Did you know that organisations with integrated customer data platforms (CDPs) are significantly more likely to surpass their revenue goals? In fact, a survey conducted by Forrester Consulting revealed that data-centric businesses are 58% more likely to exceed revenue targets compared to their less data-driven counterparts.
Yet, despite this clear advantage, many organisations still struggle with fragmented technology stacks – where the website, content management systems (CMS), and customer data platforms function in silos. This disconnection not only leads to inefficiencies and data inconsistencies but also compromises the user experience, a critical factor for retention and loyalty.
When done thoughtfully, effective integration can transform this patchwork into a unified digital ecosystem, unlocking powerful benefits like personalisation, real-time insights, and streamlined operations. It’s a shift that empowers organisations to better understand their audiences, automate manual processes, and scale impact efficiently.
While this may seem like a daunting task, the path to successful integration is often clearer than it appears. Starting small can build momentum.
In the following sections, we’ll break down the key choices and best practices that will guide your integration journey – making the complex, achievable.
Middleware vs. Direct API Integration
One of the earliest decisions is architectural: should you use middleware or opt for direct API connections?
Direct API Connections allow two systems to communicate directly, using well-defined interfaces (APIs) to exchange data in real-time.
Dan James, Technical Director at manifesto, highlights the growing maturity of cloud CRMs like Salesforce and Microsoft Dataverse, which now offer powerful native APIs. In many cases, these can eliminate the need for middleware, simplifying your architecture and reducing costs through standardisation and investment on a single technical stack.
This may lead to the development of a monolithic architecture, but this is often the most efficient pattern, particularly with an organisation with a small internal development team.
Pete Cooper, Engineering Director at manifesto, notes that middleware on the other hand, acts as a bridge between multiple systems, handling tasks like data transformation, message routing, and complex orchestration. It’s particularly useful in scenarios where:
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Complex workflows or data transformations are needed
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You must orchestrate across multiple systems and across multiple development teams
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You’re integrating with legacy platforms lacking modern APIs
Organisations must assess complexity, transformation needs, system count, in-house skills, and scalability to determine the best-fit approach.
Plan before you build
Robust integration starts with planning. Visualising user journeys with workflow diagrams is essential. These diagrams serve as a shared language among stakeholders, helping everyone, from developers to business leaders, align on the goals, seeing how users will interact with what is being developed, and understanding the dependencies.
It’s equally critical to define scope early on. What systems and data are involved? What functions will be automated? What’s explicitly out of scope? These questions prevent costly misunderstandings later.
Data mapping, defining how fields from one system correspond to another, must be done with both technical and business stakeholders present. Similarly, an agreed API contract (including endpoints, payload formats, security protocols, and versioning plans) is the cornerstone of successful collaboration between CMS and CRM partners.
This approach can be supported using tools like Swagger.io where CRM and website development teams can collaborate on the specification in parallel.
Security, resilience, and flexibility
Strong technical foundations should be planned for at the start.
The integration must respect GDPR, use secure authentication to a common standard (for example, OAuth 2.0), and encrypt data both in transit and at rest. API rate limits should be monitored to prevent service disruption, especially during peak periods.
Data structure, platforms and APIs should be designed around stable business concepts, like “donor” or “member”, rather than attached to ephemeral elements like the current thoughts around the user interface. This allows stakeholders to make changes to the things that change often (the interface) while holding the unchanging elements immutable.
Resilience is also an important consideration up front. We need to expect things to go wrong, for example an API or system might be down. Proactively designing for these “unhappy paths” with clear error messages, retry logic, and user-friendly fallback behaviours. By plotting out the process flows you can brainstorm the possible error states and design user friendly messages and fallbacks.
Another way to ensure reliability and resilience of the system is to be clear about the sources of truth and be pragmatic about what happens if a system goes down. When data is duplicated between systems then there are situations where they can become out of sync, especially in the situation of an outage, however brief. Trying to sync data between systems and recover from errors can introduce complexity around data integrity. Often, for many organisations that aren't an ecommerce store, it's better to have a simpler system over one that tries to compensate for all possible error states.
People, process, and partnership
As with any project, the human element of an integration project is just as vital as the technical. Integration projects tend to bring separate partner teams together, for example one for the website and one for the CRM, creating additional project management complexity that needs to be managed carefully.
Clear ownership of the activities and outcomes is key in this scenario. For example, who defines the API contract? Who is responsible for testing? When will teams be available for answering triaging questions? Which common tools will be used to assist collaboration and ensure everyone is on the same page.
Using a RACI matrix (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) clarifies roles and reduces awkward finger-pointing. As the client, you are often the only party with visibility across the whole stack and either have to act as orchestrator, or ensure one partner is employed as the lead agency to ensure all partners are aligned on objectives and timelines.
Regular communication, shared access to integration documentation, and a clear change management protocol are all vital to success.
Monitor and maintain
Once live, an integration must be monitored to ensure it continues to perform. Monitoring tracks known metrics (e.g. API uptime, error rates), while observability provides the tools to investigate unknown issues. Logs, metrics, and traces across all systems create the transparency needed to resolve issues quickly and collaboratively.
Real-time alerts should be in place, and ownership of monitoring responsibilities clearly defined. Regular reviews of performance data, API updates, and security configurations help avoid future surprises.
Here's a few things manifesto recommend when thinking about monitoring:
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Implementing realtime monitoring and alerts (such as Sentry, UptimeRobot) for key indicators such as API response times, failure rates, queue backlogs, and authentication errors.
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Observability tooling such as Datadog (log aggregation, tracing and APM) to gain insight across the full integration chain - from the source system to the CRM via any potential middleware.
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Setting up automated health checks (again via tools like UptimeRobot and Pingdom) and heartbeat monitoring to catch silent failures early
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Reviewing API dependencies regularly, have there's been any rate limit changes and new security requirements
By embedding these monitoring practises early in the implementation we have found our teams can proactively maintain integration reliability, reduce the amount of fire fighting needed and build trust in the overall platform stability.
New tools, same Principles
The landscape continues to evolve. Modern cloud CRMs offer built-in capabilities that reduce integration complexity. Low-code/no-code platforms (like Zapier or Make) make integration more accessible, but still require thoughtful planning and governance to avoid becoming unmanageable.
Some organisations are exploring Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) for deeper personalisation across touchpoints. While a full CDP is a major investment, its principles, like unified data and real-time orchestration, are relevant even in simpler integrations.
Final thoughts
Integrating your CRM into your digital estate is a marathon and not a sprint.
For many organisations, the size of the operation can seem daunting, but at manifesto, we’ve found that there are small steps that create returns early and demonstrate the value of the investment required.
Running some small proofs of concepts, like allowing members to create an account, login, update their basic details and get a personalised landing page can increase engagement as well as reducing operational efforts quickly.
Ask the right questions of your partners. And always remember: it’s not just about connecting systems, but connecting people and your organisation in more meaningful ways.