E-commerce in particular is under enormous pressure in Switzerland: a small market, heterogeneous customer segments and price competition. That's why, alongside the e-commerce front end, the CRM system carries great importance. For smaller providers especially, it's important that the technical interfaces are as easy to implement as possible and the costs as low as possible. CRM and e-commerce need to be thought of together.
In collaboration with CustomersX®, a web shop based on WooCommerce was built alongside the existing personal selling. Even though companies often rely on other shop systems, WooCommerce offers one key advantage: for most CRM systems, plugins are available that enable automatic integration. This helps keep the costs of the interface, and of maintenance, as low as possible. Through this technical implementation, our client was able to save significant costs and, on the basis of ActiveCampaign, focus on the value-adding marketing automations. Data quality is very high, individual segments can be addressed in a targeted way, and with further powerful plugins, numerous price-differentiation options could be implemented easily.
Customer Value-based Decision Making
Customer-centric Transformation
Co-Creation
Customer Management
Our client launched new offerings to be sold via e-commerce. It was important that the technical implementation be as simple and inexpensive as possible to build and maintain. WooCommerce in combination with WordPress was chosen as the e-commerce platform, because the costs are comparatively low and deep integration with the existing CRM system is possible.
Based on our DTC approach, we developed a project approach to implement the web shop and its integration with the existing CRM system as agilely and cost-effectively as possible. Alongside an attractive front end, the project focused on deep integration into the CRM system and value-adding marketing automations.
As a first step
our UX/CX team created a prototype for the web shop. An existing template from the WooCommerce world was then selected to ensure high speed and SEO appeal. The individual pages were built over several sprints. It turned out that involving our sales experts was an advantage, because besides the visual design of the pages, the customer journey also had to be ensured from a sales perspective.
As a second step
the automations for the various activities in the web shop were implemented, combined with different forms of price differentiation. Here, too, WooCommerce offers numerous plugins that enable price differentiation of many kinds.
Alongside a comprehensive view of each customer's purchasing activity, the existing CRM system ActiveCampaign offers numerous automation triggers. After a purchase, an abandoned cart and so on, numerous automations could be set up that significantly increase web-shop revenue. Several segmentations could also be established that, derived from existing CRM data, made it possible to address each customer even more individually. The connection between WooCommerce and ActiveCampaign was implemented via an existing plugin and required no resources to build or maintain.
In summary
CRM and e-commerce need to be thought of together. For small and medium-sized companies in particular, solutions are often used that require a lot of manual effort for data integration. This leads to considerable extra work and constant manual adjustment over time. Many companies — especially B2B companies that want to establish e-commerce alongside existing personal selling — should consider WooCommerce as a valuable alternative.
*We take confidentiality towards our clients seriously. The name has been changed; the results are real.
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