No matter the size of your retail business, once you take it online, you attract a new level of competition.
You’re no longer competing with the next man on your street at that point but with many similar businesses globally.
This is because the internet is an equalizer of opportunities. It gives every business equal opportunities to get compete.
But how then do you compete? Is it by just having a high-converting Shopify store? Or reducing your product prices?
Well, It goes beyond all of that. It’s about properly managing customer relationships with a CRM software for online retail.
47% of CRM users state that CRM technology has an immense impact on their customer satisfaction rate.
-IBM
How is CRM used in retail?
In short, a CRM bridges the gap between you and your customers. It’s a technological advantage that gives you real-time data about customers enabling you to serve better and delight them.
An online retailer usually has marketing tools like a website, social media handles, email marketing, video marketing, etc.
And most of these tools mainly help you sell and communicate with the buyers. But, how do you track your buyers’ behaviors, know their names, spending habits, and even birthdays?
Now, that’s where CRM for online retail comes into play. It enables you to forge lasting relationships with your buyers. Relationships that transcend business transactions.
Essentially, CRMs are great tools for uncovering customer touchpoints and deepest interests.
Benefits of CRM for Online Retail and E-Commerce
There are numerous benefits of using CRMs in online retailing and e-commerce, they are as follows:
- It helps you to better understand your customers
- It helps you to respond to your customers’ needs better
- It allows you to customize the shopping experience of your customers
- It allows you to attract, retain, and re-market buyers
- It enables you to speak to your customers in the most relevant and timely manner
- Then, it helps you turn prospects into buyers, and sell more
CRM systems enhance customer retention rates, leading to a profit gain ranging from 25% to 85%.
5 All-time Best CRM for Online Retail & E-Commerce Stores
The role of a CRM software in an online retail outlet cannot be underestimated.
Just like you need premium tools like FreshBooks for accounting and TouchBistro for POS to manage daily business operations effectively, you also need a CRM to manage your customer relationship.
I’ve curated the best DTC CRM software, its benefits, pros, and cons.
1. Salesforce
Have you ever experienced this?
After shopping from an online retailer, you receive a customized thank-you note with your name. Similarly, you also got some fantastic recommendations (as though the retailer was in your mind).
How did you feel? I bet you were happy and would love to shop again.
The Salesforce CRM AI feature can replicate this exact scenario for your customers. And much more.
Salesforce is the world’s leading CRM with powerful features that will help you scale and unlock more revenue streams for your business.
Whether you’re just starting or an established online retailer, Salesforce CRM would exceed your expectations.
Top Benefits of Salesforce CRM
- Customer Experience: Leverage mobile apps and social extensions to improve the buyer shopping experience in your retail store.
- Marketing and Merchandising: Boost organic store traffic, unify products and catalogs, and personalize offers to buyers.
- Artificial Intelligence: Use the power of Einstein’s AI to make personal recommendations with real-time data from your store.
- Scalability: Scale while maintaining operation with innovative multi-language, multi-sites, and multi-content strategies.
Cons of Salesforce
- It’s expensive
- You have to pay for add-ons to get the most out of the software
- Configuration and setup are complex and time-consuming
Visit Salesforce
2. Pipedrive CRM
Sometimes, managing an online retail store can be overwhelming
Especially if you’re wearing all the hats in the business. It might even get to a point you’ll begin to feel inadequate and maybe, incompetent.
I have good news for you. With Pipedrive CRM for online retail, you can easily oversee and manage your entire sales operations.
Plus, you can increase customer retention by optimizing your entire sales pipeline. Best of all, it has a low learning curve.
Pipedrive comes with tons of integration and API capabilities to enable you to connect with your existing platforms too.
Top Benefits of Pipedrive CRM
- Simplify your Sales Process: Create workflows, and automate manual processes and follow-ups from your central dashboard.
- Automate Order Management: Easily track abandoned carts and supervise all buyer’s activities on your retail website.
- Third-Party Integrations: Quickly connect your CRM with other accounting, POS, email marketing, and other tools.
- Generate Loyal Customers: Increase your market share by enabling a fast cart, staying on top of your inventory, and providing a swift response to customer inquiries.
Cons of Pipedrive
- Support is limited for small accounts.
Visit Pipedrive
3. HubSpot
They call Hubspot the King of Inbound Marketing.
In case you’re wondering what inbound marketing is, It is a strategy that attracts customers by creating valuable content and tailored experiences.
Simply, it means inspiring sales and harnessing relationships through personalization. You’ll be able to do that by using HubSpot CRM for online retail and e-commerce.
Best of all, Hubspot now has built-in integration with Shopify now has built-in integration with Shopify. This means you can now access all your most important sales, customer, and revenue metrics on Shopify.
Top Benefits of Hubspot
- Convert Traffic into Sales: Create optimized landing pages, emails, and social media campaigns that delivers a personalized experience to your customers.
- Own the Process: Map out a straightforward process to maximize shoppers’ experience based on real-time intelligent analytics data.
- Track and Attribute Revenue: Get the direct attribution reporting between marketing efforts and digital dollars spent.
Cons of Hubspot
- Getting started takes time
- Survey functionality is currently limited
- High support volume can increase wait time
Visit HubSpot
4. Zoho
Zoho CRM for online retail is a complete solution for your retailing business.
A quality I like about Zoho is that it makes room for the scalability of your business from day one.
Invariably, they’re super confident in the ability of their solutions to help your retail business grow faster and make more revenue.
Zoho retail solution brings your disconnected systems together. And manage all your retail operations from purchasing to warehousing to return processing.
Top Benefits of Zoho
- Prebuilt Integrations: Retailers can leverage Zoho’s 600+ pre-built integrations to connect with third-party services and enhance their online shopping operations.
- Artificial Intelligence: Take advantage of AI features such as predictive, sentiment, and OCR to forecast sales and better understand your customers.
- Process Automation: Put the operations of your online retail store on auto-pilot with Zoho’s intuitive process automation tools.
- Business Intelligence: Get a periodic intelligent real-time analytics report to make smart business decisions that translate into growth.
Cons of Zoho
- Need to have an Internet connection.
- Support has vastly improved, but it still depends on who you get online.
- Completely manual input – no smart tools for form filing.
Visit Zoho
5. Act CRM
The last yet significant CRM on our list is Act!
Act! is a sales-focused CRM for retailers. It helps organizations to manage opportunities and close deals faster.
Faster is the keyword there.
In today’s e-commerce space, customers have limited attention, and the brands that’ll win are brands that can act fast.
Fast in responding to customers’ inquiries. Fast in following up with an abandoned cart. Fast to up-sell the customer. And, fast to inform the customers of new products.
Fast! is fast.
Top Benefits of Fast!
- Sales Pipeline Management: Understand your pipeline’s effectiveness and how you can improve it.
- Sales CRM App: Access your prospects’ details anywhere and anytime on your mobile with Act! CRM App.
- Sales Reporting and Forecasting: Make smarter decisions with in-depth sales reporting and analytics.
Cons of Fast!
- Don’t have specific retail functionalities
- It’s limited in features
Visit Fast!
Using a CRM system can help increase cross-selling and upselling revenue by 39%.
Final Verdict
Here’s the thing, all CRMs listed here are incredible.
They can make all the difference in your revenue when used well.
However, our overall recommendation is Pipedrive based on customer reviews, personal users, and experts’ reviews. It’s affordable and super-efficient.
Picking a CRM software for your business is a critical thing. That’s why we took the due diligence to put together enough information on this article to facilitate your choice.
Got any questions? Share in the comments, we’d love to hear them.
