By Sammy Fiorino
A March 2026 survey conducted by the ABA shows that while the marketing technology landscape continues to evolve, customer relationship management (CRM) systems and marketing automation platforms remain the foundation of bank marketing technology infrastructure.
Based on responses from 116 bank marketers, the survey highlights a consistent pattern across the last three years: despite the emergence of newer technologies and growing interest in AI-powered tools, marketers continue to rely most heavily on established platforms that support customer engagement, campaign execution, and operational efficiency.
Foundational platforms continue to lead
Across the past three years, CRM and marketing automation ranked as the top two categories in utilization among respondents, consistently maintaining their position at the top of the martech stack. Unsurprisingly, AI-powered marketing tools saw substantial growth between 2024 and 2026, from 16.9% in 2024 to 50.4% in 2026. However, that growth was not enough to displace CRM and Marketing automation as the most widely utilized technologies.
This broader increase in technology adoption is also reflected in the decline of respondents selecting “None of the above,” which fell from approximately 26% in both 2024 and 2025 to just 13% in 2026. The shift indicates that more marketers are actively using marketing technologies overall, even as the foundational platforms remain unchanged.
Core value drivers
The survey also measured which technologies respondents believed had the greatest impact on their marketing efforts. Reported impact from CRM systems increased from 12.3% in 2024 to 25.7% in 2026, reinforcing the growing role customer data and relationship management play in bank marketing strategies.
Marketing automation platforms also remained highly influential, though their trajectory was less linear. Reported impact rose to 25.4% in 2025 before declining slightly in 2026 to levels closer to 2024, at roughly 22%. While CRM and marketing automation continued to rank among the most impactful technologies, marketing analytics and data platforms gained momentum, moving from third place in 2025 to second place in 2026 and surpassing marketing automation by 1 percentage point.
Personalization at scale
For community banks, CRM and marketing automation platforms enable more targeted and effective customer engagement throughout the customer lifecycle. Common use cases include identifying cross-sell opportunities, onboarding new customers with personalized communications, nurturing loan and deposit prospects, re-engaging inactive customers, and supporting retention efforts through timely outreach. These platforms also help banks segment audiences by demographics, product usage, and behavior, enabling marketers to deliver relevant campaigns at scale while tracking performance and optimizing results. By automating routine marketing activities and surfacing actionable customer insights, CRMs and MAPs help community banks grow relationships, increase product adoption, and improve marketing ROI.
Marketing analytics and data platforms play an increasingly important role in helping banks maximize the value of their CRM and marketing automation investments. By consolidating campaign, customer, and channel performance data, these platforms provide marketers with deeper visibility into what is driving engagement, conversions, and revenue growth. As banks collect more customer and marketing data, analytics tools help transform that information into actionable insights, enabling marketers to refine audience targeting, optimize campaigns, allocate resources more effectively, and demonstrate marketing’s contribution to business outcomes.
Confidence continues to rise
In addition to utilization and impact, the survey asked respondents to rate their level of understanding and comfort with marketing technologies on a scale of 1 to 5. Interestingly, the order of technologies remained identical in every year surveyed. CRM systems and marketing automation platforms consistently ranked as the technologies marketers felt most comfortable using, mirroring their leadership in adoption and impact.
At the same time, overall comfort levels increased steadily across the industry. The average respondent comfort score rose from 2.68 in 2024 to 2.94 in 2025, before reaching 3.21 in 2026. The increase suggests that bank marketers are becoming more confident in navigating increasingly sophisticated marketing ecosystems. As organizations continue investing in digital tools, marketers appear to be gaining familiarity not only with emerging technologies but also with maximizing the capabilities of the platforms already at the center of their operations.
While much of the recent conversation around marketing technology has focused on rapid innovation and emerging AI capabilities, the ABA survey results suggest that establishing a solid foundation remains a defining characteristic of bank marketing technology strategies.
CRM systems and marketing automation platforms have remained the most utilized and impactful technologies throughout the last three years of the survey. Their continued dominance underscores the importance of reliable, integrated systems that support long-term customer relationship management and scalable marketing execution. At the same time, the growing influence of marketing analytics and data platforms highlights an increasing emphasis on measuring performance and turning customer data into actionable insights. Together, these trends suggest that banks are not only investing in foundational technologies but are also becoming more sophisticated in how they use and evaluate them. Just as notably, marketers’ comfort and confidence in these technologies continue to rise, reflecting both increased adoption and a growing ability to leverage these platforms strategically to drive measurable business outcomes.
Sammy Fiorino is marketing consultant and project manager at Capital Performance Group.
