It’s no secret that the worldwide marketplaces for clothing, footwear, and accessories are competitive, dynamic, fast-paced, and constantly changing. Today more than ever, there is a growing need for sustainable products and personalized experiences. Brands must not only follow, invent, and predict trends, but also produce goods on schedule, while keeping costs low and boosting customer satisfaction.
But what if there was a way to empower your entire product life cycle by digitalizing, automating, and centralizing the value chain from ideation to manufacture? What if you could stay connected to your customers and increase loyalty towards your brand? This is where ApparelMagic’s PLM and CRM solutions come in, but what exactly do they do?
Keep reading to find out more about ApparelMagic’s customer relationship management (CRM) and product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions and how they help change the fashion industry.
Benefits of Apparel Magic’s CRM for Fashion Brands
There are many benefits to having a CRM solution for apparel companies. Business owners and decision-makers understand that in order to close a deal and maintain a competitive edge, the customer experience is just as crucial as pricing and quality. Any customer acquisition and retention strategy must focus on this, and CRM can assist. Let’s examine the primary advantages of using ApparelMagic’s fashion CRM solution.
1. Segment and Manage Your Contacts
The best thing about ApparelMagic’s CRM is that it serves as a single location for all of your customers’ information and enables you to make use of it. It allows you, for instance, to divide your audience into different segments based on the data you have. This means that by having a greater grasp of what various audiences are demanding, you can target consumers and prospects much more effectively. With this knowledge, you’ll be able to launch marketing campaigns based on the needs of your contact base, whether it is customers for a certain product or prospects that are at a given stage of the sales funnel.
By allowing you to build relationships with contacts based on data, CRM helps increase conversion rates while also enhancing customer experience.
2. Automate and Streamline Your Customer Communications
Communication, both internal and external, benefits from an effective fashion CRM solution. With ApparelMagic’s CRM solution, you can use many ways to interact with clients, including social media, online chats, automatic emails, and text messages. ApparelMagic’s CRMs have a number of pre-made templates for all these different channels so that you can reach out to customers in various ways, be it by sending an automatic SMS message thanking them for a purchase or an informational email newsletter.
When it comes to internal communication, ApparelMagic’s CRM is made to unify information through a centralized database, so everything your team members need in order to communicate and exchange information related to issues, orders, campaigns, and everything in between is there in the CRM.
3. Personalize Your Approach
Today, the crucial differentiator between a positive customer experience and a poor one is often the degree to which that experience is personalized. According to research, 80% of shoppers say they are more likely to buy from a company that delivers personalized experiences, and 91% of consumers say they are more likely to make a purchase from companies that provide relevant product recommendations.
Personalization should be at the center of every fashion company’s customer experience strategy because of the chances to keep customers by giving them an experience that is specifically tailored to them.
In order to personalize, apparel businesses must make the most of the customer data they have gathered and utilize it to inform their messaging to customers, including who to target for a given campaign.
4. Enhance Your Customer Service
Effectively handling customer complaints and inquiries is often what sets leading apparel companies apart from the competition. Even though this might seem quite simple, a single negative customer experience can have a significant impact on your company. According to research, consumers typically tell nine other people about a favorable brand experience, but the number of those who will hear about a negative one is sixteen. In other words, if a consumer receives poor service, there will be more consequences than if they receive excellent service.
Using a CRM solution makes everything centralized, ensuring that emails are always received and customer queries can be handled according to importance.
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5. Increase Customer Retention
Did you know that a company gets 65% of its business from past clients? Customer retention is important, and using a CRM gives you the ability to do just that. If you use ApparelMagic’s fashion CRM solution, you’ll be able to map out your customers’ journey and how they behave after making a purchase. Repeat customers give you invaluable insight into their interests, enabling you to offer a more personalized customer experience.
A personalized customer experience results in happier customers, and happier customers mean customers that stay with you. In fact, studies have found that a 5% increase in client retention boosts earnings by up to 95%.
6. Manage Inventory
One of the main advantages of using ApparelMagic’s fashion CRM solution is that it provides effective inventory control and real-time visibility into each stage of order fulfillment.
Apparel companies often use two separate systems for managing their inventory and customer relationships, but combining the two provides an improved customer experience. Knowing exactly where your inventory is located is essential; for instance, if a customer inquires about a certain product, you want to be able to check the CRM immediately to answer their question.
Combining these two software solutions is a great way for fashion businesses to streamline their technology and offer their consumers a higher level of service. An integrated customer relationship management system can update automatically, sometimes eliminating the need for manual data entry altogether, and as a result freeing up time for your employees to focus on other, more important tasks.
How ApparelMagic’s PLM Helps Fashion Companies Stay Competitive
PLM software is a useful tool for keeping track of inventory and streamlining production. An efficient fashion PLM solution is an essential tool for the modern apparel and textile industry because it helps improve efficiency and minimize waste, which in turn lowers costs, boosts productivity, and enhances product quality.
You can manage your product’s complete lifecycle using PLM software, from product design and manufacturing to retail shelves. It involves more than just keeping track of inventory; it also involves activities like analyzing purchasing patterns (such as what materials are used where) and demand forecasting using historical sales data or the introduction of new fashion items to the market. All of these activities are necessary when determining how much inventory should be kept on hand at any given time.
Fashion product lifecycle management software also aids businesses in staying competitive, meeting customer demands, maintaining their position in the industry, and boosting revenues.
Knowing what your competitors are doing will help you stay one step ahead of them or even outperform them by coming up with novel ideas or techniques that will set your product apart from theirs. This necessitates using a fashion PLM solution like AppareMagic as it provides users with real-time visibility and access to a wealth of product information, such as:
- Stock levels for each item across all brands/channels, including both raw materials and finished products
- Shipping costs for each item, along with shipping times
To sum it up, PLM helps brands in the fashion industry to improve quality, improve productivity, shorten time to market time, and reduce costs. This refers to both operational and financial costs, such as those associated with using manufacturing resources, locating raw materials, etc., that fashion retailers or end users can utilize to their advantage when purchasing goods from an apparel manufacturer or merchant.
Last but not least, PLM apparel software makes it simple for customers who need more information about where they can purchase products from a specific company or brand at any time through an easily accessible website with just a single click (regardless of what device they use).
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Challenges in Implementing CRM/PLM Solutions
Not so long ago, companies in the fashion sector used to pay thousands of dollars for PLM and CRM software licenses. This did not include additional expenses such as implementation fees, integration fees, training fees, data migration charges, etc. In addition, it used to take months to implement the software and cost several thousand dollars in consultants and technical workers.
Luckily, thanks to the development of cloud software solutions, apparel businesses now get to pay a monthly charge to access CRM and PLM solutions via the internet. There is no longer any hardware or software to acquire, set up, maintain, or upgrade. As a result, a fashion CRM or PLM solution now has a fraction of the price and implementation time of what it did just a few years ago.
A complete software solution like ApparelMagic that incorporates inventory management, as well as CRM, PLM, and ERP functionalities in a single platform, can process massive volumes of data from all areas of the fashion ecosystem, combining all information and presenting it in a structured and understandable way. The best part is that it will cost you $495 a month, paid annually, for five users (compared to $1,200 to $2,250 for an average PLM solution). For this price, you get the Enterprise Plan which includes up to 5 integrations, up to 5 warehouses and top sophisticated features like custom fields and triggers.
The Bottom Line
As consumer expectations continue to increase and their behaviors keep changing, decision-makers in the apparel industry will need to make sure they have the appropriate technologies in place in order to effectively provide a great customer experience and stay competitive.
The benefits of CRM and PLM for fashion brands are undeniable. Streamlining customer service and using data through a CRM solution provides the best opportunity to gain and retain customers, whereas PLM helps streamline ideation, design, product development, sourcing, and other business processes to reimagine innovation.
Implement the ApparelMagic inventory management solution to begin taking advantage of these benefits and improve your entire business today.
