Marketing Automation vs. CRM – Which One Is Best for Your Business?

If you are reading this, it is perhaps because you are stuck in a dilemma shared by many marketing strategists, whether to trust CRM or marketing automation.

You might have heard they are both essential for a customer-centric business culture, but it is still not clear which one will be the most beneficial for your business. As you might suspect, the answer here will largely depend on what is most important to your business – securing sales or activities such as scheduling and tracking your campaigns.

Starting with a list of clear marketing objectives is crucial, but it won’t get you far if you don’t know how to differentiate between these two solutions, especially when they aim at doing exactly the same thing, whether managing your customer relationships or similar sets of data. If a phrase like multi-channel marketing automation still means nothing to you, read below to eliminate all indecision and boost your strategy with the right tools for the right results.

When to Choose Marketing Automation

If your business strives to wear many hats, for example, by trying to push campaigns through multiple channel environments, automated marketing might be your best friend.

It streamlines the most crucial marketing processes such as customer segmentation, campaign engagement, or event-based marketing, by allowing marketers to quickly sift through large amounts of data, in order to conclude what is crucial for developing targeted communication and offers. It is a software especially useful for those who are looking for automated solutions to overcome the limitations of time and manpower.

It is commonly used to manage, audit, and twist effectiveness of marketing campaigns with analytics. Data that feeds its processes is the data that comes from online and offline behavior; it makes it possible to identify prospective customers. So automated marketing is really useful for those businesses that rely on event-based marketing strategies.

The most common marketing automation tools on the market are now Single Customer View platforms, which allow for segmentation at the individual customer level, and Customer Journeys Automation mapping tools, which help people understand and increase conversion rates.

The leads that MA software fosters are later directed to the appropriate sales channels; they become your sales leads, and this is when CRM comes into play.

When to Incorporate CRM software

If automated marketing is about using technology to assist marketing processes, CRM is about applying smart solutions to improve company’s selling activities.

The objective is to optimize the one-on-one interaction between the company and the customer or to simply put it, to make the sales processes more personal for better customer experience. So although they might occur in unison, they cater to completely different roles in organisations.

CRM is an umbrella term that work on everything that comprises all the elements of your sales strategy, from lead qualification, needs identification, to closing the sale.

Incorporating CRM is invaluable when your business has access to comprehensive, real-time customer data aggregated from various media channels such as mobile phones, desktops, laptops or personal assistants. With that data and CRM tools, your marketers will have a chance to recognize and progress opportunities, estimate future sales, and most importantly, reach out to the right customers with the right message at the right time.

The software is recommended for all companies trying to boost their sales, but it becomes essential when your business has particularly complex selling tasks that need strong sales methodology in order to be successful.

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