5 Reasons to Add a CRM to Your Magento Ecommerce Site
If you run an Ecommerce business, you know that working with both future and current customers is crucially important. You are not just using your website to sell your audience on potential engagement and purchases down the road, but asking them to become a customer and complete their buyer’s journey right there, on the spot.
It’s only natural, then, to ask whether you should add Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to your Ecommerce system. Though the implementation is not instantaneous, the long-term benefits are significant. More specifically, here are 5 reasons to add a CRM to your Magento Ecommerce site.
1. Provide a More Complete Sales Funnel
When do you first learn about your customers? If it’s the moment they check out, your marketing strategy could use some enhancement. Ideally, you should begin to learn about potential customers long before that moment, when they first express interest in one of your products.
Using only Magento, that feat can be difficult to accomplish. But through a CRM, you can begin to build strategies that help in the process.
For example, you can begin to build lead-generating landing pages that get potential customers into your sales funnel before they’re ready for the purchase. Then, you can build specific email drip campaigns that slowly and strategically nudge them toward the shopping cart.
2. Collect Customer Information
Once you embrace gathering information about your customers before they take that final step, you need a system can hold that information. In addition, wouldn’t it be great if you could track the various ways that your potential customers begin to interact with you, such as replying to emails and visiting specific pages on your website?
Through a CRM, you can accomplish just that. Once a lead is in your database, the software dynamically gathers the information about potential customers, allowing you to take marketing and sales-related actions based on this intelligence. In addition, you can use the information the system gathers for you for the next step:
3. Segment Contacts For Targeted Outreach
Not every potential customer comes to your website for the same reason. Especially if you offer a wide range of products or services for sale online, the audience your website tends to attract may fall into more than one core group.
In that case, segmentation becomes crucial. Integrating a CRM allows you to group potential customers together in segments that are homogenous across a number of characteristics.
As a result, you can send more customized marketing messages and ensure more relevant outreach. Rather than simply sending a ‘Holiday promotions’ email in the days before Christmas, you can send specific, product-focused promotional emails during the same date that more directly speak to your individual audience segment.
4. Build an Abandoned Cart Strategy
If you’re like most Ecommerce merchant, chances are you have an abandoned cart problem. A meta analysis of studies on the subject showed that almost 70% of shopping carts across industries are abandoned.
Losing customers during the checkout process is difficult to stomach. They are so close to converting, why won’t they take the final step? A number of strategies can help you encourage them to do just that, and a CRM can help you through the process.
Through integration with Magento, your CRM can record not just which of your contacts have abandoned their shopping carts, but also which exact items they left behind. Now, you can start a targeted email campaign and even direct outreach via phone, encouraging them to finish the process.
5. Improve Customer Retention
Growing your customer base is great for your business. But ultimately, retaining existing customers matters just as much. Convincing your existing customers to buy again is significantly more cost-effective than attracting a new audience: one study found that it costs up to 5 times more to acquire new customers than it does to retain current ones.
Through a CRM, you can drive customer retention more effectively. Because these contacts have gone through the checkout process at least once, you have collected information that can be crucial in convincing them to buy from you again.
For example, you may find that a group of customers from Ohio tend to purchase the same product group. So why not do a targeted outreach toward these existing customers, perhaps with a discount, to encourage them to repeat the process. With the help of a CRM like Microsoft Dynamics, this type of campaign is easily possible.
Integrating a CRM into Your Magento Site
At its best, Magento is a comprehensive Ecommerce system that enables you to ease the process of making purchases on your website. The sales management aspect of the software, both on the customer end and on the backend, ranks among the best ecommerce platforms available – and is free to use and implement.
But to get the most out of your website, only using Magento is not enough. In addition, you also need to ensure that you have a solid system in place to reach out, communicate with, and manage your future and current customers. That’s why adding a CRM solution to your Magento site is so crucial.
The above five reasons get to the core of that need. Through a CRM like Microsoft Dynamics, you can more easily communicate with future customers, collect their information and interests, segment your audience according to that information, build a communication strategy for users who have abandoned their shopping cart, and improve your customer retention. The benefits, in short, make integrating a CRM into Magento well worth the initial investment and implementation cost.