The eCommerce marketplace is continuously growing. Currently, the revenue figures predict a stable annual growth of 11.52% until 2025. That means that more businesses are competing to earn a piece of revenue.
If you’re running an eCommerce business, staying ahead of the competition will require a little bit of creativity, dedication, and a set of right tools. That’s where an eCommerce CRM tool can help you achieve better results.
Most of the online tools easily integrate with platforms such as WordPress. Connect your website with the CRM tool and start using the data. Once you are certain there are no WordPress issues and your website is running smoothly, it’s time to focus on bringing more buyers to your online store. Let’s explore how an eCRM tool can help you achieve that.
What is an eCommerce CRM?
An eCommerce CRM tool helps you provide outstanding service to your customers by focusing on the eCommerce performance of your online store. It automatically collects the data and uses it to make future predictions of your customer behavior.
It’s the perfect tool to help you understand your customers much better. The primary benefit of using an eCommerce CRM tool is tracking and improving:
- Conversion rates
- Email subscriber count
- Number of sales
- Inventory management
- Customer satisfaction
The list of reasons to use an eCommerce CRM goes on, but more on that later. First, let’s discuss how it’s different from the traditional CRM.
How is eCommerce CRM different from the traditional one?
Traditional CRM solutions come with a design that helps employees better understand leads and existing customers. The staff uses it to store information about all the current customers, allowing them to provide better service in the long run.
Information about customers includes their preferred contact method, product history, and any previous interaction with customer support. The more details there are, the better the interaction with a client will be. It serves to build stronger relationships, and it’s the perfect SaaS B2B asset.
In general, traditional CRM tools help companies build better relationships, but with a certain number of clients. However, as you can imagine, an eCommerce store can quickly reach millions of buyers, especially if the business scales.
Therefore, the design and list of features differ greatly, as traditional CRM solutions are different in the way they collect data, the goal of their implementation and scalability potential.
Reasons why you should use eCommerce CRM
Using an eCommerce CRM tool brings plenty of benefits. Thanks to the wide range of data at hand, you can streamline numerous processes. That allows you to grow your online store more efficiently. Let’s see how.
- Customer from a 360-degree angle
The best way to look at your customers from all angles is to implement an eCommerce CRM tool. It draws the data from multiple sources to provide detailed analytics of your customer’s behavior. Furthermore, the data it contains, including customer contact information, their behavior and purchasing habits, enables it to present easily-digestible information.
That means that you can look at graphs, diagrams and various charts to learn more about your customers. Businesses can make smarter decisions and further streamline their processes to improve customer experience. Given how important it is, you can expect your store to keep growing as you improve the experience.
Therefore, an abundance of customer-related data is the foundational element that supports improving other business elements.
- Better inventory management
Optimized inventory management is essential for driving more sales. It ensures that your business consistently delivers timely service, as you know that you’ve got the merchandise ready for shipping. Any mismanagement of in-house inventory leads to complications such as product shipping delays, resulting in negative customer experience.
An eCRM tool allows the business owner to prepare for different parts of the year. It does this by providing insight into sales data. It’s easier to notice peak periods when sales are high. More importantly, it shows which types of products are selling well. In-house teams can act quickly and ensure that those products are always in stock.
Quick shipping means better customer satisfaction, which increases user retention rates. It’s one of the key metrics of business growth.
- Order history data for personalization
Monitoring sales behavior and keeping track of order history enables businesses to create super-targeted email campaigns. If you know a customer has ordered a particular set of items, they might need more of them from the same category.
Then, a business can sell products at a significant discount with a personalized email that promotes this particular offer. Companies can achieve this kind of hyper-personalization with a vast amount of data at hand. That’s what an eCRM tool offers.
The ultimate goal is to achieve more sales through personalized offers. If you manage to hit the sweet spot, the conversion rates will be much higher.
- Visitor behavior analytics for higher conversions
Insight into user behavior can point to the right optimization steps for better conversion rates. The perfect example is monitoring cart abandonment rates. An eCRM tool uses the collected data to present your funnel. If you notice high cart abandonment rates, there might be something you could do.
You can try different A/B testing approaches and see the new results. A little bit of web design changes on the checkout page might result in higher conversions, leading to more sales. Play around with the checkout button and the colors of the page. Make the needed interaction obvious, so users know where to click.
- Personalized marketing campaigns
If you’re looking for a way to advertise better, having a look at your existing customer base is the place to start. Given how many details about your customers are present in your eCRM solution, you can create your buyer persona.
That step would allow you to create targeted PPC campaigns to attract more people who would buy from you to your online store.
Achieving that kind of personalization is quite challenging, making an eCRM tool the perfect partner to do it.
- Better employee efficiency
Internal teams can do much more with the right eCRM tool. All the team members working with customers have access to the relevant data that can help them offer better customer support. All that without wasting any time of their other colleagues, as everything they might need is already in the CRM’s database.
What’s more, controlling access to sensitive data is easily manageable. Create a multitude of accounts with different access, ensuring that the crucial data is only accessible by managers and other authority figures in the company.
After receiving training and learning all the benefits of a CRM tool, your employees will be able to do more. That will lead to higher productivity and better solutions for a variety of other protocols that your teams need to focus on.
Explore the tool and see what kind of automation features are available. Leaving some processes on autopilot will also allow your teams to focus on other relevant matters.
- Predicting future trends
Are you unsure how many sales to expect for the upcoming holiday season? Just take a look at the previous years. All the data will be there in the CRM tool, allowing you to stock up with products that sold the most.
Aside from noticing patterns in different quarters, the tool will help you identify upselling and cross-selling opportunities. Use the data with other plugins to create suggestions to drive sales.
- Cross-platform support
Modern eCommerce CRM tools are available on multiple platforms. It’s easier for team members to work together regardless of their location. Plus, it doesn’t matter if they’re using a phone, a tablet or a computer. They can access the eCRM and find the relevant data they need.
That way, employees from all departments, whether in management or other business areas, can seamlessly change the CRM’s database. Mobile-friendliness makes in-house collaboration easier.
With the growing remote work trends, your employees who are out and about will be able to handle work assignments from a device that suits them best.
- Smooth collaboration with vendors
An eCRM system doesn’t only serve your relationships with customers. It also helps you build strong relations with your suppliers. Use the CRM tool to keep track of collaboration with your suppliers, but more importantly, store all the relevant contracts, invoices and other important documentation.
You won’t need multiple software tools to solve various challenges. You can keep track of all the processes in a single place. That helps simplify internal procedures, as all employees can use one tool to handle everything.
Concluding thoughts
If you’re looking for a way to grow your store steadily, implementing an eCRM tool is a necessary step. It empowers your in-house teams to do much more with a limited workforce. That will put your business up to par with many companies with much higher budgets.
Once you carefully analyze all the data the tool collects, you’ll be able to make decisions that will positively impact your business efforts. Driving sales in the modern market requires intelligent choices and strategies, and that’s only possible with enough data about your buyer’s habits.
Use the data to try different approaches, and watch your business attract more happy customers who will help turn your online shop into a brand.
About the author
Dmitriy Maschenko is the head of a division and a Board member at PSD2HTML, a company that offers top-notch web and mobile development services to all kinds of clients, from S&M businesses to agencies and governmental bodies. Dmitriy went all the way from a developer trainee position up to where he is now. With 12+ years of experience in the IT industry under his belt, Dmitriy has a wealth of knowledge to share with his readers. He writes on topics related to business management, website & app development, and everything in between. Follow him on Linkedin.