Let’s take a quick quiz!
What is the key to your e-commerce business success?
- Products that stand out
- Competitive prices
- A well-designed customer loyalty program
If you have opted for option C, then well done! You are amongst those e-commerce entrepreneurs who know what it takes to scale your business.
The majority of large-scale businesses face the same challenge - How to expand the customer base through their Enterprise ecommerce platform. Capturing new interest and reaching out to more people is not that tricky. The greater challenge is to retain existing ones and increase their lifetime value.
For B2C brands with a reputation, it's easier to keep their customers loyal with simple discounts and promotions.
However, it's a different story if you are handling a large business of B2B model in which case, your marketing strategy has to be aligned in a way that helps you communicate better with your customers and make them convert faster. Maybe the B2B ecommerce platform you choose could do the trick!
How? In what way? Yes, you already have these questions in mind. But hold your horses! Even before we consider using the e-commerce solution to boost customer loyalty, let’s understand what it is and why it’s needed.
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What is customer experience and how does it increase customer loyalty?
From the e-commerce perspective, customer experience refers to how your brand manages to engage its audience on your e-commerce business website. It describes your customer’s perception of how your company interacts with them. Going forward you will learn how the right kind of enterprise ecommerce platform can add value to your customers’ experience with your brand.
In a recent survey of B2B decision-makers, 44% said that they want to see pricing on the website and 41% revealed that they need self-service functionality to get comfortable with the online store. While these are not the only reasons you need to boost customer loyalty, the point is that your CX strategy leaves footprints on customers’ minds. Right from the first impression to repeat purchases, every aspect is important to boost customer loyalty which is possible with the right solution.
5 ways to use your enterprise e-commerce platform to boost customer loyalty
Deliver Enhanced Mobile Experience
Are you aware that 50% of B2B queries today are made on smartphones? The figures are expected to grow to 70% by the end of 2020. Hence most of the wholesale business will go the B2C way with the mobile-first approach.
This does not mean having a responsive web design only. Nowadays, Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are widely used to serve the business to business customer segment. You can opt for a B2B ecommerce platform that is mobile responsive but also offers PWAs.
PWAs have a technological edge and offer the users a native-app-like experience. Shoppers find it convenient, transparent and time-saving to browse product categories through an app or phone over a laptop or a computer.
PWAs translate several benefits including;
- Push notifications to inform order statuses, fresh stock, etc.
- Checking out order previews or browsing even in the offline mode
- Reduction of company cost due to its focus on web application rather than a native app
- Easy adaptation to Android and iOS system
StoreHippo is a modern-day B2B ecommerce platform that uses the mobile-first technology to provide an unforgettable customer experience. It is one of those platforms that incorporated this benefit during the early stages of platform development, keeping the focus of small screen from scratch. You can explore the platform's mobile-responsive performance and deliver an unbeatable experience to your customers about load-time and navigation.
Enhance your Landing Pages
Did you know that as the website owner, you only have around 8 seconds to make an impression on your customers? One way to grab their attention is to have customer-winning landing pages. The ecommerce enterprise platform you choose plays a significant role in helping you craft pages that sell.
All your efforts of building an online brand can go in vain if you cannot influence your buyers’ purchase decisions once they are on your business website. Thus, you need influencing and attractive designs that provide a clear cut message to the audience. Since the large scale business model is already complex, we recommend you keep your design less cluttered and simple.
Also, since it is the landing pages that play a significant impression to create the first impression in your customers’ minds, the ecommerce enterprise platform must help you with;
- Customised pages for different B2B customers based on geography, language, etc.
- A pleasant theme and colour palette that resonates with your brand image
- Easy-to-search and navigation options for convenient browsing
- Double-check for broken links and poorly presented search results
- Clear call-to-actions (CTAs)
StoreHippo brings to you a library of hundreds of ready themes to design your business to business website. Using the drag-drop tools, you can easily enhance or modify it to resonate with the theme with your brand image. Also, it lets you incorporate all these features without disturbing the design architecture. The B2B ecommerce platforms’ Multi-store functionality helps to build multiple storefronts and hence separate landing pages for segmented customers which are managed by a common admin.
User Personalisation Techniques and Loyalty Programs
You must have persistently heard that touch of personalisation is very important to boost retail sales. Business to business segment is no different! In the retail sector, you see shoppers as individual customers. In a wholesale business, you need to persuade companies and different organisations who are looking for solutions in their particular niche. All in all, it’s the same thing. Hence, as an owner of a mega-e-commerce, you must not underestimate the power of personalisation and leverage a good B2B ecommerce platform to assist you in a customer loyalty program.
A marketing report states that "65% of business buyers are likely to switch brands if a vendor doesn’t personalize communications to their company." So if you are already thinking about how you can personalise your product pages and boost sales, why not try out the below-mentioned tactics?
- Create special marketing landing pages, optimise them and target them to promote limited period offers and deals
- Intelligent targeting by tracking customers’ browsing history and shopping behaviour
- Communicate with your customers in their native language through multi-language feature of an enterprise ecommerce platform
- Enable frictionless transactions with Multi-currency payment options
- Have a powerful Discount engine for offers and promotions
- Use Unified notifications (emails, SMS, push) to send out tailored deals, thank you messages, etc. in real-time
- Offer free delivery on the minimum order quantity
- Offer device or IP based customized checkout flow
Nothing can boost customer loyalty than managing customer touch points for a great shopping experience. StoreHippo offers you endless features to boost personalisation tactics and retain your customers. You can leverage the enterprise ecommerce platforms’ powerful discount engine to come up with different offers based on customer geolocation and minimum order value. You can also upsell or cross-sell products through personalized notifications in real-time and gently push them towards the sales funnel.
Along with all this, StoreHippo offers you Multi-lingual and multi-currency features to not only expand your business across various countries but give your customers a native experience. StoreHippo also integrates you with a host of domestic and international Payment gateways that are highly reliable. All these features of our B2B ecommerce platform is a sure-shot way to make your buyers feel comfortable and boost their loyalty towards your brand.
Leverage a Good Content Strategy
A beautiful website and personalised messages alone cannot improve your business traction. What's the missing element then? The good, old, oh-so-powerful content!
Quality content for your business to business brand is the biggest way to earn your customers' trust. Publishing relevant content attracts your audiences' interest. It also positions you as an industry expert and helps the audience to find solutions to niche-specific problems.
The power of words through the blogging engine of a top B2B ecommerce platform makes customers feel that they can trust your advice. They also ultimately look forward to doing business with you.
What more? You already know that Google likes fresh content too! With a consistent content strategy, you can earn a good ranking in the search engines and make your website a top performer.
Since out of billions of online users, less than 5% navigate past the first page of the Google SERPs, you must opt for SEO-friendliness through;
- On-page optimisation strategy like using keywords, meta tags, etc.
- Using a top enterprise ecommerce platform to have a seamless site architecture based on the keywords
- Using different types of content in the form of images, videos, testimonials and reviews to boost conversion
- Creating engrossing content through a blogging engine and use it to earn inbound links
- Integrating the business website with your social media pages
- Integrate CRM feature to communicate with your customers across multiple channels
StoreHippo’s e-commerce solution is designed to give you SEO-friendly tools for generating URLs, meta tags and descriptions and manage your microdata. Its blog engine is like any other software and helps you create different blog categories for various verticals. Also, the enterprise ecommerce platform gives easy integration with social platforms and CRM connects you to your customers across multiple channels. You can also have the rating and review option product wise/ vendor wise, etc. for increased SERP ranking.
Provide Excellent Logistics
Can a B2B ecommerce platform help to improve your logistics? Well, not directly but by indirectly integrating you with third-party carriers it can provide a solid backup to your business.
Logistics is the base of any e-commerce business, especially for the B2B sector where you need to deliver huge orders consistently. Delivering a shipment to an individual shopper is still alright. But to fulfil shipments of a large chunk of goods to companies across the globe, you need a well-equipped logistics strategy that is integrated with your B2B ecommerce platform. Also, with the market becoming more competitive, customer demands and expectations are increasing. Customers tend to show increased loyalty towards a business who delivers their products on-time, safely and provide them free-shipping.
StoreHippo integrates your e-commerce business website with it’s shipping aggregator platform, ShipKaro that gives you rich tools and features for a seamless shipment strategy. With this you can;
- Partner with multiple carriers to deliver products to any geographical location
- Have bargained rates for a sustainable shipment chain
- Leverage automated systems for bulk order uploads, labeling, pick-ups, etc.
- Avail flexible shipment plans like partial delivery
- Real-time tracking to learn the status of the shipment
A good enterprise ecommerce platform understands what it takes for customer satisfaction and hence provides you a holistic approach to your fulfilment strategy.
Wrapping up
Nurturing customer loyalty is a crucial aspect of your B2B e-commerce business. It not only helps you establish long-term bonds but also have access to more business opportunities with your clients. That’s not it! Boosting customer loyalty morphs into referrals that work as word-of-mouth-marketing and gives you greater brand visibility. It indirectly helps to acquire new customers too.
Noted that the quality of your products and services will ultimately decide the fate of your business. No loyalty strategy would beat that benefit. But if you wish that your customers remain open to every new business interaction with your company, then boosting loyalty through an enterprise ecommerce platform can help.
StoreHippo offers end-to-end solutions for your growing business to business brands and diverse customer groups. Check out our unique features with a 14-day free trial or contact us at [email protected]
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