The ecommerce industry is seemingly unstoppable in its growth. According to sources like Internet Retailer, it’s already surpassed a $330 billion haul in the U.S. over this past year, with experts predicting that the worldwide take will top $1 trillion by the year 2017. Needless to say, it’s one of the fastest growing industries in history.
Commonly, online retailers do not try to market their products in a solitary niche. Rather, they utilize the benefits of omni channel marketing to attract as many consumers to their conversion funnel as possible. This means that the typical online business will maintain a presence across multiple marketplaces and shopping carts in efforts to woo customers to their brand.
How can CRM for ecommerce help? We’ll take a look at five of the powerful benefits that integrating such a system can have for any online business.
Catering to Customer Shopping Habits
Customer shopping habits are everything when it comes to being successful with e-tailing. But each marketplace and shopping cart provides varying analytics, as do search engine providers like Google. This often leaves a pile of legwork for retailers, namely in culling and comparing data across sales channels to determine shoppers’ tendencies.
But CRM for ecommerce helps do the heavy-lifting in this regard. The right solution has the ability to pull data from all the sales channels, migrating it to one source and compiling reports and charts to help retailers better prune their business to cater to shoppers’ behavior. The end result in stronger conversions and improved retention.
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Studies have proven that social media is one of the most powerful ways to reach your customers in e-retail. But in order to really stay connected with them, your business needs to know what they are talking about, who they are sharing it with and what they like and dislike about your products, services and brand in general.
CRM solutions offer deep social analytics that can track everything from brand and product mentions, to chatter, hashtags and even trends. This helps you not only connect with more of your target demographic, but also empowers a business to cash in on trends and social chatter early, in addition to be able to respond to negative reviews in a timely manner.
Driving Deep, Robust Analytics
Understanding how your customers are responding to products that you have listed across multiple sales channels is incremental to your success. With deep analytics and signals, you are now able to follow the customer from their initial landing page all the way through the conversion funnel.
Once the customers do convert or bounce, the information can be gathered. This critical information enables retailers to fine-tune their conversion funnel and shopping cart to help improve conversions and reduce bounced users and cart abandoners. It also provides insight into customer behavior while serving as an inbound source for customer data that can then be harnessed to enhance the relationship.
Reducing Returns Through Logic
A relatively recent entrant to this software is returns logic. Newer ecommerce CRM software is powered by cloud, which offers an array of benefits to the retailer. For example, a retailer can drive returns analytics and customer data that helps them better understand the performance of products across multiple sales channels.
Where one product is being returned more often on a particular channel, like Amazon, but less often on a different platform, like eBay, can mean the difference in a successful product or a failure. Being able to have the ability to analyze this data and make small changes serves to benefit the bottom line of the retailer exponentially.
What’s more, with seasonal analytics and customer specific data, including buying patterns and return habits, retailers can cull customer lists that are specific. This means that they can offer sales and specials to customers who return products the least often, helping avoid costly returns while yielding healthier profits and conversions in the process.
Expanding the Relationship with Customers
Using the data that’s provided by the CRM system, retailers can expand the relationship that they have with customers. For instance, if the data reveals that a sect of customers is trending with certain products and services, sales campaigns can now be created and targeted to those specific customers to help move more products.
This data can, in turn, be cross-analyzed against return habits to further improve profits while reducing returns. This works expeditiously with email, newsletter and social campaigns and direct-to-customer sales, like mailers and online advertising, retargeting, etc.
With customer data and habits available in real-time, retailers are empowered to make the right business moves that help grow their entity while improving customer satisfaction and loyalty, and supercharging long term retention.
