A business is nothing without its customers, and how you treat them goes a long way in deciding your overall success. That’s why customer relationship management (CRM) is such a critical aspect of any company. Whether your field is healthcare, logistics or retail, CRM will be the glue that holds the operation together and turns potential buyers into lifetime customers. With e-commerce, the role of CRM is especially critical, even if you’re running a small free e-commerce website. CRM can help e-commerce companies understand shopping habits and personal preferences, and help convert feedback into valuable marketing data. A clear and comprehensive map of customer relationships is vital to creating an effective e-commerce strategy. CRM allows you to find out where your strengths and weaknesses are, and use that to refine your business processes. You will never be a successful entrepreneur without valuing your customers. So how do we go about integrating CRM with the rest of our e-commerce jobs, and what are the advantages this can bring?
Marketing and advertising are important in generating quality audiences for your e-commerce products, and CRM can boost your efforts in these departments. CRM lets you categorize your e-commerce customer base and use this information to provide targeted calls to action. Furthermore, it can provide valuable data that you can feedback into your marketing to ensure your business evolves all the time. This data can also be useful when trying to overcome commercial challenges and periods of lower e-commerce business activity: CRM can help get to the bottom of a high bounce rate, and show why certain kinds of customers aren’t patronizing your e-commerce business anymore.
What to Look for in e-commerce CRM Integration
An effective CRM platform works to gather data sets from accounting, workflow automation, and analytics. The type of CRM you choose for your e-commerce platform will depend on what effects you want to have on your business. Despite this, there are some standard features that ought to be present as a bare minimum when looking to implement CRM e-commerce website builder integration:
- Convenient document navigation and management
- Marketing tools functionality
- Client base compatibility
- Financial transaction interfacing
- An intuitive user interface
- Good compatibility with popular business software suites
- Differentiated access support
- The ability to register and record phone interactions to help refine your customer service processes
- Automated sales funnel creation
These considerations should identify the kind of CRM you want when deciding how to start an e-commerce business. Now it’s time to examine in detail just how effective CRM integration can be.
CRM Can Help With Lead Generation
Is your marketing department managing to reach e-commerce customers with advertising on social media networks? CRM gives you the ability to decipher the source of your sales, so you can gauge their effectiveness. This can then inform you to make the best decisions on how to make your e-commerce marketing more profitable.
CRM Can Reinforce Your e-commerce Sales Tunnels
If you’re serious about increasing revenue, you need to look beyond the bare figures. The ability to preempt customer behaviors and inquiries with CRM integration is the best way to put yourself ahead of the competition. Content marketing allows you to anticipate these customer actions and offer them solutions that can benefit both them and your business. Thanks to CRM tracking tools, you can see which parts of your sales funnel are punching above their weight and evaluate e-commerce SEO from page to page. Now you’ll know what kind of content material has real benefits for your e-commerce business, and which ones you can afford to drop.
CRM Can Spin Content Out of e-commerce Analytics
Analyzing leads lets you prioritize the ones that matter the most to your e-commerce business, while also giving you the opportunity to come up with fresh strategies for those leads that never seem to convert. Use your CRM platform to categorize your e-commerce leads into subsections and develop tailor-made email marketing campaigns to reach each one.
Consider Enlisting a CRM Consultant
CRM consultants can offer an independent appraisal of your relationships with your customers. They help ensure that you’re doing everything possible to earn their loyalty while helping you build the best e-commerce platform you can. These consultants can also discover ways to gain new audiences in innovative ways. Their work puts your customers at the heart of everything your business does and can boost your e-commerce store across the board. Furthermore, they can also be used to measure the performance of your employees and the quality of their work.
How Can CRM Integration Boost E-commerce?
The underlying principle of sales is connecting customers with products and services. If you can’t adhere to this principle, then your e-commerce software won’t succeed. CRM integration can be used to facilitate all the different e-commerce processes that need to be completed to make sales a reality:
- CRM provides a language for describing processes: Articulating a vision for the e-commerce sales process usually starts with the sales executive leadership. Once these values are defined with CRM, you can work with an index for daily processes and strive to hit targets. This will prove very instructive for your staff and help communicate the core concepts powering your sales processes.
- CRM allows you to forecast e-commerce transaction likelihood: Forecasting is a useful tool that helps companies budget effectively while ensuring supply adequately satisfies demand. However, CRM can carry out this process automatically whilst taking many e-commerce parameters into consideration. With effective CRM forecasting, the likelihood of mispredicting sales is dramatically reduced.
- CRM lets you standardize your e-commerce business processes: Whatever your position in the company, CRM allows you to standardize and streamline interactions at every level of your business structure. The system already has your repeated processes present, allowing you more time to devote to making sales. There’s nothing like knowing that your customers are being looked after around the clock.
Conclusion: CRM Integration Puts Customers at the Heart of e-commerce
It’s no secret that the e-commerce marketplace is extremely competitive. To get an effective edge on the competition, you need every tool available to help your business offer more value in the marketplace. CRM integration puts customers in the center of everything your business does and gives you access to a wide suite of measures that can help improve the efficiency of many departments. Marketing and advertising both benefit hugely from a powerful CRM e-commerce platform that can better inform their sales funnels moving forward. However, as beneficial as these tertiary boosts are, CRM really shines in one important department: customer retention. Lifetime customers are what makes a business a long-term success, and CRM allows businesses to nurture relationships with old customers while offering superior service to new buyers.
Modern e-commerce customers expect a value proposition from their customer service interactions, including easy shipping, simple returns, reliable warranty offers, and hassle-free delivery. E-commerce CRM integration is the tool that will help you make all these processes possible simultaneously. And this creates the kind of customer satisfaction you can’t put a price on. Are you considering CRM integration for your e-commerce business? Or maybe you’ve already implemented it, and you have some useful feedback to share? Let us know in the comments section below.