Updated on August 20, 2021
Ever heard of Hershey’s bitter experience in the sweet market?
Well, that’s what I call a Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) catastrophe.
When Hershey’s market share was eroding, they went ahead and purchased a $112 million CRM system from Siebel. Unfortunately, the system was extremely complex for Hershey’s suppliers and production line.
What happened next?
The stream of sweet treats froze.
And as if adding fuel to the flames, Hershey’s poor choice of Customer Relationship Management System was implemented right before Halloween. As you guessed right, many of Hershey’s customers were abandoned on their biggest chocolate binges that year.
Translating this loss in numbers, Hershey’s witnessed a 19% drop in quarterly profits and an 8% decline in the stock price.
If you would take a closer look at this CRM disaster, the flaw was not in the decision to implement a CRM system. Rather, the choice of the CRM system and the timing at which it was done.
So, friend, don’t turn around and drop your idea of implementing a CRM for your eCommerce business. You just have to make the right choice at the right time. And through this blog, I’ll help you do just that :)
Walk with me as I help you understand and choose the best CRM for your eCommerce business.
Table of Contents
If you are in a dilemma as to whether your eCommerce business needs a CRM, this discussion is just for you.
Statistics reveal that by 2040 around 95% of all purchases are going to be via eCommerce. While on one side of the spectrum, the online businesses are growing tremendously, so is the landscape becoming hyper-competitive.
Your customers have infinite choices. To stand out, you need to endorse a seamless experience and delight your customers in every single transaction.
But to do that, you need a holistic view of your customers. Unfortunately, Gartner’s research suggests that less than only 10% of businesses have a 360° view of their customers.
This is because you and your eCommerce peers don’t have any face-to-face contact with your customers as in a physical store.
With your existing customers, it’s arduous to retain them, especially when your competitor allures them with exciting offers. Even if you succeed, you need to study their buying history and retain their interest.
And if you look at your new visitors, it’s hard to get their attention and gauge their interests to thereby make a personal connection.
All this put together makes it a struggle when the data you are collecting is dispersed across the disparate tools used by your sales and marketing teams.
Here’s where the best CRM for eCommerce comes to your aid by stitching together your fragmented data and providing you with a unified view of your customers. What’s more, the CRM system can also give you the much-needed insights to target the right leads.
Leveraging the power of CRM, you can thus enable smart decision-making, augment customer retention and increase your revenue.
Now that you know that a CRM is vital in wowing your customers, let’s see how exactly a CRM system can benefit your business.
1. Collect Customer Data
As I mentioned earlier, the best CRM for your eCommerce business, helps you gather user data from multiple touchpoints. With this, you can then create buyer personas with their behavioral, demographic, and psychographic data.
This information, in turn, can be used in your marketing campaigns and blog content to drive better engagement.
2. Augment Conversion Rate
Creating an effective sales funnel is possible once you understand who your customers are. You can save time and lead to faster conversions because all the necessary information needed by your sales team will be housed on the same eCommerce platforms.
So, you could move from the on-size-fits-all approach to the audience of one method, and take personalization to the next level.
3. Re-engage Your Customers
Have your customers kept their carts abandoned for long?
It’s time to remind ‘em.
Re-engaging them will show that you care for them. In return, they will be of value to you by converting 4.4% higher than those of new visitors.
The eCommerce behemoth, Amazon, leverages its CRM to execute some of the best re-engagement campaigns. Besides reminding customers of the things they left behind in the cart, it also gives product recommendations that their customers might be interested in.
4. Hyper-Personalized Email Marketing
If you still mass email thousands of your contacts the same message, friend, you are living in the stone age.
Personalization is your marketing campaign’s core that determines whether your mail lands in your customers’ inbox or spam.
With CRMs, you can now create marketing campaigns that instantly connect with your customers. You can segment your customers based on their demography or interest or their basket of products to tailor personalized messages.
By A/B testing your campaigns, your marketing team could tell what works and what doesn’t and thus generate quality leads. And if there’s some segment that never engages with your brand, you can always filter them out, so that you concentrate your efforts on what brings you profits.
5. Savvy Inventory Management
The information you get from inventory management would help you discover your customers’ buying patterns, trending products, accounting information, and others. By integrating this data with your CRM, you can automatically get a single view of your customers.
This process would help your business understand how customer preferences are evolving. You could also figure out the amount they spend, what their frequency of shopping is, etc.
6. Efficient Customer Support
We are species that long for things to happen at the click of a button. So, it won’t be a euphemism if I suggest that your customers yearn for lightning-fast support from your eCommerce store.
The good news?
CRM helps your sales rep go from being a person to a friend for your customers by addressing their queries and attending to their needs quickly. Into the bargain, your salesperson would also have the chance to upsell and cross-sell to your leads and customers in synchronization with their tastes and preferences.
So, it will not look like you are trying to sell, rather, add value and make their shopping experience a pleasant one.
7. Reduce Man-Made Errors
Tell me, how many times have you slipped in customer service or other aspects of your eCommerce business by doing your tasks manually?
Once? Twice? Forgot to keep a record?
Well, with a CRM system, you can automate your redundant tasks and also create automated customer journeys.
For instance, instead of entering your customer record manually and creating spell errors and duplicate records, let the CRM system do the job for you. Correctly. Automatically.
8. Ensure Brand Consistency
You have various brains working for your eCommerce business. Each of them has a unique style of representing and vocalizing things.
But you can’t afford to let this creativity create a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde branding for your business.
This is where the CRM system helps you stick to standard templates that all your employees can use across your company. This way, there is this touch of personalization and at the same time, the process is automated.
9. Integrate Social Media
Customers want omnichannel interaction with your brand and expect a quick response. Since social media is one touchpoint where customers spend the majority of their time, why not turn it into an engagement tool with your brand?
As quoted by Salesforce, Social CRM can help you delegate 79% better customer service and increase retention by up to 63%.
Ingage is the best CRM for omnichannel retail. Irrespective of whether you have only an eCommerce store or a physical store or both an e-store and a brick-and-mortar store, Ingage is all you need to take customer engagement to the peak.
Let’s look at some of the key features of this E-Commerce CRM tool.
1. Capture eCommerce Events
Tracking visitor activity on your eCommerce website is crucial to garnering a better understanding of what keeps them on the site and what drives them away. With Ingage, you can capture the following eCommerce events in real-time.
- Login
- Logout
- Product Clicks
- Add to Cart
- Purchase
- Check out
- Payment
- Return
2. Create Automated Journeys
Great. Now that you can capture visitor data with Ingage, what are you going to do with it next?
Well, Ingage gives you the capability to create automated journeys based on visitor behavior, in real-time. For instance, when a visitor clicks on certain products, you can trigger an email or a push notification to campaign personalized product recommendations.
Alternatively, when a customer adds a product to his cart but forgets about it, you can trigger a series of cart abandonment campaigns until you win the deal.
Other automated campaigns that customers run with Ingage include:
- Product-based campaigns
- Purchase-based campaigns
- Customer engagement campaigns
3. Curate Intelligent Segmentation
Combine your customer attributes with eCommerce events and transaction history to create an intelligent customer segment with Ingage. Take this to the next level, by creating an omnichannel automation journey and render hyper-personalization.
4. Launch Campaigns
Want to run tailored promotions to increase your customer’s basket value for your eCommerce store? Get the help of the Campaign Builder to create custom campaigns for your segmented audience.
This makes it easy for you to run a separate campaign for your first-time customers, and a separate campaign for your VIP customers. So, run as many unique campaigns as you want to deliver an extraordinary customer experience.
5. Landing Pages and Cross-Channel Marketing
For certain campaigns, you might have to design a separate landing page and spread the word to your customers. Ingage makes it easy for you by giving you a drag-and-drop interface to create responsive landing pages for your campaigns.
What’s more, you can easily send it across to your customers over an SMS or a push notification or an email or, WhatsApp.
There’s More to Ingage
Hope you now understand why Ingage stands as the number one choice for eCommerce businesses. Besides the aforementioned features, Ingage empowers you with the following:
- App-based loyalty programs for customer retention
- Unified customer data platform for a 360° view of your customers
- Marketing automation
- Customer feedback surveys
- Comprehensive business dashboards and analytics
- Dynamic vouchering
- Referral program for customer acquisition
Schedule Your Personalized Demo For Ingage Now!
1. HubSpot
HubSpot is suitable irrespective of whether your eCommerce marketing team is made of five or five hundred folks. It helps you manage your entire sales pipeline with the holistic visibility you need, in real-time. You can log your sales process and activities automatically and also get all the information about a lead in one place.
Pricing: Basic plan starts at $50 for 2 users per month and the Enterprise plan is priced at $ 4,000 per month for 10 users
Free Trial: Yes
Free Version: Yes
2. NetSuite CRM
NetSuite gives you a single customer view to help you close more deals and provide better customer service. With its CRM tools, you can see all customer interactions and transactions, manage up-sells and cross-sells, discover purchase history, and view service issues, pending orders, and overdue invoices.
Pricing: $129 per month
Free Trial: No
Free Version: No
3. Active Campaign
Want to interlink contact organizations with sales automation? Active Campaign is all you need to sell more in less time. You can prioritize your leads and automate contact management so that you don’t let anything slip through the holes.
With lead scoring and other key features, Active Campaign will help you deduce the win probability and top-up with automated segmentation to better close your deals.
Pricing: This starts at $15 per month, with the enterprise plan priced at $279 per month.
Free Trial: Yes
Free Version: No
4. Marketo Engage
Marketo is a marketing automation suite that facilitates email marketing campaigns, nurturing, SEO, landing pages, scoring, and analytics. Using these advanced features you can attract and convert your potential customers, grow customer relationships, and scale your SMS marketing, e-mail marketing, and all other forms of communication marketing.
Its core capabilities would assist you with content personalization, cross-channel engagement, and automation.
Pricing: $895 per month
Free Trial: Yes
Free Version: No
5. amoCRM
This is your messaging-powered CRM. From its CRM tools, you can converse through messengers, email campaigns, and calls. So, every single interaction you have with your customer can take a personalized note on a one-on-one dialogue. Besides, it gives you other analytics, reporting, and automation tools to understand and delight your current customers.
Pricing: This starts at $15 per month per user and the enterprise plan is at $45 per user per month.
Free Trial: Yes
Free Version: No
6. Salesforce Sales Cloud
Salesforce CRM helps you log, manage, and analyze all customer activity under a single hub. You can automatically capture data and get the necessary insights to enable your sales team to win with predictive forecasting. Get detailed insights with dashboards and reports and plug in other apps to empower the CRM.
Pricing: Not given by the vendor (Pricing plans vary by user)
Free Trial: Yes
Free Version: No
7. Zoho CRM
Zoho's CRM is apt for both SMBs and enterprises striving to establish a 360º customer relationship lifecycle. Besides others, contact management, pipeline management, sales funnels, and workflow automation are some of its key features.
What's most attractive is the fact that Zoho CRM can seamlessly facilitate integration with 500+ popular business apps.
Pricing: Starts at $14per month per user
Free Trial: Yes
Free Version: Yes
8. Ontraport
Ontraport is a robust CRM and automation system that can work in sync with its built-in landing pages, email marketing, eCommerce, and analytics CRM tools. This way, you can give your customers a streamlined and targeted experience to increase your profits. You can power your CRM strategy with referral programs, sales force automation, and business process automation.
Pricing: Basic plan starts at $79 per user month and the enterprise plan is priced at $ 497 per month for five users.
Free Trial: Yes
Free Version: No
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9. EngageBay
EngageBay CRM is suitable for small and medium-sized businesses. Its key features include a full marketing stack, sales, and service automation features. This E-Commerce CRM tool allows you to capture leads, nurture, and engage with them.
Pricing: Starts at a forever free plan, upgrades to $14.99 per month per user. The enterprise pricing plan is at $79.99 per month per user.
Free Trial: Yes
Want to compare your eCommerce CRM choices? Download this free worksheet and get rolling with your decision-making phase.
Once you have shortlisted two or three vendors, it’s time to calculate the implementation cost for CRM. When you factor in the budgets be sure to include the following:
- Platform and integration cost
- Service cost
- Implementation cost
- Planning cost
- User cost
- Training cost
- Support cost
To determine a ballpark, read our detailed guide about the cost of implementing a CRM.
I understand how daunting it could be for you to invest in a CRM software solution before testing it. This is why, at Ingage, we give you a personalized one-on-one demo using your eCommerce store data to help you witness the transformation that Ingage can bring about for your brick-and-mortar and online business.
Try Ingage now by scheduling your personalized demo.
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