Recently, we announced that Endear raised a $2 million series seed round led by investors who believe in our growth and our capabilities. Our steady growth since we started in 2019 has always been built on a core principal: to provide a feature-rich yet easy-to-use CRM platform built from the ground up specifically for retail businesses.

And this audience is incredibly important. Studies continue to show that shoppers still prefer to shop in brick & mortar stores when they can, and brands are realizing that relying solely on ecommerce isn’t the best way to build a community of loyal patrons. There’s nothing like shopping in the real world, and today’s modern retail businesses need a CRM that has an omnichannel approach in mind; one that can track and communicate with shoppers both online and off.

Of course, businesses know that there are many choices in CRM platforms out there today. And while Endear may not quite have the cache to charge $2000+ per conference ticket just yet (ahem, Dreamforce), our CRM has the specialized features that today’s retail brands need for success.

Let’s compare Endear’s feature set to some of the competition out there on the market.

Cutting to the chase, Hubspot was built on the philosophy of “inbound marketing,” where creating great content will bring clicks and impressions to your website. While that can be great for b2b businesses, Hubspot was never meant to be the go-to CRM for retail brands.

We’re not saying that great content doesn’t have a place in your marketing strategy. After all, email and SMS marketing needs content. Yet Hubspot’s philosophy on inbound marketing focuses much more on the lengthy blog posts that are great for SEO; but not the punchy language needed for email blasts and text promotions.

As commented on by nectafy.com:

…when you purchase HubSpot's software, you're not just buying a piece of software. You're buying into a methodology; one that's going to add hours to your workload if you want to be successful. What's more, this methodology—inbound marketing—could very possibly go against everything you've ever known about marketing.

Endear’s CRM focuses on the “relationship” part of Customer Relationship Management. We help teams send bulk branded messaging to targeted segments, help you engage in effective 2-way communication, and help get customers back into your store.

One of the most important and effective marketing efforts your brand can make is to send out a curated, visually striking catalog of product recommendations. Personalized content increases the efficiency of marketing by 10 to 30 percent, and a good CRM can leverage your customer data so your team can curate the perfect group of products to push to each segment of your audience.

Oneshop has that philosophy in mind, but their recommendation feature is limited to a static catalog of product images.

It’s an extension of a shopping page, but today’s younger shoppers have moved beyond this.

Endear’s Shoppable Stories take visual curation to another level by making it dynamic, similar to today’s social media platforms that modern shoppers are familiar with. These Stories can showcase your curated recommendations right on their mobile device in order to drive action and clicks:

Best of all, Shoppable Stories enable shoppers to complete checkout right from the Story by clicking and purchasing through Endear Checkout. They don’t need to go to another product page to do so, lowering the hurdle of shopping from their smartphones and shortening the path to completing the transaction.

Did you know that shoppers today don’t mind receiving texts from retailers? It’s true, and over 60% of consumers think businesses should use SMS messaging even more than they already do.

Not only are text messages more immediate, but they’re also more personal. That’s why there is a near 100% open rate with texts, compared to the relatively low open rates of emails.

Yet crafting, sending, and responding to robust SMS campaigns can be taxing for a small retail team. While Salesfloor’s platform allows for SMS conversations, it may take a small army to manage all these campaigns.

Endear solves this personalized messaging scale problem by introducing Campaigns, a way to segment your customer base into highly-specific groups, then text (or email) them all at once with a personalized message or promo for that group.

For example, Endear’s Campaigns allow you to mine your CRM data for just the customers who have birthdays in May, or purchased a sundress in the last 30 days, or haven’t shopped inside a retail store in three months. Then messages can be queued up to send automatically, helping smaller retail sales or marketing teams manage these communications according to each campaign sent.

If you’ve followed our content for a minute, you’ll know how passionate we are about the concept of clienteling. In crowded industries with lots of competition, what will make your brand stand out from the rest is how much you can elevate your customer’s shopping experience both in-store and online.

A great CRM gives your business actionable clienteling insights to help create intimate customer experiences that cultivate loyalty, a higher Average Order Value, and word-of-mouth.

Salesforce, as you could guess from the name, has transacting at the core of its product. It was built to help sales teams sell, and the CRM component that helps cultivate customer experience was never a part of their philosophy. This is why it’s difficult to create great branded email templates that are useful for 1:1 messaging.

Endear, as you could guess from the name, has endearing your brand to your customer at our core. Less about just transacting, our CRM helps empower your business to send branded messaging that your customers will respond to, both figuratively and literally.

Endear’s messaging platform isn’t just a megaphone, rather it’s a telephone allowing for two-way communication. It helps teams open up a dialogue with customers who may have questions or comments, and personalizes the messaging experience so that promotional emails are far more likely to make an impact than to remain unopened or dragged into the spam folder.

What features does your retail business need from a CRM to create an exceptional clienteling experience for your customers? Endear has got you covered. Check out a free demo of Endear today.