5 Smart CRM Tricks for E-commerce to Grow Sales of Your Online Store

This guide is a part of the below ultimate guide:
10 Best E-commerce Software Solutions — The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Online Store

Running an online store is a great thing, especially when it’s well-operating, bringing a steady amount of new visitors from your advertising activities or simply coming from Google organic traffic. But what if these visitors don’t turn into so many customers actually buying your products?

Even if you manage to capture new clients, there’s always some room for improving your conversion rate. According to Smart Insights, the average conversion rate for global e-commerce businesses in Q2 2018 was 2.86%. This means that on average, more than 97% of visitors at your store will not decide to buy your product. Quite a large crowd, isn’t it? So how to change this situation to your advantage and see your conversion rate growing with e-commerce analytics tools?

Data to collect with analytical tools

One of the most important things about optimizing your store for user experience and consequently, on conversion rate’s optimization is understanding how visitors behave at your e-commerce store:

• Which products do they visit most often?
• Which areas of pages do they like to click?
• When do they decide to quit your website?

All of this information can provide you with a pretty essential insight into your potential customer’s behavior and can be a valuable base for your website’s optimization.

But to gather the data, you firstly need a proper data-collecting software. And while you likely have Google Analytics already installed at your e-commerce store, you likely don’t take full advantage out of its data and features. Also, Google Analytics is not the only tool out there to help you optimize your store.

There are quite a few other e-commerce software solutions out there that can be easily installed at your store to bring you an additional set of essential data.

How to use the data in your decision-making?

But having all the data needed, how can it actually help you in growing your online business?

We can distinguish between 3 main areas of the website’s optimization:

• Top: Website’s structure -> the structure of linking/navigation of your website’s pages
• Middle: Pages’ structure -> the structure/design of particular pages in your store
• Bottom: Element structure -> the structure/design/color of particular elements within your page

So how can data derived from analytical tools help you in optimizing the top, middle, and bottom lines of your store?

Let’s say you use the analytical software to help you understand how users behave on your website.

Case 1. You see a visitor browsing through your store and you realize that the most often visited category within your navigation menu is shoes. This can signal you the information that it might be worth to put “shoes” as a featured category on your home page. At the same time with Google Analytics data, you realize that shoes are actually the category characterized by the lowest conversion rate. As a result, you might consider modifying your shoe category in an attempt to increase conversion rates, e.g. by offering an exit-intent discount using a tool like Sumo.

Case 2. When analyzing your customers’ flow within your online store, you might realize that when adding the products to the basket and proceeding to checkout, the customer decides to visit your “About Us” page, where he checks on more information about your company and team and then quits your website. This might be a signal to optimize your “About Us” page so that it includes reliable information about your team (e.g. your clients’ logos, the photo of your team), increasing the chances of your visitor coming back on the path to purchasing your product.

Case 3. When looking at the scroll data of your homepage, you realize that 90% of your visitors do not reach the final 25% of your website. As a result, they’re not able to see the option to subscribe to mailing discount updates. You might then consider re-designing your homepage to make sure you’re able to effectively capture your visitors’ email addresses.

The ways of using data to optimize your online store are endless, but first, it’s essential to collect the information required in the decision-making process. So below we look into a few most popular software solutions used by e-commerce businesses for analytics and conversion optimization.

3 best e-commerce analytics tools for collecting data at your online store

From a bunch of analytical tools, there are quite a few which are particularly popular and useful among e-commerce companies.

What’s important to look at when searching for an analytical tool for e-commerce business? There are a few things to consider:

• Does the tool integrate easily with the e-commerce platform you’re using?
• Can it monitor all stages and elements at your website (e.g. shopping cart, drop-down menus, JavaScript animations)?
• Does it provide you with an interface well-fitted to driving proper conclusions, e.g. the segmentation of users’ recordings/heatmaps?

You might also be interested in whether the software does not limit you from the proper data collection. E.g. after GDPR implementation in Europe, some analytical software has started to blank the input into the search and contact form queries. If you have a search form available at your website, this might turn out to be quite a significant limitation. You might be interested to use the software which would support you with an option to view search queries of your visitors.

1. Google Analytics e-commerce — an analytical basis for your online store

Google Analytics is the most popular analytical software. According to BuiltWith, 8.4% of the total websites available online are using Google Analytics, with 69.5% of the top 10k websites having Google Analytics installed on their website.

It’s likely you already have Google Analytics installed on your website, however, within Google Analytics, you’d be able to take advantage of the E-commerce Analytics module, delivering additional insight to you as the E-commerce business owner/manager.

What’s the difference between Google Analytics and Ecommerce Google Analytics?

The main distinctive element of E-commerce Analytics is its Customer Report option which can help you understand the behavior of particular customers at your store. This includes measuring metrics like:

• Products’ analytics -> which products are the most visited/purchased by your customers
• Conversion analytics -> which products/groups of products convert the best into paying customers
• Bounce rate changes -> this can help you experiment with product pages and observe the impact of any changes on bounce rate for your website
• Transactions -> the statistics for revenue, taxes, shipping fees for your transactions
• The time needed to realize the purchase
• Last order details
• Total money spent at the store
• Split between existing and new customers

Analyzing who are your actual customers and how they interact with your store can really help you in achieving the targeted growth. Did you know that Amazon generates 66% of its revenues from returning customers? This shows how important it is to target people who have already purchased something at your store.

There are quite a few ways you could use this data to your advantage and maximize ROI from the returning customers:

• Sending targeted emailing campaigns with the complementary products (e.g. purchased iPhone -> send the list of accessory products) using a mailing automation software
• Personalizing the pop-up message for the person returning to your online store, e.g. “Welcome back! We’re really happy to have you as our customer, so please grab a $10 discount from our team”
• Targeting people who haven’t been shopping at your store for a specific time frame with a tailored mailing campaign, e.g. “Hey, we haven’t seen you shopping for more than 3 months. Did you know we’ve recently introduced a -20% holiday season promotion for our branded t-shirts?”

Expert’s comment, Ronnie McKenzie, Storehacks

"Google Analytics — For a free tool it is an absolute powerhouse for data analytics. Having used it for years I am quite familiar with it, however, still find I haven’t even scratched the surface of its capabilities.
With enhanced e-commerce, you can delve deep into customer interactions with your products. If you LOVE data, you’ll love this. Aside from the information, you can gather from user behavior on your site there is another novel aspect…
Real Time viewing of what your customers are doing onsite. My favourite url handle… /checkout/thank_you

2. Hotjar— enrich your Google Analytics data by observing real visitors’ behavior

Google Analytics makes for a great base to analyze your e-commerce store and it’s more than a great data aggregator (or I’d say more sort of a data generator;) ). However, if you’re looking for a way to analyze the real user-experience at your online store, it won’t provide you with an essential insight into clicks, mouse movements, or most clickable areas of your online store.

With Hotjar, simply by installing a piece of code to your website, you get access to the following details about your online store:

• Heatmaps -> Areas most clicked at your store e.g. to learn which buttons/elements are the most engaging to your customers
• Recordings of visit sessions ->e.g. to learn reasons why visitors might quit your store
• Scrolling behavior -> the statistics about scrolling the web pages and the % of users reaching a particular level of the website

So having all of the above data, you’re well-equipped with the information needed for the decision making process. So how can you use it to get more customers at your online store?

• Analyze if customers actually click the buttons you want them to click -> try changing the design of the button, link and test if it impacts the customers’ clicks
• Analyze the % of scrolling the particular webpage -> try putting the relevant information higher if your visitors do not reach this point
• Analyze recordings of each customer’s session -> Monitor how customers interact with your store and e.g. how they react e.g. to exit-intent messages

Expert’s comment, Wiktor Sobolak, Growth Marketer, Divante.co:

While looking for the best heatmap solution for your business you should think of how it fulfills your actual needs. Beside heatmapping, you might want to consider if you really need recording, A/B testing or scroll depth. Before you proceed with any tool you should figure out do you need regular website analytics and test if a software you want to use can deal with advanced JavaScript animations or drop-down menu.
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3. CrazyEgg — analytical software with the built-in optimization tool

CrazyEgg is another analytical software solution, allowing for an in-depth analysis of your website/e-commerce store. It additionally provides you with in-depth analytics of clicks on your website, depending on the source of your visitor. What distinguishes CrazyEgg from other analytical tools like Hotjar is its built-in tool allowing for optimizing your website and testing different design variations.

With CrazyEgg, you get access to 3 major products:

• Snapshots -> with snapshots you’re able to identify the sources of your visits, how people are using your store or where they might get stuck
• Recordings -> recordings let you measure the exact behavior of your website’s visitors browsing through your website with the session replays
• Editor -> with CrazyEgg editor, you’ll be able to optimize particular elements of your website or do A/B testing without the need to engage an IT professional/designer

How can you use the above functionality to grow an online store?

• Optimize user experience for the visitors, depending on the visit source

So, having the information about your visitors’ behavior, depending on the source of the visit, you can add specific actions that influence your visitor, depending on the source they’re coming from. For example, let’s say you discover customers visiting your store after a Google search are less engaged and, never scroll down to enter the promotions section. You can set up a pop-up letting them know about the available deals, targeted solely at visitors coming from Google. Or, another way would be to set up an automated live chat message with the link to the directory.

• Identify the elements of your store customers want to click on and simply make them clickable

You might not even be aware that people click on specific parts of your store. Even more, they might think a particular element is a button, then discovering it’s not actually a clickable element. You can either take advantage of this discovery, making the element (e.g. an image) clickable or alternatively change its design so that it doesn’t distract the customer from his journey at your store.

• Test different design/layout and optimize for conversion

With CrazyEgg’s editor, you’d be able to test different versions of the website and check how the changes affect visitors’ behavior. However, to introduce A/B testing, you’d first need to make sure you have enough traffic on your website, which would increase the reliability of the implemented tests.

Expert’s comment, Vlad Calus, co-founder Planable.io:

Another good tool for optimizing your store’s performance is Visely. It’s supercharging your sales by giving you specific recommendations, based on the analytics in the back and people that are more open to buy the product. They’re doing an absolutely amazing job and you should definitely give them a try. I personally saw how sales were up with 10% just a month after installing it.
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As you can see, the analytical software installed at your store does not mean a straight path to success. A key is to properly use the data, drive the right conclusions, and test your store for optimization when possible. This, in connection with other e-commerce software solutions, should help you grow conversion at your store and drive more happy customers and 💰 your way.

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In today’s world, having a good relationship with the client is the basis for creating a strong, long-lasting business. Especially if it operates within the e-commerce sector. And in the fast-paced world where rapid changes often influence the business environment, making sure that the customer is on our side is important more than ever.

Curious about how e-commerce came to existence, I dig a little into the deep abyss of the Internet to find out the beginning of this so lucrative today's business sector. Surprisingly, one of the first things sold on the internet was a large pizza from Pizza Hut in 1994. There’s more to that so if you’re curious about the birth of e-commerce, you can follow this link.

But today, the business of online transactions is much more complicated. Even though making a purchase usually takes only one click, the entire process that leads to the customer’s shopping decision is based on an advanced system. Here you can find the information about E-commerce website development with Verified SoftwareSupp Experts.

E-commerce and CRM

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is an inseparable part of e-commerce. It helps in managing relationships with customers and in collecting all the data about them. Through the eCommerce CRM software, you can easily automate procedures, manage contacts, and use the tool as a pipeline manager. All that, and even more in one place.

It’s also a great source of information about your business. It allows you to see whether your business strategy is right as well as determine the strengths and weaknesses and answer such questions as how are your data management and communication systems working? Are the processes necessary in managing customer relationship going the right way?

However, all that isn’t enough, if you don’t know how to use CRM to grow sales of your online store.

5 Smart CRM Tricks for E-commerce

Today’s business world is very demanding. Everything changes rapidly and if you don’t follow these transformations, you will stay behind. But… knowing how to operate on the market and having the right strategies is what can help you stay on top.

Here’s what you can do to take your company to the next level in a smart way.

1. Implement CRM Software

One of the best and at the same time the smartest solutions for e-commerce is, obviously, implementing CRM software. If it’s not part of your e-commerce strategy, you shouldn’t linger around but get good software immediately.

CRM software can tremendously help in growing sales of your online store — it serves as a means of acquiring data about customers. But having that data does not solve all your problems and doesn’t answer any questions in itself. It’s about the way you use all the information and what you do with it.

If used in a smart way, the tool can work miracles.

First of all, CRM software automates the process of sales and incredibly enhances work. Many procedures become replaced by the program which very often eliminates most if not all tedious tasks.

But automation is not everything. One of the crucial aspects of e-commerce is creating and managing a sales pipeline and that’s what good CRM software can help you do. Proper pipeline management then helps to forecast sales, avoid mistakes, properly apply metrics, and easily review pipeline processes. According to Hubspot, “Companies that master pipeline management sees 28% higher revenue growth.”

The implementation of CRM software creates a unified system of managing customer data within your company. People can quickly and easily log all the statistics in there. It works as a reporting tool with always up-to-date facts.

Here are 5 of the best CRM software to automate and organize work of your online store:

1. Pipedrive
2. Salesforce
3. Zoho
4. Hubspot
5. eDrone

Having the right CRM software is a fantastic way to smartly outrun your competitors, get to know your customers and their needs.

2. Smarketing

Every store needs Marketing teams who would be responsible for promoting the business, and the e-commerce sector needs it more than others. But the trick is in making it smart.

CRM should serve everybody who is engaged in your online store because it can help people understand all the processes and gain a transparent view of the business. And that includes Marketing teams, not only the Sales team or people who are strictly responsible for managing the data about customers.

And so, a very clever tactic is to use smarketing. What’s smarketing? It’s engaging both Marketing and Sales teams into work to create a better marketing and sale strategy to gain more customers.
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How are things looking like? What are customers’ profiles? Who shops at your store? The marketing team should know answers to these questions and have every information given straight up. It will not only improve the collaboration between the two teams but will be helpful in directing customers to more effective communication channels.

What’s more, in marketing everything happens now. All campaigns and activities are based on current information. And who has better access to the database if not the Sales team? Such cooperation is a must. When the information in the database change, so should the campaigns. It can also help expand marketing and reach out to more potential customers. There’s even more to that — it can be a source of an idea for a new product and it can help extend the offer of your online store.

That’s why it’s important (and smart) to use smarketing.

Sometimes, it may be hard to see the clear boundary between Marketing and Sales actions. Nevertheless, these two definitely should work together to grow sales of your online store. If you need, you can even merge the Marketing and Sales departments for even better results.

3. Retention

According to Invesp, it’s seven times more expensive to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one.

That’s why focusing on customer retention is a smart move. Loyal clients are those who bring the most revenue. They like your offer, are satisfied with the customer service, and want to come back to you. So what should you do to keep high customer retention?

Of course, the most important part of getting loyal clients is to provide them with professional customer experience. Attracting new customers is one thing but making sure the existing ones stick with you is another.

Your team should constantly evaluate the needs of customers, monitor their purchase history, and make conclusions based on such research.

A strong relationship with clients and knowing their needs are the best ways to keep or even increase retention. It also helps in attracting new customers. How? Happy customers who are satisfied with the product or service are more likely to recommend it to friends and family. That can create a chain reaction — customer one recommends your store to customer two, customer two recommends your store to customer three, and so it goes.

PRO TIP! Use live chat software to always stay close to your clients and keep them satisfied. Keep the conversations in support of history to always know what’s going wrong. It’ll help you prevent future problems and potential customer loss.

4. Outsmart your competition

Every business has competitors, so does e-commerce. But there’s a smart way to outsmart your rivals.

Personalized communication is key. With it, you will gain loyal customers. Because if your competitors reach out to your niche of clients, you will already have a strong customer database. It’s an astute way to outwit competitors and even win potential clients.

Remember, if your customer doesn’t choose you, he will choose your rival so make sure you keep the customer close and let him know he’s important.

PRO TIP! Use marketing automation tools — create targeted messages to customers, automate e-mail marketing and ad campaigns, create content, and many, many more.

5. Integrate

I mentioned the CRM software as one of the smart ways to help your online store grow sales. But it’s not the only tool that can help you.

There are thousands of apps out there that are made to enhance our work. Email marketing, customer support, accounting, document management, collaboration, team and workflow management, project management software are just a few of many that are available. And there are 3 types of integrations

• Native integrations — these are built into the CRM software
• 3rd-party integrations — created by independent companies
• Custom integrations — developed using APIs

If you integrate your CRM app with other tools, it will become a productivity and success powerhouse. Your team will avoid extra paperwork and will be able to fully automate most of the processes.

Use Zapier to automate your work even more. It’s one of the best apps for work automation. “Zapier is a web automation app. With Zapier you can build Zaps which can automate parts of your business or life. … Zapier supports hundreds of apps. You can mix and match triggers and actions to automate just about anything.”

Sounds great, right? Let’s look at how to smartly apply this solution to your online business on the example of integration between Pipedrive and Shopify via Zapier:

1. Improve workflow and transparency thanks to one shared place to store information about your clients/vendors:

• The team can easily check on the customers’ data
• Everybody can see the mailing history with your customers
• Everybody can put notes and share them with the rest
• Sync products between your store and CRM [there’s a zap for this Shopify <> Pipedrive]

Interestingly, this way of integrating relates to the first smart solution for e-commerce on the list — implementing CRM software. That’s because integrating other tools to your CRM system makes processes even easier and more agile.

2. Increase conversion by focusing on the abandoned cards:

• Abandoned cards display on the pipeline
• React to abandoned cards quickly to increase a chance to place an order by a customer
• Automate your work and send e-mails automatically when dragging and dropping a card to next stage [e.g. abandoned cart -> contacted]
• If you have a phone number, you can also call to check for the cancellation reason (e.g. learn that competitor has a better offer)
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Now, this type of integration relates to the fourth point — outsmarting your competition. You can not only increase conversion but quickly make the customer choose you, not the competition. This brings us to point three — retention. If you take care of the customer who abandons cards, you are likely to gain a new loyal one. And increase retention as a consequence.

3. Handle canceled orders in a structured way:

• Once an order is canceled, information appears on your pipeline
• React quickly and send an automated email to your customer once the issue is moved to another stage and solved
• Identify customers most often canceling orders and be prepared to cancel in advance
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How to Make It All Work?

Undoubtedly, it’s best if you use all these 5 elements together. They are very much interconnected and work best if applied en masse.

They say that if you care about your employees, they will take care of your customers. Don’t forget that the only way to achieve success and increase the sales of your online store is to be dedicated to your work and treating your employees as a second family.

As a customer, I am personally loyal to those online stores that care about my needs, are interested in my opinion, and quickly resolve conflicts (if there are any at all).

Thus, implementing CRM solutions is great but keep in mind that it also serves your customers and your employees.