According to Forrester, your B2B ecommerce website is now your main channel for customer engagement. Making it easy to find and a pleasure to use are now essential requirements.
Choosing the right B2B marketing strategy will allow you to optimize the impact of your ecommerce site and keep you ahead of the crowd. It will help you to build customer loyalty and improve efficiency.
Here are five key approaches we believe you should consider.
- Personalization
While B2B purchases often involve multiple decision-makers, they will all expect personalized buying experiences based on their previous buying history. Your ecommerce system should deliver a unique workflow, tailored content and offers based on each client’s role.
With your knowledge of your customers’ previous purchases, you can take a retail-style approach. Online pricing promotions such as end-of-line sales and seasonal incentives will attract price-conscious buyers.
With the right ecommerce system, many of these personalized options can be automated, improving customer self-service experiences and reducing administration.
- Ease of use
B2B buyers need to work fast, so they will be looking for a convenient and transparent buying process.
Make your catalogue search functions very fast and effective so that they can find exactly what they are looking for based on product details, price, and availability. Machine learning can help to speed up the process and offer related products.
To make the right impression, right from the start, your registration and login processes should be quick and easy, with as few steps as possible. Your client profiles and login permissions will then allow you to deliver that all-important tailored content.
By integrating your stock control systems you can also provide your customers with a real-time view of product availability and delivery times, building confidence to make your site their first choice.
- Multi-channel
Enabling customers to place and manage orders on-the-go from a range of devices can be a real point of difference for your company that will help to build loyalty.
Providing a fast and consistent user experience on mobile devices will drive sales and influence choices. Placing an order on a Sunday evening from a tablet device gives your customers the flexibility they are looking for.
Enabling them to move seamlessly from their online self-service process to speak to sales or a service representative and then move back to complete their purchase on a different device is quickly becoming the expected standard.
- Content
You can help your B2B customers to make faster, informed decisions by providing specifications, how-to videos and detailed FAQs. They expect to research this level of detail before making purchase decisions.
Highlighting the range of your expertise will not only provide information, it will also increase your customer’s confidence that they are making the right purchase choice. Without this level of support, your product catalogue could overwhelm them.
- Sales
Ecommerce can move your offline customers to a more cost-effective, self-service online environment allowing your sales team to spend less time managing low volume customers and processing reorders. They can then use their expert knowledge to support specialized needs and queries and to build new business.
You can also support your sales team with a solution like mSeller so that they can take your online catalogue to the customer, placing orders in real time directly into your business systems.
Get in touch with us to find out how you can implement these ideas with Cloudfy as part of your B2B marketing strategy.
