Do you remember the early days of CRM software? The customer relationship management (CRM) wave caught on in the early 2000s, and juggernauts like Salesforce and Oracle offered detailed solutions for major corporations. They were powerful tools, but they didn’t serve small to mid-size businesses that didn’t need all the extra data. That is why companies started launching new solutions that were more industry-specific and useful. In particular, ecommerce CRM software providers took notes from these solutions to create software for the modern e-tailer. It tracks order and customer data so you can make smarter, data-driven business moves and boost your bottom line.
As a WooCommerce seller, you know how valuable this data is, which is why software solutions like ReadyCloud’s WooCommerce CRM integration are the must-have addition to your arsenal. Best of all: it doesn’t have to add website bloat because it connects via API rather than functioning as a third-party plugin.
These are the benefits of WooCommerce CRM software.
One Data Hub
Selling on WooCommerce means having access to the platform’s native reporting and analytics, which are a good place to start when assessing your store’s performance. However, it still requires some manual data entry in order to see everything in one place, and it gets even more complicated if you’re selling on multiple channels. WooCommerce CRM solves that problem. Once you log in, you can see your data in one user-friendly dashboard. No more Excel spreadsheets or hand-drawn graphs. View performance by channel or product, and quickly see which customers are placing numerous orders. It’s all streamlined into digestible reports, which you can save for your records and use when planning out your next month, quarter or year.
No Added WordPress Bloat
Consider this Hubspot finding: 79% of consumers won’t revisit an online store if they were unsatisfied with the website’s performance. This means WooCommerce sellers should be especially wary of WordPress plugins that add bloat to websites, slowing them down and frustrating shoppers. Fortunately, WooCommerce CRM acts more like an “unplugin” that connects via API so there is nothing weighing down your store.
Improved Customer Service
Nobody looks forward to contacting a brand’s customer service department. It often requires waiting on hold or staring at a chatbot hoping someone responds in a timely manner. Then, you have to explain your situation, probably more than once, and overall, the interaction is draining. WooCommerce CRM improves this process by helping your reps keep track of each customer so they’re immediately up to speed whenever they get a call. They can then make notes of the latest interaction so in case there’s a next time, the most up-to-date information will be accessible with just a few clicks.
Expedited Marketing Activities
WooCommerce CRM provides valuable data about your customers so you can more effectively market to them, plus find other shoppers with similar traits and market to them as well. Take location as an example—if you have several customers located in the same area, there’s a decent chance more consumers in that area will also want to buy your products. You can then set up geo-targeted ads for shoppers in that location, which is a low cost and low risk way to test your theory. Perhaps you find instead that several of your customers are university students, judging by email addresses ending in “.edu”. Rather than advertising based on location, you can set ads to be shown to the college demographic. It simply depends on what customer data you find in your WooCommerce CRM.
Synergistic Back Office
Adding more people to your team can be a blessing and a curse. It is, of course, worth celebrating that the business has scaled to the point of needing additional employees. A larger team, however, requires more efficient communication. Details can sometimes slip through the cracks. This is where a WooCommerce CRM software can help. The robust customer contacts have all the details anyone in the back office could possibly need. There are timelines of the customer lifecycle, notes of when the customer last contacted the business and more. Your customer service, sales and operations teams will all be in sync, making them more efficient.
Holistic View of the Customer Journey
The customer journey encompasses all activities surrounding a purchase that a customer makes with a brand and can be broken down into five stages: awareness, consideration, purchase, retention and advocacy. With a WooCommerce CRM, you can see the touchpoints that shoppers use on the way to make a purchase, plus have the ability to easily engage them after delivery. All these details get logged in the customer profiles, and you can create Notes to elaborate wherever necessary.
Quick View of Trending/Seasonal Products
Many products have obvious seasonality. Beach toys sell best in the summer, cozy blankets are popular in the fall and winter and umbrellas are needed in the spring. Other items, however, can see various busy seasons throughout the year, and you’d never know without WooCommerce CRM. The main dashboard can show you performance per product, meaning you can see when each product goes through spikes. There are unexpected trend-setting moments—celebrity endorsements or unprompted influencer recommendations, as examples—that translate to data in the CRM software as well.
Automated Workflows
There are so many tasks that can take up your entire day as a WooCommerce seller, but what if you could automate them? WooCommerce CRM integrates with Zapier, the self-proclaimed “automation for busy people” tool that lets users set their own workflows without coding. Simply identify a Trigger and define the subsequent Actions so you can sit back and let the automation handle the busywork for you.
For example, you can automate your customer service by setting up Zaps to save missed calls and chats to the correct customer profiles. That way, you’ll always have a record of when the customer contacted your store and what they needed. You can also automate shipping and returns to be saved to the customer profiles for another layer of organization. This will make your process as easy as the customer’s and save you much-needed time to focus on other areas of your business.