Marketer’s Space: Supercharged Journeys with Zoho CRM Integration

Marketer’s Space: Supercharged Journeys with Zoho CRM Integration


Hello Marketers!
Welcome back to another post in Marketer’s Space! Today, we’ll explore how integrating Zoho CRM with Zoho Marketing Automation (ZMA) can take Journeys to the next level. In this post, we’ll look at a specific use case to demonstrate how this integration enhances triggers like Custom Date Field, Criteria Match, and Added to List—making your campaigns more precise and impactful.
An event management company needs an automated way to target high-budget corporate employees with personalized anniversary event offers a week before their anniversary. Let’s see how they achieve this with the integration of Zoho CRM and Zoho Marketing Automation using Journeys.
They create a custom module in Zoho CRM called Corporate Event Contacts. The sales team adds key fields to the module, such as:
  • Name, email, and phone number.
  • Employee’s birthday, partner’s name and birthday, anniversary date.
  • Interests and preferred event themes.
  • Guest count and budget.

The sales team collects data from various companies and populates this module with valuable insights about employees and their preferences. The marketing team then integrates Zoho CRM with ZMA. During the sync, they select the custom module “Corporate Event Contacts” and sync it to a list named “Corporate Event Contacts” in ZMA. Now, they can use Journeys to target these contacts and send personalized campaigns.


Here’s how the Journey was set up:

Custom Date Field Trigger

Integrating Zoho CRM with Zoho Marketing Automation also syncs date fields, ensuring that important dates like birthdays and anniversaries are readily available in the Custom Date Field component. This allows marketers to seamlessly access and use these dates for automated, time-sensitive campaigns without manual data entry or tracking.
Idea
To set up their Journey, they selected the Anniversary Date from the synced fields, making it the trigger for their campaign. To ensure contacts received timely reminders, they enabled the Trigger the Journey before the selected date option and set it to 7 days before the anniversary.


This way, customers had enough time to plan their celebrations and book an event. By automating this process, they ensured that their campaigns were both relevant and well-timed, increasing engagement and conversion rates.

Add Criteria for Precision

The Custom Date Field trigger in Zoho Marketing Automation enables marketers to set additional criteria for contacts based on synced CRM data. All custom fields synced from Zoho CRM appear as available options for filtering contacts, and the List Membership criterion enables targeting contacts based on the specific list they were synced into during the integration process.
Idea
For this Journey, they set the Budget to greater than 2500 to target high-value leads and configured List Membership to “Corporate Event Contacts” to focus on the contacts synced from the Corporate Events custom module.

Both Criteria Match and Added to List triggers are also available as separate components, so marketers can choose to use them independently when needed, allowing for more tailored automation flows based on specific campaign requirements.

Add an Action Component

After setting up the trigger component, the next step is to add an action component to define what happens when contacts enter the Journey.
Idea
Here, they included the Send Email Campaign action to automatically deliver a personalized email to recipients a week before their anniversaries.

By setting the custom date, defining the right criteria, and specifying list membership, the event management company streamlined their workflow and ensured highly targeted campaigns. This automation simplified their operations and helped drive more event bookings, ultimately boosting sales.
In the coming weeks, we’ll dive deeper into how Zoho CRM integration brings even more enhancements to Journeys. Stay tuned, and until then, happy marketing!

Regards,
Pearlin Nitika
User education | Zoho Marketing Automation