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7 min read
The client needed a specialist to implement email and SMS marketing for their newly established online store. The client's main goal at the beginning of the collaboration was to acquire potential customers before the store's opening.
Monika Nastalska
Email Marketing Freelancer at SoftwareSupport
4 min read
As developers, we often live in a bubble-like environment where we build software based on a prepared backlog, user stories, and contact with product owners or other stakeholders that are integrated into our team.
Users might look at our product in a completely different way than us. There is a quote that makes a lot of sense after your first Usability Testing session with a real-life user:
“Design isn’t finished until somebody is using it.”
- Brenda Laurel (Ph.D., Independent Scholar)
As a developer in a software marketplace, I didn’t think that I need to have any contact with our users and that there should be a layer between programmers and customers. “Someone more experienced in UX should talk to users” – I thought. What I failed to comprehend was the fact that in everyday developer’s job we make a lot of small decisions everywhere.
By avoidance of talking to users, we create a gap of misconceptions that is widening every day. No intermediate layer of UX experts and business-related team members, or how I like to call it, “middleware”, can point to us every little UI detail and every little tweak in apps behavior, that end-users will not be happy about.
Don’t just take my word for it, try it yourself. What you will find below is shorthand of how to prepare your first Usability Testing Session – written by a developer for developers.
First things first, what you have to understand is why UX is so important in the software development process and how an ideal Usability Testing Session should look like.
Remember all those times when you were using someone else’s software and grumbling about design and functionalities? All these times, there were some developers on the other side who most certainly thought that this software is their magnum opus - the greatest thing that they ever created. Remember Windows Vista? 😊
UX is all about getting real users into your app and letting you look at your software through their eyes. To see how it looks in practice I strongly encourage you to check out Steve Krug’s Usability Testing Demo which was shared for free on YouTube.
Steve Krug is one of the most influential and respected UX experts so his work is definitely worth checking. I also strongly recommend his book “Don’t make me think” which is a bestseller on UX worldwide.
Are you ready to try? Why don’t we make this article practical now and help you set up your first session in 7 simple steps that summarize my experiences:
1. Get in touch with end-users. You can ask your project manager for contacts or you can try to reach them by yourself. Gather e-mails and other contact info and write to them politely asking for their time. Be concise, try to reserve no more than 20-30 minutes, and describe what it is about upfront. Don’t be discouraged! In my case 10 contacts resulted in 2 responses from customers that actually agreed to meet with me.
2. Prepare location, let your customer decide on date and time:
a) In COVID-19 times I went for organizing online meetings via whereby.com, there is a lot of software that can help you with that.
b) To make decisions on date and time I published my free time slots on calendly.com and sent links with possible options to my counterparts.
3. Prepare what you will say when on the meeting which should include:
a) Thanking your participants for devoted time. Make sure to let your client know that you appreciate their time.
b) Asking for consent to record the whole session, mentioning that it will be only used internally by you and other developers in your team. Don’t grumble when you will hear no!
c) Creating a safe space for those who you speak with, it’s worth mentioning that they are not judged, they can’t make any mistakes and they should not be shy with criticism because you want to make your product better and you appreciate their honesty.
d) At the end of the meeting you should include a value proposition connecting your customer and your product. Think of ways you can pay back for a devoted time.
4. Prepare scenarios that you would like your user to perform. It could be something as basic as reading your landing page and telling you out loud what they think and how they understand it. It can be also something more advanced like creating a user profile on your website. Depending on how much time you have you should prepare one or many scenarios. Remember to test how much time they take ahead of the meeting so you won’t take extra time from your user’s schedule.
5. Prepare software for a meeting, test your camera and microphone beforehand. Also, test your recording software for case in which you will be allowed to record meetings.
6. Secure location and time where you will be able to go through the meeting. Some quiet space in your office or home, remember to let your co-workers know that you will be unavailable when the meeting will happen.
7. After the meeting check your recording and make notes as fast as possible. Every minute after the session you will forget more and more valuable details. Share your findings with your team and make plans to act on them in order to produce valuable results. You can also share the results of this meeting with your user when you and other developers will make some meaningful changes based on your conversation.
I hope you find these tips useful!
3 min read
A reverse marketplace is an unusual type of service. The difference from a regular marketplace is that the sellers are bidding for a particular offer. The creator of the tender can then choose whom to pay for the services.
A reverse marketplace is an unusual type of service. The difference from a regular marketplace is that the sellers are bidding for a particular offer. The creator of the tender can then choose whom to pay for the services.
Building a reverse marketplace with Sharetribe Flex seemed difficult, because here, at SoftwareSupp, we have an environment where experts are bidding for specific job offers. The tool does not provide any help for this type of feature. The creator of the tender (called “listing” in Sharetribe) cannot be the same person paying for the service. In other words, only the owner of the listing can receive payments. At first, we thought about it as a huge challenge to solve, but as you will see, the solution is quite simple.
The only way for the expert to receive payments was for him to have a listing. We did not want to lose the possibility for the users to post their job propositions. The only solution was to add a category to the data. The listing can now have one of two types: job or expert. The best way to do this is to create an additional public data field called “category” and set it at the beginning of the listing creation.
The best choice to accomplish this is to create two separate URL routes that redirect you to:
Of course, both of the listing types will have different data. Inserting the category variable right at the commencement gives us the occasion to exhibit different paths for the user. In our case, this decision was crucial because the buyer can see all the fundamental data about the expert who applies for the job.
In Sharetribe Flex, payments work within the transaction process. There is practically no possibility to transfer data between users outside the transaction. Because of this, the solution to make the platform work was to connect two transaction paths.
Here is where the reverse marketplace changes back to the regular one. Here the user can pay for the seller’s services, get a refund, etc. The default Sharetribe Flex transaction process is a perfect example of how such a path can look.
When the bidding is coming to an end, and the client decides to accept one of the provided bids, he needs to make an action. For example, every transaction can have an accept button that redirects to a particular seller profile. For that to occur, the other-party bidder profile needs to get fetched. You can either choose to do this every time you open a transaction page or store the necessary seller’s information in the transaction’s private data. The second solution is vulnerable to every change in the bidder’s listing data.
From here now on, there are many possibilities to finish the bidding. You can either choose to close every other bid, allow to chose multiple offers, close the listing, etc. It all depends on the service you are providing.
4 min read
Let’s be honest, implementing a CRM system by yourself can be a challenging task. Especially for bigger companies where there are many people involved in the sales process.
With the client we have rebuilt their Pipedrive processes and made sure the data in the system is accurate and well-structured.
Luke, SoftwareSupp Freelancer
Time of the project: 3 months
Scope:
Effect: Complete CRM refinement and adjusting the CRM to the organization's needs, +500h saved on CRM setup, sales effects to be determined
Let’s be honest, implementing a CRM system by yourself can be a challenging task. Especially for bigger companies where there are many people involved in the sales process.
Without an experienced expert, companies may struggle to create an optimal CRM setup that would help them with their daily work.
The customer provides solutions designed to handle electronic transactions and support online sales. With over 20 years of experience, they’ve been helping their private and corporate clients with processing online payments.
As a company of significant size, the customer's team knew they needed a professional CRM solution to manage their customer details, sales processes, and reporting. They did their research and decided to go with Pipedrive.
The customer started implementing the system on their own. Unfortunately, no one at the company had the experience needed with setting up the system or creating automation workflows.
Having worked with the system for a while, they realized that they’re not using Pipedrive effectively. It turned out that three different sales departments were using the tool in a different way. The funnels, custom fields, and deals were not tracked properly. Activities weren’t recorded in the system. To sum up, they used the system in a non-structured way and it resulted in a lot of confusion. They wasted time and the tool didn’t really do the job it was supposed to do.
To no surprise, the reporting wasn’t accurate either. The customer data wasn’t as easy to find as it should. Implementing the CRM system without setting up proper funnels creates a lot of additional work for the team. Not having usage rules in place
Fortunately, with the help of a professional CRM consultant, everything can be fixed and the team can start using the tool in a way that actually helps them with online sales.
Together with the customer, we reviewed their workflows and created a Pipedrive setup that mirrors their real-life sales funnels. We also created how-to guides for the team, so that they could work with the software independently.
The customer's Pipedrive setup wasn’t helping them at all. We needed to start from scratch and create a new setup that takes into account the company’s needs, processes, workflows, and other software they use.
We needed to take some steps back and start from the beginning. The first step was to define processes that should be mirrored in Pipedrive.
We helped the customer discover how Pipedrive can contribute to the company’s sales success. We started with a discovery call, followed up with a series of steps that made it possible for the company to start using Pipedrive in the most efficient way.
What we do best at SoftwareSupp is connecting clients with the right experts for their projects. We invited two Pipedrive consultants to take part in this project. Sebastian was responsible for the business part of the implementation and Patryk was responsible for the technical aspects.
During the first meeting, we wanted to learn more about the general needs of the company, its structure, and its priorities. Then, we came up with a plan on how to approach the project for the customer.
We found out which aspects of using Pipedrive are the most important for the company. We learned the challenges that the teams face on a daily basis and the expected outcome of the project.
During this kickoff meeting, we established what we’ll be working on to make the most impact on the organization.
The next step was to meet with sales leads from three different departments that already used Pipedrive. We gathered all their feedback about the system. We were particularly interested in what doesn’t work at the moment.
They pointed out what their daily workflows look like. We figured out together how Pipedrive can contribute to growing their productivity. The confusion and unstructured data entries were the main issues within the organization. The reporting features weren’t possible to use due to the differences in funnels that each team created.
We agreed on the structure of data. We made sure that the system mirrored the actual sales process. What they needed was a unified process to manage all the incoming leads in a systematic way.
We talked about the integration needed to get all the information into Pipedrive. The team wanted to have a clear overview of all activities like calls or emails with the client.
One of the most important goals of the project was to create a clear structure so that all data can be available in one secure place.
We agreed on the steps that can be automated and the ones that should be done manually. Estimating the lead score is one of the processes that should be done by the team members, as it requires their input. However, we agreed on the numeric scoring system.
We shared best practices with the team and guided them through the process of unifying and structuring their customer data in Pipedrive.
The last step was to create the ready-to-use processes that would make Pipedrive implementation more effective. Based on the input from the customer's team and our Pipedrive expertise, we created guides that make using Pipedrive easier.
The first document that we created for the company was the Pipedrive implementation guide. It was a manual that shows how to use the system. This document was a comprehensive guide that summarized all processes implemented within the company.
It’s a reference guide that includes all the necessary information. With this guide, everyone at the customer's team is equipped to start working with the system.
The guide describes many different aspects of working with Pipedrive. The most important categories were:
This part explained the basic functionalities: how to invite teammates, the onboarding process, how to connect the email account with Pipedrive, account management, and sales analytics.
The document includes screenshots and detailed step-by-step instructions that anyone at the company can refer to in case they need support in their daily work.
In Pipedrive, it’s important to enter data in a unified and systematic way to allow advanced reporting to work.
The data structure was defined for deals, organizations, and contacts. It’s a reference point for anyone at the organization to make the data in Pipedrive as accurate and relevant as possible.
This part describes the entire sales process and how it is mirrored in Pipedrive. What is important, we have the lead scoring system included which speeds up the entire process of finding qualified leads. We defined one clear sales funnel for the entire organization.
In Pipedrive, it’s recommended to create the sales funnel based on the “yes-tree”. Every action has a specific outcome that can be summarized as an answer to a yes-no question.
For the customer, the funnel consisted of 7 stages:
Every organization needs to define its own funnel that mirrors the actual sales cycle. Agreeing on one specific funnel for the entire organization lets you prepare more detailed reports and make more informed decisions.
This part of the guide also included information about integration with external tools. The company uses Systel to manage their calls, Mautic, and Woodpecker for marketing automation.
This document summarizes all the most important rules that the Pipedrive users need to follow to use the system to the fullest and make sure that the reporting is clear.
All the most important rules that everyone should remember are included in this document. It’s a short guide that can be a quick reminder for all Pipedrive users.
This guide includes the general rules for the organizations. It makes the process easy to follow. Some of the best practices are:
This document lists out all the rules that the customer's employee agrees to follow. It’s used in the onboarding process and as a point of reference for every person within the organization.
The customer's team can easily refer to the ten most important rules that everyone within the organization should follow.
With the help of the experienced experts, the customer rebuilt their Pipedrive processes and made sure the data in the system is accurate and well-structured. Thanks to that, they can focus on their sales, not on trying to figure out how the system works. They have all the usage rules are written down and available for everyone at the company.
We identified the next steps for the organization to take if they’d like to improve their workflows further. They have a clear outline of how to approach the Pipedrive automation and integrations with other tools.
At SoftwareSupp, you can find freelancers to further automate or customize their internal processes. Outsourcing some tasks and connecting with experts saves your company time and resources that can be used in a more effective way.
8 min read
A few things you need to remember about when setting up your CRM analytics.
Once you start using a CRM system, it becomes a central place to collect and store all the information about your customers, team, and activities performed in your business.
No doubt that using a CRM can (of course doesn’t always have to) help your business grow which is confirmed by the actual research and numbers:
Collecting the relevant data and statistics will take at least 3 months since the system’s initial set up to provide you with insightful metrics but it’s worth the wait taking into account the value of the information you’re about to get.
Outlining just a few stats you can get from your Pipedrive CRM:
The above are just a few metrics you extract from your CRM and there are many more you can use to make your business more effective and we’ll look into them later.
But to make sure you’re able to get the most important metrics and KPIs from your CRM there are a few things you need to remember about when setting up your CRM. Let’s look into a few essential steps to making it work well.
Some of the integration projects we run here relate to analytics setup and display. But when talking to customers, we always outline to them the importance of proper CRM set up to make sure the data they analyze is real and reliable.
So which integration points are essential to make sure your CRM works correctly?
Without proper lead sources integration, you will not be able to analyze the data divided and broken down into acquisition channels.
To be able to analyze your sales team efficiency, they simply need to input their sales activities into Pipedrive, so this might require:
- Calling system integration
- Email integration
- Customer service integration
Proper goals setup will let you analyze your team’s performance versus previous expectations and planning. Without the goals in place, the only benchmark you’d be getting is the previous months/period (still, a good indicator of growth but goals will make this analysis much more down to earth).
Setting up predefined lost reasons will let you analyze why you lose sales (also by a specific stage in the sales process).
Of course, without a sales process in place, there is no chance for insightful data for conversion and progress.
With the above in place and assuming you and your team know how to handle a CRM (so that you actually use it), you should be able to analyze the sales and activities’ data in your system, generate reports, measure KPIs, and display most relevant business metrics to the management.
So how to set it up in Pipedrive CRM? Let’s look into a few ways to make it work both inside Pipedrive and by using external solutions.
Pipedrive is a robust tool so it’s no surprise it offers built-in options for data analytics.
Insights is a new Pipedrive feature in a beta mode allowing you to create fully custom dashboards built out of the most important business metrics you’d like to monitor in your business. To make it work, just go to Progress -> Insights and select the reports you’d like to display on the dashboard. This can include:
and of course, many more, depending on your needs.
Also, Insights will let you display data in 5 different formats:
These are just a few options. With Pipedrive Insights, you will be able to create the basic reports and stay up to date with the most important business metrics. For more advanced data, however, a connection with external tools might be required.
Once you set up your Insights dashboard, it’s time to share it with your team using a public link.
Pipedrive dashboard is an older version of current Insights and displays a few most important data about your CRM and sales performance. It provides you with a quick glance into the most important business metrics like:
and a few more but will not offer significant customization options.
Pipedrive reports is a set of predefined reports allowing you to analyze the most important performance metrics, including:
Pipedrive will let you display reports in multiple dimensions, including:
Once you divide your employees into groups, you will also be able to run analytics divided into teams.
Using analytical tools inside Pipedrive might not be enough to generate all desired business metrics. Hence, using external tools (including more advanced BI solutions) can be required.
Google Sheets is probably the most common way to store data outside of your CRM system, so why not use it connected with a CRM to generate reports and analyze performance? With Pipedrive’s open API, you can connect your Google Sheets to Pipedrive and sync data automatically both ways, helping you generate valuable insights/KPIs in your Google Sheets report.
Stitch data is a popular solution used by some of the Pipedrive customers to push data from Pipedrive to other systems, like Google Data Studio. It also syncs with more advanced data warehousing solutions like Amazon Redshift or Microsoft Azure. It will let you push your Pipedrive data for more advanced analysis or regression/statistical models.
If you’re looking for ways to handle a significant amount of data from different sources and Pipedrive is only one of them, you will finally end up with an SQL database to store and process information. Solutions like Amazon Redshift or Microsoft Azure will let you do this and will let you prepare & process the data for further analytics in external solutions like Tableau or Power BI.
Once you’ve extracted your data from Pipedrive using a connector tool like Stitch and/or connect it with information from other systems through your data warehouses, you can now sync this information with additional analytical solutions like Tableau. One of the benefits of using Tableau is the ability to process large volumes of data and display them in the visual form, helping management make the right business decisions.
Power BI is another data analytics tool allowing you to handle large amounts of data in one place. Power BI will easily sync with your Microsoft software environment letting you analyze data from multiple different sources and will integrate well with your Microsoft software ecosystem.
Google Data Studio (once connected through Stitch) will let you match and display the data from Pipedrive with multiple different data sources such as marketing campaigns (Google Ads/Facebook Ads).
Less complicated apps like Plecto or Klipfolio which integrate natively with Pipedrive will allow you to display more advanced reports and dashboard, also in a gamification form but will not provide opportunities for advanced business intelligence.
Pipedrive is a simple and user-friendly solution and so are its reporting and dashboard features. Assuming you store your data and information in Pipedrive, you will be able to use basic reporting features by yourself. Just remember about:
More comprehensive dashboards, however, might require understanding business/reporting needs within your organization and proper setup of conditions/display rules within Pipedrive.
Finally, connecting with other data sources and building a data warehousing environment where Pipedrive is just a piece of the puzzle will require specialized know-how and experience. You can then use the support of a dedicated and specialized consultant to make it work right in your business.
4 min read
We support our clients in general CRM implementations as well as in more advanced cases. One example is custom reporting for Dirty Hands.
Time of the project: 1 month
Scope:
Effect: Custom reporting script completed
Choosing the right CRM is not the only problem our clients reach out to us to get some help with. We support our clients in general CRM implementations as well as in more advanced cases. One of the stories that can illustrate that is the one about custom reporting for Dirty Hands.
Having an efficient CRM in place is a great first step that can transform the way you work. However, when you explore all its functionalities you may find that the default configuration doesn’t always match your exact workflow. Customizations in reporting are one of the most influential adjustments you can apply to improve your CRM performance.
Every company has a specific set of needs when it comes to making informed decisions based on data. That’s why generating precise reports is crucial to optimize your business operations.
With SoftwareSupp consultants, you can not only implement and choose the right CRM, but you can seek help with more advanced issues that are too complicated to solve on your own.
Dirty Hands is a family-owned company that helps grocery stores with retail execution, sales, data, and reporting. They live by the “of service” mentality and that’s how they build great relationships with their customers.
The Dirty Hands team has already used Pipedrive for some time when they got in touch with us. They had a reporting issue that they tried to solve on their own but the task seemed too advanced and time-consuming.
To make the best decisions, many businesses need specific reports and summaries. Sometimes, the options available in the CRM system by default are not detailed enough. That was the problem the Dirty Hands team was facing.
They needed efficient automation that would allow them to track specific product’s value on every stage of the sales funnel. In other words, they wanted to know the worth of all products (potentially) sold on every stage of the funnel. Dirty Hands needed a solution that would be reliable and cost-efficient.
By default, Pipedrive shows you the sum of all deals’ value on a specific stage of the funnel, It’s not possible to have a breakdown for each product separately. And that’s exactly what Dirty Hands needed to manage their business more effectively. The team also wanted to see this “product value per deal stage” report in Pipedrive Insights.
Let’s explore how we approached this configuration.
As in Pipedrive it’s not possible to generate a report based on the product value itself, we needed to approach this task in a different way.
The main idea was to use Pipedrive’s custom fields. These new fields mirrored the value of the products attached to a deal.
This means that for every product, you’ll have an additional field that shows the exact same value. If “Product 1” costs $500, the custom field will also show $500.
It’s important to note that you can only use numerical custom fields for this purpose. Otherwise, you won’t be able to generate the report.
Having applied this solution, you can sum all custom fields up and generate the report in Pipedrive Insights.
But that was only the first stage of the project. The real challenge was to automate the process of updating the custom fields. Managing these fields manually wasn’t an option as the reporting process needs to be efficient and accurate. With manual updates, there are simply too many possibilities for human errors and inconsistencies.
The real challenge was to automate the process of updating manual fields so that the user would be served with up-to-date, reliable data in Pipedrive.
We created an automation flow using 3 technologies:
The goal was to create an automation that would update the custom field value anytime the deal is changed. We needed to:
The automation flow looked like this:
First, we used the deal.updated webhook in Pipedrive to get the deal’s ID into a Google Sheet.
This webhook caused the code embedded in a Google Sheet to run. This piece of App Script code had a goal to get a specific set of data from Pipedrive. Once the process was over, we had the timestamp and the deal ID listed in the spreadsheet.
The Google Sheet is deployed as a web application. It makes it possible for the Pipedrive webhook to trigger the code upon the deal update. Then, the script fills in the deal ID in the Google spreadsheet.
Once the deal ID is already in the spreadsheet, Zapier is being launched. In Zapier, we have a Python code set up that downloads the relevant field values from the deal. We connect with the client’s Pipedrive database to get all the info we need.
This code also compares the entries and identifies if the product value field was updated.
The next part of the automation funnel only runs if the product value has changed. The last “PUT” stage uses a Pipedrive-Zapier trigger called “deal updated” to finally update the custom field with the correct values and make the automated reporting possible.
We also created a separate automation funnel to make sure that this sequence would also work for new deals that are created in Pipedrive.
When a deal is created, its custom fields are empty by default. This zap updates all custom fields with the “0” value upon the deal creation. Thanks to this additional funnel, the entire process can run smoothly and without any manual work on the team’s end.
It was crucial to make sure to optimize the process and make it cost-effective for the client. The automation uses only 3 zaps in the first funnel and 1 zap in the second one.
To ensure the highest quality of the automation, we used unit-testing to check if the data is flowing smoothly at every stage of the process.
Thanks to this automation, the Dirty Hands team can always access real-time product value reports in Pipedrive Insights. They can easily see what is the value of a particular product on every stage of the funnel. They can also identify which products in their offer perform best.
The automation allowed them to see more detailed product information that otherwise wouldn’t be available in Pipedrive.
Even though the Dirty Hands team is quite advanced at using Pipedrive as a reporting tool, they chose to cooperate with the CRM experts. It let them speed up the automation process and save the team members’ time.
At SoftwareSupp, we specialize in solving difficult CRM cases and we really creating custom solutions for our clients. An atypical request always creates an interesting challenge for us that we’re ready to take up.
17 min read
Let me show you how to use modern technology to make your crazy e-commerce entrepreneur life much more pleasant and entertaining.
In today’s world, starting an online store is no big deal. The market provides you with plenty of dropshipping opportunities and e-commerce software, so you can even sell products that don’t actually belong to you, taking care only about the product’s marketing and delivery.
If you don’t own a store, yet, we’ve set up a separate guide showing how to set up an online store by yourself. But once you have your e-commerce store working or if you already operate a well-performing one, it’s time to think about ways to grow and sell more.
In this material, we’ve gone through the major e-commerce trends and data to provide you with the best e-commerce software recommendations which can help you grow your already operating online store.
Let me show you how to use modern technology to make your crazy e-commerce entrepreneur life much more pleasant and entertaining. Use it to grow your online store, having more time for yourself 🏖️
So, how to use modern software to your advantage in growing an online store?
Before we start, let’s look into a few tips which might be helpful in figuring out the way to grow your business:
Communications is at the heart of e-commerce and community.
- Meg Whitman, President and CEO of Hewlett-Packard
In today’s world, people have a variety of stores to choose from. Make your brand unique and make sure your visitors remember the customer experience on your website.
You will not experience much organic traffic shortly after the store’s launch. Still, in the long-term, traffic from Google might turn out to be the most valuable source of your business.
E-commerce business is pretty much about trust. Make sure your customers believe in your brand by showing clearly who you are. Using customers’ testimonials might be crucial for your final success. Running a blog can also boost your credibility.
Traffic on your website provides you with a valuable source of information about your users’ behavior. Use this data to create the best possible user experience.
There are many different channels to build the presence of your online store online. Focus wisely on social media, paid ads, or content marketing, depending on the type of your audience.
The best e-commerce stores don’t require special guidance. They’re user-friendly and navigating through them is easy for each and every visitor. The best store’s structure you’d like to have is the one that will keep your user smoothly cruising through your store. Still, there are moments when your visitor will want to contact you and in today’s world, no one wants to wait to be served. With so many alternatives available out there, people are most likely to buy from your right at the moment when looking at your store.
So how to provide instant answers to questions together with outstanding customer service?
One of the most common solutions to do that is a live chat software. Installing a chat window on your website might contribute to the significant boost in conversion rates at your online store.
How can that magic happen? There are a few ways you can use live chat software at your e-commerce store:
Installing a live chat window on a website can be as easy as one click, adding the application from the marketplace of the software you’re already using, or at hardest, copying a piece of code and adding it to your website’s code. Don’t know how to start? Just ask us anytime on chat.
There are quite a few live chat solutions available on the market. You might wonder: Is there any live chat which is simply the best one for e-commerce business?
There is probably no such answer, as each store and business might have its own needs, preferences, or design guidelines.
E.g. If you are looking for a very basic live chat solution (only to respond to customers visiting your store), there are a few free solutions you could try. However, if you’re searching for a software which will provide you with data analytics, automated messages, ticketing system, or queue management, you’d rather look at more premium solutions.
Let’s look into a few live chat solutions you could use in your e-commerce business:
LiveChat is especially well-known among e-commerce businesses. It focuses on delivering the value-added to online stores by additional e-commerce functionalities like sales and goals tracking. It also pays vast attention to user-friendliness with its simple and well-designed interface and step-by-step tutorial for new agents/operators.
Main LiveChat features for e-commerce:
Tidio Chat is a freemium live chat solution, which is especially known for its easy automation’ set-up. What does it mean? With Tidio, you will easily draft the flows of automated messages to be sent to your visitors, either by chat or by email. The only thing you need to do is to drag and drop particular triggers and actions which happen within Tidio. E.g. an agent doesn’t respond for more than 2 minutes -> send an automated chat message asking for a visitor’s email.
Another great thing about Tidio is its free version to try out and well-supported integration with the most popular e-commerce platforms like Shopify or WIX.
Main features of Tidio for e-commerce:
LivePerson is a solution designed for larger enterprises to help them communicate with their customers more effectively. It’s known for its built-in bot functionality, letting you handle simple customer cases automatically, without the engagement of a human being. It’s also one of the few solutions which focuses on connecting online chat with mobile messaging, integrating with SMS, iMessages, or Facebook Messenger.
Main features of LivePerson for big e-commerce stores:
Did you even know you’re able to “spy” on your store’s visitors and track the way they move through your store? Even if you know, I’m pretty sure you’re not making the most out of the data you gather at your e-commerce business. Knowing how users use your online store provides you a vast advantage. You can then use this data to move particular elements across your website and check the impact on the conversion rate. Using some analytical tools, you’d even be able to make specific optimizations within a tool, without the need to engage your developer, simply by dragging, dropping, or rearranging particular elements.
Installing an analytical software is very similar to adding other tools to your website, it simply requires copying and pasting an additional piece of code on your website.
If you have an analytical tool already installed, you have started collecting the data. With analytical tools, you can collect the following information:
So how to use these data to grow your business?
To gather the above data, all you need is the right analytical software to use. You don’t require software expertise to use one. Actually, all you need to do is to add a single line of code to make it work.
Google Analytics is the most popular analytical software. About 70% of the top 10k websites available online are using Google Analytics, and the rest is likely not using it to not provide the data about their website to Google.
Google Analytics provides online store owners with a special e-commerce module, letting you dive even deeper into the data.
With E-commerce Analytics, you can easily gather information about:
There are numerous ways you could use this data to your advantage, including:
E-commerce Analytics can easily act as a basis for your store’s analytics with additional tools providing deeper insight into vital information.
Hotjar is a tool that can enhance your online store’s information with insight into detailed visitors’ behavior. It lets you see exactly what your visitors do on your website with automated session recording and heatmap analytics.
So what can you get with Hotjar what you don’t get with Google Analytics?
All of these can be a valuable data source for you to use in optimizing your online store:
There are many more ways you could use the above information to grow your online business but these highly depend on the type of your operations. Go through the data and think! How can you improve based on this information?
So you have all the data you need to draw the right conclusions. Based on this, now it’s time to optimize your store and see your business growing 🚀 CrazyEgg is the analytical tool that will help you in optimizing the way your store works with the built-in optimization software.
What will you find in CrazyEgg, which is not available in other tools?
What can you do with the above data?
Installing the analytical tool is the first step to data-driven decision making (it’s not that difficult, it’s just adding one additional line of code or installing plugin e.g. at your Shopify store!). Unfortunately, gathering data is only the beginning. It’s all followed by aggregating the information and its skeptical analytics.
And while it’s the most difficult step, the right analysis of the data is crucial to your store’s success, if you’re aiming for outstanding user experience for your customers and increased conversions.
Using a CRM system when your store is still small might not be necessary. But when your operations start to scale and tasks multiply, it’s not difficult to get lost in all the issues. So how can a CRM system help your online store solve some of the problems you’re likely having?
Having an easily accessible CRM system lets you communicate with your team more effectively. All the data about your customers and suppliers become available and synched for your employees, which will save you and your team’s time on cross-checking the data every time you need it.
Having abandoned carts at your store is quite a common thing but are you doing everything you can to turn abandoned carts into the actual customers? With a CRM, you’d be able to make abandoned carts appear on your pipeline and handle them in a structured way. When a new customer abandons the cart, a new card will appear in your CRM, automatically scheduling an email or call with a customer for you.
Cancels and refunds are likely not your favorite tasks. They take time and money but they’re likely here to stay for a long time and the more customers you have, the better you have to plan your refunds and cancels. With a cloud CRM solution, you’d be able to easily structure the way you handle canceled orders within your team by automating the process on the pipeline. Also, anytime you move the item to the next stage in the pipeline, an email can automatically be sent to your customer, notifying about the status update.
Setting up and using a CRM system for e-commerce is likely not very different from other businesses. Let’s look into some tips on implementing and using CRM software to your advantage:
As with any other type of software, there is no one solution that would be suitable for every business.
It’s important to make sure your software can easily integrate with other ones you’re already using. That’s what makes Pipedrive a great tool to create a synced and effective software environment within your company. Connect it with Shopify, MailChimp, and dozens of other tools and make your work even smoother.
Setting up an online store is not a problem these days. A few years ago, you might have needed a development team’s help and support to create one. In today’s world, it’s not a problem to create one, even for a less tech-savvy person. With the help of the e-commerce platforms, you will be able to easily create your own brand, add products, descriptions, set-up the payment, delivery method. You’d also be able to connect it with Amazon, Facebook or Etsy to sell via multi-channel.
When selecting the e-commerce platform, you’d better take a look at:
While there are many e-commerce platforms available (you can browse through them at SoftwareSupp or ask about our recommendations on chat), only a few of them offer a decent quality of service and are worth considering, when setting up a store.
It’s an extremely popular online e-commerce platform letting you design an online store by yourself.
Shopify advantages:
Shopify disadvantages:
BigCommerce is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms for those looking for a more advanced solution to build a larger online store. It’s quite common among developers and software houses looking for a tool to help them design an e-commerce store for their customers.
BigCommerce advantages:
BigCommerce cons:
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