Running successful ecommerce brands comes with unique challenges that other business models don’t have to contend with, and most of them loop back to whether or not you understand your online customers.
Keeping customers happy is critical to thrive in any market, but when you lack the info you need to make the right calls, your best bet is to try things that “feel” right and hope for the best.
Ecommerce CRM software is all about giving you the data and tools to do better than that!
Whether you want to bump up quarterly sales, improve your customer service pipeline, or plan a more effective video marketing strategy, an excellent CRM setup can help you succeed. But to get to that point, you first need to find a platform that covers your needs and adapts to your business’s existing framework—luckily, that’s what we are here for!
Join us as we take a closer look at some of the best CRM for ecommerce platforms, see what each brings to the table, and explore how they can help you take your ecommerce brand to the next level.
Understanding eCommerce CRM (and Why You Should Care!)
When we talk about CRM for ecommerce, we are talking about a specific software platform designed to give you a deeper understanding of who your customers are and how they behave when they engage with your brand.
A good Customer Relationship Management setup can give you a comprehensive look into customers’ patterns, behaviors, habits, and preferences, all vital data points you need to understand to make informed decisions across the board.
They can also help you track your audience’s progress across their customer journey and make identifying their relevant pain points easier.
When it’s all said and done, CRM reporting tools can give your sales and marketing team the accurate information they need to streamline and improve their strategies. Moreover, you can integrate these apps with tools you already use—like your e-shop, website, and email marketing platform—to make things easier and enhance their overall effectiveness.
5 Ways eCommerce CRM Can Help Your Brand
You can do plenty of specific optimization for your business with the right CRM software integrations. From figuring out the best “related products” to recommend to new buyers to cross-referencing purchase history with shipping preferences to help you optimize your next marketing piece.
However, there are five major areas where CRM for ecommerce can have the most tangible impact on your bottom line, and getting familiar with them will help you choose a platform that’s right for your brand.
- Customer Data Collection and Analysis: First and foremost, ecommerce CRM software is there to help you collect and collate data on your customers’ interactions with your brand across multiple platforms. This can help you quickly identify and reference previous interactions with individual customers, find patterns that apply to your entire customer base, and help you make more accurate and beneficial decisions for your business.
- Empowers Your Teams: Having an ecommerce CRM in place can give your employees all the information they need to carry out their tasks as efficiently as possible. This is particularly true for your sales and marketing teams, which can base their decisions on accurate data and metrics, then measure results and refine their approach.
- Shortens Sales Cycle: The best ecommerce CRM platforms allow for many integrations with popular marketing tools, providing several software solutions for marketing automation. By helping you segment your audience and deliver timely, personalized experiences, you get to streamline their buyer’s journey and improve conversion rates.
- Enhances the Customer Experience: Good CRM software makes it easier to reach out and engage with your customers through their preferred channels—email, social media, SMS, etc. Moreover, they usually store all these exchanges (and related metadata), making it contextually easy to serve your customers.
- Reduces Costs and Limits Losses: CRM platforms make it easier to keep track of leads progression down your acquisition funnel, giving you the data you need to make conversions and sales far more likely, especially when cart abandonment and last-minute resistances are cutting your bottom line.
With those elements in mind, let’s go over some of the best ecommerce CRM platforms out there and see what each can do for you.
5 Top CRM Platforms for Your eCommerce Brand
Now, let’s plunge into the realm of e-commerce CRM software. We’ll explore a curated list of solutions, spotlighting the unique features that distinguish them and identifying the ideal users who can maximize their benefits.
HubSpot CRM Suite
In a nutshell, HubSpot’s ecommerce platform is there to help you manage your customer relationships, task automation, and ultimately improve your sales numbers—and it’s clear the company has put a lot of effort into making these core goals as accessible as possible.
Client interactions across multiple platforms are neatly stored in easy-to-reference timelines that help you nurture prospects in ways that fit the current stage of their journey. Moreover, the app integrates seamlessly with many popular marketing automation solutions, analytic reporting tools, shopping cart trackers, and payment processing platforms, simplifying how you track customer relationship data from multiple sources.
All in all, this ecommerce CRM software from the renowned digital marketing giant has much to offer to businesses of all sizes. Whether you need a robust platform to share relevant data across multiple departments or teams or are just looking for a way to automate interaction tracking, it’s clear the folks at HubSpot do a great job at making CRM solutions more accessible without sacrificing effectiveness.
Key Features
- Delivers clear insights into customer behavior patterns that you can use to improve your ecommerce marketing campaigns.
- It lets you track customer engagement over time and determine areas needing improvement.
- Offers plenty of features you can use to create customized campaigns targeting specific audience segments—like its automated contact scoring functionality.
- It offers a constantly updating look into your entire sales funnel through a clean UI with many filtering features that streamline usage.
Pricing
Pricing for this tool is relatively flexible, but it escalates quickly. You can get started for free and try out a lot of features free of charge with certain limitations, or you can upgrade to their CRM suite subscriptions, which start at around $1600 per month for the Professional package.
Who It’s Best For:
HubSpot’s ecommerce CRM solution is flexible enough to offer a lot of attractive features to a wide range of customers.
Its free version has a lot of hefty sales-oriented features, while the CRM suite adds functionality to collect and track payments. Also of note is the app’s remarkable simplicity of use, making it an ideal starting point for anyone looking to integrate CRM solutions into their business model for the first time.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Marketing Cloud represents Salesforce’s drive to provide B2B and B2C companies with comprehensive ecommerce CRM solutions across all verticals. It’s designed as a cloud-based, full-support suite of solutions to help companies facilitate sales, marketing, support, and services in a singular ecosystem where different departments and teams can easily coordinate and collaborate.
Their CRM-focused platforms, like their “Account Engagement” suite, are designed to provide businesses with the tools to accomplish more tasks with less effort—whether that’s gaining a holistic perspective on your customers by cross-referencing their data across multiple channels or integrating with third-party data to improve your product marketing videos’ reach.
The platform is meant to work well and integrate with multiple outsider services, like AI initiatives and Google Analytics 360, giving you access to heaps of data-driven insights to personalize your audience’s experience throughout their buying cycle and shape how your customers relate to your brand.
Key Features
- It provides all-inclusive, relevant user data reporting, which can help bolster your customer support, services, and marketing teams and improve their success rates.
- Its well-segmented suites of tools can give you more flexibility and customization that adapts to your needs and lets your team focus on what they need.
- It covers a wide range of features you might usually need to source from different apps—from sales forecasting to marketing campaign strategizing, all under one roof.
- It makes personalizing marketing campaigns and even landing pages easier with their no-code builders.
Pricing
Pricing here covers a considerable range, given that the company offers various plans that grant access to different parts of their cloud marketing suit. Their simplest ecommerce CRM solution starts at $25 per month, while some of their most complete suites can go over the $1000 mark.
Who It’s Best For:
Although comprehensive in scope and reach, Salesforce’s platform remains flexible and easy to manage. It is ideal for startups and growing ecommerce brands looking to take their online sales and content marketing game to the next level, using automation and advanced analytics reporting.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive’s app is a simple-to-use, lightweight ecommerce CRM solution entirely focused on organizing and overhauling your sales process. It lets you create altogether customizable “pipelines”, which work as visual representations of your sales funnel to break down and track progress toward your goals.
The platform makes it easy to monitor key performance indicators and then report suggested goals you need to hit to reach your target—like calculating your average conversion rate so that you know how many new leads you’d need to hit that new threshold you are after. Its real-time reporting functionality also makes it easier to see if you are on track or need to make adjustments along the way.
Ultimately, this simple ecommerce CRM software is focused on delivering analytics that let you quantify and examine your sales process in a very heuristic manner—simplifying some critical administrative tasks and allowing for integrations with other popular tools to make things easier.
Key Features:
- Lead management tools that let you customize different pipelines for different segments of your audience and make it easy to sift through data and prioritize processes.
- A fully customizable, powerful insights and reporting tool that lets you focus on key metrics for your business, track deals, and craft revenue forecasts.
- An intuitive UI aimed at simplifying things for you and your team and making it easier to get actionable insights.
- A built-in product catalog that tracks every detail of every product you sell. This includes cost, price, description, ID numbers, additional internal notes, and contact data management tools that track activity, prevent duplication, and provide a visual timeline.
Pricing
The platform offers a 14-day free trial that should give you a good sense of what this tool can do for your business. After that, plans start at a monthly $25 for their Start Plan, which goes up to $49 for their “Grow” alternative.
Who It’s Best For:
This sales-focused ecommerce CRM is designed to scale well to teams of all sizes, and its user-friendly, intuitive interface makes it an excellent option for small businesses looking for a sales-oriented solution. That said, don’t let its simplicity fool you; with over 150+ app integrations, Pipedrive is one of the best CRM for ecommerce brands out there.
Freshsales Suite
Freshworks’ ecommerce CRM suite, Freshsales, offers an all-inclusive solution for getting a clearer picture of your customers’ intent, focusing on faster conversions. The award-winning software unites sales and marketing tasks in a customer-centric environment, giving you all the tools you need to earn a customer’s loyalty and satisfaction.
Among its many features, Freshworks provides a lot of tools for creating and deploying data-backed marketing campaigns, helping you flesh out automated customer journeys that close deals faster by sending the right message at the right time. Also of note is the app’s integration with the popular online sales platform Shopify, which even free users can access.
All things considered, this ecommerce CRM software provides a solid scaffolding you can use to evolve your customer handling and marketing games. This gives you the tools to attract and track the best leads, generate more conversion opportunities, and deliver personalized content at scale.
Key Features
- It delivers a 360° view of your customers, keeping all interaction in one easy-to-track place, which you can use to craft fully customized campaigns and optimize them with real-time data to improve engagement.
- It offers AI integrations that help you identify your best leads and strategize approaches for converting them. It also helps improve revenue predictability with Dynamic Forecasting and lets you find better deals to close using their AI-based Deal Insights.
- It also offers many customization options to adapt the platform exactly to what your company needs, including custom lifecycle stages, sales activities, and entirely original modules to capture whatever other info you deem relevant.
Pricing
The company offers several monthly subscription plans at competitive prices that mix and match different parts of their platform. Paid plans start at $15 for the Groth plan and go up to $69 for their Enterprise solution. There’s also a free plan that limits access to three users and 100 contacts but lets you explore the app’s features extensively.
Who It’s Best For:
As an all-encompassing CRM for ecommerce apps, Freshsales can be the ideal solution for companies who need to consolidate their customer relationship and marketing strategies into a singular location. But beyond that, any company looking to scale up its approach and stay ahead of the game by dipping into AI-enabled features should also find a powerful tool in this platform.
Zoho CRM
Zoho’s app for ecommerce CRM rose to the top spots of popularity due to its outstanding sales automation capabilities, which, among other things, use AI and machine learning tech to deliver thoroughly actionable insights for your brand.
With a fully customizable setup, the platform makes it progressively easier to pick things up. Focusing on modules and integrations immediately relevant to your situation at the start allows you to add more in-depth solutions as you grow.
In short, Zoho’s CRM makes it easier to empower your customer-facing teams, delivering accurate analytics, robust automation, and personalized solutions they can use to nurture excellent customer relationships. And the best part? You can take advantage of all these features using an omnichannel approach, KPIs, segmentation, and even predictive intelligence to give your customers interactions they won’t forget.
Key Features
- It makes automating your workflows, campaigns, and customer journeys easy, opening up time to take care of tasks that benefit from a more personal touch.
- It consolidates all customer-interaction information across multiple channels in a single place, where you can cross-reference and integrate with custom solutions that suit your goals.
- It offers extensions and integrations with over 800 digital marketing platforms and AI sales tools.
- It delivers advanced analytics that helps you monitor and understand the people you are trying to do business with. Further empowering you with content management tools that take much of the guesswork out of customer engagement.
Pricing
Zoho divides its subscription options across four different plans, ranging from $12 for the Standard package and up to $45 for the Ultimate version. Every plan comes with the option of a free trial that lets you test most of its features for a few weeks.
Who It’s Best For:
As versatile as it is, Zohos’ ecommerce CRM makes for a perfect fit for any brand that needs extra customization and support for integration with platforms they already use or those looking to effectively automate significant portions of their sales cycles, which this platform makes easier to accomplish.
Wrapping Up
And there you have them! Hands down, some of the best CRM for ecommerce solutions you can find on the market right now. Hopefully, you now have more than a few viable alternatives to consider adding to your company’s setup.
Needless to say, ecommerce CRM software is only a tool, and it’s up to you to choose the right one for the job—something that should come far easier after reading this far!
Now it’s time to take a closer look at your top picks and see which is better equipped to help you deliver a more substantial, satisfying experience to your customers. Take your time, choose right, and the results you are working toward shouldn’t be too far behind!
