Building a new B2B ecommerce store is relatively easy—the biggest challenge is increasing your online sales. In this digital age, you have competitors from all over the world. With so much competition, you must have a sound strategy to build a profitable business.
Here are some fool-proof tips you can implement to improve your B2B sales:
1. Revisit your pricing strategy
The biggest dealbreaker is how much your product costs. Your customers are always looking around to find a cheaper vendor. Businesses usually choose one of two pricing strategies:
Cost-plus pricing: You evaluate all your costs along with a profit margin and price your products.
Market-oriented pricing: You set up a charge on par with other competitors in the market.
To be customer-centric, you must find a balance between the two pricing strategies. The right price should not undercut your profit too much or compromise on quality.
Pro tip: To get repeat orders for your B2B business, offer discounts on long-term subscriptions and bulk orders.
2. Optimize your process for faster shipping
No one likes waiting for days to get their orders delivered. A study conducted in 2017 showed one in three online shoppers decided to check out through large marketplaces—rather than ordering directly from a business ecommerce shop—for a faster delivery option.
The best way to enable faster shipping is to optimize and streamline your current order processing system. Check into all things that happen after an order is placed and how long it takes to get shipped. The most delays happen due to the lack of inventory or time taken to pack products for shipment.
By choosing a better inventory management system, you can forecast order patterns more effectively and stock up. Also, if you feel the time taken to pack and ship products could be improved, you can try custom packaging solutions. You can find some innovative ways to pack products at a low cost.
3. Provide a good customer experience
Your online store will likely have orders coming in at odd hours, and it can be challenging to reach out to customers if you have no ’round the clock’ support. Setting automated responders for all calls and messages will help keep customers in the loop. Also, being transparent about when your team will be available to help them establish trust.
With the advancement of technology, it is easy to track customer messages and provide timely support. AI-powered chatbots on your website can help customers with basic questions. However, to provide better customer experience, your support team should be trained to provide prompt responses. Adopting a ‘customer first‘ strategy built on empathy will help you connect better with customers.
Pro tip: If you’re selling machinery or industrial products, build a repository of information on how to install and use these products better. Useful information helps bring customers back to the website.
4. Enable multi-currency options
Globalization has taken over eCommerce, and customers will be more comfortable checking out using their native currency. By allowing them to shop using their currency, you help them connect better with your store and see the actual value of the product.
5. Find additional platforms to generate meaningful revenue
You might be running Google Shopping ads and seeing a significant amount of traffic and conversion on your website, which is enough to make you happy. However, just stopping there means you are missing out on various other social platforms and forums where your target audience is active.
Allocate a test budget and run ads on numerous forums and social media sites like Facebook and Linkedin. Such tactics will help bring relevant traffic back to your store. Monitoring these advertisements and identify sites that have the best conversion rates to find other profitable mediums.
Pro tip: Look into your Google Analytics and find from which third-party websites you’re getting inbound traffic. This is the perfect place to start your marketing.
You can also look into affiliate marketing and influencer marketing to find the right people who can sell your products for you. The most significant advantage of these two techniques is that there is no upfront cost for putting your product out there, you only have to give a percentage of your profit for each sale made.
Pro tip: The key is to identify which affiliate/influencer marketers your target audience follows. You won’t have as much of an impact, using someone whose audience wouldn’t be interested in your product or service.
6. Update your product inventory in real-time
A unified inventory is crucial for all B2B success. Selling online means not only selling on your website but also in multiple marketplaces. If your inventory is not up to date after every sale, a few products could go out of stock but will appear as available on the websites. If a customer orders an unavailable product and has to wait for it to be re-stocked, it could negatively impact your brand, and you could potentially lose the customer forever.
It’s essential to adopt an advanced inventory management solution that updates stock in real-time to avoid such issues.
7. Implement a segmentation strategy for targeted email campaigns
Email marketing strategy has an average expected ROI of $44 for every $1 spent, making it the most sought-out medium for marketers. Capitalize on your existing relationships and build a better, more personalized experience for your customers.
Segmentation in B2B ecommerce—dividing your customer base into groups based on specific criteria—helps increase open and click-through rates. Ideally, most B2B ecommerce marketers create targeted segments to reach out to customers with the right messages.
These segments are based on their purchase history, buying frequency, and category of products they have indulged in. Sending promotional and informational emails based on their requirements will ensure maximum adoption rate and conversion.
Pro tip: Creating segments for dormant buyers and sending an e-mail with your top promotion will help bring them back to your store.
8. Let customers check out with ease
Your B2B online store navigation can make or break your business. A clean and easy-to-use storefront helps customers find and add products quickly and check out easily. This is important because the average cart abandonment rate is 79.17%. Equipping your store with the following features will help decrease that rate:
Quick-order forms: Let customers add multiple products easily without needing to navigate through the store.
Easy checkout page: Have a simple and familiar checkout page to help buyers complete their purchase with the least amount of effort.
Multiple payment options: Let customers pay using PayPal, credit cards, local payment options, or on credit to increase conversion rates.
9. Make your B2B ecommerce website SEO-friendly
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps you rank better on each search engine. Carefully crafting each page’s meta title and description with the right keyword will help you rank higher.
Invest time into researching your products and learning which keywords people use to discover similar products. Include these keywords and search terms in your product titles and description to help your products be more discoverable by search engines.
Customer reviews are also another great way to generate user-generated content on your website. This content has several search-friendly keywords that will help your products rank better on top search results.
As competition grows with time, figuring out different platforms and marketing efforts is crucial for your online success. These nine tips will help you provide a better customer experience to improve your B2B ecommerce sales.
To know how to set up your ecommerce store, read our blog ‘Build an ecommerce store in 6 steps‘.