Four Must-Have Ecommerce CRM Integrations

Consider how CRM integrations can benefit your retail, and how business software can be tied in with your commerce ecosystem.

Roman Davydov //June 30, 2022//

Four Must-Have Ecommerce CRM Integrations

Consider how CRM integrations can benefit your retail, and how business software can be tied in with your commerce ecosystem.

Roman Davydov //June 30, 2022//

Today, ecommerce CRM systems are indispensable tools for any digital retail business that strives to grow and prosper. Implementing CRM integration with ecommerce, merchants can manage customers’ data and analyze their purchasing behavior. In the long run, ecommerce CRM allows them to continuously increase their operational efficiency and make more informed and profitable business decisions.

However, a retailer can only gain the maximum advantage from its ecommerce CRM if they make the solution an integral part of their digital commerce ecosystem. The best way to do this is to set up integrations between CRM and other business solutions. In this article, we will discuss how exactly CRM integrations can benefit your retail and provide the examples of business software that can be tied in with your ecommerce CRM.

The Benefits of Ecommerce CRM Integration

By linking your CRM with other business technology, you can enrich your ecommerce ecosystem, thereby expanding its technological capabilities and increasing its overall efficiency. As a result, you will be able to reap the following business benefits:

Increased Employee Productivity

Given that employees from your sales and marketing departments will be able to work via a single digital solution, they won’t have to spend time switching between multiple tools, creating and entering different logins and passwords, and searching for data across several software systems.

Consequently, your employees will be able to work much faster and concentrate on more strategic tasks instead of wasting time on routine activities that benefit neither them nor your enterprise. This way, you can also save money on staffing since fewer people can perform more tasks and spend the same amount of time.

More Intelligent Decision-Making

By connecting ecommerce CRM with the rest of your digital toolset (such as ERP software, data analytics, and so on), you synchronize multiple data sources, thereby helping your sales and marketers to get a more comprehensive picture of your customers. Now, being able to access any information about customers, including their preferences and purchasing history, your employees can dramatically improve the speed and quality of decision-making.

Enhanced Customer Experience

As we have mentioned, by implementing CRM integrations, you help your salespeople and marketers to get any customer data faster and easier. Thus, they can respond more quickly to any customer requests, launch more accurate and effective advertising and marketing campaigns, and create more attractive and relevant offers. As a result, your enterprise can increase customer satisfaction and, consequently, profits.

4 Ecommerce CRM Integrations to Consider

Now that we’ve discussed the general benefits of ecommerce CRM integrations, let’s see which integration types can help you establish a more robust and powerful ecommerce ecosystem.

ERP

Integration between ecommerce CRM and ERP is the key option on our list since ERP systems are the backbone of any modern retail business. Being connected to a wide range of enterprise operations, ERPs gather and process vast amounts of data related to such business aspects as supply chain management, procurement, compliance and inventory management, and many more. That means you can synchronize customer relationship management with many back-office operations, thus enabling more efficient and transparent communication between departments.

Here’s how it might work in practice: members of your sales and marketing teams use CRM to view basic customer information, which is enriched with the data about previous purchases and transactions. Taking into account these details, your employees can personalize communication and create more targeted offers, thereby improving the service quality and, as a result, your enterprise profits.

Ecommerce Portals

Given that ecommerce portals primarily work as unified points of customer interaction, integrating the data from web portals with CRM may be essential for improving the efficiency of your sales. For example, you can connect live chat on your web portal to CRM so that the data gathered during communications is immediately added to customer profiles.

Due to the CRM-ecommerce portal integration, your employees can continue to convert prospects into buyers without wasting time on manual data exports. At the same time, your marketers can utilize data from CRM to create more personalized content for your customer portal.

Customer Data Analytics

By synchronizing data flows between your CRM and analytics solution, you can use customer data to predict buyers’ behavior better, run more accurate marketing campaigns, and identify more effective sales channels. With the proper data analytics functionality on hand, you can also set up custom KPIs to monitor the performance of your marketing and sales departments by analyzing the data from CRM.

Marketing Automation

If your existing CRM does not have in-built functionality for automating sales and marketing activities, you can link the system to a marketing automation solution. Thus, your employees will be able to run marketing campaigns in just a couple of clicks and automatically deliver targeted content to potential and existing customers.

Of course, this is not a full list of retail solutions that can be integrated with your ecommerce CRM system. Depending on the needs and specifics of your business case, you can develop APIs or build connectors to integrate CRM with collaboration, document management, accounting software, and many more. To discover more future-proof and viable CRM integration options, get your in-house team or third-party consultants to conduct a comprehensive business analysis of your digital retail ecosystem.

The Value of Ecommerce CRM

We can’t underestimate the value ecommerce CRM systems can bring to a modern consumer-oriented business. However, the usefulness of these solutions can be increased even more by making CRM an integral part of the digital ecommerce ecosystem. Retail enterprises can leverage APIs and connectors to tie in their CRM systems with other business systems like enterprise resource planning, data analytics, or ecommerce portals. These and other integrations will help you boost employee productivity, foster cross-department collaboration, and enable more data-driven decision-making.

 

RdRoman Davydov is an Ecommerce Technology Observer at Itransition. With over four years of experience in the IT industry, Roman follows and analyzes digital transformation trends to guide retail businesses in making informed software buying choices when it comes to commerce and store management automation.