Cut-throat competition in the ecommerce market is no longer a surprise. With the prolonged pandemic and the resulting demand pattern shift, ecommerce business development is getting tougher. As a consequence, a growing number of ecommerce website owners compete for customers in every possible way.
Customer engagement approaches are numerous, but not all of them are effective. Today’s digitally savvy customers are not fooled by flashy advertising as they need something more—a promise that they will spend a minimum of their time shopping while still getting the maximum benefit.
According to Gartner’s research, you have roughly 5% of a B2B customer’s time during their buying journey. During this time, you not only need to persuade your customer to purchase your product but also to convert them into a loyal one providing a memorable customer experience. Moreover, B2B strategies imply a more niche approach with a narrower customer focus, longer turnaround times, and lead nurturing.
Launching ecommerce portals is one way to support this process. Still, to ensure the success of your ecommerce portal, you should keep in mind some effective strategies.
What Determines the Success of an Ecommerce Portal?
Personalized user experience
The appropriate way to ensure business success is to identify what exactly your customer needs. By collecting as much information as possible about their past purchases and preferences, it is possible to create a personalized user experience that can retain the customer for a long time to come.
Portals with the implementation of features for gathering data, saving previous orders, and offering recommendations based on customers’ search requests are many times more effective than portals without such functionality.
According to Ted Schadler, Principal Analyst at Forrester, “Consumers want full-journey, omnichannel experiences. This requires a common strategy and toolkit; increasingly, a real-time customer data platform acts as the glue that ties it all together.”
B2B customers search for ecommerce websites with instant search, intuitive navigation, straightforward checkout, detailed product information, and high-quality images. Moreover, they expect to save time on the next re-order, so an order history feature or an automated replenishment option are essential.
Provide your customers with all necessary data regarding inventory availability, value offers, and freight terms instead of them having to contact your sales rep and complete these steps many times slower.
Integration capability
Your portal should evaluate customers’ demand to meet it in terms of new features they might require. So continuous upgrading will allow your business to keep up with the times and enhance your customer loyalty. Moreover, spinning up new modules ensures workflow effectiveness and freeing up your time for more critical tasks.
There are various add-ons you may implement into your B2B portal. The choice of a new module depends on your business needs. Still, the most common add-ons deal with analytics, payments, delivery, and other back-office operations.
Through new functionality, you can extend payments gateways, ensure detailed business analytics, inventory, freight, and customer relationship management to interconnect your business functions.
Diverse pricing models
With a customer-centric approach, your business certainly won’t miss out. This approach is also useful while creating your pricing model. By dividing your customers into groups according to their location, order volume, purchase frequency, and so on, you can develop various price options like starter value offers or bulk discounts.
This way of pricing can benefit both you in terms of loyalty nurturing and customers seeking lower costs.
Extended search options
Users are unlikely to linger on your website for long looking for what they need. They are more inclined to leave the website and try another one with faster search options which means you lose that customer. Generating B2B leads is challenging enough, so losing a customer means losing money and time. It is advisable to think about all the possible ways of searching for a product or service on your portal to provide a top-notch user experience and save your potential customer’s time.
With a well-tuned search engine, business users will be able to adjust their queries by product settings and product synonyms and find their products of interest much faster. Such attention to the search possibilities within a portal is critical when the list of product items is quite extensive. Even indicating material or performing a search-within-search-results approach increases the chances of finding the right one.
Content creation
Providing a customer with an interactive experience and educational content showcases your expertise in the field and attention to detail, which is highly valued.
Add extended product descriptions, safety data sheets, and manuals, complement the text with infographics, create demo videos, 3D product images, and consider product configurator integration for a customer to make an informed buying decision.
Final words
Following these simple strategies and applying them to your ecommerce strategy can help you lead your B2B portal to success. Keep in mind that your customers might need more of a niche approach and more time to convert. Since they appreciate straightforward and highly informative experiences, serve them just those along with your attention to detail for them to stay as well as come back for more.
