As one of the leading e-commerce shopping cart solutions, Shopify is used by millions of users daily, who rely on it to host their online store, shopping cart and payment processing system. In fact, some of the most popular stores you can find online are actually hosted by using the Shopify system. From rock band stores and celebrity accounts to professional sports teams and everything in between.
Certainly, Shopify will give you the tools that you require for success. But it’s not a marketing solution. Getting the word out about your online store will require hard work and diligence, as well as a little bit of creativity and a healthy marketing budget on your part. An emerging trend marketers are using is a Shopify CRM app to better connect with their customers. Here are a few reasons why this trend is growing in popularity, and why it may be worth considering.
Connecting Cross Channels
Shopify is a wonderful shopping cart. But if you want to sell outside of your Shopify hosted store, you’ll also require a presence on sites like eBay, Amazon and others. Unfortunately, this also happens to separate your order, sales, shipping and returns history, as well as your customer history.
That’s where CRM can come into the picture. With cross-channel integration, a good Shopify CRM app will connect all your sales channels. This will give you the ability to generate detailed customer profiles, and to get a complete look at your cross-channel data like never before, with every channel’s data hosted in one place.
Predicting Shipping Costs
With data from all your channels feeding into your CRM platform, you will also have another advantage at your fingertips: The ability to predict your shipping cost. By analyzing all your shipments, you can get a better picture of what shipping method costs you the least and gets packages to your customers faster.
You may find that a negotiated rate from UPS is good for your heavier packages while standard Priority Mail works for all the rest. Being able to forecast shipping costs can help you get a step up on your bottom line for your busy seasons.
Reducing Product Returns
Using the data that is culled from your CRM, you will also be able to determine returning patterns of customers. This also lets you find customers who make the most returns, too. With this data in your hands, you can then wheedle out serial returns from your marketing lists for future campaigns. This means that you will have reduced returns, more sales and less costs, which equates to improved margins overall.
Making Marketing More Effective
Speaking of marketing, it becomes far more effective when you are no longer guessing. Instead, you can know in advance what products sell the most, when, why and to whom. Using this data, you can create revenue-producing marketing lists, newsletters, emails and social campaigns that deliver more robust seasonal results.
As you can see, CRM is a powerful Shopify tool that shouldn’t be overlooked. It takes much of the guesswork of getting to know your customers out of the equation. Instead, it puts you in the know, so you can make educated moves that deliver lasting results.