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( votes)When people think about CRM software, they usually picture a sophisticated tool that is made for salespeople and big businesses. But CRM can help any business, including eCommerce stores.
By using CRM software for your eCommerce store, you’ll be able to offer better customer support, increase sales, and get more organized.
In this article, I am going to discuss the benefits of using CRM for eCommerce and how to find the right software.
What does eCommerce CRM do?
CRM software stores all your customer activity information in one place. With a quick glance at your CRM dashboard, you should be able to see things like the products they purchased, the lead magnets they signed up for, how you have served them in the past, and more.
Some CRM will also provide details about your customer activity on other sites such as forums and social networks.
All this data can benefit your business in multiple ways.
What are the benefits of using eCommerce CRM software?
Better customer service:
When you have all the data of your customers in one place it becomes easier to offer customer service. You can look at their past purchases, email activity, and interactions and converse with them at a more personal level.
For example, if a product they want isn’t available, you can use the data in your CRM to suggest alternate products they could potentially like and still get a sale. You can also upsell the right products.
Better segmenting of subscribers:
Many of the top CRM out there offer segmentation of subscribers. You can tag people based on what they purchased, how they purchased it, which newsletters they signed up to, etc.
This level of segmenting and tagging subscribers will make it easy for you to send more targeted and personalized emails to your subscribers and mobile users.
This can help you increase open rates and click rates as found by this study.
As you can see it can also reduce unsubscription rates and abuse reports (complaints).
Time-saving:
As all the data will be saved on one piece of software, this will save you a lot of time. You won’t need to jump across multiple software to see the data and past conversations. Everything will be clearly visible in one place. All your employees will just need to look at a customer’s profile to understand their needs.
Lower overhead:
As the data will be in one place and is easy to find and use, you will require fewer employees to help with customer service. A lot of the tasks can even be automated.
Create a more accurate persona:
The data from your eCommerce CRM can also be used for your overall marketing strategy. You can aggregate all the information form your customer and develop empathy maps and personas that help you understand your audience better.
This will help you create better email campaigns as aforementioned, create accurate chatbots that automate customer support, write better copy, create products that your customers want, and do a lot more things.
What to look for while choosing a CRM for eCommerce?
As you can see using CRM for your eCommerce store offers an array of benefits. But you need to be extremely meticulous while looking for a service. As there are hundreds of them out there. You need to pick one that functions properly in the long run.
The most important thing is to decide if your CRM has all the features you need. So, start by making a list of all the features you need. Some important features you can look for are:
Sales and customer dashboard:
This is the most basic feature your eCommerce CRM needs to have. It will make it easy for you to find all the data quickly. Make sure you sign up for a trial if the software offers it to see how easily everything is organized. A good CRM will make it easy to find customer data so that you can get back with the appropriate response.
Team management:
The software should include team management features so that an entire team can use it. They should be able to assign tasks, create schedules, and communicate with each other through messaging/chat.
Email automation:
The CRM should also come equipped with email automation to make it easy for you to communicate with your customers. You should be able to send emails both individually and to your entire list and segments.
And you should also be able to track activities such as opens, clicks, and traffic.
You can always use a third-party email automation software, but using something that’s built-in will simplify things.
Social data:
A good CRM should pull data not just from the activity on your eCommerce site and email, but also from social media. This will help you generate even more insights into their preferences.
A good CRM software that has these features is Nimble.
Integrates with your eCommerce platform:
This is extremely important to ensure the transfer of data from your store to your CRM. So, make sure your eCommerce platform directly integrates with your CRM or works with third-party tools like Zapier. For example, take Shopify, they don’t have a direct integration with Nimble. But you can use Zapier to transfer all the data you require instantly. They have around 30 integrations.
If you are using other third party software for tasks like email automation and social media management, make sure they integrate too.
Is within your budget
And finally, it should be within your budget. You shouldn’t just be able to use the software now, but in the longterm as well when your business grows and you need to upgrade to a bigger plan.
You will probably be earning more when your business grows, but it is better to budget from the beginning. Moving all this data from one CRM to another can take an ample amount of time.
So, calculate your budget before you finalize the move. Some CRM will offer discounts if you pay for the annual plan. If you can pay in advance, make sure you take advantage of this.
Conclusion
Now that you know the benefits of using CRM for eCommerce, go ahead and get yourself one. Make sure you follow all the guidelines in this article and pick a CRM that meets all your needs and is within your budget.
Taking the time to carefully choose the right software can seem unnecessary. But it will save you money and time in the long run.
