CRM vs. Marketing Automation: Differences + How To Use

Your business generates customer data every day—from website visits and email opens to purchase history and support tickets. But managing all this information manually? That’s a recipe for missed opportunities and frustrated customers.

Today, smart businesses rely on powerful software to automate tasks that would otherwise consume days or weeks. Two essential tools stand out: customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation software. When used together, CRM and marketing automation tools can share datasets, help build stronger customer relationships, and map the efficiency of sales and marketing strategies.

Here’s everything you need to know about the differences between CRM and marketing automation platforms, plus the key benefits of combining them.

What is a CRM?

CRM stands for customer relationship management. A CRM system helps businesses manage and enhance their interactions and relationships with both current and potential customers. It serves as a central hub for customer data, including contact information, communication history, purchase behavior, and customer support requests. CRM software manages and analyzes customer interactions throughout the entire customer lifecycle—from first contact to repeat purchases and ongoing support.

CRM tools help businesses nurture customer relationships at every stage. Here are the key benefits of using CRM software:

• Centralized customer data. A CRM platform houses all customer-related information in one place. This provides a unified view of each customer, enabling more personalized and effective engagement throughout their customer journey.

• Insights into customer relationships. Your sales team can use CRM data to call up a comprehensive history of customer interactions, from purchases to service requests. This helps them swiftly address customer needs, anticipate preferences, and craft personalized communication to promote customer retention.

• Improved efficiency. Beyond facilitating the sales process, a CRM solution streamlines your internal operations. It can automate repetitive tasks, such as updating contact information in a customer database. It also gives sales and marketing teams access to the same database, so both can quickly access any relevant data about customers.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation refers to software and systems that automatically manage marketing tasks and campaigns. Marketing automation helps businesses streamline workflows, allowing marketing departments to spend their time building client relationships and studying customer behavior instead of manually sending emails or scheduling social media posts.

Marketing automation tools can do many things, including:

• Assist with lead scoring. Marketing software can automatically score leads based on their engagement and demographic information. When potential customers reach a certain score, the system can automatically notify your sales team, helping them focus on qualified leads who are receptive to further outreach.

• Organize marketing campaigns. A marketing automation system can determine the optimal times to run a campaign based on data from previous sales cycles. 

• Generate and send emails. Tools like Shopify Email help create and send branded email templates for welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, and periodic newsletters with product updates and business news.

• Schedule and publish social media posts. Most marketing automation software can integrate with social media accounts. You can then use the software to plot a social media campaign and automatically publish the posts you add to your social media calendar.

• Categorize customers. Marketing automation platforms can help you create customer segments such as first-time customers, existing customers, and deeply loyal customers who have referred your business to their friends and colleagues.

• Personalize individual customer journeys. This type of software collects and analyzes customer data from interactions like website visits, email opens, and form submissions. Leveraging this data lets you deliver highly personalized and relevant content to the right people at the right time.

• Generate actionable data analytics. Marketing automation platforms come with robust analytics and reporting capabilities. This lets you track the performance of your campaigns in real-time, understand what content resonates, and identify existing bottlenecks. You can then optimize your marketing strategies for better conversion rates and a higher return on investment (ROI).

Key differences between CRM and marketing automation

• Primary focus
• Role in the customers’s journey
• Software features

Software vendors design CRM and marketing automation tools for different purposes. Sales reps, who work with existing clients or highly qualified leads, typically use CRM software. Marketers work with broader audiences, many of whom haven’t become sales-qualified leads yet. These professionals use automated marketing software to support their work.

Here are the key differences between marketing automation and CRM platforms:

Primary focus

A CRM serves primarily as a sales and customer service tool. Sales teams use it for lead management, nurturing qualified leads, recording customer interactions (e.g., phone calls, emails, text chats, in-person meetings), managing the sales pipeline, and retaining customers with personalized offers. Customer service teams also use CRM software to track support tickets, manage customer inquiries, and provide personalized service.

Marketing automation solutions focus mainly on generating and nurturing leads at scale while automating repetitive marketing tasks. You’d use it to target the general public who may not be far along in the sales funnel—that is, they’re not currently considering your product or services. You’d leverage it for marketing processes like creating campaigns, building landing pages, sending automated emails, and managing social media posts.

Role in the customer’s journey

Most CRM platforms come into play at the middle-to-end stage of the customer’s journey, or at the post-purchase stage of the customer lifecycle. This includes managing leads once marketing qualifies them, moving them through the sales pipeline, closing deals, onboarding new customers, and providing ongoing customer support. CRM software also helps sales teams encourage repeat purchases from loyal customers.

Marketing automation software supports the beginning-to-middle stage of the buyer’s journey. This includes attracting new prospects, engaging them with content, nurturing them with personalized campaigns you pre-populate, and qualifying them as leads for the sales department.

Software features

Both tools streamline processes that would otherwise consume your team’s time. While every software platform is different, many core features come standard, no matter which software vendor you choose.

For CRM platforms, this includes tools for lead management, customer contact information management, sales forecasting, communication tracking, and data analysis related to your sales team’s performance and efficiency.

For marketing automation platforms, you can expect tools that help you nurture leads (especially those that aren’t yet qualified for sales), score new lead data, run email campaigns, manage social media platforms, manage ad campaigns, track website behavior, and measure campaign performance.

How to use CRM and marketing automation software together

1. Integrate your CRM and marketing platform
2. Implement automatic lead scoring and qualification
3. Create defined roles for each of your automated software tools
4. Set up closed-loop reporting
5. Leverage your data for personalization

Combining these two systems creates a seamless handoff from lead generation to post-purchase support. Blending their capabilities helps both your marketing and sales teams stay aligned and efficient, freeing them up for higher-order tasks. Here are some strategies for getting them to work together:

1. Integrate your CRM and marketing platform

To combine the two systems effectively, store and synchronize all data on prospective leads, customer interactions, and user behavior in a central database. Use native integrations or third-party tools (like Zapier or Make) to sync your CRM and marketing automation software. This makes all data accessible to both the sales and marketing teams and provides the same profile of each prospect and customer.

Some platforms, like Shopify, integrate these features into your online store’s dashboard automatically.

2. Implement automatic lead scoring and qualification

Businesses typically want their marketing team to qualify leads before passing them to sales. Integrated automation tools make this process much easier. Use your marketing automation software to track lead engagement (e.g., website visits, email opens, content downloads) and assign lead scores. Once a lead reaches a predetermined sales-qualified score, the marketing automation system should pass this enriched lead, along with their activity history, to the CRM for sales team follow-up. The goal is for sales reps to receive only the most promising leads.

3. Create defined roles for each of your automated software tools

Your marketing software should nurture leads while your CRM closes deals. For example, have the marketing tool produce automated drip email campaigns to educate and engage early-stage leads. When a lead becomes sales-ready, let your CRM tools take over to help sales reps manage outreach, track deals, and personalize communication.

4. Set up closed-loop reporting

Closed-loop reporting means that marketing can see which of their nurtured leads ultimately became closed deals in the CRM, and sales teams can understand which marketing activities led to successful conversions. Sharing data in this way allows both teams to analyze the full customer journey, identify which tactics work best,

5. Leverage your data for personalization

By integrating marketing and sales systems, you gain valuable insights about your customers, from demographic data to marketing preferences. Use this data to personalize every customer touchpoint from welcome emails to reviews. Let your marketing automation tool use CRM data to segment audiences and deliver tailored messages during the nurturing phase. Let your CRM use data that the marketing team gleaned when nurturing a lead, so sales reps can customize their outreach, product showcases, and offers.