5 Ways To Use Microsoft Dynamics For E-Commerce

I remember the days when e-commerce simply meant a single sales channel online, and that kept everything nice and simple. Not only a single sales channel, but a single “prospects” channel too. That single channel was your website, and was the sole focus of your day-to-day operations.

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As the years have rolled by, more and more sales channels have opened – eBay and Amazon to name but two. Then consider sales prospects – the popularity of social networks have created a lot of opportunity to capture new sales and engage directly with your target market.

I can already see the bead of sweat falling from the small business owner’s brow. Where on earth to begin with all of this opportunity? How can I organize my business to make the most of this sprawling internet? And even when I decide to open up new sales and leads channels, how on earth can I even measure the value of each sales / leads channel I engage in?

Three words: Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

With so many potential sales and leads generating channels, you need one single location that you can collect all of this data and manage it. That’s where CRM software comes into play and can help you sanely organize customers, leads, inventory, human resources and a lot more. We’re going to look at one suite of software in particular: Microsoft Dynamics, and look at five ways in which this software can be used to help aid your e-commerce goals.

Aggregate Sales and Leads Channels In One Place

Storing all of your customer details in one place is an absolute must if you have multiple sales channels. Microsoft Dynamics will allow you to do this, so you can manage, contact and analyze your customer / prospects base in aggregate form. Some examples of where this would be particularly handy:

• exporting your aggregated prospects / leads to Excel, and then sending on that list to a telesales company to follow up with phone calls.
• creating a mailing list of customers to alert them to a new sales offer you have.
• alerting geographically local customers to a new pay-on-delivery service you’ve launched
• send out feedback emails to recent customers

Follow-up on Customer Sales

There are many reasons why you want to contact recent customers of yours. Perhaps you want to encourage some feedback from them, and so a follow-up email / phone call can facilitate that. Perhaps you need to let them know of the progress of a delivery. Such follow-up communication reassures customers and encourages repeat business. Microsoft Dynamics makes that a lot easier to do now you have all your customer data in one place.

Synchronised Inventory Management

With multiple sales channels, it’s important to keep your inventory management under control. Nobody wants to order items that aren’t in stock. MS Dynamics allows you to not only manage inventory levels, but also accurately update where each item is during the delivery stage. You can even set custom prices for each item on a per-customer basis.

Local Marketing Options

With MS Dynamics, you can easily identify customers geographically local to a certain location – for example, your warehouse from where you export your items. You can easily generate a list of sales or prospects (or both) and alert them to a new local service you may provide. For example:-

• free delivery within certain post codes.
• a pay-on-delivery service that allows customers to have their items delivered the same day.

Sales & Marketing Analytics

Now that you have all of your sales and leads information in one place, you can drill down into this data to find out which sales channels are performing the best, and which may need more marketing effort. For example, you may find that Facebook helps you acquire more leads with far less effort than Twitter, so you double your efforts on Facebook. Unify Your Data

In summary, consider setting up multiple online sales channels if you aren’t already doing so. Once you’re in that position, look to aggregate your sales and leads data into a single back office, such as MS Dynamics.