The D2C e-commerce industry is a behemoth of its own and at the rate that it is booming, it is projected to hit $175 billion1 by next year. Riding this wave of opportunity are millions of emerging businesses and established brands – the thread that ties them together are e-commerce platforms like Shopify that powers their online stores.
With this digital-first retail industry growing at a rapid pace, the competition has also sky-rocketed beyond one’s imagination. Online stores are popping up daily, with an estimated 12–24 million e-commerce2 sites across the globe. To survive and thrive today, D2C e-commerce brands need an approach and strategy that’s stronger, bolder, and faster – one that makes getting direct with customers simple, yet effective.
Before we jump into why Shopify store owners need a unified multichannel, conversational marketing tool such as the Freshworks CRM and how can they leverage it to scale their sales and support, let’s take a look at key factors that have shaped the D2C market so far in 2022.
From trends and troubles to triumphs and more
“Consumers’ expanded roles make them highly valuable stakeholders in an extended brand ecosystem.”
– From me to we: The rise of the purpose-led brand | Accenture Strategy3
It’s no doubt that customer expectations are constantly evolving, but truly understanding the voice of the customer takes center stage. For a Shopify digital agency partner such as yourself, this means knowing your Shopify merchants inside out and equipping them with the right tech stack and integrations to offer better experiences and foster deeper, long-term relationships with their customers.
According to Shopify’s Future of Ecommerce Report 20224, competition is the biggest obstacle to achieving growth in 2022. The rising customer acquisition and retention costs make it all the more difficult. The key to rising above the game is to differentiate and diversify with a focus on fostering long-term relationships with customers, investing in exceptional CX across all touchpoints of the journey that goes beyond purchase, and building a community that promotes customer loyalty and retention as well as lifetime value.
Another emerging trend in the world of e-commerce is the migration to social media platforms, be it for brand marketing, customer support, or shoppable advertising. It has opened up another avenue for merchants to authentically engage with their customers, thereby offering an opportunity to reimagine consumer experience.
The technology landscape for a Shopify storefront can be overwhelming, to say the least. To ensure a seamless customer experience, they employ multiple tools that make up their tech stack, including store operation and analytics, inventory management, product search and discovery, POS financing, marketing automation, last-mile fulfillment with 3PL providers, last-mile experience, bots, caller, and chats amongst so many others.
But the biggest struggle these storefronts face is having all these tools working together in harmony. Here’s how it leads you down the rabbit hole of poor customer experience.
- Customer information gap: A disconnected tech stack leads to data in silos and a lack of unified customer views that are required to anticipate needs
- Fragmented engagement: Multiple communication tools that don’t connect causes customer experience across channels to be fragmented
- Teams slowing down: Juggling many tools disempowers teams from efficiently engaging with customers and providing better support
- Poor personalization: Inability to leverage data about customer behavior and engage in personalized campaigns
This brings us to the burning question – what is the key to e-commerce success and how can you help Shopify storefronts achieve it?
The answer is to KNOW YOUR CUSTOMERS!
Simple right? But we encourage you to read between the lines. To begin with, having a single stack to manage the entire customer journey is highly recommended. And let’s quickly take you through how Freshworks CRM for e-commerce helps businesses segment their audience, automate and personalize messages, and delight customers with proactive support, all in one solution.
- Drive engagement and revenue across multiple channels
- Bridge the context gap with a 360° customer view
- Build relationships at scale with conversational marketing and support
- Integrate seamlessly with e-commerce platforms like Shopify
Freshmarketer’s state-of-art integration with Shopify helps provide its millions of merchants with a unified CRM that enables live conversational support, marketing and sales where and when consumers want to buy online.
“At the core of Shopify’s Ecosystem is our community of developers who give merchants access to critical commerce technology. We’re happy to welcome Freshworks to the Shopify App Store, bringing its insight and experience in customer engagement and conversational marketing to Shopify’s millions of merchants.” – Fatima Yusuf, Director of Commercial at Shopify
How can you help Shopify store owners easily set up and scale their business with Freshmarketer
1. Shopify Playbooks
With pre-built customer journeys, the Shopify storefront owners can choose from 20+ Shopify playbooks to create personalized automated campaigns at scale and in minutes to increase customer engagement across channels. These playbooks are customized for Shopify to recover abandoned carts, give shipping updates, send product catalogs, and more.
And if needed, they can even build on top of the existing templates and configure complex marketing journeys that cover every aspect of your customer interaction, and even engage with their customers 1:1 and at scale via email, SMS, WhatsApp, and live chat.
2. Segmentation
To better upsell and cross-sell, the Freshmarketer for Shopify integration enables the storefront owners to create dynamic segments of buyers based on their interaction with their brand—who they are and what they like, — to better personalize their marketing strategy and campaigns.
And with Freshmarketer’s pre-defined segments created exclusively for Shopify storefronts to tailor experiences at scale, the storefront owners can create events like last order date, average order value, abandoned cart value, and more to personalize customer outreach.
3. Chatbot Templates for E-commerce
The Shopify merchants can use intelligent chatbots powered by AI to understand the intent and send contextual answers to their customer queries. Leveraging the power of these custom bots on their websites to greet visitors and return customers, offer product recommendations, promote offers, prevent cart abandonments, upsell, and cross-sell will amplify delightful customer experiences.
Additionally, these custom bots also mean they can easily target anonymous visitors (first-time and revisiting) to the storefront with chat campaigns. These chat messages can be used on websites to offer discounts and convert them into customers.
Besides the custom bots, Freshmarketer also offers templates for canned responses, solution articles, and bot templates created specifically for e-commerce scenarios to effectively reduce onboarding time.
4. Dashboard and Reporting
With Freshmarketer, the marketing dashboard works straight out of the box and tracks key metrics from Shopify such as selling volume, average order value, top items sold, campaign performance, and more. And monitoring these important metrics will give a clear picture of the revenue breakdown.
The Freshmarketer for Shopify integration empowers the Shopify storefront owners to gain insights about their business and make smarter decisions by leveraging clear data.
Why Deyga Organics chose Freshworks CRM for Shopify
A skincare and cosmetic brand from India, Deyga Organics makes vegan and cruelty-free skincare products with a digital storefront hosted on the Shopify platform. As a rising star in the space of D2C e-commerce, they started facing good yet grueling growing pains. This included difficulty in personalizing campaigns, an insufficient context for customer conversations, and working with multiple tools/platforms which cumulatively resulted in fragmented customer experiences.
In order to turn the table in their favor, they brought in the Freshworks CRM integrations for Shopify which includes Freshmarketer and Freshdesk Messaging. Here are the top 3 ways that the implementation of these robust integrations changed things for the better:
- Ability to send hyper-targeted, personalized campaigns via email, WhatsApp, web chat, and SMS from one tool
- Unified agent inbox with Shopify order context, chatbot support to automate queries
- All-in-one marketing and support solution (replacing 3 tools)
Conclusion
As Shopify resellers and consultants, we hope you have gotten a taste of how Shopify store owners can use the Freshmarketer for Shopify integration to quickly set up and scale their business with a customized, easy-to-use CRM. But what’s in it for you as a Shopify digital agency partner? By becoming a Freshworks affiliate partner you can earn 20% for the first full year of the customer lifecycle for every customer referral.
That’s right! Deliver more value to your Shopify customers as a Freshworks affiliate partner and proudly promote Freshworks products with Shopify integrations used by over 50,000 companies across the globe that will exceed your customer expectations.
Sign up to become an affiliate partner
Source:
1. US D2C e-commerce sales, 2016 – 2023, e-marketer and Insider Intelligence
2. How many online stores are there, Digital In The Round
3. From me to we: The rise of the purpose-led brand | Accenture Strategy
4. Shopify’s Future of Ecommerce Report 2022
Thanks to Siddharthan JJ, my co-author on this blog.
