Member Article

Grow a successful ecommerce business with only WordPress and a social CRM

Once upon a time, building an ecommerce site meant needing access to seemingly a million and one developers and an immense budget. Things have changed a lot on that score - you can now set up an ecommerce store with little more than WordPress and a social customer relationship management (CRM) strategy.

But why are both of these elements so impactful, and how can you bring them together to make your ecommerce site a success?

The wonderful possibilities of WordPress

There are so many reasons why WordPress makes sense for an ecommerce business. It is especially well-suited to the more basic affiliate sites, given its simple ease of use, flexibility and maintenance.

But WordPress-based plugins exist that tap further into the platform’s inherent qualities, saving you time and money even if you intend a rather more sophisticated ecommerce presence. Such plugins may incorporate a vast range of themes and extensions, encompassing shipping tools, payment gateways and marketing extensions - and you won’t necessarily need to pay for them, either.

Other platforms may be more technical, but they can also be much more expensive - and may represent overkill for what you actually need.

Why customer engagement is so important

More and more burgeoning ecommerce businesses are now recognising the importance of getting social with their customers, engaging with them via social media services, techniques and technology.

Indeed, recent years have seen an emerging emphasis on deeper customer engagement, rather than merely chasing leads. Leads, after all, are often cold. They are also short-term in focus, frequently sporadic and have the objective of that one-time-only sale. Leads can also go stale and are dependent on a specific campaign on your part.

Treat your customers more like social contacts, and the dynamic changes. Contacts are warm in nature, are nurtured rather than merely generated and prequalified, are ongoing rather than sporadic and have the objective of more meaningful, longer-term relationships. Best of all is that a good contact lasts forever.

Making the most of your social CRM

The emphasis with a social CRM is therefore on having conversations with your customers to inspire not merely a sale or even the occasional repeat business, but loyalty and allegiance to your store and brand. Indeed, while CRMs already provide a lot of information about customers, you might not be making the most of the insights gained from yours to drive traffic, engagement and revenue.

Ours is an era where we can access more data about customers than ever before, but you need to use that information well if you are to leverage the social within the CRM. Customers expect more personalised marketing these days - they don’t all want to have the same experience.

With the data that you garner through your CRM, you can make this possible through automation. This allows the customer to feel recognised by you and engage with you in a deeper conversation, inspiring greater loyalty to your ecommerce business.

By putting your customers at the heart of your ecommerce business with a social CRM, you can grow their affinity with your brand, which in turn makes high conversion rates much more likely.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Benjamin Kerry .