Looking to get ahead with your online store? Then you need the right tools to make things happen. These days, your shoppers expect more from your customer service. With sites like Amazon setting the standard, consumers want fast, free shipping, easy returns and ample selection.
Setting your store aside from the pack can mean the difference between stronger sales or the lack thereof. Here’s why newer tools like ReadyCloud’s Ecommerce CRM can help you bridge this gap. Ready to learn how it can help you get ahead? Here are eight things you probably didn’t know about this kind of software.
Cross-Channel Functionality
If you’re selling online, you likely are also selling across multiple sales channels. Commonly, retailers will host their own store, via a shopping cart service like Shopify, and will also sell on channels like Amazon, eBay, Jet, and others. The right CRM connects all these channels and integrates your data check here into one central hub for better organization and more seamless, real-time reporting.
Customer Profiles
The bread and butter of an ecommerce CRM are the profiles it creates. While your centralized data is still key to identifying trends, with individual customer profiles and order timelines, you can more easily build relationships with each shopper. Having the entire order history available to you lets your customer service team track each order, shipment and even return.
Customer Focused Notes
Improving customer service means getting to know your customers better. Newer CRMs for ecommerce help you accomplish this by including focused notes. These notes can be tagged, assigned to customers and updated in real-time to suit the needs of your customer support team. As you can imagine, this is a critical customer service tool.
Tasks and Team Management
Services like Slack have become immensely popular in recent years due to their superfluous ability to connect teams in real-time. The core function of Slack is a glorified office messaging service that has similar functionality to Wunderlist and Skype. Doing away with these services are the more modern Task and Team management features found in ecommerce CRMs that offer the same features but are offered within an ecommerce suite.
Business Intelligence
Business intelligence is the bread and butter of today’s smartest online businesses. Up until recently, smaller ecommerce businesses didn’t really have the budget to compete with larger ones in the BI category, namely because this type of data was so costly to procure. But things have changed. Ecommerce CRM derives critical BI based on the ecommerce order activity of all the cross-channel customers. The results are smarter business moves that improve ROI and build better, stronger relationships from day one.
Auto Filtering
Filtering, what does it mean and how does it apply to CRM software? With ecommerce, it means a way for you to find out the actions that your customers did or did not take when making a purchase. For example, let’s say that you wanted to send out an email marketing message, but you wanted to avoid serial returners and you only wanted to market to prospects that were likely to make a $100 purchase or greater. With filtering, you can sort through the history of these shoppers and create a list of ones that are most likely to purchase and least likely to return.
Email Marketing
Speaking of filtering, today’s leading ecommerce CRMs are also designed to give you a way to market to your customers via direct emails and newsletters. We all know that newsletters are a fantastic and proven revenue driving model. We also know that tapping into this vital source of revenue is improved when you have business intelligence powering your moves. Add in filtering, and you have a win-win recipe for a better, healthier bottom line.
Shipping & Returns
As orders come in, they have to be shipped out to your eager customers. This used to require that you had a separate solution to process all your orders, generate shipping labels and update customers with tracking numbers. But newer CRMs for ecommerce take on this heavy workload, too, and some even offer integrated returns software, so that your logistics are seamless from start to finish.
As you can see, ecommerce CRM is reshaping the way that retailers operate, and for the better. Ecommerce has been around for more than 20 years. It’s high time that the software powering these online shopping services caught up to the present day. And now, it clearly has.
Kim Marks 
Nicola Holder