B2B buying has evolved dramatically over the past few years. The buyers are now accustomed to everything they are getting as B2C customers and want the same experience while buying on a B2B online marketplace.
Not surprising is the fact that 73% of B2B buyers now want a personalized B2C-like experience.
Also, to keep you updated on the trends, almost 90% of online businesses are already investing in personalization at some level.
Yes, you got the message!
This is THE TIME to take your brand leagues ahead of competition and B2B personalization is the path you need to traverse to do so.
And if you are not convinced enough, here are some more figures that validate the idea of personalizing your B2B ecommerce solutions.
- 84% of the customers say being treated like a person is very important
- 59% of customers say that personalization influences their shopping decision
- 10+ touch points explored by average B2B buyers to connect with sellers
- 80% of companies see a lift in sales after implementing personalisation
Source: Accenture, Statista, Econsultancy
The secret to taking your B2B company to the next level is exposed!
By offering extreme B2B personalizations, you can create unique experiences for your buyers based on factors like location, industry and even website behavior.
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B2B personalization: A complete guide
Ours is a data-driven world, and the buyers expect brands to capitalize on these insights to provide them with highly personalized experiences tailored to their unique needs.
To help you master the art of personalisation, here’s a complete guide of the concept, followed by some personalization tips to get you started.
What is B2B personalization
B2B personalization is the process of tailoring the buyer journey with content, design etc aligned to the individual users’ preferences, interests, behavior. It is all about creating a unique cross-channel experience for your audience, meeting their needs at each touchpoint.
Why is B2B personalization important for your business
B2B business has always been associated with traditional means of communication that works well with the one size fits all strategy. However, with the recent changes in the buyer shopping behavior, businesses have realized that their customers have unique personal needs.
As biz-to-biz brands implement personalisation on their B2B online marketplace, they can improve their user engagement, increase conversions, and provide a more personalized shopping experience to their customers. A personalized customer journey heightens their loyalty and boosts revenue making it a win-win for their customers and business.
How to implement personalization on your B2B online marketplace
There’s no second guessing to the fact that personalisation helps B2B brands scale to newer heights of success. However wonderful the idea of implementing personalization is, it is quite an arduous task. B2B brands not only need cutting-edge solutions but also a future-ready B2B ecommerce solution that supports agile changes.
Let us look at top 7 ways to implement personalization on your business-to-business marketplace:
Different stores for different buyer groups
One of the easiest ways to implement personalisation on your marketplace is to set up different stores for different buyer groups. As you set up multi-location stores, you also gain a competitive advantage over your competitors. You can showcase customer segment-specific offers, deals etc and work for a given segment of customers offering high-end personalization.
StoreHippo B2B ecommerce solutions help you roll out your multi-storefront B2B websites with its multi-store ecommerce platform. You can set-up and manage a network of stores that are location-based, product line based, customer segment based etc. for your B2B business. You can also customize each storefront with unique URLs, themes, inventory, pricing, discounts, checkout options, shipping etc. for different user groups. StoreHippo also helps you control all your storefronts and their operations easily from a common central admin.
Personalized pricing and discounts
When we talk about offering a personalized shopping experience on B2B online marketplaces, we also mean offering pricing and discounts that are customized to the customers’ needs. For example, a B2B online marketplace that sells chairs can offer 20% discounts on the actual price per unit, if the customer buys more than 100 chairs. The B2B buyers are more price sensitive than the B2C counterparts.
With StoreHippo’s inbuilt pricing override feature, you can offer customized multi pricing based on customer login on your B2B portal. It helps you plan better cost management and profit margins by offering custom prices to different customers based on their order volume, order frequency, geolocation or any other factor. You can also set up personalized discounts like promotions, coupons, free shipping, promo codes etc on your marketplace with the in-built discount engine using StoreHippo B2B ecommerce solutions.
Personalized buying experiences on multiple channels
60% of B2B brands said multi-channel interactions with buyers increase their average ticket size. Yes, that’s true, the new-age B2B buyers love to interact with businesses on multiple channels, which is highly categorized with mobile commerce today.
Did you know that 70% of B2B queries are made on smartphones? Well, m-commerce is the future of biz-to-biz marketing, making it imperative for you to ace personalisation on mobile channels. And since B2B business flow is complex, it becomes a tad bit challenging to offer a streamlined buying experience across channels.
However, your go-to solution is StoreHippo.
The B2B ecommerce solution, StoreHippo offers cutting-edge solutions to keep you ahead of the curve. The flexible ecommerce platform is built on the decoupled headless architecture which enables brands to rapidly add new customer touchpoints. Using the same backend logic and APIs used for building the B2B marketplace, you can seamlessly build your marketplace apps, or create multiple other front ends to engage and convert your buyers. Also, with StoreHippo’s m-commerce solutions, you can seamlessly build Android or iOS apps directly from your admin dashboard.
Personalized content to make better buying decision
80% of the businesses confirmed that content personalisation is way more effective when it comes to boosting conversion rates than un-personalized content. The new-age customers are smarter, looking for highly personalised user experience. In place of treating all your leads the same, with hyper B2B personalisation, you can deliver relevant content, product recommendations, reviews etc. As you provide your customers with content tailored to their specific needs, you can engage better with them.
Here are a few ways you can offer personalized content to your customers to help them make better and quick buying decisions -
- Product recommendations based on the visitor's real-time activity, their order history, their wishlisted items, browsing history etc
- Allow the customer to personalize their shopping experience by adding a sorting feature on your B2B online marketplace
- Send hyper-relevant emails to different customer groups and acknowledge their needs
- Create multiple landing pages for different search keywords
- Re-target customers who have previously visited your brand, or who are in your databases
StoreHippo comes with a variety of tools that help you implement content personalization on your marketplace. StoreHippo's B2B ecommerce solution is built on an SEO-friendly platform that has a range of built-in marketing tools like a powerful blog engine to create personalized content. You can seamlessly use the blog engine to disseminate information that is relevant to your ideal buyer and helps you attract more qualified leads for your B2B ordeal.
Personalized marketing
Marketing is an integral part of B2B buying. Reining in personalization for different buyer segments helps you differentiate your enterprise brand. Since B2B sales are not done in an instant but require days of persuasion and convincing to many stakeholders and decision-makers, you need to hyper-personalise your marketing game.
StoreHippo enterprise ecommerce solutions offers a host of tools and integrations to help you implement personalizations and sell more on your B2B online marketplace. You can easily create multiple dynamic pages that help you pull rich data on customers’ interest and create targeted marketing campaigns. You can also bring back lost sales on your marketplace by recovering your abandoned cart orders with automated follow-ups.
Personalized payments
Wondering why you need to offer personalised payment solutions to your B2B buyers? Well, when you offer personalized payment options during checkout, in accordance with the shopper’s past payment or purchase history, you enable faster decision making processes.
For example, you can offer your customers the choice of making a full payment at the time of order or ask them to deposit half the amount based on their past financial transactions.
StoreHippo comes with a wide spectrum of payment channels for your B2B online marketplace. With 60+ pre-integrated payment gateways, mobile wallets, built-in B2B wallet or credit management features, vendor ledger etc. you can offer highly personalised payment options to your biz-to-biz buyers. StoreHippo helps enterprise brands to adopt the latest B2B ecommerce trends for digital payments.
Personalized support through multiple channels
The best way to enhance your conversion rates and boost revenue with personalisation is by offering personalised support through multiple channels. The quick personalised responses from live agents provide customer satisfaction and establish loyalty and website credibility. You can seamlessly address customer pain points using chat support through multiple channels.
Skeptical of offering personalised chat support on your B2B ecommerce solutions? Suppose a customer lands on your website, looking for support or a shop assistant to resolve their queries, but finds no one around. The buyer would leave your marketplace to never return. To help you curb the scenario, StoreHippo offers multiple live chat or chat bot integrations and allows brands to offer a personalized buyer journey. You can also keep track of all your customers and their buying habits to offer them a personalised chat support.
Conclusion
With more and more B2B online marketplaces offering personalized buyer journeys to deepen their customer relationships, make sure you are not far behind. As you offer hyper-personalizations to your biz-to-biz buyers, you attune your brand to an upward growth trajectory.
Push your way into the B2B space with StoreHippo B2B ecommerce solution that covers all your enterprise business needs with its 300+ inbuilt features like automated marketing tools, headless and MACH architecture to prepare your B2B brand for the dynamic market shifts.
Are you ready to offer B2B personalization on your online marketplace with StoreHippo? Start your 14-day free trial now.
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