Five Pillars Of The New ECommerce Solution Stacking

Stacking the Essential Tools for Smart Selling heading to 2023

Retail sales shifted significantly over the past decade. Online sales rose from 4.2 percent in 2010 to 15.7 percent in 2020. Recent events had an impact, but the trend was already underway. Forcing retailers to devise effective ways to market products without direct physical customer contact.

Because the main problem is a lack of customer personalization, your retail business must stack together several integrated omnichannel marketing solutions to get the most out of your eCommerce conversion. This will generate automatic, data-driven, personalized customer experiences that will improve your relationships with your customers.

While there is no right way to stack eCommerce solutions, the most successful of them include:

1. A robust and unified CRM and marketing automation 
2. Omnichannel marketing
3. Artificial intelligence for cultivating customers
4. Customer service platform add-on
5. Future-proof scalability

Using a Robust CRM to Develop a Consistent and Positive Customer Experience

Your customers expect a lot from you, especially online. They assume 24/7 customer service availability with a customized, personal experience. However, your customer service representatives just get overwhelmed from gathering data from multiple sources to satisfy your customers’ growing needs

To ease the burden, every retail business must understand its e-commerce customer journey and meet its customers with the right tools at each stage. To do that, you need a robust integrated CRM platform that can adapt to the needs of your customers from the beginning to the end. Such as system would support and retain your customers, allowing you to grow your customer base.

A reliable CRM would empower your customer service representatives with easy access to your customer data, improving your customer relationships process. Your customers will experience nearly instantaneous, high-quality customer service through a simple reference number or email address.

Utilize Omnichannel Marketing Strategies

Omnichannel marketing is another important addition to your solutions stack. While this popular business strategy works similarly to multichannel marketing, it has a much different focus.

Multichannel marketing strives to replicate your brand across a variety of channels. It tries to reach your customers where they are whether it is by social media, email, mobile, or physical contact, using a unified message. Revolutionary when it was first proposed, multichannel marketing fails to deliver a personalized message to your customers.

Omnichannel marketing fixes the shortfalls of multichannel marketing by providing a unique form of your brand for each platform. It strides to meet your customers based on how they use each platform to provide the most relevant message for their needs.

Artificial Intelligence for Sales and Marketing Automation

Most organizations feel they cannot afford dedicated data analysis for their sales and marketing operations. Luckily, customer cultivating techniques use artificial intelligence (AI) to process the data through automated workflows.

This sales automation lets you cultivate your customers through consistent, personalized product pages optimized for your target markets. Your sales team would have a centralized means to understand and engage your customers as they move through your sales process.

Stack AI Tools Can Improve your Marketing Campaigns as Well

Marketing automation tools can help you sell smarter and better with dynamic customer targeting that develops loyalty without technical support. By adding these tools to your stack, your organization will launch campaigns quickly and efficiently through personalized, data-driven promotions and customer segmentation.

Through it, all, your sales and marketing strategies will have enterprise-level personification without the cost.

Use the Right Customer Service Platform

It all means nothing without the right customer service platform. Your e-commerce strategy must handle multitudes of customers at once. These customers can come from any platform, market, language, and everything in between. Therefore, a customer service platform that can handle and monitor high volumes of service and support requests is essential for your e-commerce stack.

As your customer service is the voice of your brand, you want it as simple and personal as possible. That requires providing your customers easy access to common questions about your products, fulfillment, and return policies. That also means your customer service representatives must also be able to update the platform quickly to meet the needs of your customers.

It also means using a platform that conforms to certain customer service best practices to include:

• A shared inbox that integrates into your CRM
• Simple and clear self-service (knowledge base) customer interface
• Robust e-commerce customer analytics and tracking system
• Fully automated, personalized transaction management and response
• Supports multiple formats, channels, and languages with real-time integration
• Seamlessly integrates in-house and outsourced customer service
• Provides ample customer engagement

Ensure Futureproof Scalability

No warehouse handles higher volatility and unpredictability than e-commerce or omnichannel fulfillment centers. Online customer behavior and demands can change constantly. Either seasonally or in response to external events, these overnight market shifts create a level of volatility that makes traditional automation difficult to install, maintain, or scale.

To survive this unpredictability, you must plan ahead of time with the appropriate technologies, supply chains, and technical partners. In other words, you need a flexible dynamic eCommerce platform that can easily scale at a moment’s notice to meet new demands, enter new markets, and have aggressive growth ambitions.

Adding such a platform to your e-commerce stack would:

• Minimize your risks, costs, and technical complexity when entering new international markets
• Allow you to quickly customize your service, sales, and marketing strategies for different cultures, customs, languages, and currencies.
• Provide localized regional reference architectures
• Generate great digital customer experiences with targeted content, offers, and relevant products
• Improve the development and management of all your e-commerce brands, teams, and properties under a single, unified framework

Start Stacking

Retail eCommerce requires a multifaceted approach to sales and marketing. Luckily, your business can achieve this through the right stack of tools such as a robust CRM platform, omnichannel marketing, and AI marketing and sales workflow automation.

To see how your organization would benefit from e-commerce stacking, contact us at info@cetrixcloudservices.com, or through our Contact Us page, to get started today. Together, we develop scalable solutions stacks to meet your growing needs.