Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has been popularized during the late 1970’s and we believe this impactful concept upholds and extends a lot more since then. Fast forward today, CRM becomes one of the core systems in most businesses, whether it is brick-and-mortar or Ecommerce. CRM aims to create a greater customer service relationship which will lead to high customer r retention and encourage sales growth.
Many have agreed that CRM will greatly affect their business, and they understand the importance to put more efforts into the system. But what exactly is the modern CRM? It is all about utilizing the three essential elements: business strategies, effective practices and innovative technologies to analyze the interactions with customers and collect all the necessary data along the way.
How to Implement CRM for Ecommerce
There are many strategies you can adopt to build your customer relationship management system. At the end of the day, it boils down to how your approach enables you to collect the data and improve the customer loyalty.1. Know Your Goal
Everyone understands the importance of setting goals, but to identify goals that are aligned with your objectives are often not as easy as every imagined. We have put together a list of the commonly used goals that work for different business models.- Improve your ratings on different selling platforms
- Receive plentiful positive feedbacks from third-party websites
- Reduce the possibilities of returns/refunds
- Increase the chances of repeating visitors/customers
- Reach out to win back your customers who have abandoned purchases
2. Understand Customer Loyalty
Customer loyalty is simply a measure of the likelihood of a client to do business with a company or a brand in a repeating manner. This is often a result of the customer satisfaction from a positive experience throughout the transaction and customers appreciate the value of the goods or services that they paid for. One of the key points of boosting your customer loyalty is to improve your customer service, because it will push your customers to the competitors if you are performing a poor customer service. It is best for you to swiftly attend to all the requests and quickly respond to resolve all the issues in a friendly yet professional manner. However, we understand that under the pressure of a pandemic, you might be overwhelmed by a lot more questions and your team might be too rushed to provide the top notch customer service, we would recommend investing into an essential piece of CRM software which is the helpdesk like Freshdesk and Help Scout. These helpdesk softwares are easy to install, you can connect it to your own website or even a Shopify webstore. All the conversations will be threaded and you can search them whenever you need to. The details collected from the conversations can be used to analyze what lies in the interest of your customers, and you can transform your visitors into devoted customers. After knowing how to curate the right environment in growing customer loyalty for your Ecommerce business, we would suggest to consider a loyalty program when your web store is well-established. Although there are certain risks, a good CRM system will be able to assist in gauging the ROI through the cost-to-returns data so you can make a better decision.3. Gather all the data
Last but not least, we are at the final step before we can kick start a full CRM strategy. There are several ways you can collect the data and we have broken it down into three categories: manual, electronical, automatic. Manual Recording: Commonly used by small-scale business owners with very limited variations in their stocks. Simply comb through the sales report and shipping records to learn about the buyer’s behaviour. It is time consuming but it doesn’t cost a dime. You can organize your data in Google Sheet or Microsoft Excel. Digital Collection: In case you don’t already know, there are many tools for you to extract data off your website or e-shop. Some of the platforms like Shopify and SquareSpace have their own user-friendly analytical tools to generate a simple report. You may even study data from Google Analytics to understand both visitor’s and buyer’s pattern through specific customer data like past purchase history and loyalty points collected. Automatically Gather the Data: If your business contains a lot of variance and you have higher traffic as your webstore grows, it will be a hassle to continue manual recording. As mentioned in the suggestion above, you can incorporate useful CRM software like HubSpot, MessageBird, MailChimp, SugarCRM or Salesforce into your strategic planning, just pick one integration that you are comfortable with.