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 […]
Implementing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, particularly for small businesses, is not always easy. It’s a comprehensive process that, while ultimately benefiting your operations and customers in a variety of ways, can quickly become frustrating. But it doesn’t have to be. If you approach your CRM implementation strategically, you can ensure a successful process that ultimately benefits both your business and your stakeholders with minimal friction. To help in that process, here are 6 ways to prepare your small business for a CRM implementation. 1. Understand Your Goals As any strategic process, planning your implementation has to begin with goal setting. Exactly what do you want to get out of the new software? Try to stay away from general answers such as improving business practices, and get specific instead. Which processes could and should be automated? Which current problems do you face in interacting with current and potential customers? To succeed in this step, we recommend following the SMART goals framework. Each objective of the CRM implementation should be specific, measurable, agreed upon, realistic, and set within a specific time frame. Only once you understand exactly what you are looking to get out of the software should you proceed with the implementation. 2. Examine Your Current Processes Implementing your CRM will likely include at least some process automation. A core reason why businesses take this step is to move away from manual outreach to potential and current customers, or hand recording of relevant information about this audience and their interactions with your brand. To ensure lasting success, examine what exact processes you are currently undertaking, and how they are structured. For example, you may send a weekly email newsletter to current customers with coupons and other loyalty-based promotional items. You may also have a lead nurturing strategy in place that helps you increase your contact-to-customer conversions. In the course of your CRM implementation, you can automate these processes, but only if you know exactly how they are constructed. Examine the processes you look to implement, in order to smoothen the project as it occurs. 3. Strategize Your Timing There is no perfect timing for a major software implementation. The long-term benefits of a CRM are significant, but that doesn’t take away from the resources and efforts you will need to get it up and running. There is, however, a least bad time for your implementation. Don’t start your project without first understanding when that time would be. For example, you would not want your employees occupied and sales systems down during the holiday season. Most businesses experience lulls in revenue, which tend to be great opportunities to divert resources that may be difficult to give up in the short term, but encourage long-term growth. You should also keep in mind the employees who will need to spend time on the implementation, and whether their time is needed elsewhere during your suggested frame. 4. Choose the Right Product A large part of your implementation preparation should be dedicated to finding the right […]
A business grows by expanding its customer base and keeping repeat customers. To do this, it has to keep track of leads, add new customers to its information base, and track their activity. This is what Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is for. The advantages of CRM A CRM system keeps all your information in one place, organized for easy access and analysis. You can see who your best customers are, what orders are pending, who’s behind in payment, and much more. You can update customers’ contact and shipping information as necessary. You can give them preferred status and select them for special offers based on their history, or flag them as having a poor payment record. If you’re working just from a spreadsheet, it isn’t easy to do all these things. The result is better customer communication and service. You can resolve issues more quickly and provide the information to employees as needed. If a customer has had a similar problem before, such as a delivery error, a record of past events can help to identify and fix it. Everything goes more smoothly with a good record of past transactions. Adding CRM to WordPress WordPress is the most popular tool in the world for creating business websites. Perhaps you’re already using a contact page on a WordPress site to hear from interested people. If you’re collecting the information into a spreadsheet or simple database, that’s a good start, but there’s a lot more you could be doing with it. Simple forms processing to collect contacts leaves you with a lot of work to do by hand. It works as long as your customer base is small enough, but as it grows, the job gets more difficult. Moving to a CRM system and connecting it up with WordPress saves effort and gives you more ways to use the information. When potential customers fill in a contact form, the information will go straight into the CRM. It can send an automated email response, refer the information to the appropriate department based on the request type, or add the prospect to an electronic or physical mailing list. If you have an e-commerce site under WordPress, you may be able to integrate it with CRM. This will let you update the customer’s order history and retrieve any special information about the customer. Plugins are available which provide CRM capability entirely within WordPress. Their functionality tends to be limited, so they’re best suited for very small businesses that want a little more than a spreadsheet. More serious businesses will want separate CRM. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Microsoft Dynamics is a popular and trusted family of CRM systems. It’s available in both on-premises and cloud versions, with pricing packages for businesses of all sizes. Both versions have rich feature sets, including: Customized reports Contact and lead management Sales partner management Analytic tools Role-based security Email integration It works easily with other Microsoft products. The Dynamics 365 bundle combines Dynamics with Microsoft’s ERP software and Office 365 […]
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