Add CRM: eCommerce alone is only half the battle.

Why eCommerce isn’t enough – You need CRM too

You’ve got a successful online business – but your eCommerce platform might not be enough!  Customer Relationship Management software (CRM) allows businesses like yours to easily keep information about business relationships in one tool.

However, for e-commerce businesses, this may not be enough. In order to stand out in today’s fast-paced, competitive online landscape, they need to know what both their existing and potential customers want as soon as they can, and then be able to target a message directly to them. This requires not only the capacity to collect data, but the tools to analyze and interpret it as well. Simply put, it is why e-commerce CRM software has become essential to your online store.

The following are six specific ways in which your business can benefit from an e-commerce CRM system, as well as the features that make OroCRM stand out:

Greater visibility and insight to customer data

eCommerce and CRM will help you build a reliable customer profile

The number one benefit of a CRM for eCommerce is the ability to keep all the information about a customer in one place, on one screen in one view.

A successful e-commerce CRM system should go beyond merely collecting contact information, potential leads, and other basic data, and be able to track customer trends and behaviors as they interact with sales, service, online commerce and your website. For instance, instead of just knowing what product is selling the most, you should be able to tell which products customers are looking at, but not buying, or even track guests’ activities and associate their activities to their account once they’ve opened it.

OroCRM’s website tracking tools can do just this, giving you information about where customers go on your store, what products or categories they look at the most, and what is placed in abandoned carts – all organized in the customer account. For businesses with multiple websites or touch points, OroCRM will synthesize all this data into a single account in order to create a holistic, 360-degree view of the customer. You can then easily segment this data to gain greater insights into your customers’ activities. For example, you could create a segment of customers who have purchased large monitors and viewed, but not bought, speakers. Then, you could move that data to your sales or marketing team so that they can create a hyper-targeted campaign.

Better customer management

In order to organize and handle all of this data, a CRM system needs to have an equally robust set of customer and account management tools. This is doubly important for online stores due to the myriad of ways customers can interact with them. If the CRM can successfully organize and display this information, your teams will be able to recognize trends, identify pain points, and develop strategies for continued growth.

To make reading and interpreting customer data as simple as possible, OroCRM comes with a powerful reports engine that is capable of generating detailed, comprehensive reports based on user input. You can track anything from conversion rates to revenues, and easily create a presentation to share with your team. Additionally, you can display this data, as well as anything else, on OroCRM’s completely customizable dashboard. Build your own chart or report, then place it on your team’s dashboard to help them better understand their customers’ needs.

Increased efficiency

Not only can the best e-commerce CRM systems gather data and help you keep track of it, but they will also help you and your team develop ways to use that data in order to maximize your efficiency. For instance, certain tasks, such as following up on leads or managing abandoned carts, can and should be standardized across your organization. Likewise, identifying the highest performing customers can help your business streamline its results.

With OroCRM’s built-in, customizable workflows, you can easily set your business’s best practices for a variety of tasks. These workflows can be created in order to manage highly specific tasks, or to support a range of more general activities across your company. And, with its Reach, Frequency and Monetary tools, OroCRM will qualitatively help you identify which customers are purchasing most recently, frequently, and often.

Improved marketing

It is not enough for an e-commerce CRM system to give you data to interpret; it should also help your business proactively respond. Marketing is a core aspect of online businesses, and the best CRMs will come with tools that help you get the right message to the right customer at the right time.

OroCRM’s segmentation tools allow you to do just this. By gathering all pertinent customer data in one place, you will be able to divide customers up based on your own customized, specific criteria, and then send out either personalized emails or targeted email campaigns, a strategy that has been shown to increase email revenue by an incredible 760 percent. With its built-in email engine and its integration with MailChimp and dotmailer, you can easily do all of this from within OroCRM.

Deeper integration with CRM platforms

Knowing your customer profile will help you grow sales

You’ve designed your online store, set up your e-commerce platform, and even have a CRM system in place. Orders are finally coming in, but all your time is soon taken up with transferring order and customer information between your store platform and your CRM. Unfortunately, this is a common problem. However, with the right CRM, you will be able to overcome many of these challenges. The right CRM will allow for a seamless and efficient integration with your e-commerce platform to ensure one source of truth for all customer information and allow you to efficiently manage customer accounts, launch effective marketing campaigns, and provide superior customer service.

Whether your store uses Magento, PrestaShop, WebSphere, or another platform, OroCRM’s structure and architecture allow you to launch deep and efficient connectors to retrieve any data you need in the format that you need it and keep your systems in sync. This level of integration allows you to bring over data any way you want, and even opens up your CRM to greater functionality. For instance, with Magento’s abandoned cart extension, your sales team can receive notifications about abandoned carts from the e-commerce platform based on parameters such as product type and product price, and then contact the customer and complete the transaction, all within OroCRM.

Impressive flexibility

Finally, no e-commerce CRM system should exist within a bubble, especially online. It is now common for e-commerce stores to take advantage of a number of different applications for their various tasks, such as customer service, e-payments, and email campaigns. The ideal CRM will not only work with these programs, but also will do so flawlessly.

With its unique structure, you can be sure that OroCRM meets this requirement. Already, it integrates with ZenDesk, dotmailer, and MailChimp, and the aforementioned abandoned cart extension built for Magento will allow you to recover up to 30 percent of unused carts. Furthermore, OroCRM Magento Bridge gives Magento users unparalleled insights and access to everything that OroCRM has to offer.

Having a good CRM system has become imperative for any online business to succeed. Whether you are B2C or B2B, or even both, OroCRM’s wealth of features will give your teams access to valuable data, as well as the tools to interpret and act on it. No other e-commerce CRM system offers anything close. Contact us today or request a free demo to learn more.