CRM vs. marketing automation: What’s the difference? CRMs help store and analyze customer data while marketing automation tools help perform various day-to-day marketing tasks automatically. That’s why it’s a good idea to have both CRM and marketing automation in place for your business.
One thing every good marketer needs is a toolbox. There are tons of marketing tools out there, and while you don’t necessarily need all of them, you’ll certainly want to have at least a few tools at your side to help you optimize your campaigns and your workflow.
Two of the most common types of marketing tools out there—which you may have heard about before—are CRMs and marketing automation tools. But you might be confused about how those two options are different, as well as which one you need for your business.
So, between CRM vs. marketing automation, which is better? That’s precisely what we’re going to cover in this blog post. Keep reading to find out more!
CRM stands for customer relationship management. It refers to the process of using customer data to streamline the sales process and push prospects toward conversion. A CRM platform does exactly that—it gathers customer data from various external sources in one place.
It then helps you organize that customer data in meaningful ways and analyze it to learn about your audience. Some of the things CRMs can do include:
Marketing automation refers to any tool that can perform day-to-day marketing tasks for you rather than requiring you to do it manually. Not all tools automate the same tasks, but there are definitely a few tasks that are common among marketing automation tools. Those tasks include:
Sending out emails
Bidding in paid ad campaigns
Generating data reports
Posting on social media
And more!
You’d normally have to spend time and effort doing all those tasks on your own, but marketing automation tools handle it for you.
Benefits of a CRM
Now that we’ve defined our terms, let’s talk about how they can help you—beginning with CRMs. What benefit do CRMs offer your business?
The main benefit of a CRM is that it helps you learn more about your customers so you can streamline your sales process. With a CRM, it’s much easier to learn about what your audience wants, which demographic and geographic groups they tend to fall into, and more.
With that information, you can optimize your sales and marketing efforts more easily to appeal to that audience. Plus, CRMs help you reach that audience more easily with things like automated email campaigns.
Benefits of marketing automation
The main benefit of marketing automation is fairly straightforward: It knocks out monotonous tasks automatically so you don’t have to do it. By handling day-to-day things like sending out emails, it frees you up to spend your time elsewhere.
Without marketing automation, you might spend hours every week just sending out individual emails to new leads or carving out time to post on social media. But marketing automation tools can send out those emails and launch those social media posts for you.
The result is that you get to spend that time working on more pressing issues, optimizing your company’s overall sales process.
What’s the difference between a CRM and marketing automation?
Having covered the definition and benefits of each type of tool, let’s return to our original question: What’s the difference between CRM and marketing automation platforms?
Basically, the two tools serve totally different functions. CRMs are for helping you learn about your customers, while marketing automation is for freeing you up from time-consuming, day-to-day marketing tasks.
Of course, there’s a bit of overlap between the two because many CRMs contain some sales automation features. However, the automation in a typical CRM doesn’t compare to what a full-fledged marketing automation tool can do.
CRMs can automate some aspects of email campaigns, and sometimes, they can also automatically categorize the data you import. Still, they can’t generally handle things like social media or paid ad campaigns. For that, you’ll need a marketing automation tool.
So, if you had to pick a CRM or marketing automation tool for your company, which should you pick? Which is the best tool for you to have?
The answer is: Both.
As we just established, the two tools do totally different things. There’s a tiny bit of overlap, but not enough that one tool can replace the other—far from it. Trying to pick one over the other is like deciding between a rake and a shovel. They aren’t interchangeable—they do entirely different things. Why not just get both?
With the combined power of CRM and automation, you can drive much bigger and better results for your business. You can use your CRM to learn how you can improve your campaigns, and then you can use your marketing automation tool to streamline those improvements.
Leverage CRM and marketing automation integration
As both are essential and dependent on each other, it’s best to integrate your marketing automation solution with your CRM system. Integrating the two gives you a more holistic platform, allowing you to maximize the power of each of these tools.
With a fully integrated sales, marketing, and contact management system, you can take advantage of the following benefits:
Strengthen relationships: Your marketing team can start developing relationships with marketing qualified leads (MQLs) before passing them on to your sales team.
Improved collaboration: An integrated system allows sales and marketing teams to easily share, collaborate, and discuss interactions, campaigns, and projects.
Better customer experiences: With access to all lead, customer, and marketing information, your sales and marketing teams will have a clearer picture of prospect and customer interactions, ensuring a more personalized experience at every touch point.
Enhanced big-picture reporting: Analyze data and generate reports incorporating both sales and marketing metrics, giving you a better view of your overall lead generation, customer retention, and revenue-generating efforts.
Increased lead score accuracy: Integrated sales and marketing software and teams can improve lead scoring, resulting in more accurate sales and revenue forecasting and making it easier to plan ahead.
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Choosing a robust CRM solution is integral because your CRM will become the nucleus of your company’s tech stack. With the right CRM in place, you’ll be able to integrate software used in your other departments, bringing your entire organization together.
When it comes to combining your CRM and marketing automation software, you must ensure that the two are compatible and serve your overall goals. In other words, you need a CRM solution that integrates seamlessly with your chosen marketing automation tool and meets your business needs.
Here are a few factors to consider when choosing the best marketing CRM software for your business:
Determine your budget: Most CRM providers charge per user and offer discounted pricing if you pay annually rather than monthly. You may also need to invest in CRM add-ons for additional features, which will add to the cost.
Check integration capabilities: If you already use marketing automation software, you’ll want to make sure that your chosen CRM system offers easy integration with it. Alternatively, select a CRM system with native marketing automation tools or easy integration with leading marketing automation software.
Sign up for a trial: Narrow your options down to your top three marketing CRMs and sign up for a free trial for each. CRM free trials typically last 14 days—So ensure you give yourself enough time to test all the critical features, including importing data, creating data, and running mock marketing campaigns through your marketing automation software integration.
Nutshell is the ideal CRM for marketing automation integration
CRM and automation are a killer combo, but you can’t harness their combined power until you’ve gotten both tools. Thankfully, we can help speed up the process a bit for you. If you want a top-tier CRM that pairs fantastically with marketing automation, all you need is Nutshell.
Nutshell is one of the best CRMs on the market. With excellent sales automation, top-of-the-line data analytics, and the best customer service team you’ll find, it’s the perfect CRM choice for your business.
But that’s not all! Nutshell offers a powerful email marketing add-on called Nutshell Campaigns, which gives you all the automation features you need to run effective email campaigns. With this native integration, you’ll have world-class CRM and email marketing automation solutions that work as one.
Of course, we know you can’t be expected to believe us purely from what we say about ourselves. That’s why we offer a 14-day free trial of Nutshell. Check it out and see for yourself what Nutshell can achieve for your company!
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