In the fast-paced world of ecommerce, customer relationship management (CRM) is crucial for success. Integrating your CRM system with your ecommerce platforms can help you streamline your marketing, sales, and fulfillment efforts, enhance customer experiences, and ultimately increase revenue. With the right tools, managing your CRM integrations is easy, even when a native integration doesn’t exist, allowing you to focus on the benefits of the integrations rather than the complexities of managing them.
This guide will provide you with a comprehensive overview of integrating CRM software with order management systems (OMS), warehouse management systems (WMS), and shipping software, including the benefits and key features to look for. Whether you're just starting out or looking to upgrade your current system, this guide will help you make an informed decision that will take your ecommerce business to the next level.
What Exactly Is A CRM Integration for Ecommerce?
An ecommerce CRM integration is the process of connecting a customer relationship management (CRM) system with other ecommerce software. This integration allows businesses to manage customer data and interactions more effectively, provide a better overall customer experience and streamline marketing, sales, and fulfillment efforts. It can also enable businesses to gather valuable data and insights on customer behavior and preferences, which can be used to drive targeted marketing campaigns and improve sales strategies.
Why Do You Need a CRM Integration for Ecommerce?
In today's highly competitive ecommerce landscape, businesses must make the most of their CRM and ecommerce tools to deliver a seamless consumer experience. Integrating a CRM with an OMS, WMS, or shipping platforms takes the power of CRM solutions even further by automating order, inventory, and tracking information. This ensures that customer information is up-to-date and that orders can be fulfilled more quickly and accurately. With automation, ecommerce businesses can reduce the risk of errors and eliminate the need for manual data entry, saving time and resources. This integration allows businesses to focus on providing exceptional customer experiences and growing their business rather than getting bogged down in operational tasks.
Forecast and Plan for Future Demand
CRM integrations provide ecommerce businesses with valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences, helping them anticipate and meet future demand. These integrations also enable personalized marketing campaigns, which drive repeat business and loyalty. By integrating with inventory management and fulfillment systems, businesses can optimize operations and avoid stockouts, reducing waste and increasing profitability. With real-time data on inventory levels and customer demand, businesses can make informed decisions that ensure that products are always available when consumers want to buy them.
Automate Marketing Campaigns
CRM integrations automate ecommerce marketing campaigns by using customer data to send targeted and personalized messages. This includes email and social media marketing triggered by specific customer actions. By automating these campaigns, businesses save time and resources while delivering more effective content to their customers.
Analyze And Track Customer Journeys
Ecommerce CRM integrations help businesses analyze and track customer journeys by capturing customer data and interactions across multiple channels. This data can be used to create a comprehensive view of the customer journey, from initial touchpoints to conversion and beyond. With this information, businesses can identify trends, pain points, and opportunities for improving customer experience management.
Streamline Team Comms
Effective team communication is crucial for success in ecommerce. CRM integrations with ecommerce platforms provide a centralized location for customer data, enabling all team members to access up-to-date information in real-time. This shared knowledge allows sales and customer support teams to provide more informed and personalized assistance to customers, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Improve Sales Pipeline
Ecommerce CRM integrations improve the sales pipeline by efficiently managing leads and tracking customer interactions across multiple channels. This allows businesses to personalize their approach and increase the likelihood of conversion. Integrations also provide visibility into the sales pipeline's different deal stages, enabling businesses to track progress and identify areas for improvement.
Top Features of Ecommerce CRM Integrations
Integrating a CRM with OMS, WMS, and shipping platforms can provide online businesses with a wide range of benefits, from improved inventory management to better customer service. By automating the order fulfillment process, businesses can save time and resources, reduce errors, and provide customers with real-time tracking information. In this section, we will explore the top features and benefits of integrating a CRM with an OMS, WMS, or shipping platform, and how it can help businesses optimize their operations and improve their bottom line.
Order Automation
Integrating OMS, WMS, or shipping platforms with CRM can streamline the order process by automating the entire workflow from order placement to fulfillment, minimizing errors and saving time. This integration enables businesses to deliver a seamless customer experience from the moment an order is placed to its successful delivery.
Inventory Management
Real-time inventory updates are a crucial feature of CRM integrations with OMS, WMS, or shipping platforms. With this capability, businesses can monitor inventory levels, track movements, and avoid stockouts or overstocking, helping them manage their inventory efficiently and optimize stock levels to ensure product availability for customers.
Shipping and Tracking
Businesses can manage shipping and tracking information directly from their CRM with the integration, which improves transparency and communication with customers by providing real-time shipping updates and helping businesses manage delivery schedules to enhance the overall customer experience.
Data Synchronization
Real-time inventory updates enable efficient inventory management, while shipping and tracking information can be managed directly from the CRM, improving communication with customers. Data synchronization eliminates the need for manual data entry, reducing errors and ensuring that all systems have accurate and up-to-date information.
Analytics and Reporting
Detailed analytics and reporting on order fulfillment, inventory levels, and shipping performance are provided by the integration, empowering businesses to make data-driven decisions. These insights can be leveraged to identify trends, optimize inventory levels, and enhance the overall customer experience.
Easy Integration
When looking for an ecommerce CRM integration, it's important to consider the ease of integration with other applications and platforms. Good CRM software should provide easy integration with websites and other systems. This feature allows businesses to quickly adopt new tools and technologies without having to rely heavily on IT support or resources.
Top CRM Solutions for Ecommerce Integration
Ecommerce businesses can benefit greatly from implementing a CRM system that integrates with their OMS, WMS, or shipping platform. However, with so many options available in the market, it can be overwhelming to choose the right one. The following CRM solutions offer robust features to help businesses streamline their sales pipeline, manage customer relationships, and grow their business. Additionally, they can be integrated with popular OMS, WMS, and shipping platforms using Extensiv Integration Manager. Let's take a closer look at each one.
Salesforce
Salesforce is a highly customizable and scalable platform that can meet the needs of businesses of all sizes. It offers a wide range of features and functionalities, including lead and opportunity management, sales forecasting, and customer service automation. If you're looking to enhance your sales forecasting capabilities, you can easily insert your sales forecasting template into Salesforce. Additionally, Salesforce integrates seamlessly with popular ecommerce platforms like Extensiv Order Manager, allowing businesses to easily manage customer data, track sales, and improve their overall ecommerce performance. Its robust analytics capabilities and real-time reporting also provide businesses with valuable insights into customer behavior and sales trends, allowing them to make informed decisions and optimize their sales pipeline for maximum efficiency.
Infusionsoft (Keap)
Infusionsoft (Keap) is a top CRM solution for ecommerce integration. With a focus on serving small businesses, it offers robust automation capabilities that allow businesses to generate leads and automate their marketing and sales processes, reducing errors and saving time. It also provides real-time inventory updates, shipping management, and data synchronization, which helps businesses manage their operations more efficiently and make data-driven decisions. Additionally, Infusionsoft (Keap) offers advanced analytics and reporting features, enabling businesses to monitor their performance and optimize their ecommerce operations.
ByDesignFreedom
ByDesignFreedom is a versatile and user-friendly CRM solution that offers a range of features to help ecommerce businesses grow and manage their operations effectively. Its flexible pricing and compensation plan options allow businesses to differentiate pricing tiers and incentivize sales, while its extensive reporting and analytics capabilities provide valuable insights into business performance. The software's customizable dashboards and personalized displays make it easy to create a tailored experience for representatives and leaders alike, helping businesses stay organized and focused on growth.
Quickbooks Online
Despite not being a full-featured CRM system, QuickBooks Online still manages to provide some fundamental customer relationship management features, including the ability to monitor customer transactions and generate invoices. Moreover, the platform offers advanced reports and analytics, which enable businesses to make better decisions based on real-time data. As a cloud-based system, QuickBooks Online seamlessly integrates with various applications, making it an ideal solution for businesses seeking efficiency and convenience. Its user-friendly experience and invoice templates also make it an excellent tool for small businesses looking to manage their finances effectively.
Grow with Extensiv's Platform
Extensiv Integration Manager's CRM integrations streamline business operations by integrating customer relationship management software with order management, warehouse management, and shipping platforms. This integration simplifies processes, improves accuracy, and increases efficiency. In addition, Extensiv's CRM integrations provide real-time data and insights, allowing businesses to make informed decisions and optimize operations for growth. By automating workflows and reducing manual errors, businesses can focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences and driving revenue growth. So whether a brand/merchant is looking to expand to new sales channels, increase their warehouse operations, or are looking to partner with a 3PL, their data and integrations can grow with them.
Extensiv Order Manager
Extensiv Order Manager acts as a central hub for you to manage your entire ecommerce business and team. Impressively, Extensiv Order Manager can also automate processes for you, meaning you can focus on customer satisfaction more than just executing sales processes.
Since you can see all sales activity through Extensiv Order Manager, communicating and relaying sales information to your support team is easier. Ecommerce is competitive, so focus on customer satisfaction and less on the mundane manual tasks that Extensiv can automate.
Extensiv Warehouse Manager
Inventory management is seen as a hassle for many ecommerce businesses, but with Extensiv Warehouse Manager, it becomes less of a problem. With real-time validation, you'll know what's happening with every piece of your inventory.
Whether you need to restock or have too much inventory, you'll get all that information anywhere at any time. Extensiv Warehouse Manager integrates and works with any device to ensure you have access to your most important inventory data at any point and time.
What's even better about Extensiv Warehouse Manager is that it integrates with all leading ecommerce and marketplace platforms: Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, eBay, UltraCart, and even Walmart.
