CRM on Faire: Free tools and tips for better customer relationships

Customer relationship management (CRM) is critical to your success as a brand. When you invest in building a CRM strategy, you can drive customer loyalty and establish trust, increase operational efficiency, and make data-driven decisions to increase your revenue. 

Email marketing is perhaps the most essential component of a successful CRM strategy. In fact, a survey from Litmus found that for every $1 a brand puts into email marketing, it sees an average return of $36. However, poor email marketing can have an adverse effect. When customers and leads feel inundated with emails, or the messaging doesn’t feel personalized, they may stop opening them or unsubscribe altogether. Faire’s free CRM tools are designed to help you strengthen customers’ trust in your brand and avoid these pitfalls. 

Today we’re going to dig into the basics you need to know to master Faire’s CRM tools. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to streamline your marketing efforts; send personalized, on-brand emails that engage your customers; and of course, drive sales.  

Send timely, targeted messages with Faire CRM

We can break Faire’s CRM tool into three main components: customers, campaigns, and automations. With these features, you can:

• Add your existing customer contacts and invite them to join Faire.
• View data about your customers and leads, and create segmented customer contact lists for more targeted email campaigns.
• Build one-off campaigns for announcements, such as new arrivals or promotions.
• Automate reminders to your customers, e.g., a nudge to take advantage of unused Faire Direct credit.
• Send personalized, 1:1 messages directly to your customers using Faire Messenger.

All of these features are accessible through your brand portal. 

Customers 

Segmenting your contacts and frequently updating your contact list on Faire can ultimately help you convert more leads, maximize the potential of your customer relationships, and build trust with your subscribers. While some brands turn to third-party services to manage their CRM, Faire’s rich customer data relates specifically to your performance on the platform and makes it easier to target specific customer segments. 

In your Customers tab, you’ll find default lists such as “Eligible for Faire Direct referral offer” to easily segment your customers into different categories, and you can also create your own lists using filters and custom tags. Filters like “abandoned cart” and “last ordered 60+ days ago” can be used on their own or combined with other filters to create segments such as Customers who have items in their cart but have not checked out. We recently updated our filters to help you easily find and segment customers for targeted outreach and analysis. We also added a highly requested feature: custom tags, which allow you to organize customers in whichever ways make sense for your business. For example, you could tag all the customers you met at a specific trade show with the name of that show. You can add custom tags to individual customers or in bulk, and create filters from those tags. Plus, you can add and remove tags at any time in case anything changes. 

Creating customer segments helps you send more targeted, relevant communications that will drive your customers to convert, whether you’re sending triggered, recurring, or one-off email campaigns. 

For managing all of your 1:1 customer relationships, you’ll want to get familiar with your customer details page and our messaging tools. Use these to create an order, view items in a customer’s cart, start a conversation with Faire-provided templates, send document attachments, suggest products to a retailer, or star conversations for follow-up. 

Get more tips for effective segmentation here.  

Campaigns 

Once you know which customers you’d like to target, crafting campaigns that allow you to reach those customers at scale while still ensuring they feel personalized and authentic is the challenge. With Faire’s campaign composer, you have the flexibility to build fully custom designs or use plug-and-play email templates for common themes, like inviting retailers to shop with you on Faire, sharing a promotion, or spotlighting a particular product. 

As you discover more about this tool, here are some critical features that’ll help you create engaging, personalized emails you’ll be proud to send—and save you time and effort too: 

• Merge tags: Whether you’re launching a new product or following up on a recent meeting, merge tags will automatically pull in dynamic content like the retailer’s name or store name. This allows emails to feel more personal to each retailer, regardless of the number of recipients. (Campaign Monitor reports that personalization increases open rates by 26%.)
• Customizable templates: Select colors and fonts to match emails with your brand identity and aesthetic and explore which layout options best showcase your products. Together, these customizations will help you send more professional communications that reflect your brand and increase the likelihood that retailers will engage with your content. 
• Faire benefits component: You can easily drag and drop your custom Faire Direct benefits component into any email to help you turn more leads into buyers and drive reorders by reminding retailers of the benefits of shopping on Faire and extending your Faire-funded referral offer. 
• Save your emails: Now that you have these beautiful customized emails, save them as editable templates for future use to save time and effort next time you need to contact your customers. 

Dive further into engagement and segmentation here. 

Automations 

We’re always looking for ways to help you create efficiencies across your business. Automated triggered emails, or automations, as we call them, can ensure that the right message gets to your retailers at the right time without you having to write and send it at that moment. Through Faire’s CRM, you can enable a number of automated marketing emails, including an invite for buyers in your list who haven’t signed up yet, a nudge for customers who have unclaimed credit to your line, and a reorder reminder when a customer hasn’t placed an order in 60-plus days. Simply turn on the automation, make some edits so it’s personal to you, and let us do the work of keeping you top of mind with your customers.

Knowledge is power: Using analytics to send stronger messages 

Whether you set up automations or build a new email from scratch in the campaign composer, our data dashboards allow you to view opens, clicks, revenue, and orders placed as a result of your campaigns. We encourage you to track the progress of your email campaigns to see what’s working—and what’s not working—so you can adjust accordingly. Rather than just looking at revenue and orders placed, strive for strong open and click rates with your email campaigns. Try experimenting with different subject lines and clear, clickable calls to action. This will help prevent customers from unsubscribing, improve your reputation as an email sender, and build more trust in your brand. 

We’re still building

This is just the start: We’re actively improving our CRM tool, with plans to roll out new features and improvements based on feedback from our brands. Follow the Release Notes blog post to be the first to know about the latest features to improve your marketing efforts.