The difference between marketing automation and CRM

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Marketing automation and CRMs work together but serve different functions. Marketing automation tracks top-of-funnel activities to drive qualified leads to sales, while CRM stores information about the lead and where they are in the sales cycle.


Common Marketing Automation Integrations
Marketing automation can potentially integrate with hundreds of other applications. Aside from CRM, one of the most common integrations is with webinar applications to boost engagement. Many webinar tools offer an installed package that connects with the marketing automation platform and makes it accessible to engagement data, as someone who stays weight loss email list through the webinar will have a higher engagement than someone who registered but didn’t attend. It’s also very common to integrate the marketing automation tool with a chat platform.

Marketing automation best practices
A good example of marketing automation? Tracking how someone first arrives at your site (referral source), then where they convert (the first form they fill out or interact with your chatbot, for example), and then orchestrating how, when, and with what marketing and sales messages you’ll continue to engage the buyer throughout that entire purchasing decision.

You can do all of that manually but the purpose of marketing automation is to create scale and as a result, efficiency and repeatability such that the outcome is predictable. Before marketing automation, marketers were dependent on IT resources to code emails, create landing pages and actually deploy mass emails. Marketing automation gives marketers the power and thus saves time and money.

Good marketing automation will look like an organized space where it’s easy to find and locate the things you need, with orchestrated processes that run seamlessly and holistically, on a refined database. Marketing automation at its best should enhance every program and process, improving the lead lifecycle journey so that the sales team is confident in the data and in all marketing-driven efforts.

Bad practices in marketing automation
The real value of marketing automation is in the data. The worst part of the process is that marketers rarely receive the training necessary to manage, manipulate, and use data effectively.

All of the training for marketers in college is primarily focused on learning price, product, promotion, and point of sale (the famous four Ps) and not data management, field validation, or privacy compliance concerns. All of the best features of marketing automation are data-related, but marketers rarely learn it. So if marketers don’t follow data best practices, they will eventually mess up the entire process and the opposite of what you are supposed to achieve with marketing automation will happen.

Now that you know what marketing automation is and we've covered some basics on how to implement it, you should be able to get your own automation up and running. If not, don't worry, get in touch with us - we'd love to help!