Firstly, what’s a virtual storefront, or a CRM? Virtual storefronts are platforms that hold product inventory and customer information to allow employees to manage fulfillment and distribution from any location. It can also be a place for customers to order directly through a cross dock warehouse that fulfills on demand. As for CRM, it stands for customer relationship management. A CRM is software that provides you with the means and tools to manage customer relationships from the first point of contact, through to sale and on to post-sale.
The CRM software houses all of your customer’s data, from personal information to products purchased. Using a CRM gives your company deeper insights into your customer base. You can segment customers based on interests, purchases, sex, location, age and more. Beyond this capability, there are a few strong reasons why companies benefit from using a CRM.
Elevated Customer Experience:
With all the data a CRM system holds, companies can leverage that information to create personalized customer experiences. Customer interests, past purchases, logged conversations and more are all available to sales and marketing teams to utilize to attract new customers, convince prospective customers to buy and entice past customers to buy again. Marketing and sales have taken a giant leap towards hyper-personalization and hyper-targeting to make the potential customer the center point of all conversations. With a CRM, companies have the capabilities to do this and draw in customers through what feels to them like one on one conversations.
Higher Retention:
After a prospect becomes a client or a customer, they expect that the company knows them, even if the transaction never involved a sales rep and was conducted entirely through digital means. Traditionally this concept was inherent to business operations. Seeing a tailor, plumber, electrician, shopkeeper, lawyer, accountant, etc., were all individual, face-to-face transactions, after which the customer expected to be remembered should they return for services again. Businesses that knew customers by name and remembered their needs flourished. As our world has moved to a digital shopping experience, technology developed to recreate that same personal relationship without the human-to-human contact. We’ve reached an age now where the technology is so advanced that businesses that neglect this need for customer-to-business relationships fail to meet the customer’s expectations, ultimately resulting in retention loss. With a CRM system, your company has a place to house all the digital information customers share and a way to utilize this data to establish a digitally, personal business relationship.
CRMs Offer In-depth Reporting on Customer Trends
Using the data stored within the system, businesses can predict purchase behaviors and customer interest to serve them with messages that will keep them interested in the products or services, thus encouraging them to purchase again and again.
What About Virtual Storefronts?
Similar to CRM’s virtual storefronts give marketers the ability to keep track of customer information. What’s more is that when you make your own online store, all your employees are able to access this information no matter their location. This keeps marketing material branding consistent, and allows employees to reach customers with custom printed materials, and promotional items without having to have the resources on hand.
Velocity Print Leads the Way
As an industry leader in online storefronts, we empower businesses every day through custom marketing solutions. We get your message and swag in front of your clients fast, while handling all the logistics so your team can focus on the clients.