02 Jun Best Woocommerce CRM for eCommerce?

As your business grows, you might outgrow some of the free tools such as Mailchimp for email marketing automation. That is when you might consider a Woocommerce CRM for your eCommerce store. Perhaps if you had the tools to follow up with your customers, you might get more repeat business and build your bottom line. At this point, you might consider the different Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms out there.

I recently did a deep dive into this topic, so I can share with you a few things that I learned. It is the sort of thing that you want to take for a test run with your data to see if a platform has the features that you need.

The usual suspects

As a small store who is growing, I instantly dismissed some of the larger competitors in the field of CRM like Keap (formerly Insightly), Metrilo, and ZenDesk. I started out trying smaller and more reasonably priced options. Such as Agile CRM, Zoho CRM, and Salesforce. I found all of these options quite ‘buggy’. Although I started to learn about what a CRM can do – think marketing email automation and drip sequences, as well as customer data segmentation. A lot of the features just plain didn’t work. And not all CRMs are specifically designed to work as a Woocommerce CRM.

Honourable mentions

One option that seems very well built is Zero BS CRM. It has a much more user-friendly interface. It also integrates directly into your WordPress Dashboard. However, I could not see what it was capable of, because I could not upload my data to the plugin without signing up to a $200 a year subscription.

Another honourable mention was Ready Cloud (the names become forgettable after a while!). The interface is much cleaner and more user-friendly than the first options I tried. I wanted to love it, but I seem to recall that they had very light on documentation. So I couldn’t find out how to achieve the outcomes that I was looking for. Playing around with this CRM made me think that I was not going to be able to send out drip-feed automated emails, or simple shipment tracking emails.

The Woocommerce CRM winner is:

This left me with barely anything from the lists I had found when searching for a CRM or Woocommerce CRM. Then, in (an admitted) flash of brilliance on Saturday night, I searched for something different. I typed in ‘Woocommerce data analysis’. There, buried on page 3 of the Google results was a platform called Metorik. My perseverance and tendency to leave no stone unturned came up with the goods in the end. I am so excited about this platform. And I think the Return on Investment (ROI) will be enough to justify adding it to our software stack.

In addition to superior data reporting and analysis such as Life Time Value (LTV) of new vs returning customers, top-selling products and categories, projections of future growth, VIP customers (whose LTV is over $600), Metorik provide the capacity to segment customers based on the most interesting and useful data. We can segment an audience who has not placed an order for 6 months. Or customers who ordered from a certain range, and we can send each of these (and more) segments of customers emails to entice them back into our store to make repeat purchases. Using this tool in concert with Google Analytics for eCommerce promises to reveal actionable insights.

For a growing eCommerce store

As the impetus for me to go on this search was the fact that our customer base is growing beyond a free account on Mailchimp, and also the fact that my research showed that customers are more likely to return if they show some degree of commitment to your store, in the form of a rating or review, I am delighted to find what seems to be the perfect platform to do all that. Metorik allows us to send follow up emails with links to opportunities to review products that customers purchased. This kind of sophistication has always been a bugbear with MailChimp, who don’t have sophisticated segmenting options.

As it turns out, we are likely to keep using MailChimp, as it contributes a great ROI itself. It is useful for more marketing based broadcast blast emails. Metorik is more applicable to transactional emails and (hopefully) does what it says on the box – builds relationships with customers. Email might be boring, but it can be a powerful tool in getting repeat sales and nurturing your prospects.

One of the best discoveries was finding that we should be able to automate our tracking and shipping email process to inputting one number and ticking one box in the Woocommerce interface of WordPress. That alone is worth hundreds of dollars a month!

Data analysis has never been so fun

I have never been more excited about a piece of software for a long time. The app was developed in Melbourne, Australia (even better), and it seems to have been developed by people who had extensive experience with developing Woocommerce beforehand. So it looks like we are in good hands!

This is not quite the ‘list’ of Woocommerce CRMs that you can trawl through to try and make your own conclusions. Metorik is a great app for Woocommerce store owners who are looking for a reasonably priced Woocommerce CRM.

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Image credit: “Customer relations are investments by Brian Solis” by The Brian Solis is licensed under CC BY 2.0