RD Station Marketing Conversions vs CRM Contacts: Where Should Your Form Submissions Go?
RD Station is really two products — RD Station Marketing and RD Station CRM — and when you connect a WordPress form, you have to decide where each submission should go. Connect Elementor Forms to RD Station supports both destinations, so this guide explains what each one actually receives, and how to choose.
Two products, two destinations
Each integration you create picks one destination:
- RD Station Marketing — the submission arrives as a conversion event, with LGPD consent and the visitor’s attribution cookies. It feeds your funnels, lead scoring and traffic source reports, exactly like a native RD Station form would.
- RD Station CRM — the submission adds or updates a contact in your sales pipeline. Contacts are matched on email, so a returning visitor updates the record they already have instead of creating a duplicate.
They are genuinely separate: separate products, separate credentials, separate app permissions. You do not need RD Station Marketing to use the CRM integration — a CRM integration talks only to the CRM, and RD Station CRM’s free plan is enough (you register your own app in the App Store and give it the CRM permissions).
What each destination requires from your form
The plugin requires exactly the fields RD Station itself marks as required on its own forms:
- A Marketing conversion needs an email.
- A CRM contact needs a name — and you’ll want to map email too, because that’s what duplicate matching runs on.
- Any custom field your account marks mandatory is required automatically.
Everything else is optional. The Field mapping doc covers the details.
How to choose
Choose Marketing when the form’s job is lead generation you’ll nurture: newsletter signups, ebook downloads, webinar registrations. The conversion event carries the visitor’s tracking cookies (_rdtrk, __trf.src), so your funnel and traffic source reports stay accurate — which is the whole point of running RD Station Marketing.
Choose CRM when the form’s job is starting a sales conversation: contact forms, quote requests, demo bookings. The submission lands as a contact your sales team can pick up, with no duplicates for returning visitors.
Can one site use both?
Yes — the destination is chosen per integration, not per site. The free version includes one integration, sending to either Marketing or CRM, so you pick the destination that matters most today. The Pro version removes the limit: unlimited integrations, so your newsletter form can feed Marketing while your quote form feeds the CRM — plus conversion identifiers, tags, funnel stage, lead owner and opportunity flag, and CRM companies and deals alongside contacts.
Getting started
Whichever destination you choose, the setup is the same three steps: install the plugin, connect your RD Station app, create the integration and map your fields. Our step-by-step tutorial walks through all of it, and the Getting started doc covers the connection in detail.