back" travels with the card it belongs to.

![The CRM pipeline board with lead cards spread across New Lead, Contacted, Qualified, Proposal Sent, and Won stages](/images/marketing/crm-pipeline-kanban.png)

*Eight leads across Elite Learning Center's sales pipeline. Each card wears its days-in-stage badge; the 16-day one is the follow-up that quietly fell through.*

## One Inbox for Email, Texts, and Calls

The CRM inbox puts email threads, SMS conversations, and call entries in one list, so you stop reconstructing a family's story across your email tab, your texts, and your memory. The lead's own page shows the same history as a timeline, with a compose bar at the bottom: send an email, send a text, place a call, log a note, or set a task without leaving the record. Calls placed there appear in the history with their duration, and voicemails come back with a transcript. Email and SMS drafts pull from one shared template library, so the message you send after every form fill gets written once.

![The CRM inbox showing an inbound email thread in the unified conversation list](/images/marketing/crm-inbox-unified-threads.png)

*The inbox's All view. This thread arrived as email; SMS conversations and call entries land in the same list rather than a second and third app.*

![A lead detail page with activity stream, properties panel, and the email/SMS/call compose bar](/images/marketing/crm-lead-detail-compose.png)

*Priya Sharma's record: stage history in the activity stream, source and contact details in the properties panel, and a compose bar that emails, texts, or calls from the same screen.*

## Journeys That React to What a Lead Does

Journeys are automations built on a graph, not a numbered blast schedule. Nodes are typed (entry, send email, delay, wait-until, branch, exit), a wait-until node watches for something to happen with a timeout, and a branch splits the path on whether it did. The result reads like a flowchart of your actual follow-up logic, with live funnel counts on the running graph.

Two details matter once real people are inside. Each enrollment snapshots the contact's identity at the moment it starts, so an edit to the lead mid-flight can't reroute a message already in motion. And a running journey isn't locked: you can pause, resume, or cancel it, send yourself test messages, preview each step, and relocate enrollees if the audience changes.

![The journey builder showing the Lead nurture drip graph with entry, email, wait-until, and branch nodes](/images/marketing/crm-journey-builder-graph.png)

*The "Lead nurture drip" journey: entry, a first email, a wait-until with a 3-day timeout, then a branch that sends a follow-up or exits. The funnel counts (4 recipients, 6 sends, 1 click) update on the graph itself.*

> **Worked example:** run a lead through the "Lead nurture drip" above. A parent submits your form Tuesday at 9:12pm and enters the journey; the first email goes out. The wait-until node then watches for her click, with its 3-day timeout expiring Friday at 9:12pm. If she clicks before then, the branch's TRUE path sends the follow-up email; if Friday night passes without one, the FALSE path exits her instead of nagging someone who never opened the first message. And if a staffer edits her record on Wednesday, the enrollment keeps the identity it captured Tuesday, so the change can't redirect a send already in motion.



## Broadcasts and Segments

Not everything needs a graph. A broadcast is a one-off send: the spring schedule update, the summer program teaser. Broadcasts and journeys are two shapes of the same campaign object, so both carry the same lifecycle (draft, test send, preview, launch, pause, resume, cancel) and the same per-campaign counts of recipients, sends, failures, and clicks.

Audiences come from segments, static or dynamic. A static segment is a hand-picked list. A dynamic segment is a saved rule that re-evaluates itself, so "all parents" is still correct in March without anyone grooming the list. Both feed campaigns the same way.

![The campaigns list showing a paused journey, a completed broadcast, and a draft with send metrics](/images/marketing/marketing-campaigns-list-detail.png)

*Three campaigns in three states: a paused journey, a completed broadcast, and a draft, each with its recipient, send, suppression, failure, and click counts.*

![The segments list showing a dynamic segment and a static segment with member counts](/images/marketing/crm-segments-list.png)

*"All parents" is a dynamic segment with 504 members today; "Newsletter test list" is five hand-picked people. A campaign can target either.*

## Which Ad Paid for Itself

Because capture, pipeline, and campaigns share one system, the Sales Acquisition report can read the whole trail: which sources and campaigns produced leads, and what those leads became. Connect Google Ads with OAuth and Gigpie syncs conversion actions with Google automatically, then refreshes ad performance in the same report daily and on demand, so the campaign you pay for gets judged on enrolled families rather than clicks. CRM reporting itself is deliberately narrow, covering deal and pipeline financials such as win rate and pipeline value; the rest of your business reporting lives in [analytics](/features/analytics).

## Who This Is For

A solo tutor whose students all arrive by referral doesn't need a pipeline board to move two cards a month; a note on the phone covers it. The CRM starts to matter when inquiries come from more than one place, like a website form, a Google Ads campaign, and a phone number parents text. That is usually the 3-to-20-educator company where the owner is also the entire sales team and follow-up dies during busy weeks. It is also not a general newsletter platform: segments are built from the families and leads already in Gigpie, which is the point.

## How-To Guides

Step-by-step guides for the pipeline, campaign, and journey workflows above:

- [Work leads in the CRM pipeline](/docs/how-tos/admins/work-leads-in-the-crm) - Triage the Kanban board and reply from one compose bar
- [Send a broadcast campaign](/docs/how-tos/admins/send-a-broadcast-campaign) - Draft, test send, and launch a one-off email
- [Review a journey automation](/docs/how-tos/admins/build-a-journey-automation) - Read a live send/wait/branch flow and see who's still enrolled

## Frequently Asked Questions

## FAQ

**Q:** Can I import my existing leads?
**A:** Not from a CSV today; Gigpie has no general-purpose lead import. Leads get in two ways: through intake webhooks (point your website form or ad platform at a per-source token and submissions become leads automatically, with duplicates merged) or by manual entry. If you are sitting on a large exported list, write to support@gigpie.com before you commit so you know exactly what moving it will take.

**Q:** Does texting leads actually work, or is SMS bolted on?
**A:** Two-way SMS is a real part of the CRM: you text from the lead's record or the inbox, replies land in the same thread, and a text from an unknown number creates a new lead on its own. It runs on your connected phone provider account (Twilio or Telnyx), with the numbers you already own there synced in. The same number also sends automated session reminder texts, 28 hours and 1 hour before each session alongside the reminder emails; that traffic comes from automation rules rather than from the inbox.

**Q:** What happens if I edit a lead while they're in a journey?
**A:** Each journey enrollment stores a snapshot of the contact's identity at enrollment time, so messages already in motion go where the enrollment recorded and an edit (or a bad merge) can't silently redirect a send. New enrollments pick up the current record.

**Q:** Can I change a running journey without breaking it?
**A:** Yes. A running journey can be paused, resumed, or cancelled, you can send yourself test messages and preview steps, and enrollees can be relocated if the audience changes rather than being stranded mid-flow.

**Q:** Does this replace my email marketing tool?
**A:** For the audiences a tutoring business actually has, mostly yes: broadcasts handle announcements, journeys handle drips, and static or dynamic segments define who gets what, with send and click counts per campaign. It is not built for mailing lists unrelated to your business, because segments draw on the families and leads already in Gigpie.

**Q:** Do phone calls show up in the CRM too?
**A:** Yes. Staff can place a call from a lead's record right in the browser, calls appear on the lead's timeline and in the inbox with their duration, and voicemails arrive with a transcript. If nobody picks up an inbound call, an optional AI phone agent can answer it for you.

**Q:** Is there an API or Zapier integration?
**A:** No public API and no Zapier app. What exists is inbound: per-source webhook tokens that accept lead submissions from your website forms and ad platforms, with rate limiting and duplicate merging. There are no outgoing webhooks today.



**Stop running follow-up out of four apps Free until you collect revenue, then a flat 2% of what you collect. The pipeline board, unified inbox, journeys, broadcasts, and segments are all included.** [Get started free](/register)



## Related Resources

- [Business Analytics](/features/analytics) - The Sales Acquisition report that ties this pipeline, and your Google Ads spend, back to revenue
- [Coaching Agency Solutions](/solutions/coaching-agencies) - How the CRM fits into a week of agency operations alongside scheduling and payroll
- [Automated Session Reminders](/features/sms-reminders) - The 28-and-1 rule that texts and emails families from the same business number the CRM uses