Along with this, a broader shift from email to conversational commerce is driving the need for new CRM tools and processes, which are crucial to driving growth for your Shopify business.

As a leading Shopify agency in Hong Kong, Wave Commerce has helped many clients implement and integrate Shopify CRM and customer loyalty solutions to help Shopify businesses thrive. Here are some of the common questions, insights, and best practices for implementing a Shopify CRM or CRM loyalty program based on our decades of experience.

What is a CRM and does Shopify offer a pre-built Shopify CRM?

We find that CRM means different things to different clients and across industries! 

Historically, CRM systems were the domain, or seen to be, of B2B salespeople to store contacts and leads. Sales-focused CRM systems were popular, as well as Excel sheets, ultimately leading many CRM systems to be “B2B” focused and not fit for retail and ecommerce purposes.

For retail businesses, they often think of “CRM” as synonymous with their membership and rewards program. This is because traditionally for retailers the membership program was the sole source of building customer profiles, and manually typing in-store purchases onto the shopper profiles. Digital engagement, such as nurturing campaigns, segmentation, data analysis, or data verification was often an afterthought. Often resulting in bulky, inaccurate, and largely useless databases. 

For online businesses, Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) businesses, or digitally savvy marketers, CRM is often seen as their email marketing database. It’s pretty straightforward and simple to store your contact lists straight on your email marketing platform, creating what is essentially a lightweight CRM.

However, around 10 years ago, when online commerce and social commerce became mainstream, consumers in general became “multi-channel” shoppers (and now omnichannel). This created a lot of issues with traditional retail loyalty programs and email marketing databases. Online retailers struggled to collect enough data about customers if they didn't log in to an account as sales records weren't linked to a CRM profile (guest checkout). Customers buy on multiple channels which created multiple accounts of the same customer, and so forth. 

Additionally, sometimes online customers would buy gifts for friends and family, which would override their address and personal details on their CRM profile, essentially replacing a loyal customers info in to a non-customer’s. This was particularly true for B2B-focused CRM systems, like Hubspot, which are not geared for retail. Since then, retail-focused CRM systems did pop up, but were designed more for large enterprise retailers, with ERP systems, and multi-million dollar retail technology stacks. Smaller retailers mostly didn’t have access to such CRM systems or ecommerce platforms without hiring developers to build everything from scratch including CRM.

Enter Shopify! Over the past decade, Shopify has rapidly grown, supporting millions of businesses with an easy-to-use platform and ease of access to international markets. Shopify is a great platform for customer engagement, and while it does not natively offer a traditionally robust out-of-the-box CRM, it has fantastic features for managing customer orders and transactions with a lightweight customer profile system. In Hong Kong, where we are based, we’re certainly seeing increasing adoption of Shopify as the commerce platform of choice.

One of the key pillars of Shopify’s growth, and where it ultimately wins with its CRM offerings, is through Shopify’s open ecosystem of apps and partners. The Shopify ecosystem is a suite of lightly integrated third-party solutions for marketing automation, customer support, chat and messaging systems, loyalty program engines, and more that make it easy to create a robust CRM suite of capabilities with Shopify as the center of the CRM tech stack. The Shopify ecosystem allows brands to customize their customer experience and storefront to suit their needs, while ensuring everything communicates with Shopify. Shopify’s ecosystem has become so important, that new solutions and innovations for ecommerce and retail typically integrate with Shopify first as a go-to-market strategy. Thus enabling Shopify merchants, no matter how big or small in scale, to be at the forefront of customer experience and technology innovations.

How do I build an effective (“best practices”) retail CRM or CRM loyalty program system into my Shopify business?

The trend for best practices and customer experience is to move further towards offering true omnichannel CRM integration and customer engagement for more personalized and elevated customer experiences.

When building an effective CRM and CRM loyalty program, it’s important to consider the following:

• Sales channel customer unification - it’s unfortunate that we continue to see many businesses deliver underwhelming customer experiences because of the inability to unify online and offline touchpoints. Many businesses to this day have customer databases and CRM full of inactive or inaccurate customer data, and customers with multiple profiles. Some brands even have different loyalty and rewards programs for online customers vs offline retail customers due to choosing the wrong CRM or marketing tools. The choice may have been right at the time, but the business has changed, and customer expectations have evolved, but the business has been too slow to update its solutions and technology.
  • For example, if a business’ rewards program is different between online stores vs. retail stores vs. buying from a third-party marketplace (eg. Amazon or HKTV Mall), are we incentivizing the customer to buy from their most preferred channel all the time, as opposed to thinking about maximizing the customer’s engagement with the brand across all channels?
• What sales channels do you offer - to maximize your Shopify CRM, start with a plan and the systems in place to unify customers across channels, for example, customers that:some text
  • Shop in-store
  • Shop online
  • Buy from a marketplace/reseller
  • And drive them back into your Shopify DTC experience for a unified customer engagement

Best practices for Shopify CRM and customer loyalty experiences also need to be planned based on your product verticals. Here are some examples based on key product verticals using Shopify:

• Luxury - emphasis on VIP tiers, lifetime value and a reward experience geared around pampering your VIPs (e.g., VIP tiers to unlock exclusive access, free gifts, etc)
• Multi-brand sellers - strong point earning incentive and rewards model to motivate your customers to shop with you as opposed to other retailers; use reward scheme to promote new products, brands and cross-selling
• FMCG or multichannel brands - allow customers to earn points and rewards for purchases made outside of Shopify (e.g., partner retailers, marketplaces, etc); build first party data and membership registration to grow DTC engagement and sales
• Brick-and-mortar retailing - create a compelling single customer profile allowing customers to earn points for online and offline purchases, all rolled into a single, easy to use loyalty program

Learn more about how to build a Shopify loyalty program in our blog here.

What is OMNI Loyalty and how can it help grow my Shopify CRM and customer loyalty, retention and sales?

OMNI Loyalty is a Shopify loyalty program app that centralizes your Shopify customer accounts and order history, with customer data from arketing tools, and offline POS customer data etc into one unified customer profile. 

As a loyalty and rewards program, OMNI Loyalty is designed to grow omnichannel customer engagement and brand loyalty, and can be used as a lightweight Shopify CRM for agile ecommerce merchants and retailers!

For large enterprises, OMNI Loyalty also integrates with ERP and enterprise CRM systems, like Oracle Netsuite.

Why do brands like New Era, Logitech, Pretti5, and Nestlé choose OMNI to power their member database and loyalty program?

• Designed to drive sales, rather than a “just points” experience
• VIP tiers, and VIP discounts automatically applied at cart
• Premium-designed customer rewards wallet
• 50+ ways to reward your customers, including;
  • Pre-ordering
  • Welcome gifts, birthday gifts
  • 1st purchase offer, winback rewards
  • Tier-based and campaign-based rewards
• Works with top Shopify apps like Klaviyo, Loox, JudgeMe, Shopify Flow, Shopify Inbox, Gorgias
• Seamless UIUX - embedded in the customer’s “My Account” page, cart widget, points, widget, let loyalty display across your site!
• Supports multi-languages including English, simplified and traditional Chinese language text as well as multi-currency, and Shopify POS!
• Integrate with leading WhatsApp solution providers to help boost customer engagement and loyalty through personalized and context-driven marketing flows on your customer’s preferred messaging app

Check out our OMNI Loyalty Shopify app today and book a call to talk about using DTSPP to fund your new OMNI loyalty program!

Besides membership and loyalty, what else needs to be considered as part of the well-built Shopify CRM integration tech stack?

For modern Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) businesses, customer loyalty and rewards is only a slice of the entire customer relationship management experience that can be used to better engage customers and grow lifetime value. 

At Wave Commerce, when we help clients construct a full CRM integration strategy, including the technology stack and the business processes, we like to think of your CRM program in terms of the “managing the full customer experience lifecycle”.

As a brand, if you think about all the aspects by which your customer can “interact” or “experience” your brand, that’s where you want to make sure you have systems set up in place to carefully unify an manage each of the customer interaction points. The systems we would suggest to setup and unify customer profiles would include:

• Customer support (such as chat-based, ticketing systems, or helpdesk software):
  • Always make sure this is a crucial integration with your Shopify CRM tech stack, so that customer enquiries, feedback, complaints, order info etc can be neatly centralized with your other customer data
  • This information helps you to know more about your customers, and will also help derive excellent data for product/inventory roadmaps, product recommendation/personalization software, and business analytics
• Marketing automation systems (email, chat, mobile/sms):
  • In order to make marketing and messaging as personalized as possible, your marketing automation systems must integrate with your Shopify CRM strategy. This helps you to learn what your customers are interested in (such as open/cick-through rates for different deals/products), and provides more data for improving customer segmentation, which ultimately improves personalization
• Customer return portals and post purchase experience management:
  • Integrating your returns and exchange portal into your Shopify CRM strategy is a good option to track and segment which customers are returning, what they are resturning, and leverage this data for your inventory management, or to flag abusers of the system
• Commerce site personalization tools (e.g., wishlists, quizzes, surveys, reviews):
  • As mentioned above, personalization and recommendations are crucial to growing sales and personalized customer experiences. Integrating all your tools seamlessly with your Shopify CRM program will make on-site personalization highly effective and more relevant. Wishlists, quizzes and surveys are amazing tools for learning more about your customers and for your business planning. Make sure the data is collected and spread evenly to feed your strategy!
• Word-of-mouth marketing / referral engines:
  • Word of mouth and referral marketing are common tools for attracting new customers. Ensuring these tools are integrated with your Shopify CRM program will help make sure these new leads and potential clients are not lost, and that can you can engage or re-engage them effectively
• Chat messaging systems (e.g., WhatsApp, etc):
  • We often see many businesses list their WhatsApp or other chat/messaging contact information on their site, but it does not feed into their Shopify CRM or helpdesk/ticketing system etc. This results in lots of lost customer data and upsell opportunities. With Shopify apps like OMNI Loyalty, you can sign customers up directly via WhatsApp into your loyalty program, so integrating your chat apps is key to building a cohesive experience for your customers
• Customer Data Platforms (CDPs):
  • Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are used by larger brands to centralize customer data between systems and provide high-quality analysis and reporting, and must be integrated with your Shopify CRM 
• Mobile app (if you have one):
  • For brands with a mobile app, they are a great source of customer data and a key touchpoint with your brand for customer support, reviews etc. We often see brands with mobile apps that are completely standalone from their core Shopify CRM tech stack, which creates lots of opportunities. Customers expect a seamless omnichannel experience, so having a mobile app separate from your standard customer experience creates a negative interaction

OMNI Loyalty can help you integrate with each of the varying customer engagement solutions, like those listed above, to build a holistic Shopify CRM loyalty program to deliver winning customer experiences!

Book a demo today for a tailored consultation. 

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Contact us for a bespoke consultation on Shopify CRM!