Personalised Marketing Tools: CRM vs Marketing Automation

When you tailor your marketing to each customer’s situation, your messages and overall buying experience become more engaging and effective. But how can you do that in practice?

The best personalised marketing tools are CRMs and automation platforms.

So, let’s look at them individually to understand their differences and why it’s better to use both (and how) to plan a successful personalised marketing strategy, step by step.

What is a CRM?

CRM systems (customer relationship management) are platforms or software to manage all your data, touchpoints, and interactions with potential and current customers. 

By storing all their information in one place, you can bring your marketing, sales, and customer service together. That way, it doesn’t matter which team member picks up that contact and when: they’re always going to be in the loop and able to provide personalised communication, service, and support.

Main CRM features 

• Contact management – Collect, organise, and store all your customer data (from contact details to their touchpoints and insights or preferences). This allows you to track your past interactions and personalise all your future marketing and communications
• Communications – CRMs bring all your customer interactions, messages, and enquiries in one place, letting you add relevant notes, too
• Sales management – Use these features (like lead scoring and sales forecasting) to identify sales opportunities and keep track of all your leads, conversations, and follow-ups
• Customer service management – Stay on top of enquiries and support tickets, keeping a log in each customer profile
• Analytics – By reviewing your data and reports (for example, on your campaigns and sales), you can optimise and personalise your strategies even further

Why use a CRM for personalised marketing?

CRM systems are particularly useful for personalised marketing when it comes to:

• Customer insights – To personalise your marketing, you must tailor it to each customer’s situation, preferences or behaviours. CRMs facilitate this by tracking and logging all that data. When you connect a ScoreApp quiz lead magnet to your CRM (and ask strategic questions), you can collect A TONNE of additional insights on your audience!
• Segmented campaigns – Divide your customers into groups based on set criteria (like their purchase history, demographics, needs or preferences), and send them different marketing messages and campaigns. That way, they’ll be more relevant and effective. Your ScoreApp quiz will segment your participants automatically, and you can then set up separate nurturing sequences.
• Tailored communication and follow-ups – Use those insights to make your marketing, touchpoints and sales communications super-targeted (and, consequently, a lot more effective!). CRM features like lead scoring can also show you which prospects are most likely to convert into customers and when it’s the right time to make them an offer. With ScoreApp, you can take this to the next level. As well as tailoring your nurturing sequences, you get to recommend the right products or services based on someone’s quiz answers… or even reference the latter when you invite them on a call! That’s one of the many reasons why, with personalisation, you can expect a 20% increase in sales.

Can you integrate CRM systems with ScoreApp?

Yes, ScoreApp offers direct integrations with the most popular CRM systems (like HubSpot, Insightly, Keap, Zoho and HighLevel), and you can use Zapier to connect it with additional ones, too.

Create a FREE ScoreApp quiz that feeds into your CRM

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation means using software and tools to automate the most repetitive tasks and optimise your marketing.  

This allows you to save time, speed up your lead generation and nurturing, remove human error, and streamline your entire process. All of this makes your teams more productive and your marketing more effective. 

Nowadays, many marketing automation tools take this one step further by including AI capabilities, too. 

Main marketing automation features

• Email marketing – Schedule your emails, automate different sequences, A/B test them and track your campaigns
• Lead nurturing – Use set triggers (for example, based on each customer’s behaviours or preferences) to kickstart the most relevant nurturing workflow for each lead
• Social media management – Marketing automation is particularly popular for scheduling content across different platforms, tracking engagement or even replying to DMs faster
• Landing pages and forms – Collect new leads automatically with compelling assets that capture their details for you
• Analytics – Make the most of these tools’ reporting features. Measure the success of your campaigns and understand how your audience interacts with you (for example, by looking at email open rates and click-through rates, landing page conversion rates, your ROI, and so on)

Why use automation in personalised marketing?

Automation tools are particularly useful for personalised marketing when it comes to:

• Dynamic content – Automatically show different, more relevant content to each visitor or customer based on their actions and preferences. Quiz lead magnets are ideal for this! They provide an interactive and dynamic experience, revealing different results and content depending on someone’s answers. No wonder that, while static PDF lead magnets only convert at 3-10%, quiz landing pages reach a whopping 30-50%!
• Behavioural targeting – Trigger personalised emails, messages, pop-ups or recommendations depending on how someone interacts with your brand or products. For example, with ScoreApp, you can retarget all those who signed up for your quiz but didn’t complete it 
• Segmentation – After dividing your audience into groups based on their actions or preferences, send more tailored messages to each of them. A ScoreApp quiz will segment your participants for you, and you can then automate different and more relevant nurturing sequences 
• A/B testing – Try different versions of the same campaign to figure out what works best with your audience or segments. For example, with ScoreApp, you can easily split-test your landing pages

For the best results, personalise your marketing with both CRMs and automation 

Here’s a simple guide and some ideas to use CRMs and automation to personalise your marketing at different stages of your funnel. 

1. Lead capture and data collection

• Collect your target audience’s details with landing pages and forms. With ScoreApp, you can go beyond their name, email address, and basic information! Ask strategic questions to gather lots of valuable insights (like their pain points, needs, preferences, and goals)
• Sync all this data automatically by connecting them with your CRM system, building detailed profiles for each lead

2. Segment your leads

• Use your automation tools to divide your leads into groups based on their behaviours (for example, how they interacted with a landing page) or set criteria (like their industry, role, preferences, and so on). Your ScoreApp quiz will use your participants’ answers to add them to the best segment for their situation
• Plan targeted marketing campaigns for each segment. That way, they can be hyper-specific and relevant to their past behaviours or needs and preferences (more on that soon!)

3. Personalised communication

• Use your automation tools to show dynamic content on your website and landing pages (like different pop-ups and product recommendations) based on someone’s behaviours and past interactions 
• Harness your CRM insights and data from your automation tools to show different messages to your leads, personalising them based on their situation. With ScoreApp, you can make all your emails, messages, and even sales conversations more relevant! Just use each participant’s answers to inform them, and reference them directly when inviting them on a call or following up 

4. Automated lead nurturing

• Connect your tools to trigger separate workflows for each group or stage of your sales funnel. By integrating your ScoreApp quiz with your email marketing platform, you get to automate relevant nurturing sequences for different segments
• Keep track of all these touchpoints and interactions in your CRM, using this data to optimise your lead nurturing and sales even further

5. Lead scoring and prioritisation

• Use your automation tools and CRM to score your leads based on how likely they are to become customers. With ScoreApp, you can also pre-qualify your participants, asking them strategic questions to understand if they’d be the right fit for your products or services
• Check these scores so that your sales team can focus on relevant and promising leads (instead of wasting time trying to talk to everyone). As well as knowing who to contact and when, you can use your ScoreApp quiz to personalise and improve your sales calls. How? Reference each participant’s situation and results when inviting them to book one and when talking to them 1:1!

6. Multichannel engagement

• Reach and engage with your leads across a mix of marketing channels (like social media, content marketing, SEO and email), using personalised messaging whenever possible. Your dynamic ScoreApp quiz can complement all these tactics: you’ll get to use it as an unmissable call to action to turn visitors or followers into actual leads!
• Use your CRM data to keep track of all these communications and touchpoints from different channels (so that you always know when and how a specific lead has interacted with your brand)

7. Measure and optimise

• Check the analytics of your CRM and marketing automation tools regularly, measuring the effectiveness of your lead generation and nurturing processes 
• Use those insights to understand what’s working well and what can be improved, making your personalised marketing even more targeted and effective. With ScoreApp, you get reporting features that are both in-depth and easy to understand, from your A/B tests to when your audience tends to abandon your quiz, and much more!

Personalise your marketing by using ScoreApp with your CRM and automations 

When it comes to personalised marketing tools, it doesn’t have to be one or the other! Your CRM and automations can work together to optimise your lead generation strategy without you having to do everything manually.

But why settle for basic options when you can easily create a fully automated and personalised quiz funnel? Use a ScoreApp quiz to:

1. Collect more leads and data while wowing your audience with a dynamic experience and tailored results
2. Segment your participants, and add them to your CRM 
3. Nurture them automatically and in a personalised way until they buy from you
4. Pre-qualify them, and sell to them more easily
5. Complement the rest of your marketing
6. Measure your success and optimise your fully automated funnel even further

Bring these personalised marketing tools together so that they’re always working in the background for you: create your ScoreApp quiz funnel today and for FREE.