Why you need a CRM in ecommerce

Ecommerce is growing, but it is also more competitive than ever before. Customers have countless online stores and marketplaces they can choose from when making a purchase, and it is easier for competitors to enter the market.

If you want your online business to stand out in this hyper-competitive market, you need to deliver best-in-class and personalized customer experiences. This means creating holistic views of each of your customers to understand the needs of new buyers to show them the products they are looking for and analyzing the behavior of past buyers to know how to best keep their interest.

This can be challenging as eCommerce stores inherently lack the ability to interact with customers in person as you would with a traditional brick-and-mortar store. Even more so when data is scattered across multiple tools. eCommerce platforms like Shopify and Magento have customer profiles, but the information is limited, normally only consisting of name and contact information.

A CRM brings together fragmented data on customer actions from all touchpoints to give you a centralized repository for storing data and connecting sales and marketing teams. It’s a place for your sales team and sales reps to manage your sales pipeline and the sales process and allows for accurate sales forecasting. All of that is for potential customers, but there is more. Post-sale, you can use a CRM as a customer service module to manage customer engagement, document customer history and learn from customer behavior.  This data allows you to gain insights into your customer’s shopping behavior and purchasing habits. You can see everything from when a customer lasted visited your site to what products are their favorite.

When this information is consolidated into a single platform, it is far easier for you to target customers with messaging that is relevant to them. By engaging in personalized marketing, you can drive more sales while creating a better overall experience for your buyers.

How can you benefit from a CRM in ecommerce?

Adopting a CRM for your ecommerce store can have a big impact on your bottom line. Data accessibility shortens the sales cycle and fosters loyal, long-term customers and strong features improve your business operations. Here are a few of the ways you can use an ecommerce CRM to benefit your business.

Gain detailed insights for marketing

As an ecommerce business, you need powerful analytics and data to market your products effectively. With a CRM, data is gathered from all your marketing channels to provide detailed insights and reports into your ecommerce business.

Email marketing tools are one of the key features of CRM. Your marketing strategy may include customer segmentation for product launches, which increases your email conversion rate by sending the right message to the right people at the right time.

You can see what pages are the most visited, how many people add products to their catalog, how many abandon their carts, and more. All of this data helps you understand the shopping patterns and preferences of your customers. With this information, you can quickly identify your strengths and points of weakness in your shopping experience. For example, you might notice new customers prefer a specific type of product then choose to feature this product more prominently in your marketing.

Segment customers by interest

Segmentation is critical to ensuring that each customer receives an experience relevant to them. With an ecommerce CRM, you have the ability to create highly targeted segments for all of your contacts. You can then create personalized marketing campaigns tailored to each of your customers. These segments can be created using a variety of criteria. For example, you can create unique groups based on total spent, past products purchased, pages visited, and more.

Boost business efficiency with automation

Without a system for streamlining all the tasks needed to run your business, even the most organized and efficient organizations can only operate at a fraction of their capacity. When your team gets less done, it ultimately leads to a poor experience for your customers and less revenue for the company. A good ecommerce CRM lets you automate processes and redundant tasks. This gives your team more time to focus on engaging customers and creating the quality experiences needed to stand out in a competitive marketplace.

What to look for in an ecommerce CRM

With a better understanding of how to use a CRM to improve your ecommerce business, let’s examine the key functionalities to look for in a CRM solution:

Data security and compliance

Securing your data is vital to the longevity of your company. One data breach can tarnish your brand’s reputation past the point of recovery. Because a CRM serves as a centralized repository for all your customer data, it needs to be completely protected from all security threats. A good CRM meets all the industry-standard security compliances. There are security features like two factor authentications and all data is encrypted in transit and at rest.

Customization

No two ecommerce businesses are the same. This means that there is no standard CRM layout or set of features that will work for every company. Because of this, a good CRM for ecommerce needs to be highly customizable.


You want to be able to customize the interface and functionalities as needed. This means customizing sales funnels, building custom reports, and creating custom fields and templates to use for your records.

Integrations

When evaluating CRM software for your ecommerce store, it is also important to find a platform that can integrate with the other tools your business uses. To start, the CRM will obviously need to work with your ecommerce platform in order to gather data such as orders and sales histories. Other useful integrations include accounting software and any lead generation tools.

Like automation, strong integrations help you save considerable time. It frees you from having to hop back and forth between different platforms to review data or complete tasks.

Why Insightly is the best CRM in ecommerce

Insightly CRM is designed to help small and medium ecommerce businesses provide the great experiences needed to make a difference in a competitive market. It lets you bring all aspects of managing your customer relationships into an easy-to-use, all-in-one platform. Here are some of the distinguishing features that make Insightly the best CRM for ecommerce:

Holistic and unified

Today’s buyers interact with your business through a variety of touchpoints. Someone may first discover your business through social media, view your store on their mobile device and complete their purchase through their laptop. You need the ability to track this entire journey to really understand your customers.

Insightly connects data from all these interactions to give you a unified view of all your leads and customers. With the data, everyone on your team is on the same page and has access to the information needed to create successful campaigns. They can then have more meaningful interactions to boost conversions while working better without the need to switch between tools.

Customer support can know someone’s purchase history in real-time to quickly find a solution to their problem.

Audience segmentation

Age, location, browsing behavior, and other characteristics reveal a lot about how to best target a customer. Insightly gives you the ability to segment your audience according to their interests and stage in the customer journey. It ensures that you always send the right message at the right moment for each individual.

Advanced automation

Small and mid-sized ecommerce stores need tools to get more done with fewer resources. Insightly makes it easy to create workflows to break down your manual process into smaller, repeatable steps that the CRM can perform automatically. You can automatically update records to reflect each customer interaction and save time by automating many of your administrative processes.

With Insightly, you are also able to automate your email marketing efforts so that your team can focus on devising winning campaigns. For example, you can set up an automated email message for previous customers that have not engaged with your business for a few months. Or you can create an abandoned cart series targeting anyone that leaves your site with items in their cart.

Quick implementation and ease of use

CRM software should make running your business easier. With Insightly, you get a platform that is easy to implement and quick to learn. You don’t have to spend unnecessary time onboarding your team. Insightly CRM has an intuitive user interface and the features are easy to use so that all team members can utilize full functionalities of the CRM. With AppConnect, you can quickly set up an integration with eCommerce platforms like Shopify and Magneto. Plus, there are hundreds of other pre-built connections to help you integrate the other apps and tools that your business needs.

Win more ecommerce customers with Insightly

The right CRM software helps your eCommerce business provide great buyer experiences that retain loyal customers. With Insightly, you have an all-in-one tool to know every detail of your customers while improving processes to run your business more efficiently.

Get started with a free trial of Insightly CRM today, or request a personalized demo to see how it can help your eCommerce store standout.

• Marketing automation For ecommerce
• Ecommerce CRM strategy
• CRM software
• CRM for small business
• CRM for enteprise
• Agency CRM
• CRM for consulting
• Best CRM small business
• Top 5 CRM features for ecommerce