Managing customers’ information is challenging for online store proprietors, but it’s critical for eCommerce companies striving to enhance their revenue and sales.
If you acquire several new customers in your Shopify store, what strategy do you intend to use for managing their information?
If you anticipate a substantial influx of customers to your Shopify store, implementing a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system would be the most effective approach to managing information if you anticipate a customer influx.
Key Takeaways
- About Shopify CRM and its importance
- Benefits and challenges of Shopify CRM integration
- List of the best CRM to use with Shopify
What is Shopify CRM?
Shopify offers a superb platform for launching an eCommerce store with many features and tools essential for establishing and expanding your online business. Nevertheless, as your store flourishes, you may discover that you require specialized functionalities exclusive to eCommerce CRM to Shopify integrations.
If you require a thorough analysis of transactions, personalized workflows, or a cohesive support system for administering sales and marketing across multiple Shopify stores, incorporating the best CRM into your Shopify store is essential to maximizing the potential of your eCommerce enterprise.
The primary obstacle lies in locating the appropriate Shopify CRM features for your store that encompass all the essential functionalities while remaining user-friendly during and after Shopify store launch.
Additionally, you must consider its compatibility with the Shopify platform and Shopify POS hardware to guarantee that you obtain the maximum return on your investment after integrating it into your Shopify store.
Ensuring that your CRM can seamlessly integrate with your Shopify POS hardware is crucial for managing your offline and online sales channels in one place.
By doing so, you can streamline your inventory management, sales tracking, and customer data collection, making it easier to analyze your business performance and optimize your sales & B2B eCommerce marketing strategies.
In the following article, we will explain Shopify CRM’s necessity and list your recommendations on the best CRM for Shopify.
Why is Shopify CRM Necessary?
The data generated by your customers or users in your reports reveal subtle patterns of user behavior that are crucial for keeping pace with your marketing initiatives. It is one of the reasons why user data and behavior are highly valuable for all aspects of your marketing efforts and are regarded as the “Holy Grail.”
It’s not just general data that’s significant, as each individual click, viewed page, and purchased product provides valuable insights into customer behavior patterns that can be analyzed to tailor marketing activities.
This is vital as it enables businesses to create customer-centric marketing initiatives to drive greater sales.
Using a powerful CRM that integrates with the Shopify store allows for convenient access to vital data and information that can directly impact your store’s sales, revenue, and Growth. To enhance this integration, utilizing Shopify app development services can provide tailored solutions that meet specific business needs and improve overall functionality.
The challenge lies in locating an eCommerce CRM software that not only provides the required features and functionalities to enhance sales but is also designed to integrate effortlessly with Shopify stores and is easy to manage.
Benefits of Shopify CRM Integration
1. Enhanced Possibilities
Utilizing eCommerce CRM software is the optimal approach for storing and managing customers’ behaviors to be analyzed and processed. When analyzed and processed comprehensively, this data enables you to create customized marketing campaigns that enhance customer engagement and increase opportunities for cross-selling.
Any Shopify development company can leverage these possibilities to develop long-lasting stores for enhanced business opportunities.
2. Better Customer Relationships
Providing personalized recommendations is the most effective approach to improving customer engagement and retention. Studies show that more than 50% of customers prefer to buy from stores that comprehend and value their interests, fostering strong relationships and cultivating a loyal customer base.
3. More Coordination Between Team Members
The key to running a thriving eCommerce store is ensuring the entire team comprehends and adheres to customers’ preferences. By providing direct access to CRM for eCommerce systems to your team of developers, designers, marketers, and others, it’s possible to foster a collaborative environment and work together to create a successful eCommerce store.
4. Prevention of Data Duplication and Inconsistency
Shopify CRM can integrate with other systems to ensure data is synced across all platforms and prevent duplication and inconsistency. The customer’s information is only entered once, and any changes made in one system will be reflected in all other connected systems. A Shopify CRM can help eCommerce businesses avoid errors, enhance customer experience, and improve operational efficiency by ensuring that all customer data is consistent and up-to-date across all systems.
5. Data Privacy and Security
Integrating a Shopify CRM system can provide additional layers of protection for your customer’s information regarding data privacy and security. A CRM-integrated system can ensure that all customer data is stored securely and that only authorized personnel can access it.
Additionally, CRM systems can help prevent data breaches and ensure that any breaches are detected and resolved quickly. With a Shopify CRM integration, you can easily track and manage customer consent for data usage, ensuring that you comply with applicable privacy regulations.
6. Data Migration
Data migration with CRM Shopify integration refers to transferring customer and business data from one system to another when integrating a CRM system with a Shopify store.
This process can be complex, and it often requires expert knowledge to ensure that the migration is executed successfully. Hiring Shopify developers with experience in data migration can help ensure a smooth transfer of all customer data.
It involves identifying the data to be transferred, mapping the data fields to ensure they match the two systems, and then testing the migration to ensure data integrity is maintained. Smooth data migration is crucial to ensure that all customer data is accurate and up-to-date and that there is no data loss during the integration process.
7. Improvement in Efficiency and Analytics
Granting the entire team access to the CRM provides an excellent opportunity to enhance overall team efficiency. For example, suppose a user places an order via phone instead of online. In that case, the customer support team can easily update the CRM for the other, thereby significantly improving tracking and monitoring capabilities for your store.
Which is the Best CRM for Shopify?
Integrating customer relationship management (CRM) software with Shopify can provide a seamless customer experience for eCommerce store owners. With the right Shopify CRM software, you can gain a deeper understanding of purchasing behaviors, improve marketing effectiveness, and communicate with customers through various channels, such as email, social media, and phone, all from within the CRM system.
After careful evaluation, we have identified the best CRM Shopify integration options based on cost, features, ease of use, quality of support, and expert score. Below, we have listed the top Shopify-friendly CRM software platforms and their best use cases:
1. Zendesk Sell - CRM with Omnichannel Tools for Customer Service Tools
Pros
- Customer communication using CRM built-in text, phone and email options
- Detailed customer information, including purchase history, activities, and loyalty
- Reliable analytics and reporting tools
Cons
- High priced plans
- Lack of features in low-priced plans
- No free-forever plan
Price Plans
- Sell Team: $19
- Sell Growth: $49
- Sell Professional: $99
- Sell Enterprise: $150
- Free Trial: 30 days
Key Features
- Prospect list building
- Lead scoring
- Easy customer data access
- Automation of activities
- Access to relevant Shopify customer details
On our list, Zendesk Sell secured first place due to its Shopify-dedicated CRM integration application and outstanding lead and sales management functionalities. The app, named Shopify for Sell, facilitates the work of sales representatives by combining customer information from Shopify and CRM on one screen, streamlining the sales process.
The app provides access to information on orders, payment, billing, and delivery details, allowing reps to view them while browsing through deals and leads, making the service more efficient.
In addition, Zendesk Sell provides a variety of omnichannel communication features, such as an integrated phone dialing system, email, and SMS, for ongoing outreach.
These features are particularly advantageous for Shopify users who want to incorporate their eCommerce store with a CRM system that offers channels for responding to customer inquiries, fulfilling requests, or addressing complaints, while also documenting them in the CRM.
In combination with its multi-channel communication management, Zendesk Sell also provides extensive reporting features that cover various aspects. These reporting capabilities include forecasting sales, goal monitoring, campaign performance tracking, call analytics, and agent performance.
Unlike HubSpot CRM and Freshmarketer, Zendesk Sell does not have a free trial package for any plan. Additionally, the platform’s low cost tier doesn’t include lead scoring and workflow automation, which are available in Agile CRM’s free version.
2. HubSpot CRM – Best CRM for Shopify with Customized Product Workflows
Pros
- Creates multiple workflows
- Free plan with features
- Offers users a million contact allocations
Cons
- No email campaign monitoring in the free plan
- Increase to higher plans rather quickly
Pricing
- Free: Free use for unlimited users
- Starter: Starts at $45 for 2 users
- Professional: Starts at $450 for 5 users
- Enterprise: $1,200 for 10 users
Key Features
- Email marketing
- Task management
- Sales and lead prospecting
- Live chat features
- Easy Shopify integration with HubSpot CRM
By integrating with Shopify, HubSpot CRM empowers you to create personalized workflows based on your customers’ actions on your site, products, and deals. These workflows can be tailored for situations like when a visitor to your online store doesn’t complete a purchase.
You can set up abandoned cart email nurturing, product-specific re-engagement ads, and “calls to action” (CTAs) buttons in content, all aimed at driving conversions.
After integrating Shopify with HubSpot CRM, you can use eCommerce reporting in your account. These reports provide insights into engagement with customers all including key metrics like order value, top-selling products, low-performing products, and abandoned carts.
Although the HubSpot CRM and Shopify integration is beneficial in providing custom workflows and eCommerce reports for tracking orders and customer engagement, the free plan doesn’t have data-driven analytics for email marketing campaigns, which is a feature of Mailchimp.
Additionally, the higher priced plans can be costly, which may not be suitable for small businesses or startups looking to scale rapidly. For cost-effective options with various pricing plans, it’s recommended to check out Freshmarketer or Agile CRM.
3. Mailchimp – CRM for Shopify with Powerful Email Marketing Feature
Pros
- Highly functional email marketing tool
- All plans have free commerce and marketing tools
- The free plan offers support for more than 2,000 contacts using helpful customer analytics tools
Cons
- No sales management option
- Costly to scale
Pricing
- Free: Unlimited features up to 2,000 contacts
- Essential: Starts at $11
- Standard: Starts at $17
- Premium: Starts at $299
- Addons: Priced according to packages
Key Features
- Lifetime customer value
- Contact profiles
- Subject line helper
- Split testing
- One of the best CRM to use with Shopify
One of the top email marketing service tools available in the market, Mailchimp integrates seamlessly with Shopify to help you market yourself more effectively to potential customers and leads using both custom and pre-built audience segments.
This CRM integration allows you to send marketing emails based on audience segmentation, such as a subscriber welcome email, prospect deals and offers, coupons, limited offers, updates on orders, and rewards for recurring buyers.
The “Customer Journey Builder” in Mailchimp’s email marketing tool guides users to send targeted email content according to customer actions and behavior.
Making it helpful for sending reminders for cart abandonment to potential customers or bringing inactive customers back with promotional emails.
It also helps you create personalized emails based on your customer’s purchase history, including most preferred product recommendations.
Mailchimp does not provide conventional CRM features like sales pipeline and deal management tools. Furthermore, its pricing can quickly become expensive as customers, subscribers, and number of emails increase.
However, a well-executed email marketing strategy can lead to a significant return on investment, which justifies the expense.
4. Freshmarketer – Best Shopify CRM for Multi-channel Customer Engagement
Pros
- Native Shopify integration
- Visitor tracking included in all plans
- Reporting and performance tools for all paid plans
Cons
- Lacks inventory and order managing functions
- Lacks tools for transaction processing and invoicing
- Needs an upgrade to enhance storage
Pricing
- Free: 100 contacts for marketing
- Growth: Starts at $19
- Pro: Starts at $149
- Enterprise: Starts at $299
- Free Trial: 21 days
Key Features
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
- Engagement on multi-channels
- Automation
- Segmentation
- Reporting & analytics
- Native integration with Shopify
Freshmarketer is a marketing automation tool that integrates seamlessly with Shopify, enabling eCommerce stores to communicate with customers through multiple channels such as email, SMS, live chat, WhatsApp, and custom chat bots. The platform offers various features to help you enhance your marketing activities, including segmented multi-channel marketing campaigns, reminders for cart abandonment, pre-made email templates, and landing pages.
In addition, Freshmarketer can effortlessly integrate with other tools within the Freshworks system, such as Freshdesk and Freshsales. This allows businesses to improve customer tracking and lead conversion by synchronizing real-time contacts between these apps. With these integrations, bridging the void between marketing, sales, and other departments becomes easier.
Regrettably, Freshmarketer lacks a suitable order handling and payment processing tools. In contrast, HubSpot CRM provides customizable quotes and solutions for payment on all plans.
5. Metrilo – Shopify CRM for eCommerce Analytics
Pros
- A thorough eCommerce analytics function
- Supports unlimited users for each plan
- Offers email campaigns for abandoned carts
Cons
- No free plan
- No mobile application
Pricing
- Essential: $99
- Pro: $165
- Premium: $249
- Free Trial: 14 days
Key Features
- Automated production bundles
- Rich customer profiles
- Customer segmentation
- Analysis of customer retention
- Easy Shopify integration
Metrilo is a CRM designed for eCommerce that comes equipped with powerful analytics tools for monitoring and evaluating the performance of your Shopify store. Tracking marketing campaigns, engagement pain points, and sales provides a comprehensive analytical view of your business.
By integrating with Shopify, this CRM enables sellers to easily monitor different marketing areas, influencers, referrals, and coupon deals, allowing them to optimize their marketing spending and allocate budgets more effectively to channels that perform best.
Metrilo’s eCommerce platform offers robust analytics functions that comprehensively view your store’s revenue sources. The tools enable you to differentiate revenue generation from new and existing customers, leads from social media, and purchases (by country or city). The CRM also includes reports on products that give insights into how your products perform in impressions, purchases, and cart abandonment rates.
Metrilo’s pricing scheme is a significant drawback, particularly for startups and SMEs that prefer per-user subscriptions to keep costs lower, despite its unlimited user allocation feature that can be useful for larger teams. Freshmarketer is an excellent alternative to Shopify’s CRM, particularly for small businesses and startups seeking access to higher-tier plans without incurring significant expenses.
6. Agile CRM – Shopify CRM Integration for Automated Marketing
Pros
- Various marketing tools such as text, social media, email, and landing page support
- Useful CRM insights for tracking customer behavior
- 10 users plan for free
Cons
- Needs improvement in support quality
- Call dialer available only for paid plans
- Free trial unavailable
Pricing
- Free: supports up to 10 users
- Started: $9.99
- Regular: $39.99
- Enterprise: $64.99
Key Features
- Analysis of user behavior and engagement patterns
- Exit-intent pop-ups
- Task management
- Lead behavior tracking
- Easy Shopify CRM integration
Agile CRM is a CRM system that can be integrated with Shopify. It comes with comprehensive automated marketing tools to support eCommerce businesses on Shopify to increase sales and customer engagement. The system offers an intuitive pre-determined marketing campaign builder, enabling you to easily create visually attractive multi step campaigns.
The platform also facilitates scheduling automatic responders and follow-up messages based on time events or contact engagements. At the same time, the mobile-friendly feature enables you to send personalized SMS messages to leads, ensuring they stay within the SMS character limit for effective communication.
With the CRM to Shopify integration, you can generate coupons to drive sales and send surveys to gather reviews to improve your marketing performance.
For users who require comprehensive marketing automation tools, Agile CRM is the best CRM option that integrates with Shopify. However, its free option plan does not include a dialer, and has issues with the reliability of its support team.
7. Salesforce – CRM Option for Multiple Shopify Stores
Pros
- Easily syncs multiple stores using the same account
- Offers in-app tools for best customer service
- Availability of mobile app
Cons
- Suitable for advanced Shopify users
- No free plan is available
- Limited support for customers
Price
- Essential: $25
- Professional: $75
- Enterprise: $150
- Unlimited: $300
- Free Trial: only for 14 days with limited features
Key Features
- Customer support features
- Quick app builder
- Email automation
- Offers deals and opportunities
- Makes Shopify easy
Salesforce is a comprehensive CRM that provides SMEs and corporations with a centralized platform to manage their marketing, sales, and customer support. It offers advanced sales tools, reliable reporting, and integration features. To integrate your CRM with Shopify, you can download Shopify Made Easy, a free connector app available on the Salesforce AppExchange marketplace. Salesforce Marketing Cloud consultants can assist in optimizing these integrations to enhance marketing efforts across platforms.
Integrating Salesforce with Shopify through the Shopify Made Easy app allows users to easily import older Shopify data, synchronize records, and handle inventory from a single platform. Additionally, it is possible to synchronize multiple stores using a single account, allowing users to manage infinite records, inventory, products, and orders from multiple stores in one place. This can help increase productivity and streamline management for businesses that operate multiple Shopify stores.
Salesforce has some significant drawbacks, such as its pricing model and user-friendliness. Unlike Freshmarketer and HubSpot CRM, it doesn’t have a free option, and its high-priced plans may be intimidating to some users. Agile CRM might be worth considering if you’re looking for an alternative.
Shopify CRM Integration Challenges & Limitations
1. Compatibility Issues
Compatibility issues can arise when integrating a Shopify store with a CRM system, and this is because not all CRM systems are compatible with the Shopify platform. Even when a CRM system is compatible with Shopify, there may still be issues that arise due to differences in the way the two systems store and manage data. These issues include data syncing problems, duplicate data entry, and inconsistency.
Businesses may need to work with professional Shopify website development services such as ClickySoft or integration specialists to ensure that the integration is properly configured and set up to meet their specific needs.
2. Data Accuracy
One challenge of Shopify CRM integration is ensuring data accuracy. When integrating different systems, it’s important to ensure that the data transferred is accurate and up-to-date. Any discrepancies in the data can cause errors in the CRM system, leading to issues such as inaccurate reporting or incorrect customer information. Additionally, if data is missing or incomplete, it can limit the effectiveness of the CRM system, which can ultimately affect sales and revenue. Ensuring data accuracy requires careful planning and execution during the integration process and ongoing monitoring and maintenance to ensure that data remains accurate and consistent over time.
3. Integration Complexity
The complexity of integration is another challenge businesses may face when integrating Shopify with CRM software. Integration involves linking two complex systems not initially designed to work together. The differences in the structures and data formats of the two systems can cause challenges during the integration process.
Different CRM solutions have varying levels of complexity, and some may be more challenging to integrate with Shopify than others. This means that businesses need to carefully evaluate the integration requirements of their particular CRM and the compatibility with the Shopify platform before undertaking the integration.
Businesses may require customizations and configurations to ensure seamless integration between Shopify and CRM software. This can add to the complexity of the integration and require additional technical expertise to ensure a successful integration. All of these factors can make the integration process more challenging, time-consuming, and costly,
4. Integration Cost
Costing is another imitation that arises while integrating a Shopify CRM system. Depending on the CRM solution chosen, there may be significant costs involved in acquiring, implementing, and maintaining the integration. The cost may vary depending on the size of the Shopify store, the number of users, the level of customization, and the required features and functionalities. Additionally, ongoing costs may be associated with software updates, licensing, and technical support, which can further increase the overall cost of the integration. For small businesses or startups, the cost of integrating a Shopify CRM system may be prohibitive, making it difficult to justify the investment in the integration.
5. Integration Maintenance
The integration requires constant monitoring to ensure it runs correctly and the data is transferred accurately between Shopify and the CRM system. Regular updates and maintenance are required to keep the integration running optimally.
Errors and exceptions can occur during data integration. Regular monitoring is necessary to ensure that errors are detected and fixed immediately. Otherwise, the errors can lead to data inconsistencies and inaccuracies.
Sometimes, the integrated system may fail, or users may encounter issues. Providing quick support and troubleshooting services to address these issues is essential to avoid long-term negative impacts.
The integration needs to be scalable to accommodate the growing needs of the business. This means the integration needs to be flexible enough to adapt to changes in the business model, including Growth and expansion.
6. Security & Privacy
Security and privacy are major concerns when integrating CRM with Shopify, especially when storing and managing sensitive customer data. Data breaches can significantly impact both the customers and the business, including loss of trust, reputation, and financial damages.
It is important to choose a reliable CRM system that provides robust security features, such as data encryption, access control, and audit logs, to ensure the security and privacy of customer data. The CRM system should also comply with industry standards and regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).
Final Word
Integrating your Shopify store with a CRM system allows you to analyze and store your customers data and their behavior for a data-driven foundation to tailor your marketing campaigns. This can help you make your marketing campaigns more effective. By using a CRM system, you can gain access to data and insights on your customers needs.
Our top pick for the most anticipated Shopify-integrated CRM for eCommerce businesses is Zendesk Sell, with the best feature availability. It boasts a seamless Shopify CRM integration, robust lead and sales management, and reporting tools. In addition, it offers omni channel communication features, including dialer, email, and SMS plans. Plus, it has affordable pricing plans, including free options.
