AuthorAmelia Clarkson
LinkedIn
In the fast paced and ever changing world of e-commerce, a robust CRM strategy is crucial. However, many CRM teams fumble their execution, leading to missed opportunities, customer churn and inefficient operations.
Below are some of the most common pitfalls CRM teams in e-commerce businesses face and how to avoid them.
1. Lack of a Clear CRM Strategy
Many teams jump straight into tool implementation without a well defined strategy. CRM is more than just email marketing; it involves customer lifecycle management, segmentation, personalisation and retention strategies.
Solution: Define clear objectives (e.g. increase repeat purchase rate, reduce churn, boost average order value) and map CRM tactics to specific stages of the customer journey.
2. Over Reliance on Discounting
One of the most common mistakes is overusing discounts to drive conversions or win back lapsed customers. While effective in the short term, this habit trains customers to wait for sales and erodes brand value.
Solution: Focus on value based communications like exclusive content, loyalty rewards, early access to new products, rather than just percentage-off deals.
3. Poor Segmentation
Sending the same message to your entire database is a fast way to lose engagement. Yet many CRM teams fail to use the data at their disposal to tailor content to different user segments.
Solution: Use behavioural, transactional and demographic data to build nuanced segments. Triggered flows (e.g. cart abandonment, post-purchase upsell, reactivation) should be hyper-relevant.
4. Lack of Personalisation
The majority of email and SMS platforms have strong personalisation functionality to ensure customers are seeing the right content. However, many people don’t utilise this functionality to its full potential.
Solution: Start by using soft personalisation to drive engagement and sales (i.e. personalisation that doesn’t feel “creepy”) e.g. personalised product recommendations within the body of an email which aligns with recommendations the same segment are seeing on your website.
5. Siloed Operations
CRM teams often operate separately from product, customer service or performance marketing. This siloed approach leads to fragmented experiences and inconsistent messaging.
Solution: Collaborate across departments to share insights and coordinate campaigns. Ensure CRM activities are aligned with broader business goals and marketing calendars. For example, use key word trends identified by SEO teams to help plan or tell you what words to use in subject lines.
6. Neglecting Mobile Optimisation
A large portion of e-commerce traffic comes from mobile devices. Unfortunately, CRM communications are often optimised only for desktop.
Solution: Ensure all CRM content, especially emails and SMS, is mobile-first in design. With fast-loading visuals, short copy and tappable CTAs.
7. Not Enough Testing
Many teams avoid regular A/B testing due to time constraints or due to assumptions based on historic testing results.
Solution: Regularly test subject lines, send times, content and offers to ensure your strategy is correct and can lead to very strong results.
*Data source here.
8. Underutilising Data
CRM teams collect vast amounts of data but often fail to act on it effectively.
Solution: Use data to regularly track KPIs like open rate, conversion rate and lifetime value to identify areas of improvement and adjust your strategy accordingly. Ensure consistency in reporting and keep looking back at performance over time. For example, is engagement consistently dropping as sends increase? Reduce frequency of send or optimise segmentation. Is your database growing but customer lifetime value dropping? You probably have too many Leads in your audience or your new customer spend is lower than it was historically.
9. Ignoring Lifecycle Marketing
Many e-commerce CRM programs focus solely on acquisition or promotions, neglecting post-purchase engagement and long-term retention.
Solution: Build lifecycle campaigns like onboarding new customers, encouraging repeat purchases, celebrating anniversaries to drive customer loyalty and lifetime value.
10. Failing to Measure the Right KPIs
Focusing solely on vanity metrics like open or click-through rates can be misleading. These numbers don’t always correlate with real business impact. Equally, there is often too much focus on short term wins and not enough on long term performance drivers.
Solution: Prioritise metrics tied to revenue and retention, like purchase frequency, customer lifetime value (CLTV) and reactivation rate. Build attribution models to understand CRM’s true contribution, both in the long and short term.
Conclusion
CRM is a critical driver of growth and retention in e-commerce but only when it’s done right. By avoiding these common pitfalls and building a strategy grounded in data, personalisation and collaboration, CRM teams can turn one-time buyers into lifelong customers and brand advocates.
Need help with your CRM operations and strategy? Feel free to reach out to our CRM team.
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