According to Dr. Philip Kotler, ‘CRM is concerned with managing detailed information about individual customers and all customers’ “touchpoints” to maximize customer loyalty. He also mentioned the traditional customer journey AIDA model (Awareness → Interest → Desire → Action) is shifting to the 5A’s, which means:
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Ask
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Advise
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Assess
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Assist
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Arrange
This marketing model requires you to prioritize the user experience, and make inquires and research from customer feedback, offering possible solutions, providing help, and ultimately selling your products.
CRM is the key to create an outstanding customer experience
As traffic bonuses are cooling down in online store, web traffics and social media advertisings. If brands are seeking to survive in the highly competitive market, besides upgrading on your digital marketing efforts. More importantly, by shifting the focus on satisfying your current customers with quality product and customer services; attracting new customers with the optimized sales process to deliver excellent customer experience. To track how your brand interacts with customers can provide you insights on how to increase your conversion rate; run a sustainable business.
What is CRM (Customer Relationship Management)?
You might have heard of CRM before, and have probably even used a CRM tool without noticing. CRM tools are pretty self-explanatory; they are made to help brands and business owners to build and maintain a great relationship with their customers or users.
For retailers, users are the end-buyers, potential customers, and members. Through CRM, brands can achieve their sales objectives, for example, lower marketing costs, increase in sales, develop new markets…etc.
Also, the benefits that CRM can bring to brands are:
- Able to track all activities on the customer service end, segment customer issues, so your customer support team can address their problems more effectively.
- Support your marketing team to grasp insights on customers’ shopping behavior and more. And integrate your learnings on ads, copy, content, and other marketing strategies.
- Build business models based on different shopping behaviors, create personalized messages to increase sales performance.
CRM is both a management tool and a brand strategy
In general, CRM is a management tool, but it’s also your brand strategy, why is that so? I’ll explain in short, according to the 80/20 rule: “20 percent of your customers represent 80 percent of your sales.” Which means, all you need is focusing on 20% of your customers. Learn as much as you can about your customers, and everything they do needs to be identified and documented for future references. The more you learn about your customers, the better you’ll be able to provide them with the kind of positive experience they want.
Through CRM, a thorough collection of gathering customer information, categorizing, and performing customer segmentation. Brands can create and deliver tailored messages to different customers.
How can brands incorporate CRM tools into their business?
CRM software can be used creatively for e-Commerce and O2O merchants. For retailers, here are some everyday situations where CRM can be incorporated into your business:
1. When customers are signing up for memberships or making an order, your website could collect their information such as birth, gender, age, cellphone, e-mail, and more, for marketing use.
2. If your business has a brick-and-mortar store, ask your clients if they want to become a member, and sign them up on iPad POS. The membership program would allow customers to check their spendings, get brand offers, and more. It also allows merchants to find customer information more efficiently for future remarketing activities.
3. When customers fill out online forms for free-trial or samples, merchants can get their information quickly, and with constant tracking, brands can also get market feedback once they tested out the service or product.
These are some methods of how SHOPLINE merchants use the CRM software to assist in maintaining customer relationships. Besides, SHOPLINE can also integrate Facebook Messenger and Line to sned out order notifications, and cart abandons notification, which not only saves the communication cost for customer service but also improves in order rate.
Start using data to analyze shopping behavior and do customer segmentation
Having customer information of your clients is one thing, and engaging with your clients constantly to bring them back to you, is another. The 80/20 rule we mentioned earlier can be applied to your membership program as well. If there’s a product that you want to promote to your members, besides advertising it on facebook and Line to everyone, try targeting it to your members instead. SHOPLINE’s CRM tool allows merchants to do customer segmentation; you can consider parameters such as age, generation, gender, education, occupation, and more to create customer segments.
Segmentation allows marketers to tailor their marketing efforts to various audience subsets better. Find out the specific groups of customers who can resonate with the product you’re about to promote and create targeted marketing messages to them.
CRM tools not only reduce the cost for customer service, but it also helps brands to deliver messages more precisely. Also, With Shoplytics, a data analysis tool, merchants can get a detailed analysis of their membership, such as their retention rate, the purchase amount, and more.
Shoplytics provides data visualization reports on sales trends, web traffic, inventory, marketing results, and CRM, to give merchants a holistic overview for merchants to increase their operational efficiency and sales. Although CRM tools are already in the market for years, however, for small or medium business owners, building an online business is already enough work, let alone to set up a CRM system.
Conclusion:
SHOPLINE offers a well-rounded CRM system that helps merchants to create a one-stop commerce service. The platform covers everything from—creating a branded online store, brick-and-mortar iPad POS checkout management, membership program, logistics and payment methods integration, CRM system, automated marketing to data analysis, and more. SHOPLINE is here to provide full assistance to make your business bloom!
Marketing Associate at SHOPLINE. A digital marketing nerd and a podcast fan. You can find her out in the woods once in a while but most of the times she’s glued to her laptop screen indoors.