Why do online retailers need an e-Commerce CRM?

Online Retail business is a growing industry & it is very clear when we look at some of the statistics related to the industry like;

• 80% of Americans have made an e-commerce purchase in the past month alone.
• 23% expected growth YOY  in online ordering.
• 2017  is expected to see $23trillion in e-commerce sales, a 6% increase from the previous year.

The challenging part about these statistics is that they put a lot of pressure on businesses to do everything possible to attract and subsequently convert visitors either online or in-store into customers. An e-commerce CRM helps you drive & improve conversion rates. It also improves your marketing message and builds your brand, which are the keys to performing better.

Here are five reasons why you need a CRM for your e-commerce efforts.

1. Use An Ecommerce CRM to Update Your Customer Profiles

A cornerstone of proper marketing strategy is the creation of one or more customer profiles to guide your marketing efforts. Profiles are general representations of groups of target customers. For example, an energy drink company may create a customer profile around teenage male buyers of their drinks to focus their marketing message on that subset of their audience.

The question is, how do you know what profiles represent your customer base?

Agile CRM allows you to continually gather information about your customers. This information is updated every time the customer visits your website or makes a purchase. Continually updating your information allows you to not only review your customer base for qualities that would help you target your customer base more effectively, but also to update your avatar based on changes that you notice in your target customer groups over time.

2. Aggregate User Behavior to Customize Your Email Marketing

Email marketing has one of the highest returns on investment amidst any type of marketing, but that doesn’t mean it’s foolproof. Consumers are getting increasingly frustrated with a deluge many emails they receive on a daily basis. 78% of consumers have unsubscribed from emails from brands that were sending too many emails & making the customer opposed to emails with a marketing intent.

This necessitates the use of customized, targeted approaches to email marketing whenever possible. Using an e-commerce CRM gives you the ability to send emails to customers based on different actions that they take on your website.

For example, if a customer has added an item to their cart, which they later abandoned, you can use that action to trigger a follow-up email to remind them of their purchase.

This type of tailored email messaging is far less intrusive than a cold-email without any customer associated information. A customized/personalized email shows that you are being conscious of their time by sending them a message that is actually relevant to their interests (after all, they did add the item to their cart in the first place!) rather than bombarding them with pamphlet like emails.

3. Keep a Record of Customer Service Requests

Tracking customer concerns, questions, or complaints is another key feature of an e-commerce CRM. You can use your CRM software to make notes on customer behavior and keep track of some of the reasons why they have reached out to your customer service staff in the past.

This type of information is a great resource when that customer reaches out with another question or piece of feedback at a later point. Past customer service notes, prior purchases, and all other information can be referenced immediately by your team so that you can address the current problem or concern with full knowledge of other issues that the customer has had in the past.

Customers may not remember the details of every customer service interaction that they’ve had with you, but they will remember the feeling that comes with your customer service team being able to quickly and completely fulfill their request with a holistic view of the customer.

4. Use Social Media Retargeting More Effectively

Did you know that all of the customers that you have today represents only a fraction of the revenue that you could have gotten for your store? Many visitors will show up at your store and browse for a bit, only to get caught up in another task or get otherwise distracted. They end up leaving your store without making a purchase, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t interested in buying something from you.

Retargeting is a great way to advertise to those customers. By tracking them while on your website, you can then advertise specifically to these potential customers across the internet, but mainly on social media. Retargeting is an essential part of many marketing programs, capable of boosting conversions by 50-60% in many cases. The question is, where do you focus your retargeting dollars?

By looking through the 360-degree view of your customer base in your e-commerce CRM such as Agile CRM, you can quickly start to discern patterns among your customer behaviour that can help you better retarget your potential customer base.

For example, if you notice that many of your customers have Twitter handles and use them regularly, you may want to focus on only retargeting them on this platform to maximize your results.

5. Target Your Customer Base on Their Preferred Platform

Mobile is becoming an increasingly large platform for e-commerce, with 45% of transactions estimated to take place on mobile devices by 2020. You can use your CRM to take advantage of that fact by targeting your marketing message to customers using a medium that they would be more receptive to on mobile: for eg. text messaging.

While it’s becoming more popular for companies to use text messages for marketing purposes, this is still a relatively unused platform for business, and as a result, you don’t run into the same potential oversaturation problem as you do with email marketing.

Your CRM doesn’t have to be tired and boring. The CRM services of today can give you an in-depth information on your customer base, they can track metrics, and they can be used to proactively reach out to customers and provide a better user experience.

CRM makes a lot of sense for e-commerce. If your business is not currently using a CRM, money, and opportunity is being left on the table. As increasing share of wallet moves online, businesses that aren’t using the tools of the digital age will be left behind.