CRM for Ecommerce Businesses

Christine Foulds • July 1, 2023

This post was first published in 2017.

Regardless whether you are a B2B or B2C business, online or offline, every business is about customers. A lot of time, money and effort is spent on acquiring new customers and keeping existing ones happy.

As mentioned in previous blog posts, acquisition is much more expensive than retention. It’s therefore no surprise that the continued success of any business heavily depends on repeat purchases from your existing customers. This is even more important for ecommerce businesses as online competition is fierce and relentless.

For every ecommerce business it is vital to stay in touch with their customers, learn about their buying habits and communication preferences to then determine their needs and wishes. This is where your CRM and your CRM strategy come into place.

Why should you invest in a CRM?

1. Collect, Store & Analyse Data

As we all know, data is the new oil. Data allows you to get to know your customers better and provide them with a more tailored communication and sales approach. Just think about all the data that we provide when we shop online: name, address, age, email address, phone number etc. All this data is just waiting for you to be used and to contrary popular belief, customers do value it if used in the right way.

2. Email Marketing

It’s a key tool that you should be using for your retention campaigns. The good thing is that many of the email marketing campaigns can be automated such as abandoned cart, follow up purchase emails, delivery confirmation just to name a few.

3. Social Media Integration

Social media is one of the newest CRM communication tools. It still is primarily used for acquisition and brand awareness, but more and more systems can now integrate your social media channels and provide valuable input into your customer preferences. Even MailChimp which is not a CRM as such provides in-depth statistics once you set up ad campaigns.

4. Analytics

Many of the ecommerce pages such as shopify provide you with some great analytics. Just imagine what you could do with them if they were linked up with your communication campaigns! All of a sudden you can link certain spikes of sales to specific marketing messages.

5. Reactivating Customers

Keeping customers loyal to your brand has become more challenging but it’s not impossible. The key to great conversions and even better retention is continued communication with your customers. To be very blunt: Don’t assume! Don’t assume just because they liked product A, they will come back for product B. Don’t assume, just because they’ve found you on their own that they will return. Keep talking to them with targeted content and always use their preferred communication channels.

There are many CRM softwares available and each one of them has their pros and cons. Having said that they all provide you with the same thing: DATA. And data will play an essential part in keeping your customers happy.

< Older Post

Newer Post >

Closures, Launches And Everything In Between

June 7, 2024

To say that the last few weeks have been extremely busy would be an understatement. There has been a lot of change over the last few weeks and we’re still in the midst of it. So, what’s been going on? Some brands were let go. Seven of the bingo brands that I was looking after have been sold to a new owner. This meant a lot of handovers, finishing of campaigns and preparing as well as executing the exit strategy well. It was with mixed feelings seeing these brands go as I’ve been working with them for over eight years. However, feelings aside, it was a very good business decision. Some brands were migrated. On top of handing over existing brands, I also managed to migrate one of our current casino brands to a casino environment that we’re already using with the remaining casino brands. This was actually a very smooth process as most of it was handled by our partner Progress Play. Nevertheless, the CRM journeys had to be updated and we also took this as an opportunity to give the marketing material a bit of a refresh. Two of our bingo brands are being launched at a completely new platform with a company in Manchester called Grace Media. This has been very time consuming as we’re starting completely from scratch. I’m getting to know new systems like XtremPush which I’ve not used in the past. Setting up new CRM journeys, promotions, terms and conditions as well as updating the look and feel of the brands has kept me very, very busy. New brand was taken on. As part of the new partnership with Grace Media , we took on a new bingo brand called BOGOF along side our two brands that we’ve migrated to Grace Media. I had the pleasure of going to Manchester and working with the team for a week. What else? On top of that, I started work with a new Klaviyo customer called Blue Line Abrasives . It’s an industry that I know where little about so it’s great to have their team at hand to assist when I have product related questions. What’s next? Over the next few weeks, things should slow down and settle a bit. Fingers crossed.

ICE London 2024: The Importance of CRM in Online Gaming

By Christine Foulds • February 12, 2024

Introducing ICE London 2024

Google + Yahoo’s New Sender Requirements

By Christine Foulds • January 12, 2024

What You Need To Know

Has it really been three years?

By Christine Foulds • September 22, 2023

On a Friday afternoon, when all the main tasks had been done, I wondered when was the last time that I uploaded content onto my blog? I knew it has been a while, but I would have never thought that it was close to three years. Yikes! It’s one of the key rules of digital marketing to stick to a frequency of posting content online but as everyone can see, I failed. Luckily, the reason puts a smile on my face. I'd always hoped that I would be in this position when I first decided to set up FouldsCRM. I’ve just been incredibly busy. Over the last three years, I’ve increased my client portfolio quite significantly. Here is a quick overview: I started to work with the email marketing platform Klaviyo assisting three of my clients to migrate from Mailchimp to Klaviyo. None of them have regretted their decision and have seen a boost in email marketing sales due to changing the platform. I started to manage the CRM for 8 additional casino brands who use the Progress Play software. This was quite work intensive as we were the first ones to run their own CRM out of all of the Progress Play partners. It’s been an incredible 12 months since we took over the CRM. I welcomed back clients that were lost due to COVID which was really lovely. The travel industry was hit especially hard so being able to work with these businesses again has been really rewarding. I joined Mayple as one of their email marketing experts as part of their partnership with Mailchimp. The project aimed to show existing customers how to use the platform more effectively. Even though I thoroughly enjoyed being part of the Mayple community, I decided a few weeks ago to stop as most of the clients are based the United States. The time difference wasn’t working for me and my family. Family always comes first even though I’d have loved to continue working with the Mayple team. I worked on a few ad-hoc projects. Even though my blog and overall website haven’t been updated as much as they should have been, FouldsCRM is busy and I’m open for business!