What is an Ecommerce CRM?

Everyone who reads your blogs, visits your product pages, abandons your cart, or views your latest social media post leaves behind a feast of valuable data that you can use to improve the customer experience.

But here’s the problem. Customer data may be vital to your business success, but with so much of it to track, organise and explore, it can be a huge challenge to gather meaningful insights from the enormous amount of information you possess.

This is where an ecommerce customer relationship management (CRM) system comes into play. Let’s discuss how this technology works in practice and how you can choose an ecommerce CRM that gets the best out of your customer data.

An ecommerce CRM is a platform that centralises, organises, and analyses all of your customer data so you can use it to make smarter decisions and deliver better experiences across every digital touchpoint.

CRMs for ecommerce support sales pipeline management from start to finish, analyse buyer habits, monitor your marketing campaigns, and store customer details so you have a bank of information you can use to personalise interactions.

All of this helps your organisation better understand your audience and deliver a superior service to your customers.

Traditional CRM software is designed to record and store customer information in one location so it’s easily accessible to the teams who need it. Its goal is to support account management from start to finish to help a business nurture leads and close more deals.

On the flip side, modern ecommerce CRMs offer a broader range of tools to support ecommerce businesses. They emphasise personalised marketing, customer segmentation and marketing analytics. The focus is weighted more heavily toward the customer experience over the sales process.

We should mention that this distinction isn’t always clear-cut. Many modern analytical CRM's handle both sides of the equation.

The Salesforce CRM ecosystem, for instance, combines contact management and customer data with AI-powered recommendations, automation, and even website-building tools, giving you everything you need to build your online business and personalise every aspect of the customer journey.

The core function of an ecommerce CRM is to help a business understand its audience. This translates into a number of exciting benefits for your organisation.

A CRM for ecommerce creates a centralised customer data platform. This lets any team member access the data they need to create more personalised customer interactions.

For instance, you could view all of a customer’s past interactions with your website to determine the optimal approach for the next interaction. Alternatively, AI recommendations could suggest customers who are close to converting, making lead management easier.

This means every employee will know exactly what they need to do to guide customers to the next stage of the sales funnel, facilitating faster, more efficient service.

CRMs can analyse a customer’s behaviour, including purchases, click-through rates, site visits, and more, to automatically recommend on-brand content that’s the right fit.

For instance, an ecommerce CRM could detect when a customer spends higher-than-average time on a specific collection page. It could then send an automated product recommendation via email to encourage a faster decision.

This benefit applies on a broader scale, too. For example, a marketing team could analyse the different touchpoints current customers engage with on the path to purchase to gain a better understanding of the optimal channels for their next advertising campaign.

An ecommerce CRM offers a unified view of every customer. This makes it easier to gather custom insights and make informed decisions organisation-wide.

You could, for instance, use your CRM data to forecast demand automatically, helping to prevent stockouts and overstocking to cut costs over time.

CRMs will also help you be more agile in responding to consumer needs. If your ecommerce solution sees that your customers are having difficulty accessing a specific webpage, you’ll be notified in real-time and can take the steps to fix the problem proactively.

These constant analytics save time while letting you make faster, smarter decisions across the board.

All of the previous benefits add up to one thing: a better experience for your end customer. They’ll receive more personalised recommendations with customer journeys tailored to them. They’ll also get better customer service from reps who know exactly what they need.

Over time, this will contribute to more customer retention and higher sales growth, making it easier to scale your business.

Living Edge is a leading destination for sustainable Australian furniture. The brand approached Salesforce for support with its rudimentary ecommerce website, which wasn’t fitting the needs of their customers.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud helped Living Edge rebuild its digital storefront from the ground up. The furniture brand launched its new site with additional product listings and a more intuitive browsing experience, helping customers find the right information faster.

Commerce Cloud also helped the brand leverage customer browsing and transaction data to provide personalised experiences across every touchpoint. By pairing Sales Cloud with their ecommerce CRM, Living Edge could provide sales reps with a real-time understanding of every customer, enabling them to personalise customer experiences and close more sales.

Through Commerce Cloud, Living Edge experienced a 290% increase in conversion rates and an 82% increase in revenue.

Let’s examine the key features of CRMs and explain how they can solve four common ecommerce pain points.

It can be difficult to produce accurate insights when you lack the capacity to make sense of the information you possess. A great CRM collates every piece of customer data, which your business can use to generate insights that consider the whole picture.

For instance, CRMs can track all your social media channels as well as your website metrics, plus purchase history, email subscriptions, and product details. They can then automatically identify patterns and trends so you can refine your sales and marketing strategy to better connect with your audience.

It’s not uncommon to be underwhelmed by marketing ROI, especially as a new business with a limited budget. This often comes down to poor timing and poor personalisation.

Because a CRM has a real-time understanding of customer data, it can make actionable suggestions about what content to send, who to send it to, and when to send it. Automation tools can also send out this content without human intervention when a customer meets certain criteria.

For instance, an ecommerce CRM can automatically send out reminder emails to users who abandon their carts. It can also analyse demographics in tandem with purchasing history to suggest the best products to push for different buyer personas.

These features ensure businesses can scale their marketing efforts while connecting with their customers more reliably.

Modern consumers demand personalisation. It can often be the difference maker when deciding where they take their business. But with disjointed and disparate data, it’s difficult for ecommerce businesses to create a consistently outstanding customer experience.

As a great CRM for ecommerce, it unifies data across all channels and gives businesses the information they need to create more unique interactions for their target audience.

Artificial intelligence can also help with the customer-facing side of things by providing personalised product recommendations and content based on buyer habits. All of this helps ecommerce brands create 1-to-1 customer journeys that engage and convert.

It can be difficult to handle surges in website traffic during peak seasons, especially when you’re running promotional events. Poor performance and downtime can lead to frustration for customers and lost revenue for your business.

As agile CRM solutions are built on the cloud, they can scale automatically alongside your business. This keeps performance at a high level even when traffic is at its highest.

You’ve seen why an ecommerce CRM can be a powerful tool. Here are five questions that you can use to select the best ecommerce CRM software option for your business.

First, consider your budget. How much are you willing to invest in your CRM?

There are a number of free ecommerce CRMs on the market. However, consider whether these are the most economical when it comes to your time and resources.

A paid CRM typically comes with additional, advanced features, such as sales automation and AI capabilities, that put it leagues above a free option. It’s helpful to consider the return on the investment you’ll receive rather than just the upfront cost.

A CRM that can be used for ecommerce isn’t necessarily an ecommerce CRM. Look for an option that can solve your business’s problems.

Any effective ecommerce CRM should be able to analyse common metrics like click-through rates and customer lifetime value automatically, for instance. You’ll also want a solution that can automate content and email reminders to speed up your marketing efforts.

Opt for a CRM that integrates well with your existing ecommerce tools, whether that be WooCommerce, Shopify, or Magento. If compatibility isn’t built into the platform by default, check for apps and tools that will make the migration seamless.

Ultimately, these are the platforms that your CRM will pull much of your customer browsing and sales data from, so you need to make sure everything will sync before you make your investment.

Make a list of the features you’d like your CRM to offer. Maybe you need a platform that can handle content management automatically. Perhaps you’d like a service with a mobile app. Or you might be looking for an ecommerce CRM platform with a website builder included.

Prioritise different features depending on how important they are to your business operations and then use this to guide your decision.

The best way to figure out if a CRM is the right fit is to test it yourself. Request a formal demo from the sales team or take a CRM free trial if it’s available. This will give you the freedom to experiment with the solution and see if it meets your ecommerce company’s needs.

Here are four tips for integrating your ecommerce solution with your existing tech stack.

We covered this before, but check that your current ecommerce system is compatible with your CRM of choice. This ensures your CRM will have the data to produce reliable insights.

CRMs are excellent at unifying data, but messy, unstructured, and siloed information can make integration more difficult. Where possible, organise and categorise your data to improve accuracy and reliability during integration.

Take a free trial and run various scenarios to test your platform. This will help you build your knowledge while also helping you find any roadblocks that could make integration a challenge.

You may understand the ins and outs of your ecommerce CRM system, but does your team? Train your ecommerce marketing and sales departments so they understand how to use your new solution effectively.

The best way to hit the ground running with your CRM is to educate yourself on what’s possible. Need some help with that? Trailhead features hundreds of free lessons about the basic and advanced features of Commerce Cloud, Salesforce’s ecommerce CRM solution. All of our lessons are free; simply find a trail or module and start learning.

The key to providing cohesive customer experiences is having cohesive data. A CRM for ecommerce will help you bring together your customer data and then leverage it to create better marketing processes, deliver superior service, and make smarter decisions that help you grow your business.

If you’re ready to get started with a CRM built for the needs of an ecommerce business, try Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Our native ecommerce solution will connect the dots between your customer data and ecommerce journey with advanced AI, marketing tools and more.

Watch the demo or try it for free today to see how Commerce Cloud can spur your growth.