Shopify is one of the largest and most popular of shopping cart services providers online. They offer a user-friendly interface, convenient website design options and countless integrations that you can add to your shopping cart – some for an added fee and some free of charge – to make it even more useful. One of the integrations that should not be overlooked along the way is Shopify CRM software for your online store. Here are five reasons why.
Getting to Know Your Customers
It can be hard to put name or face to certain orders. Most retailers just see their reports and order data. Rarely do shopping carts color in this data to any useful extent. Sure, you can see when an order was placed, who placed it and a few other things, like order status, and some number crunching. But these analytics usually do nothing to help you get to know your customers.
CRM software for Shopify helps you create meaningful relationships from this data. Cloud-hosted platforms instantly import all of your customer data, creating illustrated profiles that display real-time order, shipping and returns information. Using this data, you can get a better idea of customer trends and shopping behavior. It can be harnessed to market revenue-producing newsletters, social media campaigns and sales events.
Learning the Seasonality of Sales
What are the trendsetting products and who is buying them and when? This is key information that all retailers want to know. If you can predict the seasonality of certain shopping patterns, then you can learn when to market what and to who. Larger companies have been using such “big data” to create winning marketing campaigns for eons. With Shopify CRM, now you can harness this data to do the same for your marketing department.
Imagine if you could learn the seasonality of your sales across all of your sales channels. What could you do with this data? What if you were aware of the most common shipping preference and cost? Could you not introduce a flat rate shipping option that gets customers their packages faster while reducing the impact on your bottom line? Would you not be able to learn what products are being returned the most and why, so you could make small changes with your inventory to improve profit margins.
What about seasonal trends, patterns and habits? With data such as this at your fingertips, you’d be able to predict your best-selling items by the season. This would give you the chance to stock up on items and create new sales campaigns to push them out, cashing in on the optimization of strong performance ahead of time through the power of big data and forecasting.
Connecting Your Sales Channels
Shopping carts like Shopify are great tools with plenty of bells and whistles. Since they are proprietary services, however, they are going to do nothing to help you learn about your sales on other platforms. For instance, many Shopify retailers also maintain a presence on marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay and even Newegg or Etsy. This makes sense because they want to capitalize on all of their possible sales outlets.
Getting this information into your Shopify store would be impossible, though, because Shopify is a standalone shopping cart. But with the right Shopify CRM software, you’d be able to integrate all of your sales channels into one platform. This data would also create new customer profiles that you’d be able to follow across all of your sales channels, enabling you to nurture relationships with customers, helping to create a stronger revenue stream found in the form of improved retention and loyalty.
Being able to integrate all of your online sales channels is just one part of the big picture. CRM for Shopify can also expand its power and functionality by allowing you to add integrations and apps for shipping, returns, accounting, emailing/newsletters, social media, payment processing and so much more.
Tackling Your Daily To-Dos
Running an online business is hard work. Chances are that your days are packed, and that you have more to-dos on your list than are humanly possible to get done throughout any given day. The answer to staying on top of your schedule is found with in an integrated calendar that makes it easy to create events, set reminders or schedule important to-dos.
With the right Shopify CRM software, you’ll be able to do just this. With integrated calendar functions like customer tagging, you could even tag the customers you plan on sending a welcome email to, a reminder, a follow-up or more. Added user licenses also mean that your entire team could connect, helping you improve accountability across your entire marketing department and back office.
Improving Customer Service
Let’s not overlook CRM for Shopify as the powerful customer service tool that it most certainly is. The ability to add notes to any given customer profile helps your customers service team deliver a better experience.
Say a caller phones in with an issue. Their profile can be pulled up and their real-time order data displayed. With the ability to document the call and add notes, your customer service agents would be empowered to succeed.
