A Guide to Succeeding with eCommerce CRM

It is time for a deep dive into another type of CRM. This time, we are looking at CRM for eCommerce. This is an extremely specific need where you are selling online, generally with higher volumes and often with a bigger range of products.

CRMs for eCommerce often overlap with other types of CRM and operational systems. It is extremely important to consider what you want your CRM to cover and what you will use other systems for. And even more importantly, how they will link together.

What do eCommerce CRMs do?

At the most basic level, an eCommerce CRM will help you understand and interact with your customers who are buying products online directly from you.

This means capturing the buyer journey from first interest and visits to your website through one or more purchases and towards becoming advocates for your business. For example, they support you in tracking buyer behaviour from initial site visits, buying behaviours and shopping cart status, ordering and payment, and all the associated up-sell and cross-sell.

There are big overlaps with the capability of marketing CRMs. Often there are standard communication sequences that make a big difference in supporting an eCommerce business, like sales emails, abandoned cart messages, and regular marketing communications. The important thing when looking for specialised eCommerce CRMs is that these emails can be automatically linked to your customer’s buying activity.

The other crucial element of an eCommerce CRM is that it is aware of what customers are buying. This may be because your CRM also manages your eCommerce storefront, or because it is closely linked to the information from your storefront. Your CRM can then help you to analyse the data to present relevant, personalised offers and other information to your customers, based on their own information and the combined purchasing information of all your customers.

What are examples of eCommerce CRMs?

There are a lot of ways that your business can use eCommerce CRM capabilities. Some storefront products like Shopify incorporate many elements of CRM, and will also link to your marketing CRM to help you both keep track of customers buying behaviour and then effectively communicate based on what you learn about customer behaviour.

There are many possible combinations of storefront and specialised CRM software that can help you grow your eCommerce business, but the important thing is to make sure that all the pieces work together well in a way that helps you serve your customers best. And that might include linking together other operational technology components, like order management and delivery/ fulfilment systems.

At the “big end of town”, products like Salesforce offer integrated solutions, but for many smaller businesses, clever combinations of specialised software will be the best option and one that you can build out incrementally as your business grows.

For most eCommerce business owners, the priority is to get your basic sales and marketing working, but there comes a point when you realise that you are spending too much time moving customer information around, or even worse not keeping customer information updated so that you can’t communicate effectively.

While you might not want to spend big on all the components from day one, having a plan for all your technology components and how you will connect them as your business grows, making incremental investments as you go – not only in buying the software but also in linking software together and investing in the data and processes that work together to better understand and communicate with your customers, so they can make the most of what you offer.

So how do I set up a linked eCommerce CRM capability?

To plan this type of setup, you must look closely at the integrations. Which software meets your needs for the basics and has the links available to join everything together as you grow? And what is your plan to bring this information together over time?

Are you considering CRM for your new or growing e-commerce business? Or could you use what you have more effectively? Feel free to ask any questions here or contact me directly.