Pretty much everything is being customized these days, don’t you agree? Or are you among those who believe ‘one-size-fits-all’ is still the best strategy for everything.
In case, you think this statement is an exaggeration, well then you need to pay a little more attention to your surroundings.
Look around, you will notice the retail industry working hard to customize every aspect of the marketing funnel, giving their prospects a tailored buying journey. And we can tell its working pretty good since more customization tools keep popping up in the market.
But what about the wholesale industry?
Well, it still has a lot of catching up to do. The reason being, Business to Business customers for long, have been thought of as direct and goal-oriented. Even today, many business organizations believe that only a traditional customer requires engagement and retention strategies.
But luckily for us, the business community is gradually realizing their customers, after all, are human beings too with their personal needs and preferences. They too, like everybody else, react positively and negatively to certain cues.
Research backs this up, claiming that 83% of B2B customers expect a deep understanding of their needs and wants, that is reflected through personalized experiences.
Clearly, personalization plays an important role, be it referring to someone by their first name in an email newsletter or to tailor the landing pages as per their interests.
Table of Contents
Multiple ways to achieve better conversions in B2B ecommerce
1. By Ensuring Long-Term Website Engagement
“First impression is the last impression”
Never has this statement been truer than in terms of a business website. Whether your lead decides to stay and learn more or bounce back, will be decided by the first impression formed by your company’s ecommerce website.
And how to make a great first impression? By following some of the best practices that increase user engagement besides taking your business sales to a whole new level.
- First of all, you need modern-day device optimized themes which are generally known for their consistency between mobile and desktop versions. These themes are not only 100% fluid responsive but also look great on both laptops and mobiles which, in turn, enhance the user experience on every device available in the market.
To get a better idea, check out StoreHippo themes, there are literally hundreds to choose from. These themes are fully responsive with the built-in drag and drop features that let you customize them according to your requirements. We also offer easy-to-use yet powerful admin panel, which helps you customize your B2B site just the way you want it.
- Another thing you need to make that lasting impression is a mobile-ready site. Why? Simply because everyone around is carrying a mobile device. But more importantly, because these sites respond appropriately according to the device being viewed on.
Built grounds up on the mobile-first principle, StoreHippo lets you develop mobile-ready sites. To put it simply, you do not need to write another code to create a mobile version of your website. , These come action-packed with features such as fluid, proportion-based grids, flexible images etc. which in turn offers easy reading and navigation without the pain of zooming in and out.
- You’ve probably had an experience with slow-loading pages yourself. Remember the wait for that wholesale site to load, and the frustration that followed? Of course, you remember.
Do not let the same happen to your business website. Make sure it loads within the first 2-3 seconds, any longer than that, and you will lose 53% of site visits. So, be on the safe side and take the necessary steps to improve the load speed by removing unnecessary elements from your web pages. Storehippo has an edge here as with CDN and SPA it offers fast-loading sites that improve conversions.
2. By Personalizing the Content
Before diving straight into content personalization, let’s clear one thing first.
No matter what you are selling, as long as you possess the ability to understand ‘who the customer is’, you will be successful in your venture. Understanding your customer needs should be an integral part of your ecommerce marketing strategy. These insights will greatly help you gauge what you can offer your potential customers.
It’s interesting how insights such as these can make or break your business. But to gain such insights, you need to learn the art of creating ideal customer profiles. These profiles help you focus on attracting high-quality leads similar to your key customers, rather than targeting everyone who might buy your product.
Once you get that straight, you can move on to personalizing the content of your B2B website as per these customer profiles. But where to begin?
Start by assessing the current situation of your business website. Answer the following questions.
- Who are your visitors?
- Are they the ones you are looking for?
- Do your visitors find what they look for?
- And, do they find the content you want them to see?
A tip: analytics tools (such as Google Analytics and Google Search) can assist you in finding the answers.
Next thing you can do is segment your wholesale website visitors to get a clear overview of your visitors. Here are three types to data you can categorize your visitors into:
- Context- when and how the visitors visit your site.
- Company information- industry, company size etc.
- Behaviour- which pages do they visit and how often
By understanding each visitor’s identity, interest and intent, you can easily match the prospects to target personas and deliver them personalized messages, content recommendations, and experiences that are appropriate to their account, industry or stage of the buyer’s journey, all in real-time.
StoreHippo’s offers a variety of tools to help you with content personalization. One example is the blog section which allows you to write about topics that are relevant to your ideal buyer and in turn, helps you attract more qualified leads for your B2B ordeal.
Another example is IP-based landing pages. That is, creating different landing pages based on the visitors’ IP address origin. This will help your landing pages stand out to your audience, thus having a really positive effect on conversions.
The bottom line is, 80% of the businesses confirmed that content personalization is way more effective when it comes to boosting conversion rates than un-personalized content.
3. By Boosting Email Engagement
Email marketing is the undisputed king of content which can help generate huge engagement opportunities for Business to Business companies. No wonder, marketers report a whopping 760% increase in email revenue from personalized campaigns. With this type of marketing at your disposal, you can easily boost engagement by sending different emails at different stages of your marketing campaign.
There is, however, one thing you need to keep in mind, if you send the same email template, it might not help you much in generating engagement from your B2B content.
And frankly speaking, it doesn’t seem professional either.
Think of having someone’s email address as if you have his or her phone number. Use this information wisely. Here’s how to nail it like a pro.
- Build the list of email addresses of your business prospects with great care. Make sure it is curated and tagged accordingly.
- Use segmentation, an email marketing strategy that allows you to target specific email users with a specific invitation or message.
- Implement automation options that allow you to communicate with your wholesale prospects and existing customers in a timely manner.
- Lastly, create a lead nurture campaign involving a series of emails to be sent over to your prospects so as to nurture their interest.
What you can do in order to maximize your email efforts, is to make sure that you send a welcome email whenever a new user subscribes to your services. Also, to capitalize on that attention, ensure that you send weekly curated email content to your subscribers. Moreover, you can also share new updates or announcements related to ecommerce via your email content.
Or you can let StoreHippo deal with your email marketing needs. It will make email easy, automated and effective. While you get inbuilt tools to add automated emails at various points in a purchase cycle you also get third-party mass mailing tools which can be easily integrated to send out marketing mailers.
But that’s not all.
StoreHippo offers, apart from an automated email notification, a bunch of other options to help strengthen your b2b marketing strategy. These include SMS notifications, PUSH notifications and Web notifications, collectively known as Unified Notifications.
Unified notifications, if used effectively, can bring extraordinary results in promoting and developing your business. For example, SMS notifications can be used to send personalized text containing relevant content and offers to B2B leads and customers. Similarly, you can use PUSH and Web notifications to send reminders, alerts, promotions etc. via little pop-ups on mobile and laptops.
4. By Reducing Conversion Friction
Nobody likes to fill out forms!
This includes your prospects as well. We understand all you want to do is to collect as much current data as possible, but surely, that shouldn’t be at the cost of frustrating your Business to Business customers.
We all know where that will end.
Never forget that in wholesale, engaging with your brand is often part of someone’s busy day. Asking them to fill out a long form, can very easily lead to cart abandonment even before you get the chance to get the conversion you want. Here’s what you can do.
Simplify the conversion form
Lead generation form should always form the heart of your landing page. That’s why special care should be taken while drafting one.
For example, you can use the above mentioned customization practices to take the information you already have and use it to prefill forms. This way, your prospects won’t feel the necessity to repeat themselves every time they fill out forms on your ecommerce site.
Another thing you can do is to limit the number of fields being used in the forms. If not possible, then at least break down the fields of the form and use it as a two-step process. This way, you can still capture the lead in the first step while still working on converting them with additional fields in the second step.
Furthermore, you can reduce the conversion friction by getting rid of any confused or ambiguous buttons, pull downs or error handling messages that do nothing more than to cause havoc on your B2B conversion rates. The key is to simplify the conversion form by removing all the complexities.
Pricing Overrides
In the business community, an efficient pricing methodology is a must if you want to stay competitive in today’s globalized markets. While developing one, make sure that there is an implicit relationship between price, value and volume. It also comes in handy if you recognize the dynamic market relationships between price, perceived value and volume/quantity.
Business to Business pricing should always be customer-centric. That’s why it is recommended to test your wholesale pricing strategies to confirm what works for you, given your cost structure, profit goals etc.
Overriding prices in this way, help you build custom checkout experiences by providing upgrade pricing. Once you remove hurdles from the buyer’s journey, you will realize how simple it is to convert prospects.
With StoreHippo’s pricing overrides feature, you can easily customize the pricing according to the needs of the individual customers. You can set different prices for different segments, this will also apply to different geographical locations as well. What’s more, StoreHippo even allows you to present the prices in all major global currencies.
Believe us, you can not offer any more customization than this.
Advanced and Faceted Search
For the majority of product-related ecommerce websites, an on-site search option has become a standard feature, regardless of whether they sell to individual consumers or to business customers.
That means your business store should have one too. And we are not talking about having a search box simply for the sake of having it. What we are talking of is a fine-tuned and optimized search function that can fetch the exact product a customer is looking for from your database. This is what having an advanced search feature means.
Likewise, you should consider implementing a faceted search feature too. It helps grouping of items into different categories that allow your B2B customers to filter their search so as to narrow down the results they receive.
Adopting the advanced and faceted search feature help makes intelligent use of available data so as to improve product discovery and, in turn, providing the necessary customer experience needed for the conversion to occur.
Luckily, StoreHippo’s interface allows your users’ both advanced and faceted search options. These not only help them find the right products but also to filter the search results by genre or by selecting specific specifications.
Personalized Catalogues
While a knowledgeable salesperson can navigate through an unwieldy catalogue, your business customers need to intuitively find only the specific products that meet their needs. Which is why a personalized catalogue is considered a valuable part of the wholesale commerce experience.
StoreHippo presents an interactive catalogue that is customized specifically for Business to Business needs. Let’s look at some of its advantages-
- It allows your customers easy access with login credentials
- You can personalize the price for each client
- You can also update prices and stocks in real-time
- Plus, orders made directly from the catalogue can be sent via email or stored on a database.
Never underestimate the power of an interactive catalogue that is customized as per your business clients’ needs. It will assist you in engaging and converting your customers better.
All these features supported by StoreHippo greatly increase the likelihood of conversion, meanwhile giving your customers a better experience to remember in the future.
Takeaways
All the customization techniques mentioned above will help you boost your conversion rates. Remember, the key here is to deliver relevant real-time experiences for each customer. Because the more targeted your message, the more likely people will convert.
One thing surely we can all agree with is, customizations, whether B2B or B2C, should always begin and end with what’s best for the customer. That’s why it is important to set clearly defined goals right from the beginning as to what you want to achieve from this business venture.
We also agree that the challenges of Business to Business personalization reinforce the need to have the right tools for the job. Even the best research and insight proves of little value unless you have a platform that is capable of extremely fast delivery of results.
Storehippo is one such ecommerce platform that fits the pattern. It offers a high level of customization to its clients, thanks to the wide range of modules that enables you to personalize your e-store and adapt it to full-scale functioning in Business to Business commerce.
Book a demo with us today and learn more about our services!
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