Here’s Why Every Ecommerce Business Needs A CRM

Ecommerce entrepreneurs who want to increase their chances of attaining success need to identify the ecommerce CRM best suited for their online business. A CRM is not a “nice to have” option but a “must have” if the online retailer hopes to remain competitive in the constantly changing world of digital marketing.

We are going to cover the top reasons why every ecommerce business model requires a CRM, so without further delay it is time to begin.

Keep Tabs on Customer Behavior

One of the immediate benefits linked to having a CRM is being able to covertly monitor the activities of customers as they visit your website. You have the ability to set the level of granularity of what information you can harvest. The following are just some of the data sets you can gather.

• What areas of your website consumers are visiting, including the total amount of time they spend there. If a consumer is spending a significant amount of time in any particular section of your online store, that is a sign they are interested.
• Whether consumers are going to your shopping cart only to have the sale abandoned. You can identify what the potential bottlenecks are and address them.
• What sales funnels are bringing the traffic to you and whether the traffic is leading to sales. With this data, you can deploy additional capital to the funnels that are giving you the best bang for your buck.

Crunching the Numbers

Along with tracking the activities of consumers on your website, the CRM will also give you the option to identify trends with the help of the analytics module. With the analytics, you will be able to clearly identify what areas of your ecommerce website are doing well (i.e., converting customers) and at the same time which areas need revision. Without the analytics feature, you would have a difficult time knowing whether you are hitting your key performance indicators.

Bringing Everyone Into the Fold

One of the features that most entrepreneurs overlook is how the CRM improves team collaboration. Instead of having multiple applications trying to keep everyone organized, the CRM will give you and your team members the ability to assign follow up tasks within the CRM. This will provides retailers a greater degree of control. Since everything is stored from within the CRM, the risk of having someone make a critical error is greatly reduced. By having the entire team participate from within the CRM, it provides a greater amount of transparency.

Streamlining Your Sales Processes

One of the most pressing challenges an online retailer faces is how to increase sales. The CRM gives you complete access to all of your customer data including what they are doing on your website. Based on the overall level of engagement, you have the ability to develop marketing campaigns that are geared towards your customers. Along with developing the campaigns designed for your customers, you will be able to bring in new leads. By tracking the leads you will be able to determine how far along in the sales cycle each of your contacts are and what are the most suitable follow up actions. With this feature, you will be able to quickly get a snapshot on how your sales pipeline is performing and whether you need to refine a particular area of your sales process.

Striking Gold by Spotting Trends

Over the course of time, your CRM will amass a considerable amount of customer data and with that data you will start to notice patterns. These patterns could be seasonal, centered on a particular product grouping or related to a specific campaign you are running. By reviewing these patterns, you will be able to identify opportunities that you would otherwise miss.

For example if you noticed that sales in the month of December are considerably higher than in October, you would need to make sure you are well stocked during December to avoid any lost sales due to insufficient inventory. Another option would be to develop a customized marketing campaign that takes advantage of these patterns so you can maximize your earnings.

Seeing the Big Picture

As a business owner, you probably have tried a variety of different ways to bring traffic to your website and generate sales. The ecommerce CRM will provide insightful metrics, similar to what you’d find with Google Analytics, that will let you know which of these sources are giving you the best overall return on investment. These metrics are vital if you are using a pay per click model, where you have to pay for every click that comes to your website. If the cost of the traffic is greater than the return on investment, you need to scale back that campaign. On the flipside of the coin, if you notice that a particular channel is helping you generate additional sales, you should put more money into that channel.

Leveraging Your Core Competencies

Something that the CRM for ecommerce will also provide is insight into the habits of consumers. Over the course of time, you will notice patterns. Your ecommerce website has to establish what its competitive advantage is in order to gain market share. To do that you must leverage your core competencies.

What is your competitive advantage? It is pricing? Quality? Customer Service? While you may have a theory on what that is, the metrics tracked by the CRM will inform you of what your customers believe is your advantage. The more time a visitor spends at any particular area of your website, the more interest they are exhibiting. If a consumer spends a large amount of time in an area, you should refine your value proposition to leverage that interest. By being adaptive you can gain market share.

Handling Customer Service and Upselling

The CRM will also give you the ability to handle all of your customer service related matters from one point. This will mitigate the risk of having a customer service issue go unattended. Something that should be taken into consideration is that while handling customer service issues you can generate additional revenue. By upselling and cross-selling services, you are bringing in a new source of income while addressing the customer service issue. As you can see, a CRM is vital for long term survival in the online retailing world. Don’t let your chance for success pass you by.