How to Use Personalization to Boost Sales in Your B2B eCommerce Storefront

According to a Seismic/Demand Metric report, 80% of B2B businesses surveyed said that personalizing their website was more effective when it came to reaching their company’s objectives than unpersonalized content.

Personalization in B2B eCommerce is the process of delivering a customized experience in your online storefront through content, features, and functionality that speak to your customers’ wants and needs. When you personalize your customers’ online buying experience, you not only engage your B2B buyers but also drive sales, nurture repeat purchases, and increase conversions by establishing trust and building loyalty.

There are many ways you can personalize the customer experience for B2B buyers in your online storefront. In this article, we will explore four of the key areas where your business can take advantage of personalization to give your customers a great online buying experience as well as increase sales for your company.

The 4 P’s of personalization to provide a great customer experience and boost sales in your eCommerce store

Product catalogs

While it’s important for your sales reps to have access to your entire B2B product catalog, many of your B2B buyers only need access to a specific product line or certain parts of your product catalog. This is where personalization comes into play.

Personalization allows you to establish a unique, customized view of your product catalog for each B2B customer or group of customers your business has. With the B2B Wave eCommerce platform, these personalized product catalogs can include such things as:

• Promoted category banners
• Per-category or per-product discounts
• Showing specific products or product categories only to specific customers
• Displaying product names and product descriptions in multiple languages

Pricing

B2B pricing can be complex as many businesses have multiple price levels based on negotiated contracts with their customers. Offering personalized pricing in your eCommerce storefront ensures those negotiated prices are accurately reflected in your B2B buyer’s experience. Personalized pricing is also helpful when your online store is public, as it allows you to let anonymous buyers view your products without seeing prices until they create an account.

Here are some more ways you can personalize pricing with the B2B Wave eCommerce platform:

• Set special product prices for specific customers
• Create multiple price lists and assign them to specific customers
• Establish per-category or per-product discounts
• Offer single or multi-currency pricing

Purchasing

Personalizing the ordering process for B2B buyers in your online storefront can equate to significant reductions in the cost of sales and service. And by ensuring that relevant details like order history, invoices, quick and easy reorders, and payment options are easily accessible, you can also increase customer satisfaction and loyalty by making the customer buying experience more streamlined and less complex. For instance, you may have sales reps who place orders on behalf of customers, but you still want those customers to be able to log in to their accounts and view their order details. Personalization allows you to do that.

Additional ways you can personalize the purchasing process for your customers with the B2B Wave eCommerce platform are:

• Adding your own fields to order confirmation emails
• Allowing multiple delivery addresses per customer
• Setting minimum order quantities per product
• Setting minimum order values per customer
• Allowing ordering from multiple countries
• Customizing your storefront’s email templates with images, video, logos, text, unique subject lines, personalized greetings, and more.

Promotions and merchandising

Promotions and merchandising in B2B eCommerce are an effective way of increasing your share of wallet (also known as SOW, a marketing metric used to calculate the percentage of a customer's spending for a certain product) and boosting sales. Promotions include such things as offering discounts on products that are highly relevant to the customer, and merchandising refers to the process of cross-selling or up-selling with featured or suggested products.

The B2B Wave eCommerce platform provides many effective ways of reinforcing a great customer experience through personalized promotions and merchandising, including:

• Per-customer product suggestions
• Per-customer product and category access
• Offering suggested or featured products
• Assigning brands to specific customers
• Creating a promotional storefront banner and showing it to specific customers
• Setting per-customer discounts

Give your B2B customers the experience they expect

As Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, states: “If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”

While it’s true that your B2B customers make purchasing decisions based on rational analysis (compared to B2C buyers who are more likely to buy based on impulse), they still expect a consistent, personal experience in your eCommerce storefront that is similar to what they experience as consumers in the B2C sector.

To ensure your efforts to personalize the customer experience in your online B2B storefront are effective, make sure they add value to all the key components of the eCommerce process, which includes much more than just the shopping cart. It also includes areas such as product catalogs, price lists, promotions, product recommendations, merchandising, orders, and more.

If you’re a B2B company and you want to boost sales and keep up with the competition, it’s more important than ever to ensure you are giving your customers a competitive and enjoyable experience in your online eCommerce store. Just start with the 4 P’s!