CRM vs. Marketing Automation: What is The Difference?

At first glance, marketing automation platforms and customer relationship management platforms have a lot of similarities: they are both designed to help front-office employees, and both help turn your target audience into loyal and happy customers.

Yet, there are also many differences in the functions and purposes of these platforms, thus, a successful business should use both. When integrated with CRM software, marketing automation platforms enable personalized customer engagement and serve as a vital tool in aligning marketing teams with your overall business strategy.

In this article, we'll explain the distinctions between marketing automation and customer relationship management software, give a short overview of the platforms in each category, and provide recommendations on how to integrate the two to ensure your tech stack covers and supports the entire customer lifecycle.

What is a CRM and How Does it Work?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software refers to software that helps businesses convert prospects into customers, engage and nurture leads, and retain existing clients. It effectively helps you manage the entire customer lifecycle.

The primary objectives of using a CRM platform are to enhance a company's relationships with clients, boost customer loyalty and conversion rates, and drive profits.

To meet these objectives, CRM systems store and process vast amounts of data related to customer relationships. This data includes customer information, interaction history, business performance metrics, documents, sales quotes, and employee tasks.

Oftentimes, customer relationship management software is seen as primarily software for managing the sales process. Still, its actual functionality is much broader and includes all possible customer-facing processes, including sales, services, field operations, and marketing. By making this information easily accessible to all customer-facing departments, CRM centralizes and streamlines customer engagement. 

Many CRM vendors offer platforms that cater specifically to one or two front-office departments, often providing limited functionality for other teams. For instance, Zendesk CRM focuses primarily on sales and service. As a result, companies might need to invest in separate marketing automation software to accompany their CRM platform to meet their broader needs.

Top Benefits of a CRM platform

Since a CRM system handles various customer-facing processes, it can offer numerous and varied benefits for companies. In this section, we will go through the core advantages of CRM tools, and you can read our in-depth article on CRM benefits to learn more.

Enhanced data management

CRM software helps get rid of data silos and ensure robust and secure data management.

A CRM system provides a safe and centralized place to store all your customer information, making sure that only authorized people can access it. By automating data entry and organization, it prevents messy and incomplete data silos that are difficult to manage and analyze.

Once data is collected, CRM systems efficiently process it, making it usable for various business operations. From categorizing customer preferences to updating sales records, CRM transforms raw data into a ready-to-use format.

Streamlined and personalized communication

CRM systems enhance internal and external communication by centralizing all customer data, allowing teams to share information instantly and effortlessly.

Internally, sales, customer support, and marketing teams can collaborate and present a unified approach to customer interactions.

Externally, CRM tools enable businesses to communicate with customers in a personalized manner and provide a smooth customer experience. A CRM tool tracks customers’ past interactions, preferences, and purchase history, and enables your marketing team or sales to communicate with new customers like they truly know them. Such a personalized approach leads to higher customer satisfaction.

Data-based decision-making

One of the main benefits of CRM software is the ability to turn vast amounts of unstructured business and customer data into actionable insights.

CRM software offers real-time snapshots of the sales pipeline, highlighting areas that are thriving and those needing attention.

Moreover, CRM dashboards can highlight critical workflows and help you prioritize specific tasks, ensuring focus on actions that yield the highest value, such as engaging a promising lead or closing a deal. For example, it can help you analyze your sales funnel and find the stages that require more attention.

Intelligent automation that saves time

The key function of CRM software is workflow automation. This feature frees employees from repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on more creative work. Additionally, it speeds up CRM processes and ensures that they run as smoothly and efficiently as possible, eliminating the chance of human error.

An example of intelligent CRM automation is automatic ticket generation. When a customer submits a query through email or a web form, the CRM system automatically generates a support ticket, logs it in the CRM, and assigns it to the appropriate team.

Increased sales and revenue

Process optimization through data-driven insights and workflow automation, combined with personalized customer experiences, helps optimize your sales funnel and increase customer satisfaction. This, in turn, leads to increased sales opportunities and a higher number of closed deals.

By leveraging accurate data and automating routine tasks, businesses can streamline operations and focus on creating tailored customer interactions, ultimately driving growth and success.

3 CRM Tools to Try

Creatio

Creatio provides a comprehensive end-to-end CRM platform that empowers businesses to streamline the entire customer journey. It integrates three separate CRM products: Sales, Marketing, and Service.

Built on a no-code platform with a composable architecture, Creatio is a user-friendly CRM that allows easy and limitless customization and use case modifications without requiring software development skills. You can simply drag and drop the necessary components to build custom functionality for your CRM.

Creatio offers extensive features to automate and optimize customer relationships, including:

• lead generation management,
• lead scoring,
• sales pipeline management,
• sales forecasting,
• automated marketing campaigns,
• case and contact management,
• business intelligence and analytics,
• ... and more.

Creatio also offers a robust AI assistant Creatio Copilot that can handle various natural language requests, from summarizing sales performance for the latest quarter to building a complete marketing campaign or creating new case routing rules.

The platform’s Marketplace offers over 700 connectors and add-ons, enabling seamless CRM integration with other business software.

Creatio is a perfect choice for businesses looking for fast CRM implementation and easy customization.

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Zoho CRM

Zoho provides a comprehensive cloud-based platform for managing sales, marketing, and customer support.

With features like salesforce automation, contact management, advanced analytics, and AI-driven insights, Zoho helps businesses of all sizes to streamline processes and enhance customer experience. It stands out for its AI capabilities that analyze customer data, behavior, and intent to prioritize tasks and recommend actions.

Overall, Zoho is well-suited for small to midsize B2B and B2C organizations with moderate process management needs.

Monday.com

Monday.com provides flexible and versatile CRM software. Along with a CRM, it offers a cloud-based work management platform that allows users to customize boards and workflows for managing customer-related activities.

Monday.com excels in adaptability, supporting various workflows, including CRM, project management, and software development. It also offers a ready-made sales platform.

Monday is particularly well-suited for small and mid-sized businesses, especially those who prefer Kanban boards for organizing information.

What is Marketing Automation and How Does It Work?

Marketing automation software is a technology that supports demand generation processes. This includes building awareness, generating and nurturing high-quality leads, orchestrating multichannel engagement to guide customer journey progression, and using analytics to measure and optimize performance.

The goal of marketing automation software is to

• help marketers capture, qualify, and nurture leads and accounts,
• assign them to the appropriate sales team members,
• maintain consistent and personalized engagement throughout the entire customer journey,
• and enable ongoing engagement with existing customers to increase customer retention.

Like any other business automation tool, marketing automation software helps businesses save time and resources by delegating some tasks to algorithms and automated workflows. It also offers many dashboards to analyze your marketing performance for actionable insights.

In this article on marketing automation, you can learn more about its use cases and impact.

Benefits of Marketing Automation

Intelligent allocation of effort and resources

Marketing automation helps with resource prioritization and allocation by identifying and prioritizing high-fit opportunities when customers are ready to make business decisions. By leveraging data-driven insights, marketing automation tools can analyze customer behavior, engagement levels, and other key indicators to pinpoint the most promising leads and accounts.

This allows organizations to focus their resources on sales opportunities that are more likely to convert. As a result, businesses can see higher conversion rates and increased revenue.

More efficient lead generation and management

Marketing automation software streamlines lead scoring. Once a lead is identified, the software can automatically deliver personalized content to guide them further down the sales funnel. Apart from the initial setup and occasional adjustments, the entire lead management process runs smoothly and is handled by the algorithm.

Suppose a lead shows interest in downloading a whitepaper. In that case, the system can automatically send them a follow-up email with related content, such as a case study or a product demo. This keeps the lead engaged without requiring manual intervention, allowing your team to focus on other high-priority tasks while the algorithm nurtures potential customers.

Increased marketing productivity

You can greatly streamline and accelerate your marketing processes by automating repetitive tasks like running email campaigns, social media scheduling, and lead nurturing. With these tasks handled, your team can focus on generating innovative ideas and creative strategies to boost brand awareness. This also helps ensure consistent and timely engagement with prospects and customers, optimizing marketing processes and team productivity.

For example, instead of manually sending out weekly newsletters, your email marketing platform can handle the distribution, allowing your team to work on crafting compelling content for a new campaign.

Real-time performance assessment and data-based insights

Marketing automation tools offer powerful customer analytics that analyze behavioral and demographic data. These insights allow organizations to plan more effective marketing strategies, identify gaps in existing campaigns, and optimize their approach to reach their target audience better.

For example, a marketing automation system might reveal that a particular email campaign is driving high engagement from a specific demographic but is underperforming with another. Armed with this data, the marketing team can tweak their strategy to address the needs of the underperforming segment better, ensuring a more balanced and effective campaign. This ability to continuously evaluate performance and adjust strategies based on real-time data leads to more informed decisions and, ultimately, greater success.

Examples of Marketing Automation Software

In this section, we will introduce three marketing automation platforms that your marketing team can try. If you're looking for a deep dive, check out this roundup of marketing automation software.

Marketing Creatio

Marketing Creatio is an all-in-one solution for marketing automation designed to streamline customer journeys and accelerate conversion. It enables users to create, execute, and evaluate highly personalized marketing campaigns through robust workflow automation.

With Marketing Creatio, marketers can easily develop comprehensive customer insights, generate target segments, and manage complex omnichannel campaigns across multiple channels. The platform offers tools for automated lead scoring and management, streamlining the entire customer journey.

Powered by Studio Creatio, Marketing Creatio features no-code tools combined with AI and machine learning capabilities. This allows marketers to build and manage customized marketing processes, implement new business rules, and design user interface sections.

The platform's advanced features, such as predictive scoring, product recommendations, and next-best-action suggestions, help improve customer engagement strategies. The AI assistant, Creatio Copilot, is able to quickly draft unique marketing campaigns and summarize performance based on natural language queries.

Marketing Creatio seamlessly integrates with other Creatio products, including Sales and Service, offering a complete suite of solutions for managing the entire customer lifecycle. Additionally, the Creatio Marketplace provides over 700 integrations, allowing users to expand the platform's functionality with supplementary tools.

Marketing Creatio was named a Leader in Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms 2023 for its unique customization options and powerful marketing automation features. This platform will greatly benefit businesses looking for a robust and comprehensive marketing automation solution with lots of integrations available.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is a popular marketing automation platform designed to help businesses, particularly eCommerce brands, manage and optimize their customer communications through email, SMS, and other channels. It focuses on providing businesses with the tools they need to create highly personalized and targeted marketing campaigns based on customer behavior, preferences, and purchase history.

Klayvio's main features include:

• Advanced segmentation: Powerful audience segmentation based on behavior, purchase history, and other criteria for targeted messaging.
• Automated workflows: Pre-built and customizable automation workflows for tasks like abandoned cart recovery and post-purchase follow-ups.
• Powerful analytics: Detailed real-time analytics to track campaign performance and optimize strategies.
• Personalization: Tailor content, offers, and product recommendations to individual customers based on data.
• Integrations: Integrates with third-party apps like Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and CRM systems for unified marketing strategies.

With its advanced segmentation, robust automation, and seamless integrations, Klaviyo is well-suited for businesses looking to enhance customer engagement and drive revenue.

Brevo

Originally an email marketing tool, SendinBlue has evolved into Brevo, a comprehensive digital marketing platform with basic CRM features. Brevo is a flexible and user-friendly solution, known for its robust automation controls and SMS marketing capabilities.

Brevo is praised for its user-friendly interface, making it easy for marketers of all technical skill levels to navigate. Its straightforward design ensures a seamless and efficient user experience.

The platform offers a powerful email creation tool that simplifies the design of visually appealing and engaging emails. With extensive template customization options, businesses can easily tailor their email campaigns to match their brand identity and messaging needs.

Designed specifically for small business customers, Brevo offers an integrated approach to digital marketing at an affordable price, starting at €19 per month.

CRM and Marketing Automation

As we mentioned at the beginning of the article, the combination of CRM and marketing automation can be even more beneficial than using two separate solutions. An integrated CRM marketing automation platform allows you to align marketing and sales processes across all customer touchpoints and convert them from new leads to existing customers.

Moreover, with an integrated CRM marketing automation tool, you get access to more comprehensive customer data, allowing you to use the information to optimize marketing campaigns and sales tactics and provide better customer service.

To understand how CRM and marketing automation complement each other, it's essential to understand their differences. CRM primarily serves as a sales tool, while marketing automation focuses on generating leads and nurturing them. By integrating these two systems, you can:

• Establish relationships before passing qualified leads to the sales team
• Get detailed analytics to see clearly which strategies are working
• Assign lead scores to prioritize prospects
• Equip sales reps with a complete view of a lead’s journey with your company
• Deliver consistent messaging to nurture and support qualified leads

Generally, there are two ways to combine CRM and marketing automation: connect the marketing automation tool with your CRM though a pre-built integration that utilizes API or choose a CRM that includes marketing automation in its functionality already.

If you choose the first option, here are three vendors that offer CRM and marketing automation capabilities in one tool.

CRM’s with Marketing Automation Capabilities

Creatio

CRM Creatio includes a powerful CRM and marketing automation that gives you access to comprehensive marketing analytics, superior segmentation empowered by AI, and a robust campaign designer. The platform consists of three products: Sales Creatio, Marketing Creatio, and Service Creatio that together cover all your CRM needs.

Creatio’s unique composable architecture and diverse no-code tools empower you to build custom CRM and marketing automation workflows and dashboards effortlessly. Combined with advanced turnkey capabilities, Creatio allows for the swift implementation of a CRM with integrated marketing automation tailored to your specific needs.

The Customer 360 view pulls data from each customer interaction, be it a marketing campaign, sales call, or customer service requests, to present the all-embracing view of customer information. AI tools such as Creatio Copilot enable automated and intelligent audience segmentation, lead scoring, and lead management, making sure you don't lose any potential clients.

Creatio offers connectors to other marketing automation software, for example, ChatGPT for content generation and Power BI for analytics, making it easy to enhance your toolkit even further.

Sign up for Creatio's free trial and experience its marketing capabilities for yourself!

Hubspot

HubSpot Marketing Hub is built on a CRM platform and is particularly well-suited for a small business. It enables organizations to drive revenue by connecting with leads through landing pages, forms, emails, and more.

HubSpot’s reporting capabilities are robust, offering detailed insights that help track conversion rates and identify bottlenecks throughout the customer journey. Users can create customizable diagrams to visualize these metrics, making it easier to optimize campaigns and improve performance.

Marketing Hub seamlessly integrates with other HubSpot solutions, such as Sales and Service Hubs, and connects with over 1,000 native integrations. This interoperability provides users with a comprehensive suite for managing all aspects of their marketing initiatives, ensuring a smooth and cohesive workflow.

Additionally, HubSpot’s intuitive and user-friendly interface makes it accessible to users of all technical skill levels. Its ease of use ensures that teams can quickly adopt the CRM and marketing automation software platform and begin executing their marketing strategies without steep learning curves.

Freshworks

Freshworks offers marketing automation software as a key component of the Freshsales Suite. The platform includes marketing tools designed for small teams to optimize customer journeys across multiple marketing channels.

Freshworks provides tools such as heat maps and session replays, which allow users to analyze website visitor behavior. The Funnel Analysis feature offers insights into how visitors progress through key web journeys, helping marketers optimize their strategies.

Recently, Freshworks expanded its offerings by adding social media capabilities, including posting on Facebook and Instagram, and enhancing its AI assistant. This AI now parses emails, analyzes historical data, and provides real-time recommendations for the next best actions.

How to Integrate Marketing Automation Software and CRM?

If you choose to invest in a separate marketing automation software, your task is to connect it to your CRM, ensuring the exchange of data and processes. Here’s how to do it step by step:

1. Map and plan customer journey(s)

Begin by mapping out the existing customer journey from initial contact to conversion and beyond. Identify key touchpoints where your marketing and sales teams interact with potential customers. Understanding these stages helps you align your marketing automation and CRM efforts to support the customer’s path, ensuring a consistent and effective experience.

2. Personalize your marketing messaging

Use the insights from your customer journey review to tailor your marketing and sales messages. Personalization is crucial for engaging customers at every stage. Marketing automation software allows you to segment your audience and deliver targeted content based on their behavior and preferences, while CRM data helps refine these messages based on individual customer profiles.

3. Choose the appropriate tools

Selecting the right tools is essential. Consider platforms that integrate well with each other and support your business needs. Ensure that the tools you choose are scalable and can grow with your business. When looking for marketing software, prioritize the following features:

• Customer profile management
• Lead scoring
• Lead management
• Omnichannel marketing
• Reporting and analytics tools
• Pre-built integrations with other business applications

4. Automate marketing campaigns

Automate your marketing campaigns to streamline operations and ensure consistent communication with your leads. Set up workflow automation and trigger actions to send out emails, publish social media posts, and carry out other marketing activities based on specific customer behaviors or timeline events.

This frees up your team to focus on strategy and creative efforts while the system handles routine tasks.

5. Revise and repeat

Regularly review your processes and campaign performance to identify areas for improvement. Use the data gathered from your CRM and marketing automation tools to refine your strategies. Continuously test different approaches, measure results, and make necessary adjustments to optimize your marketing and sales efforts.

In Conclusion

Combining CRM and marketing automation unlocks the potential to deliver exceptional customer experiences, capture more high-quality leads, and drive significant revenue growth.

Whether you opt for integrated solutions or select separate platforms, it’s crucial to invest in tools that are both scalable and customizable. By doing so, you'll not only enhance your marketing strategy but also position your business for long-term success in an increasingly competitive landscape.