7 ways a CRM helps online stores sell more

Do you need a CRM for your online store? Is that going to get you more sales?

Yes!

It’s not just another tool to slow down your site. It’s a system that keeps customer info and action so you can use it for marketing.

Without a CRM, you don’t know anything about the individuals who shop from you and can’t do personalized marketing.

CRMs made for ecommerce specifically are great because they have just the right metrics you need: orders and sessions, LTV, last activity, acquisition source, product interactions, etc.

1. Understand your customers

A CRM shows customer behavior – what people do on your site.

You’ll see how your visitors go about your site, what they look for, how long it takes to make a purchase.

You’ll also get to know what kind of people you’re dealing with – the products they like, how much they spend, how often they browse and shop, if they return things, where they live and so on.

In ecommerce, a CRM is the closest thing you can have to meeting your customers in person.

Customer Profile within Metrilo

2. Make your communication more relevant

Once you see what’s going on with your customers, you can adjust your marketing messaging to better fit their buying habits.

For example, you may notice that lots of people browse often, but buy about once a month.

This is an excellent chance to engage them with informative content via email to remind them about yourself without actually selling.

Or you might be getting too many returns of a certain item – make sure to explain all product characteristics and warn about any peculiarities so they’re aware what they’re buying.

Another example: proactively send an email offer right when a customer cohort is ready to buy again to hit the sweet spot without spamming all the time.

A CRM gives you granular info on the various individuals and customer sub-groups you have. This info is invaluable if you want to stand out with the right offers at the right time.

3. Respond to customer needs better

A good ecommerce CRM lets you keep track of customers as your store grows and not lose touch with their preferences so as to serve them best.

You not only can tag them to remember specifics such as “has a dog” or “vegetarian”, but also filter by actions they’ve taken. This will help you cater to different customers without slowing you down.

With some filtering, you can get to people with specific needs and hyper-targeting them is super-easy:

• People who bought product A and recently visited product B’s page
• Shoppers from a specific country where winter is starting now and who’ve visited your warm clothes category
• People who buy dog food every month and recently started ordering more in quantity (maybe they got a second puppy!)
• People who buy Mother’s day and Valentine’s day gifts using coupons.

There are hundreds of other very narrow selections you can make and delight your customers with just what they like and need.

Example of Metrilo’s customer segmentation functionality

4. Customize the shopping experience

Meeting your customers – even though it’s virtually, in your CRM – allows you to tailor your approach to them. Just like a good shop assistant would do in a physical store.

A few examples:

• People show interest in particular products or offers – lead them to a special landing page.
• Someone is very unsure what size to choose? Send them a personal email with a size guide.

Related: How to convert hesitant shoppers

• Did you find customers who only buy from “new in” offers? Keep them coming with more of the same.

The point is, a CRM gives you details on all your customers so you can engage them differently, according to their tastes and preferences.

Without this knowledge, you’d be showing everybody the same products, the same landing pages, the same promotions. And losing their interest.

Related: Turn individual buying frequency to your advantage

5. Retain customers

For shops not concerned with customer retention, a CRM is not essential because you won’t need to collect all that data on customer behavior .

But a CRM is a must-have tool if you rely on people shopping from your store more than once.

Thanks to all that you learn about your customers with every new session they make on your site, you can perfect their experience to make them come back again and again:

• Win back old customers
• Offer related products
• Increase order frequency
• Push loyalty-inducing products
• Relocate more marketing money to channels that bring returning customers
• Fight seasonality in sales

Getting more orders from old customers will actually save you money on acquisition and leave you bigger profit.

Related: Ecommerce Retention Marketing

6. Get context for feedback

When you ask for customer reviews, the context matters. If you just get product reviews from people you know nothing about, you can’t really be sure this feedback is legit to take action on.

Metrilo’s Customer Feedback functionality

Some people like complaining for no reason so their negative feedback may not be that bad.

Others may be your most devoted fans without you knowing it!

Your CRM will connect their order history, spending habits, communication with customer service to their opinion.

New from Metrilo: Customer Feedback Score

This way, you’ll see what they’ve bought and which part of the experience leads to negative or positive comments, and will be able to fix it.

7. Sell more

As a result of all those improvements, you’ll drive lots of additional sales because:

• Customers will love your relevant and non-intrusive marketing.
• The experience for returning customers will be getting better every time as you gain more insights.

Do you use a CRM for your online store? Which one?