ReadyCloud

The Ultimate Guide to Ecommerce CRM Software

ReadyCloud

The world of ecommerce is evolving at a rapid pace. New technology trends are paving the way for a more intuitive online shopping experience. With developments like voice shopping and search, same-day delivery and subscription box services aplenty, ecommerce is on track to set new records that weren’t even fathomable five years ago.

As retailers adapt to an ever-changing climate of new technology, more scrupulous shoppers and fiercer competition, they need to add tools to the shed that can help them stay on top of their game. Relationships with ecommerce customers are not fickle and need to be nurtured and sustained just like any other industry.

But without the right CRM in place, you’re thinking in the short term; instead of having a long term retention plan in place that sustains your business well into the future. Here’s why ecommerce CRM software is a necessary component to any successful online business model. Find out everything you need to know in this ultimate guide.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

What is Ecommerce CRM Software?

You’re probably familiar with traditional Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. Popular systems like Salesforce ruled the early 2000s, complemented by a lot of spinoffs and big corporate systems like Oracle. But times are different now. Ecommerce CRM software takes on a different approach for a different time in modern computing—where most people are buying the retail goods they want online instead of in a brick and mortar setting.

Ecommerce CRM isn’t a lead generator or a sophisticated rolodex like the CRMs of yesteryear. Rather, it’s a way to get to know the customer journey by putting a name and face to your ecommerce order activity. This type of software helps you learn the habits of your customers, so you can facilitate better marketing, build stronger relationships and improve retention across the board. But it does so much more than that. We’ll cover every single base in this ultimate guide, leaving no stone unturned.

What Does Ecommerce CRM Software Do?

Ecommerce CRM software is a new approach to retail relationship nurturing and building in an increasingly dominated ecommerce retail world. It works by connecting to your shopping cart and marketplaces accounts via API. From there, it instantly imports all your order history and data. Once it has this data, it creates beautifully rendered individual customer profiles based on their ecommerce order activity. The CRM comes complete with a wide variety of features, functionality, integrations and premium plugins that are designed to help ecommerce businesses of all sizes.

Why Do Retailers Need This Software?

Since ecommerce is a digital, faceless transaction—it’s difficult for retailers to build or sustain relationships with customers outside of a newsletter or a chatbot. That’s where CRM can be a game-changer. The CRM puts a name, face, habit, trend, activity, preference and more to each transaction that comes through. This gives the retailer unadulterated and key insights into the deepest part of their operations. Good ecommerce CRMs leverage this transactional data to the advantage of the retailer, so they can make key changes, updates, smarter marketing moves and other preplanned changes that benefit their bottom line and appease their growing customer base.

Key Features of Ecommerce CRM

To help you better understand how an ecommerce CRM system works, it’s best to go over every detail and feature one at a time in this ultimate guide.

Instant Customer Profiles

The power of ReadyCloud CRM is behind its intuitiveness when linking your shopping cart and marketplace accounts. Done from inside of the Appstore, you simply follow the easy steps to log into your accounts. Once you’ve linked the accounts, ReadyCloud will instantly import all your order data, including customer names, invoices, tracking numbers, sales data, shipping and return information and more.

From there, ReadyCloud creates instant customer profiles based on this ecommerce data. Each customer’s profile features an order timeline and a complete history of every interaction the customer has made with your store. You can add tags to the profile, notes, tasks and so much more. With this data, you can view the complete customer journey and start building better relationships right away. This especially useful for consolidating cross-channel data between marketplaces like Amazon and your shopping cart provider.

Multichannel Data Stream

Your shopping cart provider does not link to your marketplace accounts. This creates a conundrum because you’re forced to gather data between multiple dashboards, different filters and varying degrees of usability. Consolidating this data is tedious and often requires that you use an additional service to do so.

Imagine trying to determine how your Shopify data stacks up to your Amazon or eBay data, so you can make investments in new inventory, plan a flash sale or learn more about your customers’ habits and trendsetting products. With ReadyCloud, you’d see all this data inside of your dashboard, where you could sort it using filters and tagging to determine what your next move is.

Business Intelligence

Knowing who your customers are, what they are doing and how this relates to your bottom line is mission-critical in today’s unpredictable ecommerce world. This is accomplished by having the right data and using that data to create actionable business intelligence that feeds your return on investment.

This is, perhaps, one of the greatest benefits to integrating an ecommerce CRM strategy into your online marketing plan. For example, you could use the filtering and tagging in ReadyCloud CRM to sort customers by the greatest average order value, by the lowest return rate and by your most loyal customers. Next, you could create a targeted flash sale that you send out to just those filtered customers to maximize sales and prevent unnecessary returns. This is just one example of how business intelligence helps your business create more revenue-producing marketing campaigns.

Email Marketing

Speaking of email marketing, ReadyCloud integrates directly with MailChimp and Constant Contact for all your email marketing needs. Just connect the integrations from within the Appstore by logging into your account and you’ll be ready to go.

Once you’ve determined which customers to filter for your next marketing message, ReadyCloud will automatically create new email lists for you in your mailing services provider account. After that, craft your new message and send it out to the list. ReadyCloud will track all the sales and associated data that comes in from those campaigns, so you can improve retention and loyalty.

Action Alerts

New to ReadyCloud are Action Alerts. These are programmable messages that you can automate from within the ecommerce CRM software to build new relationships and to maintain existing ones. Action Alerts are created by using a nearly limitless set of filters and logic to tell the system what to do.

For example, you could set action alerts to notify a customer when their order ships, when a return has been processed or even to check-in after so many days from a purchase to give them a special offer. Action Alerts give you complete control over the relationship as each sale is made.

Profile Tagging

ReadyCloud helps you make the most of your customer profiles and data with the tagging feature. Similar to how you would add keywords to a blog post or how you would add hashtags to a social post, tagging is a smart way to help you keep track of customers, habits, trends and more. It also helps you stay more organized, too.

To add tags to profiles, you just need to choose what tags you want and amend the profile. The process takes a few seconds. Later, you can sort profiles by tags using filtering. This can help you find certain customers and demographics that you need in seconds with organized, filtered searches.

Color-Coded Calendar

Use the color-coded event calendar in ReadyCloud to stay up-to-date and to never miss a beat. Events are added just like you’d add them using popular services like Outlook, Google Calendar and iCal. You can even determine what colors you want each event to be, and you can add notes to your events and even tag customers or other team members.

If you use automation integrations (see below), you can take this to next level. That’s because you can sync ReadyCloud to your existing calendar service and import all the data in real-time, so its nestled underneath one umbrella program to save time and increase efficiency.

Tasks & Team Management

The newest additions to the ReadyCloud Suite are tasks and team management. These give you and your team an edge with the ability to assign tasks to individual or multiple team members, complete with tagging, due date, notes and even file attachments.

Tasks and teams are similar in functionality to what you’d find with Microsoft Teams, Wunderlist and Slack, but boast a more useful and enhanced interface and can be affixed to any contact or profile. This helps you and your team stay a step ahead and is a powerful customer service tool.

Shipping Plugin

As a complete ecommerce suite, ReadyCloud also has premium plugins like ReadyShipper X, which adds a powerful, multicarrier shipping software solution. ReadyShipper comes with built-in USPS savings on Priority Mail and can generate shipping labels at a speed of one per second. It integrates with the most popular shopping carts and marketplaces.

Returns Plugin

Returns happen. But you can streamline and automate them with a premium plugin for ReadyCloud called ReadyReturns. This software doesn’t require coding and drops into almost any online store in just minutes. You control returns with custom rules and settings, so you can make your return policy shine.

Automation Plugins

A robust CRM helps retailers stay on top of their game. To accomplish this feat, automation integrations are essential. This is why ReadyCloud uses a service called Zapier, which connects to the software via API and enables the automation of many different things.

Among hundreds of Zapier’s automation integrations you can use, popular ones include:

  • Customer support automations: including ZenDesk, Help Scout and Fresh Desk. All your customer inquiries are instantly imported and added to their individual profiles within the software suite.
  • Google: Including the G Suite for calendar, notes and contacts, all which are imported and attached to their corresponding customer profile.
  • Ring Central: An integrated UCaaS VoIP for business service that automatically imports your log files, affixing them to a related customer profile.
  • Live Chat: The most popular live chat services and chat bot services also integrate via Zapier, giving you a way to log customer service notes to each individual profile.

Point of Sale

No ecommerce CRM software solution would be complete without integrated point of sale. That’s where the ReadyCloud Square CRM integration comes in. This complimentary integration does require that users create a new Square account or use their existing one, which can be synced by logging into Square from the ReadyCloud Appstore.

The Square CRM integration pulls all the data from each swipe, tap or Square-powered website sale, and creates instant contacts and profiles, or updates your existing ones (if they exist) within the interface. It’s a powerful tool that gives retailers insights into all of their sales, including brick and mortar sales that were swiped.

Now every transaction that you process has new meaning and has an associated customer profile. This gives you the ability to better identify trends, build stronger relationships, send more powerful marketing messages and create long-term loyalty and retention.

Data Retention During Migration

Migration is sometimes necessary when a cart you are using no longer serves your needs. But shopping carts don’t like to see their customers migrate over to a different, competing service. This is why they make it difficult to take your data with you. But ReadyCloud has the answer.

All you need to do with ReadyCloud to preserve your data is connect it to your existing cart, where it will import all your order history and customer data up to six years back. Next, connect it to your new cart and pick up right where you left off, with all your customer data and actions and a way to keep forging ahead with new relationships.

Supported Shopping Carts and Marketplaces

The ReadyCloud Suite is designed to help retailers of all sizes and supports today’s most popular shopping cart services and online marketplaces. Just add the service you need from the Appstore.