With recent advancements in technology, it is now evident that the world has moved on to a new era – the digital era. Along with this new era comes a new trend which is online shopping. With online shopping, buyers can now easily acquire the products they desire without stress or necessarily having to visit any store. This is primarily is the definition of e-commerce.
According to Wikipedia, E-commerce is a transaction of buying and selling online. Electronic commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic fund transfer, supply chain management, internet marketing, electronic data interchange (EDI), and automated data collection systems.
Data from the U.S. Commerce Department reveals that e-commerce has seen a steady increase in sales since 2009 and a 14.6% growth in sales in 2015. This shows the growth and importance of e-commerce sales over the year. Unsurprisingly, many brands, businesses, and companies that had nothing to do with e-commerce before are now displaying their products online and also making transactions online as well.
There are several e-commerce platforms out there, but one that is fast gaining momentum and becoming more popular among all categories of businesses is Shopify. Shopify allows enterprises to easily create a store online to display and sell their products in a short period. The store is hosted in the cloud, and business owners do not need to have any programming knowledge or skills to own one.
E-commerce businesses strike a balance between their online store and their awareness activities by setting up cross-selling opportunities, email campaigns and trying to find a solution to a frequent and severe problem in the e-commerce world which is getting customers back to their shopping carts that they’ve abandoned. To do this effectively, a standard tool that most e-commerce businesses use is a marketing automation platform.
With e-commerce platforms, business owners are provided with a vast amount of customer data. This eventually becomes a problem because the data is too large and it takes a lot of effort and time to effectively process it. Hence, the need for an automation platform.
When it comes to marketing automation, HubSpot is the most widely preferred CRM choice for most e-commerce businesses. As it is a known fact that being able to react to events that occur in the market quickly is very important for a company to be successful. With HubSpot, business owners are provided with the time they need to respond to events happening in the market quickly. This is so because they can automate several digital marketing procedures with the use of HubSpot.
As business owners, whatever the type of e-commerce platform you use, there are some advantages of integrating with HubSpot CRM and these benefits are so good that you cannot afford to overlook them.
Highly efficient reporting
When you integrate and combine your e-commerce platform and your HubSpot CRM, you get the chance to accurately determine the amount of revenue you are getting from each platform. Under your Reports; Sources section, you are provided with an automatic, comprehensive, closed-loop reporting that organize, calculate and filter your customers.
In other words, you will get to see the different customers that came in through each channel, be it a referral, social media, direct or organic amongst others. This provides you the chance to study and understand what is most effective for your business and where the following month’s budget for marketing should be used.
Marketing and sales cooperation
As a business owner, bringing your marketing team and your sales team in line and turning their efforts towards one direction is of paramount importance. When you combine your e-commerce platform with your HubSpot Platform, you will get the chance to see all of your sales data in your HubSpot CRM. This will surely come in handy while making marketing decisions.
For instance, in a particular product category, you notice a sales level that is above average, cross-selling similar items of the product category to customers who are interested through campaigns and incentive offers might prove to be a very reasonable step to take.
Information from your e-commerce store that reveals when each customer buys a product, why he bought the product and what product he bought can be seen in HubSpot, so getting the knowledge of customers that are interested in the particular product group is quite easy as you can easily generate what you need.
Furthermore, HubSpot gives you the chance to categorize your customer base, based on some criteria that you can choose yourself. By creating HubSpot smart lists, setting the requirements and the software will add or eject users that fall under the smart list.
Recover Abandoned Shopping Carts
Shopping cart abandonment is severe problems and a genuine source of revenue loss for e-commerce businesses. According to Baymard Institute, the rate of shopping cart abandonment is 68%. Certainly, every e-commerce business owner knows that it is not quite possible to bring this rate down to zero. However, a small increase, as tiny as 0.5% can lead to generating thousands of dollar for annual revenue. Business owners need not worry about achieving this, as it can be easily done with the effective features of HubSpot and the data gotten from your e-commerce store.
Furthermore, a plus-feature of HubSpot’s smart lists is that HubSpot allows you to create automated email workflows that will be sent to every one of your customers. This email is based on the criteria that you have chosen before for the smart lists. In a matter of seconds, you’ll be able to spot it when a customer abandons his shopping cart which is possible due to integrating your e-commerce platform and HubSpot platform.
Conclusion
As earlier said, the world has moved into a new era where every business cannot afford not to be digital. Hence, all companies must have an e-commerce platform in place. As a business owner that is looking to generate more revenue and grow his business, integrating an automated marketing platform with his e-commerce platform is a must-do. Beyond doubts, HubSpot has been proven to be the best-automated marketing software out there. Integrate your HubSpot platform with your e-commerce platform and take your business to a whole new level.