Your CRM action plan to take your ecommerce store to the next level [checklist included]

Launching an ecommerce store? You have everything ready, your products, your website, your design - even your analytics? Yupee !

But how about your CRM ?

How do you plan to know your future leads and customers ?

Usually, when your packed with a ecommerce solution (let's say, Shopify, Woocommerce, Prestashop - or another), it comes up with "CRM capabilities" - usually, that's just a customers/leads list : First name, Last name, email & shipping adress. You could also get some useful data, like the number of orders and the total amount ordered through your store.

Add to that some data your emailing software is giving you. Some data that is not even connected with your store.

And... that's it.

While there's so much more to know - and to do.

In this article, we'll review a simple go-to plan you can start with today to extend your CRM capabilities. Let's dive in!

How much do you want to know about your customers

Take some time to review what you need to know about your customers.

Usually, for our clients, our basic go-to is in 3 elements:

• Lifestyle & personal data, to qualifiy qualitatively our customer base. For instance, for some DTC stores, we usually create a quizz at some point in the funnel (to get a discount, a reward, whatever), where we ask lifestyle questions about your audience.
  ⇒ You want to keep this data in this CRM - also keep the fact that this lead/customer answered this quizz

• Behaviour data, to qualifiy the customer behaviour on our acquisition channels. The simplest form of these datas are:
  ⇒ Created At : date of the creation of the lead on your website
  ⇒ Last seen at : date of the last connection of the lead on your website
  ⇒ # visits / # visits last 30 days : amount of visits by the lead,
  ⇒ # emails sent / # emails open / #email clics
  ⇒ Behaviour score

• Shopping data, to qualify the customer based on its shopping intent. For instance, what we find to most useful to run analysis and qualify buying intent are:
  ⇒ # of orders / # amount / # average basket
  ⇒ first order date / last order date (with these five first datapoints recorded, you're already able to run a basic RFM analysis!)
  ⇒ # product visits / lead source, etc.
  ⇒ NPS Score

Take some time to review your business and what kind of data you think will suit you the best. While we provided some examples in the lists before, we'll now build it for real!

Build a CRM system to know the customers of your ecommerce shop (Shopify, WooCommerce - with Autopilot, Mailchimp, etc.)

For this example, we'll review a Shopify shop (but that would work the exact same way with a WooCommerce, Magento or Prestashop), coupled with Autopilot as our emailing program that will support our CRM.

I'll also show the demonstration with Mailchimp - to show that it can work (with some differences) with Klavyio, Sendinblue, ActveCampaign, CampaignMonitor, etc.

The shopping structure

As many ecommerce softwares, Shopify works with two main different objects for us here : Customers and Orders - both are linked, but the main object we will use is Customers.

Our sole objective is to make sure we can gather some data from the orders into our CRM, to get the basic figures of orders, that are essential for your business.

The personal data we want to use from Customer are : First Name/Last Name/Email adress. Add here any more informations you can get (shipping adresses, phone number, etc.). Usually, the email adress is the unique key identifier we'll use for each customer.

The shopping data we want to use from Orders are: # orders/$ spent amout/order date. Add here any global customer data your ecom system is providing : # total of orders/ $ total spent/first order date/average basket, etc.

The CRM structure

Now that we gathered the data from our ecommerce sotfware (ie. the "Shopping data"),  time to have a look at where we keep our customer data. For ecommerce compagnies, that is usually the email marketing software.

Using the email adress key, your email marketing software (Mailchimp, Autopilot, ActiveCampaign, Klavyio, etc. : you name it) have aggregated data on your customers, different that the shopping data :

• of emails sent,
• % open rate,
• % click rate,
• subscription date,
• Opt-in status & method.

That's the basic data you have, only relative to emails.

For many marketing tools, you'll also have the ability to identify and collect more data about online visitors - and if they're identified, then collect data about their navigation.

For instance, using Autopilot as a CRM  for your eshop - https://www.autopilothq.com/

Autopilot gives you the ability to add a Javascript snippet on your website that will identify people on your website, and add consecutive CRM updates following any action : update en engagement score, add people on lists, etc.

Autopilot gives some examples on their website.

For instance, for each email sent, update the last email sent date and the amount of emails sent :

For opened emails, same work, where you update the last email opened date, the amount of emails opened during the last 90 days (and using the Delay Action, you minus the amount after 90 days) and an "Current Engagement Score" rolling on 60 days :

Last - but not least - you can also track the visitors on the website!

The example Autopilot provides is useful to have a more precise "Current Engagement Score" variable, because you're taking into account the visits on the website.

But for a ecommerce website, you can take this to the next level, using for example tags or categories. For example:

• Increment a Score Field per Product Categories, based on Products visits, which will give you a Category Interest per Customer. It's super useful to use in your email campaigns, because you have the precise interest of everyone.
• If you have a limited set of products, increment a Score Field per Product : you'll know precisely how many times did someone watched a product. You can then target people with specific products and promotions.

Use Sendinblue as a CRM for your ecommerce store

On Sendinblue, you can do the same thing, using a "Tracking Journey". The emails tracking journeys are the same, and you can even do the Tracking Website activity part to collect more data in your CRM.

Start with "Website activity" > "Page Visit" :

Select the kind of page that interest you - for instance, webpage with a URL that contains "shirt" :

We can then add the person in a specific "Shirt" list, add 1 to its "Shirt Interest" score, and more.

Enjoy the results of your CRM data collection

Repeat this step for your main categories and let data collection do its work for a few weeks: you'll have segmented data about your subscribers! You can use this new powers to send targeted emails and improve your conversion rates right away!

How to link them both

Main CRM tools have native integrations with ecommerce systems. Prestashop works well with Sendinblue, Klavyio works well with Shopify, etc. They all have their pros and cons and they might not be all suited for you : send me a message if you have a question, I'd be glad to help.

If you don't have a live integration, your best bet is to use a software like Zapier or Integromat to link them both and have all your data living inside your CRM system.

My usual go-to software is Zapier. I will share here a few examples of classic Zaps I use for this case.

Select the "New Paid Order" trigger (this could be Shopify, WooCommerce, Prestashop or others, it works pretty much the same way):

Then update your CRM system. Depending on your CRM and field structure, this might be different: adapt the zap according  to your need, using the Shopping data that your ecommerce software is sending to Zapier.

For example, Shopify is sending the following data to Zapier, that we want to add in your CRM:

• email
• first_name
• Shopify id
• last_name
• orders_count
• phone
• total_spent
• referring_site
• Country/Adress

And we also have the following data to use:

• When the zapier triggers, that the date of the last order,
• If it's a new customer, it's also the date of the first order.

Now, take your store to the next level

The useful CRM data you can track

Along the years, I've seen many use cases and have developed a list of data that you can include in your CRM and use both for your segmentation and in your automations:

• email
• first name
• last name
• birthdate
• postal code
• lead source (Campaign identified when we got the email for the first time)
• signup-date (Date when we got the email for the first time)
• last-visit (Last visit on the website)
• last-activity (visit on the website, or open an email)
• email-clics(# of clics in emails)
• email-clics-30-days( # of clics in emails during the last 30 days)
• email-sent (# of emails sent)
• email-sent-30-days (# of emails sent during the last 30 days)
• email-open (# of emails open)
• email-open-30-days (# of emails open during the last 30 days)
• visits (# of visits)
• visits-30-days (# of visits during the last 30 days)
• product-visits (# of product visits)
• product-visits-30-days (# of product visits during the last 30 days)
• engagement-score (that's a calculation - could be for example visits+email-open2+email-clics4+product-visits*4)
• engagement-score-30-days (the same, but on 30 days)
• checkout-id (Lost checkout id)
• checkout-id-date (last lost checkout date)
• last-order-date (Last order date)
• orders-count (# of orders made)
• total-spent (total value of orders made)
• nps (NPS value /5)

The segmentations you need and the CRM lists you can create:

Based on the data collection and the data CRM you're now tracking, you can create the following lists:

• Welcome Journey: People who signed up less than 15 days ago
• Lost Checkout Journey: People who had a lost checkout within 2 hours
• Customers: People with at least 1 order
• Loyal Customers: People with at least 2 orders
• High-Value Customers: People with at least more than 1.5* the average basket
• High Potential Leads: People with 0 order and >2 product visits within 30 days
• Churned Customers: People with last order since more than 3 months
• Slipping Away Leads: People with last activity since more than 2 months
• Potential Re-Order Customers: People with 1 order for more than 30 days and >1 product visits within 30 days
• Recent Customers: People with order made less than 10 days ago
• Fans: People with at least 1 order + engagement score within op 10%
• B2B: People who visited your B2B page

The automations you can put in place with your associated objectives:

You have the data, you have the list. Now, you can create the following journeys to take your store to the next level:

• Lost Checkout Journey (to Sell More Stuff): Serie of 3 touchpoints (emais/SMS) when a cart is abandoned

The Perfect Email Journey to get back +25% of your lost checkouts

They're lost opportunities, and generally people who would buy your product, but stopped right before the end. Opportunities that you generated for your business, either organically by putting content out there, or via paid media - and you already paid $$ for it.

I'm sharing here a proven tactic that drive results to get back at least 25% of your lost checkouts, while the e-commerce average is around 8%.

• Welcome Journey (to Connect): Serie of 3 touchpoints (emails/SMS) within 8 days, when someone signs up
• Score Journey (to Gather information): Count each visit/open/clic on the website or emails within the score of a lead
• Post First Purchase Journey (to Bring People Back): Serie of 2+1 touchpoints (emails/SMS) after the first purchase is made & review request
• Post Purchase Journey (for Customer Loyalty): Serie of 2 touchpoints (emails/SMS) after the first purchase is made & review request
• Re-order Journey (to Sell More Stuff): Serie of 2 touchpoints after someone enters the Re-Order list
• Browse abandonment (to Sell More Stuff) Email when someone browse a product page - without order
• Re-Engagement Journey (to Bring People Back): Engagement 30 days fall to 0 - while overall Engagement is high (you have to determine, with experience, this level of engagement)
• Milestones (to Connect): Example: One Year Together
• Referral / Ambassador (to Sell More Stuff): For Highest engaged leads

Your CRM checklist, with lists, automations & data collection

The checklist is accessible here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-zSMx_nvKNnQcSLa_nixzLaWn3M80vcXrtCLwTCdALQ/edit?usp=sharing

It's locked by default - to use it, copy in into your drive to make the changes in the blank cells.