Thinking about investing in a CRM for your eCommerce business comes with a whole host of questions. How will it actually impact my business? How will it support the growth of my business? Does CRM even work? Luckily, we have answers. Read on to find out how you can transform your eCommerce business with the help of CRM tools and just why they are necessary.
Improve Marketing
Data! It all comes down to data. CRMs collect customer data, not just who they are and where they live but how, when, and where they interact with your business. These insights are invaluable for multiple reasons and one of them is marketing. Marketing works best when it’s informed with information about your customer base and target audience and the data your CRM provides is a great basis for developing new marketing strategies.
The best way to leverage data is to integrate your chosen CRM with other applications. For example, you can sync your contacts between automated marketing software, Autopilot and Mailchimp to improve marketing strategies which might include automation, the data you will be interested in combining is that of customers who may have responded to automated emails and campaigns.
Better Customer Experience
Without customers, any eCommerce business is as good as a duck in a puddle. The more water there is, the further the duck can swim. Happy customers make for better and faster business growth. CRM can help you identify problem areas in your customer’s buyer journey from the sales process to customer support.
Improve sales team performance
CRM systems can help streamline your sales process by equipping your sales team with tools that allow them to find and track new leads, book appointments, and schedule follow-ups and manage purchase orders. In doing this, your sales team is saved time and can be more effective in their selling approach and building more revenue.
Increase reselling after-sale
A lot of businesses focus on gaining new customers but forget to retarget customers that have already purchased products from them. CRM tools can help you to increase the number of returning customers using retargeting. This will encourage customers to repeat buy the same products or recommend new products to customers.
The truth is, it’s much easier to convert past/current customers than it is to convert new customers and CRM can help you target those customers that are more likely to purchase from you over and over again.
Better organization
If organizing is one of your weaknesses, a CRM can help turn your eCommerce into a better-organized business. From managing customer records and data to tracking and managing inventory you can manage just about anything under one system. This makes information easier to store, find, and update whenever you need it. This is another case where app integration really is useful, say you want to streamline your accounts, you can integrate a CRM like Salesforce with accounting software such as Quickbooks, making your accounts more efficient.
Minimize Losses & Costs
Every eCommerce has expenses and will suffer from losses, the trick is finding a way to minimize these costs to your business. A CRM can do this in multiple ways. The first, a CRM can be an all-in-one solution if you use a provider like HubSpot where you can manage your CRM, sales, marketing, and website under one roof.
This cuts down the cost of paying multiple providers for different services. But the main reason businesses use CRM to cut down on costs and losses is because CRMs are designed to be effective in closing sales faster and building better marketing strategies.
When this happens businesses aren’t spending as much on chasing a customer that isn’t interested because their data will predict that the customer won’t have an interest, sales teams can focus on the customer that will be more likely to buy and marketing teams can build more successful campaigns that are informed by enriching data, saving your marketing budget some extra funds.
Keep up to date with current data laws
Data and privacy laws are put in place to protect your customers’ information. These laws vary across the world but if we take GDPR which is the EU data protection laws, this came into place in 2018 and sent a lot of businesses into a spiral. With a lot of confusion over how it works and whether they need to delete all of their customer information or start again (no, you don’t). The great thing about having a CRM system is that they need to be compliant with laws like GDPR. Your CRM will update contacts and delete duplicate customer records and help you stay compliant with privacy laws.
Tools Your eCommerce CRM Can Provide
Abandoned Cart Emails
It’s frustrating when a potential customer fills up a shopping cart only to leave them behind.
But that doesn’t mean that their buyer journey ends there. With CRM you can target those shoppers with an abandoned cart email which is just a friendly reminder that they haven’t completed their purchase. This messaging might seem like pestering at a first glance but around 45% of abandoned cart emails are opened by potential buyers, which gives you a good chance of encouraging shoppers to purchase the items they left behind.
Personalization
Today’s shoppers prefer to feel connected with the brands that they use, personalization is one way of making customers feel valued, especially if they are repeat customers and therefore loyal to your brand. CRM tools are fully capable of automating personalized shopping experiences in the form of email marketing and landing pages, giving you a better chance of converting more sales.
Segmentation
Segmentation allows businesses to delve deeper into their customers’ information by organizing your contacts according to their key demographics. This technique can be used to develop better-targeted marketing campaigns that will garner more success and can also be used for customer analysis.
Dashboard Revenues
Keeping track of your business’s revenue is one of the key indicators of your business’ performance. Revenue dashboard pulls together all the information regarding your business profits and produces detailed reports based on data such as money made per campaign and average purchase values. This information provides important data, not only on your performance but also, gives you insights on how to change your campaigns to enhance customer satisfaction.
Automated Workflows
Running a successful eCommerce business comes with a lot of different aspects to manage and organize. CRM tools are designed to automate certain tasks that are repetitive, to lighten your workload, and streamline your workflows by organizing your tasks. Giving you more time to concentrate on the more important tasks.
Lead Scoring
For businesses that are data-driven, lead scoring is the method of measuring how likely it is that a lead will become a buyer. This is done by giving each lead a score according to their behavior when interacting with your business. For example, if a lead unsubscribes from your mailing list, points will be taken away from their score, alternatively, if they consistently open your email campaigns, their score will increase.
CRM systems are much more than simply managing your customer information. CRMs can be instrumental in strengthening your customer relationships and turning one-time buyers into repeat customers. The right CRM system can streamline your sales process and tighten up your inventory and stock. If you want to take your business to the next level, a CRM tool is the way to do it.