Building Strong Customer Relationships Is Paramount for Sales — Here's How to Start Doing That

15 min read

Your customers are the heartbeat of your business. They represent your sales growth, brand reputation, and the core of your entrepreneurial dreams. But how well do you really know them?

In a world where relationships go beyond transactions, fostering strong customer relationships should be at the top of any business owner’s to-do list. This is not just about personalization to boost your marketing strategies; it’s about creating a community around your business, generating loyalty, and, ultimately, driving sales.

In this article, we will discuss why managing customer relationships is paramount for sales and how you can start doing that today with an easy-to-use and robust tool.

Why Customer Relationships Are Vital for Sales

We’ve all heard the saying, “A happy customer is a loyal customer.” But the truth behind this statement goes much deeper than just satisfying your clients. Here are some key reasons why building strong customer relationships is crucial for driving sales:

Customer retention: Repeat customers are more likely to purchase new ones, and it costs less to retain customers than to acquire new ones.
Word-of-mouth marketing: Satisfied customers are the best brand ambassadors. When they have a positive experience with your business, they are more likely to share it with their network, bringing in new potential customers.
Brand reputation: Customers who feel valued by a company are more likely to speak positively about it, contributing to building and maintaining a strong brand reputation.
Cross-selling opportunities: By understanding your customers’ needs and preferences, you can identify cross-selling opportunities that will not only increase your sales but also enhance their overall experience with your brand.

Brand’s efforts to build relationships with customers are one of the leading brand loyalty drivers worldwide (Source: Statista)

How to Manage Customer Relationships Effectively

Now that we understand the importance of customer relationships, let’s discuss how to manage them effectively.

First, get to know your customers. Gather data and insights about your customers’ demographics, purchasing behavior, and preferences. This information will help you understand their needs and personalize your marketing efforts accordingly.

Second, strive for timely and consistent communication with your customers. This can be through email or even good old-fashioned phone calls. Keeping an open line of communication shows your customers that you value their opinions and feedback.

Third, go the extra mile to delight your customers. Show them you appreciate their business by offering personalized discounts or rewards for their loyalty. Surprise and delight initiatives can create memorable customer experiences and foster stronger relationships.

62% of customers stated that a brand would lose their loyalty if it failed to deliver a personalized experience (Source: Statista)

Finally, use a customer relationship management (CRM) tool to streamline all the steps above. It will help you centralize all your customers’ information and interactions in one place, making it easier to manage and track your relationships with them. It can also provide valuable insights into customer behavior and buying patterns, allowing you to tailor your sales strategies accordingly.

This is where Ecwid by Lightspeed comes into play. As a robust ecommerce platform, it allows you to create an online store, but it also offers extensive features to grow your sales (like domains, sales reports, and advertising tools). One of them is the Customers page that acts as your CRM tool — read on to learn more about it.

If you still haven’t signed up for Ecwid, now is the time! Create a new store or migrate your existing online store to Ecwid.

Simplify Customer Information Management with Ecwid

Here at Ecwid, we understand that turning a one-time buyer into a loyal customer demands exceptional service, prompt communication, and a personalized approach. Keeping this in mind, we’ve crafted a feature to help you effortlessly manage your customer relationships.

Meet the Customers page in the Ecwid admin — a centralized hub designed to help businesses nurture their most valuable asset more effectively: their customers. This tool is more than just a page; it’s a launchpad for powerful customer relationship management. Here’s why:

Easily Access and Manage All Customer Information

The Customers page helps you see and manage all your customers — you can view, find, and edit all the information you need, such as:

Contact details: several emails, phone numbers, messengers, social media pages, and addresses per customer.
Statistics: number of orders and sales value.
More details: order history, consent for mailing, tax status, and customer group.

The Customers page offers a comprehensive overview of essential data

Need to add a new customer? No problem. You can quickly create a new customer profile from the Customers page and specify their contact details, be it phone, email, or messenger.

For every customer, there’s a customer details page where you can handle all the info about them and see helpful stats like the order count, average order value, and total revenue per customer.

An example of a customer detail page where you can see all information about them

For best results, use internal notes to save important information on a customer’s page.

For instance, you might add a contact note indicating that a specific phone number is only available on working days. Or, specify which customer’s phone number is for work and which is personal using the contact notes.

Using a contact note for saving important information

Alternatively, you could use staff notes. For example, to specify the customer’s time zone for other team members.

Notes for staff are not visible to customers

Both contact and staff notes are especially helpful when you have a team of sales reps and want everyone to be on the same page.

Segment Your Customers for Personalized Marketing

But that’s not all; the Customers page also offers advanced search filters, making it easy to find specific groups of customers.

Say, you want to assign a customer group, give a discount, or send targeted emails to your repeat customers from a specific country who bought a specific product. Or, want to see which repeat customers have purchased a particular product. The filter options empower you to gain such insights easily and effectively, helping you tailor your sales strategies and deliver personalized offers.

Filtering customers who bought a specific product and are subscribed to marketing emails

Pro tip: Save these filters for your convenience. Picture bookmarking your local VIP customers to access their phone numbers and emails quickly! How awesome is that?

Export Customer Information for Better Management and Analysis

Plus, you can export the entire client list or specific segments to a CSV file. For example, you can extract a list of customers who subscribed to promotional emails. This feature proves useful when distributing promotional emails through your email platform.

Or, export your customer information for further analysis, providing valuable insights into customer behavior. You can use this data to identify trends, create targeted marketing campaigns, and tailor your sales strategies. For example, you might want to survey customers who bought your recently launched product to get feedback and improve upon it.

Exporting selected customers

Manage All Business-Related Tasks from One Place

Why juggle multiple tools when you can have it all in one spot? With Ecwid, you can manage your customers right where you manage your online store — in your Ecwid admin.

This way, you significantly optimize your workflow, particularly when your team members already have access to your Ecwid admin. For instance, you can simply grant staff access to the Customers page to your marketing team, allowing them to execute promotional campaigns for frequent buyers.

For detailed instructions on how to use the Customers page, visit the Ecwid Help Center.

Best Practices for Managing Customer Relationships

Managing customer relationships is not just about collecting customer data; it’s about using that data to build meaningful interactions. Here are some tips on how to do that.

Keep Your Customers’ Information Up-to-Date

Customers change their contact details, preferences, and even purchasing behavior over time. Keep track of these changes to ensure your communication and marketing efforts remain relevant.

We’ve made it easier for you to keep your customer data up-to-date. You can swiftly modify basic customer information such as contact details, marketing email subscription status, tax-exempt status, and customer group.

Adding contact information to a customer details page

By the way, you can mass update information for several customers at once. For example, you can quickly filter customers who bought from you more than five times and assign them to the “Loyal Customers” group.

Adding several customers to a group at once

In addition to maintaining an updated customer details page, make sure to include extra information in your store. For instance, if you want to add an additional shipping address to send freebies to – you can do that using notes.

Plus, saving different customer contacts (like office, personal/work phone, or email) prevents you from miscommunication or losing a potential order because your sales rep didn’t see the relevant phone number on the customer details page.

Train Your Support and Sales Teams to Use Customer Information Effectively

Your customer information is only as useful as those who know how to use it. Ensure your support and sales teams are trained to use customer data in their interactions with customers effectively.

Support teams can quickly resolve issues by having access to up-to-date customer information. Sales teams can also use this information to tailor their pitches and offers based on a customer’s past purchases.

Ecwid’s Customers page helps streamline team communication by adding internal notes to each customer profile, as well as notes to each contact. For instance, your support agent can save important information for their colleagues, like “This customer wants their orders shipped to their warehouse, not their office.” This allows for a more efficient customer experience.

The sales team can also benefit greatly from the Customers page, which contains order history. This can help your sales team identify high-value customers and tailor their marketing strategies accordingly.

Viewing a customer’s past orders can help sales reps make more personalized pitches

Engage in Personalized Communication for Upselling and Cross-Selling

Your customers are more than just numbers on a spreadsheet. They are real people with unique preferences and needs. Use the information on their customer details page to send targeted offers based on their past purchases. This not only shows your customers that you value their business but also increases the chances of repeat sales.

For example, if some customers purchased a specific product from you, consider sending them an exclusive offer for the upgraded product. Or, send them an overview of complementary products currently on sale. This not only shows your appreciation for their loyalty but also increases the chances of them making another purchase.

With Ecwid, you can effortlessly achieve this by applying filters on the Customers page and exporting the list of customers to send them the offer using an email service of your choice.

Leverage Data-Driven Customer Insights

Every click and every purchase is a piece in the grand puzzle of your customers’ behaviors. With in-depth analytics and insights into customer behaviors, preferences, and sales patterns, you gain a heightened strategic awareness.

Keep track of your buyers’ habits by filtering customer data by date range and segmenting customers based on purchase frequency, location, or order value. You can use this information to understand your customers’ needs and tailor your marketing strategies accordingly.

For instance, if you notice that many customers are purchasing from a specific location, consider expanding your targeted promotions in that area. Or, if you see high demand for a specific product, consider increasing your inventory or creating bundle deals to increase the average order value.

Wrap Up

It’s impossible to drive business growth without building stronger relationships with your customers. And Ecwid’s Customers tool is all about helping your business grow. It’s about delivering a more personalized, engaging experience to your customers and building long-lasting relationships. Because at Ecwid, your business’s success is our top priority.

So why wait? Take advantage of the Customers page and start building strong relationships with your customers today! With easy access and management of customer information, advanced search filters, and the ability to export data, you have all the tools you need to personalize your marketing efforts and improve customer satisfaction.

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Apr 4, 2024

About the author

Anastasia Prokofieva is a content writer at Ecwid. She writes about online marketing and promotion to make entrepreneurs’ daily routine easier and more rewarding. She also has a soft spot for cats, chocolate, and making kombucha at home.