Getting the better of your efforts in obtaining and retaining clients is what most businesses strive for. After all, ineffective use of resources (be it the working hours of your Sales Specialists. Investment in marketing, or any other acquisition expenses), can lead to the loss of income and slow down the success and growth of the company.
This is why in this article, we’ll introduce you to customer relationship management systems (CRMs), explain why their use is crucial in eCommerce. As well as give a detailed overview of the best CRM tools and software worth considering for advancing your business.
Because keeping all the business processes organised, simple, manageable, and running like clockwork is among the most important priorities of a well-structured sales cycle. Having a powerful CRM is a great way to go.
Without a doubt, there are a whole lot of CRM benefits for small businesses and larger online retail online stores. For starters, building and maintaining long-lasting relationships with clients help to strengthen the credibility of your brand. It allows for higher conversions and the growth of sales and revenues. Not to mention the overall gains received from your returning clients, from approval process automation and minimizing other manual everyday work.
Thus, naming the key advantages of using CRMs for eCommerce businesses, it’s worth noting the following:
Forget spreadsheets and random documents that are scattered and locally stored across multiple computers of your team, this tactic isn’t effective. It’s a proven fact that lead lists and other data that are kept out of a CRM often gets lost or processed fruitlessly. This ultimately only leads to the company’s income loss.
Therefore, the strong primary side of customer relationship management systems is building a well-organized database. This regards segmenting information on your customers, partners, orders, support requests, etc., and logging all the communication (be it calls, emails, or other contacts). When information is clearly presented and available to all members of the team. It becomes much easier to allocate needed bits and not waste unnecessary time. Plus, if set up properly, notifications, reminders, and access rights can be of great help too.
Well-structured data is an outstanding basis for easing communication with leads, prospects, existing clients, partners, etc. To give an example, when collected, the data on a potential client can already help your specialists at the pre-sale stage. As such, they can see the lead source (on which channel the potential buyer left their contact details), their readiness to buy, and any additional comments.
Leads can then be distributed to the best-suited specialists for further processing. Moreover, with notifications and all kinds of reminders, your sales reps won’t forget to follow up with a client and have other teammates on the same page.
The same story applies to customer retention. Keeping clients that have previously bought something from your eCommerce store is crucial. Therefore, this layer of customers deserves a lot of attention. CRMs can assist in auto-email send-outs, scheduling actions, giving hints (for example, to congratulate a client on a birthday), mailing them an offer, discount, etc.
Similarly, those who handle customer support at the post-sale stage can benefit from CRMs too. Not only do many of the tools provide the opportunity to plug in extensions for making calls. But they also have solutions for reporting on issues and logging how they were handled.
Every business owner wants their employees to spend their working hours efficiently. This is why the CRM capabilities of automation are a goldmine. It can immensely cut down the time spent on useless manual work and on various logs and records that are created by hand.
Automation can be set up to enhance almost any day-to-day process, including the aforementioned reminders that allow employees not to use Post-it notes or rely on their own memory. This also regards notifications, approvals, contract terminations, and many other things.
One of the huge problems that CRMs solve revolves around bringing specialists from different departments to the same “wavelength”. It is a common issue that marketers and sales specialists are each occupied with their own tasks and often act out of sync.
That said, a CRM can enhance communication not only with your customers but also within and across your teams. To say the least, it can brush away many unneeded questions, as all employees will have the same data scopes right at their fingertips.
Finally, the grand CRM superpower is its ability to put together various reports that are needed for analytics. Managers can monitor the progress of their staff; marketers can evaluate the effectiveness of their channels and campaigns, support teams can allocate the most commonly occurring issues, and financial specialists can track resource flows, just to give a couple of examples.
Image Source: Pixabay
Now that we’ve touched upon how eCommerce stores can use CRMs to their advantage. Let’s see which of the software that’s available on the market deserves consideration. It should be mentioned, though, that the “best-fit” tools may differ from case to case depending on which eCommerce platform the store’s website was built on.
On another note, it’s also highly important that you secure your business from cyberattacks as your company is responsible for safeguarding the data the clients have entrusted you with. This is especially relevant for eCommerce since payments are accepted online. Remember, that in the case of a data leak, your company can face lawsuits and enormous fines. For this reason, take the matter of choosing a CRM seriously and opt for only trusted software.
Occupying the top-chart positions of many best CRMs lists. Salesforce is a universal CRM solution that’s a great match for those businesses that are large. The high level of its customisation and flexibility allows us to craft the customer relationship management system around the specific necessities of the business. Salesforce is wonderful at organising the work with leads as it allows quick auto-creation of records, their scoring, and distribution. Moreover, there are many pre-built solutions for various kinds of companies.
Yet because the setups are quite complex, such a system needs to be maintained. There’s also a learning curve. Thus, many companies using Salesforce have an admin or developer on their team.
Noted as a great choice for Shopify-based eCommerce stores, SendinBlue is most-praised for the tools it provides for marketing. As such, it covers the simple drag-and-drop creation and auto-mailing of email campaigns and even the customisation of landing pages. The classic CRM part boasts intuitive navigation. What’s for the pricing, there are multiple plans to select from, the simplest of them is available free of charge.
Moving on to the CRM that’s good for rather petite businesses, HubSpot has solutions for organizing orders in a logical way, for managing contacts and the sales pipeline easily, and for automating numerous processes. Topping that, HubSpot provides the functionality that makes creating reports very simple. Luckily, the CRM is very easy to learn (even if you’re a complete newbie) and has a top-notch payment-free plan.
Another “big player” among the CRMs is Zendesk Sell, designed to meet the needs of businesses of various sizes. Even if the online retail store is currently small The CRM has the required functionality to back up the company and its processes as it grows. Zendesk Sell is uncomplicated in its core, so it’s good for improving the team’s productivity, for organising and tracking data even if the employee is offline. It is noteworthy that the solution is simply integrated with eCommerce stores of various types and with other apps that are in use.
Casting itself as an all-in-one customer relationship management solution, AgileCRM is one more tool that’s suitable for those who are just starting out their journey with CRMs. It provides everything required for productive contact management and deals, it has time-saving telephony calls in one click, and simple scheduling. Furthermore, the designer allows for automating many marketing activities that include emails, building pages via templates, and social media channel integration. Not to forget ticket creation, helpdesk tools, and those for collecting a reusable knowledge base.
Next on the CRMs list is Zoho, an award-winning platform that’s used by many renowned brands. It is often distinguished for its innovative approach, omnichannel availability, team collaboration, metrics maintenance, and reports tracking, as well as top-notch automation solutions. It can be integrated with popular tools like Slack and Mailchimp too.
One more CRM to be mentioned is called Capsule. This tool is useful for synchronizing data entry across multiple channels, organizing the work processes (from notes to task completion), and boosting the sales pipeline. The capsule has an advanced search that makes finding sought-for data quick. This software offers a 1-month free trial as well.
Wrapping up, having a CRM to assist in organizing the work processes is a step taken toward business advancement. With a load of information that continuously grows, it’s vital to stay organized and stop wasting time on work that can and should be replaced by automation. Customer relationship management tools also help to communicate with customers better, establish stronger relationships, and to maximize profits.
Alex Husar, CTO at Onilab with 8+ years of experience in Magento and Salesforce. He graduated from the Czech Technical University and obtained a bachelor’s degree in Computer Software Engineering. Alex’s expertise includes both full-stack dev skills and a strong ability to provide project-critical guidance to the whole team.
Featured Image Courtesy: Pixabay
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