Suppose you’re new to the B2B eCommerce space. In that case, you must have seen the trends of changing customer behavior as more B2B customers migrate online.
So you ask yourself, “How do I migrate my customers to online channels?” The goal, of course, is to ensure customers remain loyal to your brand throughout the process.
Transitioning customers to online channels has been one of the primary focuses of B2B eCommerce for the past five years. In a 2017 survey, 75% of B2B transactions were already taking place online, and buyers wanted to access more products and services online.
Unfortunately, many B2B sellers are still wary of migrating online because they fear they will not meet customer expectations regarding quality service delivery and personalized customer experience.
Build a B2B E-Commerce Migration Strategy
You can deliver a better and more personalized customer experience online with the right strategies.
But before we discuss how B2B sellers can create better customer experiences online, what exactly is driving B2B customers online, and why?
Several factors are responsible for these behavioral changes. First, the ease of making purchases online appeals to customers. For example, having access to an online catalog for products that can include product details, catalog search, order history, etc. has improved customer experience, thereby increasing the need for more.
In this article, I will explain how you can migrate your B2B customers to online channels, convince reluctant customers to remain loyal buyers, and increase sales and overall brand awareness.
Educate Your Customers on the Benefits of Moving Online
Today, millennial buyers would rather purchase through streamlined digital channels than speak to a sales rep. This study by Forrester shows that millennials have gained more purchasing power in organizations. This means that to succeed in the B2B eCommerce space, you must continue to meet the expectations of the modern B2B buyer.
Before 2010, B2B marketing involved traditional approaches, such as cold calling, faxes, etc. These approaches have phased out as the digital space evolves and customers tilt towards online purchases.
However, despite the increase in the number of B2B eCommerce users, there are still B2B customers who prefer the old way of doing things. Without easing them into the online buying experience, you can’t reap the full benefits of moving your business online.
Migrate B2B Customers Online
So, how do you make it easy on the buyer? The first step is to educate them. To achieve this, you must identify longtime customers unwilling to move online and review your records for customers who have yet to make online purchases.
Once you have this list, commit human and marketing resources to teaching your customers about the benefits of migrating online. You will have to provide a step-by-step guide, from helping them set up accounts to finding products they need.
For example, you can create instructional videos on searching for products, placing orders online, or using self-help services. These how-to videos will help them understand the benefits of using online channels.
It is also an opportunity to increase your brand awareness and attract new customers.
Communicate with Your Customers Early On
Once you decide to migrate to online channels, tell your customers about it. Customers want to be involved in the changes, and communicating such changes with them will increase brand loyalty.
Change is not always comfortable. If you think change is natural, try brushing your teeth with your left hand if you are right-handed. Real change is not always comfortable at the beginning. You can ease your customers into your migration by communicating the “whys” of your shift to eCommerce.
When communicating, begin by explaining why you are migrating your customers to online channels. Letting customers know why you’ve adopted a new strategy helps remove any space for assumptions.
Successful messages show value rather than tell customers about value. Communication that demonstrates the point is far more compelling than a message that feels stale.
The clearer you are with your customers, the more empowered they’ll feel to make the smart decision to continue supporting you through your migration and beyond. When you communicate clearly enough to show why you are making such a change, you can showcase how you have their best interests at heart.
Create a System to Migrate B2B Customers
Create a system of reporting progress and asking them for their feedback on the proposed functionality and features you’re about to roll out. This will excite them.
You can use their feedback to improve the customer experience. Involving the customers in the entire process makes it easy for them to accept the transition.
Another way you can communicate with them is by using a traditional method to announce your transition to online channels.
Imagine you send your “not-so-interested-in-online-store” customer a letter through the mail. In the letter, you write about how they have been crucial to the success of your business and why you wanted to inform them first about the changes you’re about to make.
How would you feel if you were the customer? Exactly! That’s the kind of emotions you want to evoke.
Beyond making them feel special, you also show the customers that you’re taking them seriously by putting your time and effort into communicating your intention to improve your services.
When you communicate with customers directly, you make them feel part of your business. This builds a brand they can trust and successfully migrates B2B customers.
Offer Incentives
Everyone likes incentives. According to a report by Oberlo, one of the top reasons people shop online is the option of free delivery. Offering similar incentives that provide an easier experience to your customers can encourage them to continue purchasing your products by shopping online.
Incentives can take different forms. From offering free installation to a money-back guarantee to providing guides and tutorials on purchases, you can incentivize your customers to make the transition to digital channels.
For example, in preparation for Prime Day in 2020, Amazon offered new customers a 30% discount on its Amazon Business. This is an incentive that can improve customer experience.
When customers make their first purchase and experience the benefits of using your online channel, they’re likely to stick around and use the platform more often.
Also, if you already have a loyalty program, you can transfer your customers’ offline profiles to their online accounts. This is key to successfully migrating B2B customers.
Invest in User Experience
The buyer’s journey is defined by how you make them feel from start to finish. Poor customer service is the reason 58% of people stop doing business with a company.
Conversely,86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. So if you’re wondering how you can improve customer experience, here are five tips that can help you migrate B2B customers:
- Create an interactive website.
- Excellent mobile experience.
- Excite your customers with rich product content.
- Make the purchasing journey seamless.
- Personalize customer experience.
- Use Digital Asset Management (DAM) to maintain brand integrity.
1. Create an Interactive Website
When you’re moving your B2B business online, your website is your digital store where customers can browse and choose the products they want to buy. You want to make this experience worthwhile by making it easy for them to access all you have to offer.
Like a physical store, customers are influenced by what they see on your website. According to Blue Corona, 37% of customers say they leave a poorly designed website without purchasing.
Flashy graphics, unclear brand message, and poor UX design are some of the factors that can make your B2B eCommerce website terrible for users.
Your website must be interactive to create a positive user experience. Ensure your brand’s message and value proposition are evident through images, text, interactive design, and graphic design.
Additionally, you can enable the push notification function on your website. This will allow you to keep in touch with your customers even when they are not on your website. Customers love receiving relevant updates from their favorite brands; push notifications can help you plug that gap.
2. Ensure Excellent Mobile Experiences
This is crucial. While you invest in creating an interactive website interface, you must remember that 91% of B2B buyers use mobile phones to search for products online.
Additionally, 80% of B2B buyers use mobile at work, while 60% claim that the mobile experience significantly influenced their recent purchase. This points to one fact: a memorable mobile experience is vital.
Customers who use your website on large monitors expect the same experience when switching to their mobiles. To buttress this point, more than 90% of B2B buyers are likely to patronize the same vendor again due to a superior mobile experience, compared to just 50% of those who report a poor experience.
Creating a responsive website means adapting to mobile devices while ensuring all functionalities are available. An ideal mobile experience offers users a simple, quick-loading, and integrated experience.
3. Excite Your Customers with Rich Product Content
Ensure your product catalog has all the relevant information a customer could think of when examining a product.
This could include descriptions, specifications, images, measurements, reviews, videos, and any other information that will keep your customer on the website longer.
You should know that, like consumers, B2B buyers also research a product before making a purchase. So, providing straight-to-the-point, quality content about your products will grab their attention.
You can use Product Information Management (PIM) to effectively manage product data and update information in real time to ensure your customers always have accurate, consistent data with the brand.
4. Make the Purchasing Journey Seamless
Customers have high expectations and want less time in their purchasing journey. So, from finding your products to making an order, the demand for a faster experience is rising.
For example, if your customers can’t find your products quickly, they’re likely to leave, which will increase the bounce rate. To avoid this problem, simplify your product catalog.
This can be achieved by creating categories for your products, conducting keyword searches, and keeping a log of results showing customer preferences through previous search requests.
Additionally, intuitive search functions on your website that help customers repeat orders of frequently purchased items will show your customers that you understand their needs and want to make the process easier for them.
As a result, customers don’t have to start their search from scratch every time, which can foster customer loyalty.
Also, quick order and fast shipping options are integral to a fulfilling purchasing journey, the more convenient the process, the better the customer experience.
5. Personalize Customer Experience
The most crucial factor is a personalized customer experience. According to Gartner, B2B eCommerce websites with a personalized experience will outsell competitors who don’t provide one by 30%.
In addition, personalized customer experience accounts for why customers spend 48% more time on your website. In comparison, 50% say it is a crucial feature they consider when deciding whom to build a relationship with.
To personalize your customers’ experience, you must leverage machine learning, AI, and customer data.
Ultimately, offering personalized content that matches customer wants and needs will lead to more conversions and faster orders, help you build customer loyalty, and successfully migrate B2B customers.
6. Use Digital Asset Management (DAM) to Maintain Brand Integrity
When moving online, you want to ensure your brand’s message remains the same. For example, this may involve converting your physical marketing materials to digital resources.
After reproducing these materials in digital formats, you need a system to store, manage, and share them in a way that matches your brand’s message.
With Digital Asset Management software (DAM), you can manage all your digital assets – from videos to images to marketing materials – on a central platform.
The benefits of using DAM software include helping you avoid re-creating content you already have, maintaining brand consistency, and distributing up-to-date content across multiple channels.
This will help you create a buying experience that keeps the customers coming.
Be Persuasive and Continue to Reassure Customers
Transitioning all your customers to online channels will not happen quickly, even when you give your best efforts. Humans are reluctant to change by nature.
This means some of your customers may still insist on patronizing you through traditional offline channels. You must understand that a brand is based on relationships and trust built over a long period.
Some customers, who are used to interacting with physical sales reps, may be skeptical about trusting a virtual sales rep.
In this case, you must reassure them that they will get the same value offline and more online. So here is how you can go about it:
- Highlight the benefits
- Let your sales reps become familiar with the process.
- Combine the online and physical experience.
1. Highlight the Benefits
To convince customers who are reluctant to move online, you will have to promote the benefits of making the switch. This means you have to be in their faces constantly—but, of course, not in an annoying way.
While your reluctant customers don’t want to shop online, they still use online channels where you can reach them. So, you should focus your promotional activities on these channels.
An example is email marketing. According to Gartner, it is one of the most effective strategies for converting customers and increasing sales.
By running a targeted email newsletter campaign, you can get this category of your customers to learn more about the benefits of opting for online channels.
Social media is also an excellent place to reach them. You can hire a social media manager to create tailored content to persuade them to buy online.
2. Let Your Sales Reps Become Familiar with the Process
When your sales reps are familiar with how your online channels work, they can better convey the message.
One way to teach them is to have them go through the process. This will help them understand the customer experience and communicate the benefits persuasively and reassuringly.
3. Combine Online and Physical Experience
One reason some customers insist on using offline channels is that they trust and value the human touch involved. So you must assure them of personal relationships even when they move online.
To achieve this, have your sales reps walk customers through the online buying process. First, agree to take their orders offline. Then, make sure you set up online accounts for them.
Your persuasive and reassuring sales rep can show them how to make orders online and get them faster at the point of delivery. By allowing your sales reps to take the lead, customers can gravitate towards moving online when they witness the seamless process in real time.
To keep customers engaged, sales reps can call or send emails to follow up with comprehensive information about the online buying process, how to manage their accounts, and the benefits, and encourage them to try it out when making future orders.
This will assure them they can enjoy personalized services while receiving an improved and more efficient buying experience, and successfully migrate B2B customers.
Leverage Marketing Automation
The goal of today’s B2B eCommerce market is to automate every process. This is why B2B marketers are constantly following the latest marketing automation strategies.
Millennials are driving the demand for automation. It is estimated that by 2025, 75% of millennials will represent the global workforce.
When migrating your offline customers to online channels, it is crucial to incorporate marketing automation strategies to help you match buyers’ expectations and increase sales.
Currently, 51% of companies use marketing automation, while 58% of B2B companies plan to adopt it within the next few years. According to Moosend, leading brands use marketing automation to stay ahead of their competitors’ ROI and sales.
Undoubtedly, marketing automation has proven to drive more revenue for many companies. It helps you guarantee faster response times, creates high-quality leads, and saves money.
With a proper marketing automation strategy, you can harness the benefits of marketing automation when you’re moving your customers online.
What is Marketing Automation?
In simple terms, marketing automation uses automation solutions to manage all marketing procedures in a company. Your company can use various tools such as social media post schedulers, content marketing, email, and SEO.
With automation, you can create a seamless customer experience through customized content campaigns and streamlined landing pages and forms. It is a surefire way to improve your customer’s buying journey.
Here are three marketing automation strategies you can adopt.
Automate Your Social Media Marketing
A growing trend in 2021 is the use of automated social media marketing. Tools like Buffer and Hootsuite allow you to create social media posts for multiple channels in advance and schedule them to publish when and where you want them.
This will allow you to consistently produce relevant content, increase your response time, and collect data that will help you better understand your customers.
Email Marketing Powered by AI
Email marketing has always been effective, but you can revolutionize your email marketing campaign with AI.
For example, you can use a personalized automated newsletter to reach specific customers. With the help of AI tools like Seventh Sense, Drift Email, and rasa.io, you can create customized newsletters for each reader.
It significantly increases your email engagement and simplifies the entire process. Take rasa.io, for instance. It can generate smart newsletter emails, automate newsletter production, and provide quality insights for your brand.
AI tools will give your brand a competitive advantage, help you build a community of email subscribers you can bank on, and boost your overall email marketing automation.
Since customers like personalized experiences, this will boost customer satisfaction and enhance brand trust.
Automated Product Information Management
At the heart of PIM is the ability to drive product content for e-commerce, which includes product specifications, images, catalogs and descriptions.
Why is this Important for Your B2B ECommerce Digital Channel?
One of your customers’ primary expectations is consistent and accurate data, especially when they are going to be buying from you.
Product information management software has the beauty of providing product information to multiple distribution channels with the highest quality, in a standardized and consistent manner, wherever it’s used.
Millennial buyers consume a lot of information from different sources, which means they can compare other brands and give a sound evaluation of the appropriate supplier. No, if your catalog has inconsistent product data, it will negatively affect the buying decision.
In a bid to sell quickly, some companies online attach an e-commerce platform to their existing enterprise resource planning (ERP), only to discover their ERP can’t always maintain the multiple data inputs and outputs, ultimately leading to inconsistent data.
The good news is that you don’t have to worry about such problems because PIM can integrate all data into a single repository, becoming the brain behind your operations.
PIM Enhances the B2B E-Commerce Buyer Journey
PIM becomes one of the best tools for ensuring consistency and reliability at every stage of the buying process. Buyers now resort to e-commerce sites for research, learning, and even transacting, and without high-quality, reliable product content, your brand will suffer.
Product content needs to be continuously enriched. PIM ensures that all your product data is up to date, clean, and consistently high-quality.
PIM allows customers consistent access to detailed and relevant products, which will benefit both your organization and the customer by reducing complaints or, worse, product returns. Accurate product data also protects against shopping cart abandonment, allowing customers to enjoy an efficient experience. Becoming efficient and effective is one of the best ways to secure customer retention and satisfaction for your organization.
Product Information Management Helps You Migrate B2B Customers
Imagine how a customer researches for what they want and only to receive a product that was the opposite of what they ordered, in such a situation, there won’t be a next time.
PIM solution protects you from such ugly occurrences. Ideally, your customers should find what they want and head straight to the checkout section without the help of an agent pushing them to complete the purchase.
PIM software gives your customers the control they need to enjoy the buying journey, ultimately leading to customer retention.
With these tools in place, you can migrate your existing customers to your preferred online channel without fearing losing customers because of the introduction of new changes to your brand.
Integrate Both PIM & DAM for Complete Product Control
Managing your product content and digital assets in two separate systems might have worked when you were dealing with limited SKUs or basic assets. But once complexity enters the picture, multiple channels, teams, file types, and product versions, you’ll likely spend more time coordinating than actually optimizing.
Integrating PIM and DAM gives you centralized control over both product data and assets, so your team stops working in silos and starts executing with clarity.
When both systems work together, here’s what actually improves:
- No more mismatched data and images. Product specs, images, videos, and documents stay connected and accurate across all channels.
- Faster time-to-market. You eliminate duplication and rework, so products launch with fewer delays.
- Cleaner workflows. Teams aren’t guessing where to find the latest files or product info it’s all in one place, structured and searchable.
- Better brand consistency. Every product touchpoint uses the same verified data and assets, so what customers see is always correct and on-brand.
When your PIM and DAM are integrated, your product content becomes a single source of truth. That’s what sets apart operations that scale smoothly from those constantly in catch-up mode.
Conclusion
To migrate B2B customers online, you need to be strategic. Trends have shown that B2B eCommerce brands must have a solid online presence to succeed in the current business world.
Millennials have taken over the B2B eCommerce space and are the biggest online shoppers. This means there is an existing market to explore; you just have to use the right strategies. Despite this, there are still B2B buyers stuck with the traditional method that you must contend with.
To successfully migrate customers online, B2B eCommerce companies must create interactive websites with integrated mobile experiences, offer incentives to activate buyers’ interest, communicate changes with customers early, and leverage marketing automation to deliver top-notch self-help services and a memorable customer experience.
Finally, consistency is critical. The industry is fast-paced, and you must keep up with the trends. However, you cannot afford to be complacent. Use data analytics to examine each stage of your customer’s buying journey to identify issues.
To improve, learn more about Catsy’s PIM, DAM, and Workflow solutions by visiting the website or scheduling a live demo here.
