Ever heard of Hershey’s bitter experience in the sweet market? 

Well, that’s what I call a Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) catastrophe.  

When Hershey’s market share was eroding, they went ahead and purchased a $112 million CRM system from Siebel. Unfortunately, the system was extremely complex for Hershey’s suppliers and production line.  

What happened next? 

The stream of sweet treats froze.  

And as if adding fuel to the flames, Hershey’s poor choice of Customer Relationship Management System was implemented right before Halloween. As you guessed right, many of Hershey’s customers were abandoned on their biggest chocolate binges that year. 

Translating this loss in numbers, Hershey’s witnessed a 19% drop in quarterly profits and an 8% decline in the stock price.  

If you would take a closer look at this CRM disaster, the flaw was not in the decision to implement a CRM system. Rather, the choice of the CRM system and the timing at which it was done.  

So, friend, don’t turn around and drop your idea of implementing a CRM for your eCommerce business. You just have to make the right choice at the right time. And through this blog, I’ll help you do just that :) 

Walk with me as I help you understand and choose the best CRM for your eCommerce business. 

Why Do You Need the Best CRM for eCommerce? 

If you are in a dilemma as to whether your eCommerce business needs a CRM, this discussion is just for you. 

Statistics reveal that by 2040 around 95% of all purchases are going to be via eCommerce. While on one side of the spectrum, the online businesses are growing tremendously, so is the landscape becoming hyper-competitive.  

Your customers have infinite choices. To stand out, you need to endorse a seamless experience and delight your customers in every single transaction.  

But to do that, you need a holistic view of your customers. Unfortunately, Gartner’s research suggests that less than only 10% of businesses have a 360° view of their customers.  

This is because you and your eCommerce peers don’t have any face-to-face contact with your customers as in a physical store.  

With your existing customers, it’s arduous to retain them, especially when your competitor allures them with exciting offers. Even if you succeed, you need to study their buying history and retain their interest. 

And if you look at your new visitors, it’s hard to get their attention and gauge their interests to thereby make a personal connection.  

All this put together makes it a struggle when the data you are collecting is dispersed across the disparate tools used by your sales and marketing teams.  

Here’s where the best CRM for eCommerce comes to your aid by stitching together your fragmented data and providing you with a unified view of your customers. What’s more, the CRM system can also give you the much-needed insights to target the right leads.  

Leveraging the power of CRM, you can thus enable smart decision-making, augment customer retention and increase your revenue. 

The Indispensable Benefits of the Best CRM for eCommerce 

Now that you know that a CRM is vital in wowing your customers, let’s see how exactly a CRM system can benefit your business.  

1. Collect Customer Data 

As I mentioned earlier, the best CRM for your eCommerce business, helps you gather user data from multiple touchpoints. With this, you can then create buyer personas with their behavioral, demographic, and psychographic data.  

This information, in turn, can be used in your marketing campaigns and blog content to drive better engagement. 

2. Augment Conversion Rate 

Creating an effective sales funnel is possible once you understand who your customers are. You can save time and lead to faster conversions because all the necessary information needed by your sales team will be housed on the same eCommerce platforms. 

So, you could move from the on-size-fits-all approach to the audience of one method, and take personalization to the next level.  

3. Re-engage Your Customers 

Have your customers kept their carts abandoned for long? 

It’s time to remind ‘em.  

Re-engaging them will show that you care for them. In return, they will be of value to you by converting 4.4% higher than those of new visitors.  

The eCommerce behemoth, Amazon, leverages its CRM to execute some of the best re-engagement campaigns. Besides reminding customers of the things they left behind in the cart, it also gives product recommendations that their customers might be interested in.  

4. Hyper-Personalized Email Marketing 

If you still mass email thousands of your contacts the same message, friend, you are living in the stone age.  

Personalization is your marketing campaign’s core that determines whether your mail lands in your customers’ inbox or spam. 

With CRMs, you can now create marketing campaigns that instantly connect with your customers. You can segment your customers based on their demography or interest or their basket of products to tailor personalized messages.  

By A/B testing your campaigns, your marketing team could tell what works and what doesn’t and thus generate quality leads. And if there’s some segment that never engages with your brand, you can always filter them out, so that you concentrate your efforts on what brings you profits.  

5. Savvy Inventory Management 

The information you get from inventory management would help you discover your customers’ buying patterns, trending products, accounting information, and others. By integrating this data with your CRM, you can automatically get a single view of your customers.  

This process would help your business understand how customer preferences are evolving. You could also figure out the amount they spend, what their frequency of shopping is, etc.  

6. Efficient Customer Support 

We are species that long for things to happen at the click of a button. So, it won’t be a euphemism if I suggest that your customers yearn for lightning-fast support from your eCommerce store.  

The good news?  

CRM helps your sales rep go from being a person to a friend for your customers by addressing their queries and attending to their needs quickly. Into the bargain, your salesperson would also have the chance to upsell and cross-sell to your leads and customers in synchronization with their tastes and preferences. 

So, it will not look like you are trying to sell, rather, add value and make their shopping experience a pleasant one. 

7. Reduce Man-Made Errors 

Tell me, how many times have you slipped in customer service or other aspects of your eCommerce business by doing your tasks manually? 

Once? Twice? Forgot to keep a record? 

Well, with a CRM system, you can automate your redundant tasks and also create automated customer journeys. 

For instance, instead of entering your customer record manually and creating spell errors and duplicate records, let the CRM system do the job for you. Correctly. Automatically.  

8. Ensure Brand Consistency 

You have various brains working for your eCommerce business. Each of them has a unique style of representing and vocalizing things.  

But you can’t afford to let this creativity create a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde branding for your business.  

This is where the CRM system helps you stick to standard templates that all your employees can use across your company. This way, there is this touch of personalization and at the same time, the process is automated.  

9. Integrate Social Media  

Customers want omnichannel interaction with your brand and expect a quick response. Since social media is one touchpoint where customers spend the majority of their time, why not turn it into an engagement tool with your brand? 

As quoted by Salesforce, Social CRM can help you delegate 79% better customer service and increase retention by up to 63%. 

Why is SWAN the Best CRM for Online Businesses? 

SWAN is the best CRM for omnichannel retail. Irrespective of whether you have only an eCommerce store or a physical store or both an e-store and a brick-and-mortar store, SWAN is all you need to take customer engagement to the peak.  

Let’s look at some of the key features of this E-Commerce CRM tool. 

1. Capture eCommerce Events 

Tracking visitor activity on your eCommerce website is crucial to garnering a better understanding of what keeps them on the site and what drives them away. With SWAN, you can capture the following eCommerce events in real-time. 

• Login 

• Logout 

• Product Clicks 

• Add to Cart 

• Purchase 

• Check out 

• Payment 

• Return 

2. Create Automated Journeys 

Great. Now that you can capture visitor data with SWAN, what are you going to do with it next? 

Well, SWAN gives you the capability to create automated journeys based on visitor behavior, in real-time. For instance, when a visitor clicks on certain products, you can trigger an email or a push notification to campaign personalized product recommendations. 

Alternatively, when a customer adds a product to his cart but forgets about it, you can trigger a series of cart abandonment campaigns until you win the deal.  

Other automated campaigns that customers run with SWAN include: 

• Product-based campaigns 

• Purchase-based campaigns 

• Customer engagement campaigns 

3. Curate Intelligent Segmentation 

Combine your customer attributes with eCommerce events and transaction history to create an intelligent customer segment with SWAN. Take this to the next level, by creating an omnichannel automation journey and render hyper-personalization.   

4. Launch Campaigns 

Want to run tailored promotions to increase your customer’s basket value for your eCommerce store? Get the help of the Campaign Builder to create custom campaigns for your segmented audience.  

This makes it easy for you to run a separate campaign for your first-time customers, and a separate campaign for your VIP customers. So, run as many unique campaigns as you want to deliver an extraordinary customer experience.  

5. Landing Pages and Cross-Channel Marketing 

For certain campaigns, you might have to design a separate landing page and spread the word to your customers. SWAN makes it easy for you by giving you a drag-and-drop interface to create responsive landing pages for your campaigns.  

What’s more, you can easily send it across to your customers over an SMS or a push notification or an email or, WhatsApp.  

Implementation Cost for CRM 

Once you have shortlisted two or three vendors, it’s time to calculate the implementation cost for CRM. When you factor in the budgets be sure to include the following: 

• Platform and integration cost

• Service cost 

• Implementation cost 

• Planning cost 

• User cost 

• Training cost 

• Support cost 

To determine a ballpark, read our detailed guide about the cost of implementing a CRM. 

Try the Best CRM for eCommerce Now! 

I understand how daunting it could be for you to invest in a CRM software solution before testing it. This is why, at SWAN, we give you a personalized one-on-one demo using your eCommerce store data to help you witness the transformation that SWAN can bring about for your brick-and-mortar and online business. 

Try SWAN now by scheduling your personalized demo.