Last Updated on April 22, 2022

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) can be a game-changer for your traditional ecommerce store practices. It has helped many businesses to grow, expand, deliver excellent customer service, and expertly manage their customer relationships.

Today, in the ecommerce industry, there are many CRM software solutions available. They all have a varied set of features, making them unique and curated to serve specific business needs; all these CRMs are common in one way: they are designed to organize customer outbound marketing, contacts, optimize retention rates, and increase conversion rates.

In every ecommerce business, there is high importance of establishing positive, well-organized customer relationships. Especially if you have gained success in your e-commerce business and it has grown to a significant size, it becomes almost impossible to manage customers without the help of a CRM system.

Thus, to help you make the right decisions for your business regarding the CRM tools, we have researched and created a roster of the 7 best CRM software. We have also provided the features and USPs of every CRM to make a better choice as per your business needs. The world’s top ecommerce stores use these listed CRMs to manage their interactions with customers and improve them. Let’s know which CRM will suit your business to serve your customers better.

What Is An eCommerce CRM?

Customer Relationship Management software has been designed to help a company manage and utilize customer data for better business. An ecommerce CRM does the same thing, but it is specially curated for ecommerce stores.

It can gather data about the customer’s actions and then use that data to create insights into customers’ purchasing habits, behavior, and interaction of customers with the different channels of your ecommerce store. It will let you know when a customer last interacted or purchased from your store. When such information is centralized at a single platform, it better targets customers and improves the business metrics.

Best 7 CRM Solutions For Your eCommerce Store

After knowing the many benefits and reasons to use a CRM for your ecommerce store, let’s finally know the best CRM options available in the market. We have created a roster of the top CRMs used by the pros and their features. Each CRM has its own set of parts, so that’s an excellent place to start the comparison.

1. Salesforce Pardot

Salesforce is the magnum opus of the CRM software industry. It is probably the first company to roll out a CRM and is still living its popularity within the CRM market. Salesforce comes with many different types of CRM software for each industry, such as healthcare, education, e-commerce, etc.

In the e-commerce industry, Salesforce Pardot is the most commonly used CRM system and marketing automation solution aimed at B2B businesses. Salesforce Pardot allows marketing automation for B2B businesses of all sizes. If you are already using any other product of Salesforce in your business, then Pardot is like a boon to use. It can be integrated with Google Clouds, Intuit Quickbooks, Mailchimp, Slack, LinkedIn, DocuSign, Dropbox, and many more.

Salesforce Pardot is good for probably only the established business who can afford it as it is pretty high pricey. The pricing starts at $1,250 per month for up to 10,000 contacts. It is widely known for ease of use and offers a free demo.

2. Marketo

Marketo

Marketo is another popular name in marketing automation software. It is part of the Adobe family of software and supports online businesses for marketing automation needs. It has excellent features for lead management, e-mail marketing tools, revenue attribution, and account-based marketing. Marketo has a great dashboard offering detailed reports, intelligent automation, and activated campaigns.

You can integrate Marketo with Dynamics CRM, Netsuite, Oracle, SAP Cloud for Sales, and Sugar CRM. Just like Salesforce, it is also suitable for established businesses. The pricing of the Marketo starts from $895 per month for up to 10,000 contacts, and there is also a free demo.

3. HubSpot CRM

HubSpot CRM

This CRM is designed for larger e-commerce businesses that want to increase their growth.

The dashboard of Hubspot is compelling, offering multiple features such as territory management, quotes, proposals, document storage, task management, segmentation, lead scoring, mobile access, and a calendar system. You can also integrate it with other marketing tools as well.

HubSpot also offers project management capabilities and provides quotes, proposals forecasting, and client tracking. It also offers lead management and financial CRM.

You can integrate HubSpot with many popular apps such as Google Calendar, Slack, Outfunnel, Mailchimp, etc. Like the other marketing activities, HubSpot can automate marketing activities, including social media management and e-mail marketing.

4. Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM

Zoho, a popular CRM, is suitable for all business sizes. It has big-name CRMs and excellent customer experience, and financial forecasting tools. It is highly customizable, i.e., you can make it bespoke to work for your business needs regardless of your size. You can also integrate it with other Zoho Books, Zoho Desk, and omnichannel customer service solutions.

There is a freemium version of its product and a free trial of the advanced CRM software regarding pricing. Zoho CRM starts at $12/year/user with different packages at different feature levels.

5. Ontraport

Ontraport

Ontraport ecommerce CRM allows you to create and launch automated marketing campaigns through notifications, landing pages, SMS, pop-up forms, and e-mails. The focus is on the marketing budget behind leads, and you can target customers through multiple ways which enable growth opportunities.

You can integrate Ontraport with many software such as Quickbooks, Google Calendar, XERO, Acuity, Scheduling, Calendly, PopuAlly, ConvertPlus, Freshdesk, Zendesk, Shopify, WooCommerce, Facebook, Zoom, etc. It starts at $79 per month for 1000 users and offers a free 14-day trial.

Why Your eCommerce Store Requires A CRM?

Every business has its unique requirements, and an eCommerce CRM is one of the best ways to meet those requirements effectively, tech-driven, and intelligent way. There are numerous benefits of using an ecommerce CRM. Let’s know a few of them:

1. Improve Customer Experience

Using a CRM for your e-commerce store can help you improve the user experience in many ways. It can offer updates of order status, inventory checks, shipment tracking, and keep the customer informed on when to expect their orders. Data accessibility shortens the sales cycle by nearly 8-14%. A CRM can help increase sales by 29%, boost sales productivity by 34%, and improve sales forecast accuracy by 42%.

A CRM will collect all information from different channels using omnichannel retail.

2. Improved Marketing And Promotion

A CRM gives you a single place where you can find all your customers’ data. This improves all marketing activities, from planning to targeting and execution. You can send personalized marketing e-mails to your customers using CRM, and it will have a direct impact on your online shop’s income.

The average return on investment for CRM is $8.71 for every dollar spent.

3. Enhanced Sales Team Performance

The sales team benefitted the most from the CRM integration. It can increase team productivity as the sales can access details of customers such as orders, payments, and even products viewed. This allows them to upsell and cross-sell the products effectively. It is also true for the B2B ecommerce stores, whose sales teams generally negotiate with the customers based on their previous history of orders and payments.

4. Better Inventory Planning

A CRM, if appropriately used, can give you insights into the most popular or purchased order from your store. You can use this data to make decisions for manufacturing or sourcing products.

5. Drive Services After-Sales

The customer doesn’t end after the purchase or delivery of the product. The after-sale service also matters a lot, and it can improve customer loyalty, retention rate, and customer lifetime value. Another advantage of using a CRM is that it gives your sales team to address client concerns before they turn into problems.

Issues related to orders, inventory shortage, and product education should be handled immediately.

6. Minimize Losses And Costs

Without a CRM integration, your online store can suffer even the most minor mistakes, such as typo errors. Manual data entry is highly prone to errors that impact sales and customer loyalty. The best approach is CRM and e-commerce integration.

  • 47% of companies use a CRM system
  • 40% of e-commerce stores use spreadsheets to store customer data
  • 22% of sales team people still don’t’ know what a CRM is.

7. Make Your Stay Ahead In The Competition

CRM increases the efficiency of your business by automated and synchronized data transfer. It ensures correct order fulfillment and timely communication, giving your store a natural competitive edge over other stores in the same market.

8. Better Analytics And Monitoring

Integration with a CRM allows you to access huge information. Many CRMs let you customize or personalize the dashboard to leverage customer information, sales goal reports and uncover untapped opportunities. For instance, within a few minutes, a customers list will be exported who haven’t made a purchase for a long time and send automated e-mails.

9. Automating Marketing With CRM Systems

CRMs are designed to create intelligent workflows triggered by some particular events. For instance, if a customer hasn’t purchased a product in the last six months, you can set this to trigger outreach to such customers through e-mails or push notifications by offering a 10% discount. This is an example of marketing automation which is the primary function of a CRM.

Marketing automation is essential for B2C ecommerce businesses centered around product sales cycles. You can run abandoned cart campaigns, follow up the customers for reviews and ratings, update customer purchase history into a database through a CRM.

By automation, you can put the marketing budget in the most required segments, ensuring that your company maximizes repeat business with the customers and makes them regular patrons.

Comparison Criteria Of eCommerce Software

While finding out the proper ecommerce CRM for your online business, there are multiple features that you have to consider. Here are some evaluation points that you can consider:

1. User Interface

A CRM should be highly user-friendly so all your team can easily use it and make the most out of it. A cumbersome interface can be a severe barrier to overcome.

2. Customer Support

It takes time to onboard your team members on a new software system. You may need to ask questions to determine how much support each CRM company provides, including technical support, user tutorials, training, etc.

3. Cross-Channel Tracking

Today’s customers interact with your store through multiple touchpoints. They may start browsing your store from smartphones and complete the purchase through their laptops. Thus it is imperative to track this journey in a better way. The chosen CRM should offer cross-channel tracking.

4. Data & Reporting

A CRM is only as good as the data it provides. The tool should have inbuilt analytics and reporting features. It should have a great way of showing information in charts and graphs to make future business decisions.

5. Integrations

We integrate so many tools in our ecommerce store these days. Thus, the chosen CRM should connect with our content marketing software, product lifecycle management software, SEO tools, etc.

These factors will help you decide the right CRM for your e-commerce ecosystem.

Wrapping Up

At Emizentech, a reputed ecommerce development company, we develop the next-level ecommerce stores with integrations with all essential software such as ERP, CRM, SEO tools, etc. We can give you expert guidance for choosing each software tool. Let us know your requirements.

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Author

CTO at Emizentech and a member of the Forbes technology council, Amit Samsukha, is acknowledged by the Indian tech world as an innovator and community builder. He has a well-established vocation with 12+ years of progressive experience in the technology industry. He directs all product initiatives, worldwide sales and marketing, and business enablement. He has spearheaded the journey in the e-commerce landscape for various businesses in India and the U.S.