The holiday season is a boon to the retail and online store business owners as the entire nation and half the world is in a festive mood!
The meetings and greetings are on an all-time high at this time, so are the exchange of various gifts. Today, the technological advancement has eased the process of making purchases and getting them delivered to their relatives, friends, and families. We will be discussing the art of handling online sales and delivery logistics with the help of a sales CRM software, such as Salesmate sales CRM.
For every business, an opportunity arises when someone makes the basic search of, “Thanksgiving gifts for family” or “Christmas gifts for friends” or “best Christmas gift ideas”. We are giving you a general idea of the mindset of your prospects during the holiday season. So, how can a CRM help you boost your selling process! Let’s find out.
1. Analytics and customer purchase predictions
If you are new to CRM, it is a platform that creates and stores your customer data inside the system itself.
This allows the CRM to recycle each and every information related to the customers purchasing patterns and yearly purchase.
- You can pull out customizable reports from the CRM and use it to bifurcate customers based on the purchasing power or pattern.
- You can use this information for delivering a personalised shopping experience to all the customer segments.
- Customer segmentation will help you save more time than last year as you now have the analytics of the customers in front of you and you are now better informed about their preferences.
- Make their purchases available to them by sending out personalised emails with clickable links of the products.
- CRM software allows users to track the actions that are being taken on their sent email, such as the links clicked, the email open rate, email open rate frequency etc.
- Once the CRM notifies that an email has been opened, you can either call the customer using the built-in calling feature, send them a personalised promotional text message, or an email with personalised discount.
2. Handle huge order flow with ease
Every business has been preparing for this time of the year since September 2018.
But they had been planning for it since the last year’s sale itself. Planning is a tricky part, but execution of that plan requires proper logistic and inventory management, when it comes to boosting your sales for the holiday season.
- The traffic surge in holiday season might prove unexpected. But you must be prepared with the data report pulled from last year’s traffic report!
- You can plan your cloud storage and online business infrastructure.
- Take notes of the resources type you will need, which geographical location demanded the most deliveries, how many cart abandonments occurred and from which customer and location.
- Which specific day and time saw the most frequent flow of online orders.
- All this can be automated inside a CRM and set as an activity. The CRM will keep on reminding you until you complete all the task in your personalised checklist.
- With your business email synchronised within the CRM, it is easy to operate your business from a single window rather than switching between random screens.
3. Use advanced analytics to plan your supply chain logistics
During the ecommerce marketing holidays, returns surge to 30% or even as high as 50% for “expensive” products. — Shopify
- Order returns are the nightmare of every online business as it can easily crash and burn the months of planning and efforts.
- The scar on the brand name and loss of revenue acts as adding salt to the wound.
- Use the activity planner built inside the CRM for preparing an automated workflow that helps you plan your routes, decide optimal delivery timeline and preps your customer support helpdesk.
- Even if you are using third party logistics or delivering via your own, set reminders for regular vehicle maintenance logs, catch up on previous year delivery roadblocks, and customer complaints and feedbacks.
- Using highly optimized analytical reports and reminder feature of your CRM, you can sure handle this year’s surge and make the most out of the holiday season sales.
4. Balance customer acquisition and retention
5% increase in retention can increase profits by 25% — 125% — Gartner
Online retail business owners must balance between profitability and customer loyalty. Yes, holiday season is the best time for acquiring new customers however that doesn’t mean you can afford to lose your loyal customers. Customer journey analytics allows business owners to understand the entire sales cycle through which their customers have passed through. Doing so will allow the business owners to:
- Create a segmentation of customer with probable churn rate
- Fix the factors that affect positive customer experience
- Help customer attain healthy relation with the business
- Provide the best-in-class customer service and support
You can always analyse metrics such as:
- purchase duration
- average order value
- repeat purchase rate
- customer lifetime value
Identifying these metrics will help you make new connections and also maintain healthy relation with the current customer-base
Conclusion
Holiday season is all about making people around you happy and be thankful of the riches you have earned through your persistency and hard-work. Using a CRM such as Salesmate can keep you once step ahead of the competition and two-step closer to your target customer base.
Maintain a healthy streak with your current customer base by diving into their purchase history and purchase patterns. Take a good look at your inventory and manage the products as per the needs and requirements of your target audience.
Salesmate CRM has many advanced features to offer that can help you manage and boost your sales this holiday season. If you are interested to hack into your productivity and make the most out of the season than do get in touch with us.
🆕 Salesmate CRM is now coming up with the built-in calling 📲 and bulk SMS features. Which means, no more integrations, no add on hardware cost. Just make and receive more sales calls from your CRM system. You can also make use of your smartphone for this feature. Try now!!
