Ecommerce isn’t a forgiving industry. If you’re one of the millions of online retailers that’s competing to earn the business of new customers, the lack of proper tools at your disposal could be what’s holding you back. The good news is that with the right marketing weapons, you can expand reach and nurture new as well as existing customer relationships to great success.

Along the way, make sure you don’t overlook the benefits of a CRM for ecommerce. Here’s how it can help you earmark new accolades.

How Ecommerce CRM Works

Unlike traditional CRM, which is a lead-gen tool, ecommerce CRM has changed the game for this newer and evolving industry that’s currently undergoing explosive growth. Unlike the rolodexes and digital lead databases of time’s past, these CRMs work differently. They instead import all your orders and create customer profiles from them, giving you things like order timelines, notes, tasks, and a variety of integrated automation, marketing and relationship-building tools that help you gain the competitive advantage.

Putting a Face to the Name

You’ve worked so hard to get visitors to come to your store, but they end up being just another order number most of the time. Even with live chat assistance, newsletters and other features, social media used to be the only way to get personal with customers.

With the right CRM, however, you’ll be able to put a name and face to each customer, with detailed profiles and reporting that helps you secure, nurture and improve relationships from day one.

Mapping Customer DNA

If you’re selling online, it’s important to know how your customers function. Every customer is different, and each one can contribute to new trends that you should be aware of.

Good ecommerce CRMs map these customer habits and tendencies, giving you critical insight into trends, habits and behaviors, so you can make simple, real-time adjustments that have the most impact on your bottom line. What’s more, expanded reporting helps you stay on top of shipping costs, better manage returns and even improve products or remove poorly performing ones from your lineup.

Improving the Customer Journey

If you want to improve the customer journey, you need to first learn more about it. That’s where the robust data of a CRM comes into the picture. For starters, you’re likely hosting a website while also selling on available sales channels like Amazon, eBay and Jet, to name a few. The issue here is that these channels don’t talk to one another, but a CRM can connect all the dots.

Newer ecommerce CRMs are cross-channel. This means they consolidate all your data and create instant customer profiles from across all your sales channels. Not only does this give you an invaluable way to see and manage your data and orders from one central system, but it also preserve data integrity; so that if you switch shopping carts, you’ll still keep all your data.

Parting Advice

In parting, here’s to an improved customer experience at your online store. By integrating modern tools that help you get to know your customers better, you’ll be able to improve relationships, average order value, retention and long-term loyalty.

If CRM hasn’t been on your agenda just yet, do yourself a favor and take a look at your options. Adding one to the mix is a smart move that can help you improve processes and relationships across the board.