For e-commerce businesses, a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool should be an integral part of your sales and retention strategy. An effective CRM solution will allow you to increase sales, organise your data, boost your marketing efforts and improve your customer service.
In this article, we look at some CRM tips for e-commerce businesses.
- Organise and leverage your customer data
Ideally, your CRM integrates directly with your online store and the other tools that you use. Often, e-commerce back-end data can be messy, unclear and difficult to analyse at scale, but a CRM helps to organise this for you – helping you to make data-led decisions. By having all of this data in a single, central source, this saves huge amounts of time and resource from flicking between several programmes that don't 'speak' to each other.
As a result of the data being in one place, CRMs can offer a wealth of insights such as:
- Buying habits
- Best (and worst) selling products
- Customer lifetime values, order values and frequencies of purchase
- Individual customer profiles: order history, items purchased, customer support history
This data supports the wider business operation, giving you a better grasp on supply and demand, seasonal trends, effective marketing channels and campaigns, customer support tracking and will even allow you to segment and compare your customers based on their data profile.
2. Enhance your customer service strategy
One of the biggest perks of using CRM is the effect on customer service. By integrating your help desk to your CRM, your customer support team will have access to each individual customers' purchase history, their interactions with your marketing and all previous communications in one place.
This means that whether they contact you on Facebook, live chat or by phone, their data will be accessible, giving a truly omnichannel approach, and delivering a better customer experience.
If you're wondering how to manage customer feedback, you can collate your reviews, survey results and customer comments in one place using a CRM. Use this data to analyse frequently asked questions and reoccurring trends – you can then put solutions in place to resolve these with a knowledge base, FAQ or automated chatbot, saving customer support resources.
3. Take your marketing to the next level
A good CRM will allow you to truly enhance your marketing efforts. The wealth of customer data involved will help you to better define your buyer personas, demographics and interests, which will help you to tailor your advertising and communications strategy.
Similarly, by analysing purchase histories, seasonal trends and demand peaks and troughs, you can gain a much better understanding of buying habits, allowing you to plan your sales and marketing strategy based on the data.
Arguably the best use of CRM is segmenting your data. Integrating your CRM with your email marketing solution has several benefits both ways:
- Your CRM will be up-to-date with all the communications that each customer has received and engaged with
- You'll always be emailing the most up-to-date list possible (including new customers) without taking care of manual lists
- You can segment the data to create tailored and personalised communications to your customers and prospects.
A good example of this is using purchase histories to suggest other products that your customers may be interested in or segmenting your data by customer lifetime value to send VIP and exclusive offers to your most frequent and loyal customers.
An effective CRM is crucial to the success of e-commerce businesses, allowing you to understand your customers, forecast effectively and hone in on your sales and marketing efforts.
