Practical tips for optimising your B2B eCommerce strategy
B2B customers expect an intuitive eCommerce experience - how does yours measure up?
The business to business sales environment brings with it a range of challenges, and businesses throughout the B2B eCommerce market need to optimise their strategies and provide their corporate customers with the best possible service.
That means finding innovative ways to improve your marketing and sales processes so that your customers enjoy the best possible customer journey and exceptional service.
The corporate market is not only tough, but also incredibly competitive and any business that offers B2B eCommerce sales needs to offer a cutting-edge service that sets it apart from its competitors.
As experts in B2B eCommerce and providers of unique tech and services, Iconography understands that businesses like yours in this market need to streamline their strategies. For more information on how you can optimise your B2B eCommerce strategy; Iconography is here to help with this handy guide.
INTUS by Iconography
We find that businesses wanting to sell to other businesses via eCommerce need to be approached with a different mindset than conventional B2C eCommerce projects. It's never a 'one size fits all', INTUS offers a service that's built to fit your needs.
Do your research
In today's busy market, where every B2B customer deals with a variety of time-management challenges, you need to offer your clients a simple and straightforward buying process. That means streamlining every aspect of the customer journey, from client onboarding all the way through to reordering or adding extra products.
The easiest way to achieve this is to review the B2B eCommerce platforms on the market and then find the one that will work for you and your business. With an automated platform, you can simplify your B2B eCommerce Strategy and give your customers the buyer journey that they expect.
Make sure to consider what your customers actually need from your website:
- an intuitive eCommerce journey
- straightforward option selection
- fast repeat ordering
- access to marketing assets
- stock and price file exports
- automated Purchase Order creation
Does your chosen solution offer everything you need?
Encourage loyalty
While a streamlined service using an intuitive B2B eCommerce platform will help your business to improve client retention, it's not enough to rest on your laurels; there are two main routes to ensure customer loyalty:
Loyalty Discounts
As well as offering a best-in-class customer journey, your business also needs to consider ways to improve customer loyalty. Programmes like discounts for repeat orders or exclusive offers for regular clients will help to keep them incentivised and encourage them to buy more from your company.
Retaining your customers will help your B2B eCommerce business to improve revenue and to grow, so you need to explore the options available to you. You might want to take a look at this article for more information on loyalty schemes.
Unparalleled Service
You understand the needs of your customers; simple make sure you provide them with what they need, when they need it.
One really simple solution is to offer them a tailored export. This might give them stock and lead time data, or give them easy access to prices, images and other web-rich content. From talking to retailers, we know that one of the most common complaints that they have relates to the difficulty they experience when trying to upload products into their RMS, EPOS or eCommerce systems. If you can make this easy, you'll have the edge over your competitors.
Alternatively, just make sure that it'll be really easy for your customers to perform their most common tasks. Do you get a lot of repeat orders? Streamline the process so that your customers can complete a repeat order with a single click. Do you get a lot of phone calls from customers checking their account balance? Set up an integration with your ERP system so that they can self-serve on the website.
Use buyer personas
While automation and technology are changing how B2B eCommerce businesses interact with their customers, there are still some traditional strategies worth exploring.
Creating buyer personas for every market segment to which you sell is just one traditional technique that has stood the test of time. It's still a viable way to optimise your B2B eCommerce strategy. Almost every aspect of your B2B eCommerce strategy can benefit from the use of detailed and well-informed buyer personas. As such, if your business is looking to improve its sales and customer retention, then you should try to make personas for customers in every niche and job role.
Buyer personas are characters that epitomise the main characteristics of your target market. Using this technique can help your business predict your potential customers' future requirements and then create marketing and advertising strategies that resonate with them and show them how your products and services could solve their problems.
Utilise Automated Segmentation
Once you have your buyer personas, you need to match them with your existing customers. You can build up a really comprehensive picture of your customers which, when tied into your marketing, will really yield results.
What you're looking for is a solution that will automatically and dynamically group customers by their behaviour, tagging customers who:
- have placed an order in the last three months
- haven't logged into their account in six month
- an average order value greater than £5000
- only order single items at a time
- shop from a particular category
If the platform you've chosen can automate the segmentation of your customers, your marketing team will be able to work much more efficiently.
Nine out of ten consumers read at least one review before making a purchase
Target customer reviews and testimonials
Customer reviews are an important part of your B2B eCommerce strategy, as nine out of ten consumers read at least one review before making a purchase. Specifically, new B2B customers are often incredibly cautious, as their choice reflects on their job performance, so you need to ensure that you manage your online reputation properly.
That means more than just responding to negative reviews: it also means soliciting positive reviews from regular customers and satisfied clients. The phrase ‘bad is stronger than good’ is never better applied than when it’s used to describe reviews. A single negative review can have a major impact on your business’s reputation, but positive ones often have less traction individually.
As such, your business needs to make sure that it focuses on encouraging customers to review your business and share their positive experiences dealing with you and your team. There are many ways that you can encourage your clients to review your B2B eCommerce business and doing so will help your business to attract more clients, show them the benefits of your services and much more, so it’s definitely worth investing time and effort into this approach.
We have partnered with companies like Trustpilot for a long time, and although they have a strong reputation within the consumer marketplace, they're less well known within the business to business world, despite providing all the same benefits.
Stay up to date with new B2B eCommerce techniques and tactics
Industry experts are constantly creating new techniques for optimising B2B eCommerce strategies for businesses like yours. Additionally, new technology, software platforms and digital tools get released regularly, which could help you to optimise your business further.
If you want to stay ahead of your competitors, then you'll need to ensure that you're always aware of the latest developments in the market and can offer your customers the innovative services and support that they expect. To achieve this, you should follow blogs from B2B eCommerce experts like us. We share the latest industry news and updates, so you can always stay ahead of the latest industry changes.
For personalised support and more information about our innovative selection of solutions, feel free to contact us. Our professionals will be happy to discuss your business, its unique needs and how we can help you to streamline your B2B eCommerce strategy.
We are Iconography
We are team of seasoned eCommerce and omnichannel specialists, a dedicated group of digital artisans. We've been building profitable, high performing eCommerce and omnichannel businesses for our clients since 1997.
At Iconography, we don't just build an eCommerce website for our B2B customers; we work with you to understand your needs and produce a fully rounded solution.
Our innovative B2B clients challenge and trust us to deliver online solutions tailored to fit their existing business processes, providing a solid foundation and bridge to the future.
IXO Commerce is our own platform, built entirely in house. We built it, we understand it, and we will be able to provide exactly what we need.
Iconography combines an award-winning eCommerce platform with the technical ability to provide a bespoke website, fit for your needs, and the needs of your customers.
If you’re interested in exploring how our B2B solution can take you to the next level contact the team here.
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Custom B2B eCommerce
We understand how to structure eCommerce for trade customers. INTUS Trade provides the specific stock, lead time and product information they need and the pricing, promotion, ordering and delivery options necessary to ensure all our trade sites are a useful resource which supports customers and adds real value.
Posted by Georgia Caird
20th July 2021
20th July 2021