Tips to Increase B2B E-Commerce Sales
E-commerce business has huge potential when it comes to the B2B industry, but it has to be approached in the right ways. The B2C and B2B industries are completely different; hence, what works in a B2C e-commerce context may often fall flat when dealing with B2B e-commerce. To know how to increase the sales in B2B e-commerce business, it is important to know about the B2B e-commerce market.
So, let’s understand what is B2B e-commerce market.
Understanding B2B Market
B2B e-commerce includes the online sale of products and services between companies. This is as opposed to B2C, which describes the online business transacted between a business and individual customers.
B2C e-commerce transactions are relatively simple, but B2B transactions are much more complex. B2B transaction prices are highly variable, depending on a number of pricing variables on the products. In addition, the B2B e-commerce market generally has to deal with more complex tax and regulatory impediments.
Now, let’s understand how you can enhance the sales in the B2B e-commerce business.
Build Your Brand Awareness
Brand awareness impacts trust, increase repeat purchases and even helps in SEO by increasing organic traffic. More people are aware of your brand name, the higher your sales will be. To improve brand awareness, it is important to focus on quality. Create high-quality content, consider influencer partnerships, partner with other businesses in your industry, don’t neglect paid ads, and be active on social media.
Optimize for Mobile Users
Mobile devices have empowered B2B buyers with a wealth of knowledge that they can access from anywhere. You should make your entire website responsive for smartphones, tablets, and other mobile platforms.
Build Proper Email Marketing strategy
Build your email list and strategic a good email marketing campaign. Other channels may not be permanent but you always will own your email list. A good email marketing strategy can help in increasing sales.
Drive More Traffic with Facebook Advertisement
It is one of the best ways to drive new visitors to your store, convert them into paying customers and re-engage them to buy even more.
The average return on investment from Facebook ads in e-commerce is 152%, and it is the largest social media platform for e-commerce orders. If you are not advertising on this channel, it is a big opportunity missed for your brand.
Provide Excellent Customer Service
Customer service plays a very important part when it comes to increasing sales. If you are providing a good service experience to your customers, they will suggest your website to others and will also revisit your website for more shopping. Customer service is the new marketing for many successful brands. Engagement automation in the form of context chat can also help brands push promotional content or invite customers to ask questions.
Run Strategic Promotions on Your Website
Run flash sales on your website and offer a great price. Promote your offers on paid social channels. You will have to spend some money on marketing, but that will help in increasing your sales.
Make Products Easy to Find and Search
Individual product pages are often difficult to locate in a comprehensive online catalog. Make sure that you have an internal search feature that will render your offerings discoverable. You can also cross-link them on other product pages as related content.
Apart from all the above-mentioned tips, an effective B2B e-commerce strategy must be developed with the end goals in mind. Refining your process based on user behavior and feedback is essential. These easy tips can help you achieve consistent e-commerce profits at low overhead, creating a virtuous cycle that strengthens your business.
Marketing Ideas and Tips for SME Business Owners
If you are a business owner, you must be aware of how important it is to think about the most effective small business marketing ideas. No matter how long you have been in business, there is always room for improvement.
Keeping your marketing relevant and making it a catalyst for growth is more important than ever in this era. So, here is a list of some small business marketing ideas and tips that you can follow to get a competitive edge.
Make Data Cleaning a Routine
Data cleaning is very important when it comes to making marketing strategies. Data cleaning should not be a task done once in a year. If you have been neglecting your database, your complete marketing strategy would be a waste. Successful marketing relies on data-driven decision making. If your data is inaccurate, it will affect your decisions. Make data cleaning a recurring monthly routine and you will be on your way to get accurate data.
Always Link Your Marketing to Sales
If someone is looking for your service or product, find the easiest, most attractive ways to get it converted to sales. Make sure that the core message that you want to give to your customers is simple, clear, and it demonstrates benefits.
Know your Audience
When considering small business marketing ideas, it is important to think about the audience. You must know who is your audience, and how you can help them. If you are a B2B firm, there will be an aim for a specific size of the customers. Buyer personas are a great way to define your audience in terms of demographics, responsibilities, and interests. It helps in giving you a target and direction. These personas can also be used to segment your list and drive better marketing messages. Also, don’t forget to take a funnel position into account when creating buyer personas.
Keep the Content on Target
When you are aware of your audience, it becomes easier to create targeted, relevant, and valuable content. The countless sales pitch is not the way to gain the trust of your customers. Instead, make it a goal to reach your audience on a more personal level. This is also the main concept behind content marketing.
Optimize Your Emails
In general, people feel that they get a lot of emails when communicating for business purposes. Email marketing for small business owners is important but tricky business. Great content does not guarantee that recipients will open your email. However, there are always ways to improve audience engagement, open rates, and conversions.
Few things that you can follow are :
- Sender address – Make sure your emails are coming from a recognizable sender name, preferably a business address.
- Subject Line – It gives an idea to a customer what is next and helps them to decide if it is worth clicking or not. So, you should have a good, relevant subject line for your email.
- Design – Make sure that your content is optimized for mobile viewing. It should deliver what you have mentioned in the subject line and it should be visually appealing and easy to read.
- Call to Action – Make sure you add a call-to-action in the email content and let your recipients know what you want them to do.
Know Your Competitors
You should be aware of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for your business. You also need to be aware of your competitors and what strategy they are following to be ahead in the market. If you do this, you will have a unique position in your business and it might help to improve branding.
Find a Way to Measure Success
These days, data speaks volumes. Now you can track your data and measure it through analytics software. You should set goals and deadlines, and also, measure ROI and look into ways to track impacts.
Boost Your Social Media Content
Social media plays a major role in online marketing. There are a lot of changes in social media marketing and it is harder to gain traffic organically. That is where paid advertisements and boosted posts can help.
Embrace Marketing Automation
When your business starts to suffer, it is time to reassess your plan. For that, you can take the help of automation. There are so many people who use marketing automation. A salesforce study found that 67% of marketing leaders use marketing automation. If you are looking for small business marketing ideas that will save time and money, be updated, and maximize referral leads and customer retention. Marketing automation can help you make the most of every customer interaction. This means you can identify warm leads, putting sales-ready leads to conversion.
These ideas and tips can help you run your business smoothly. You can follow the things mentioned in this blog and incorporate your own ideas. Keep thinking about your business and customers as both of them change, grow, and evolve. You will find new ways to improve the customer experience.
Top Reasons to Choose E-Procurement for Your Business
If you own a business, then you must be aware of how important it is to move forward with the new technology. Today, everyone’s life has a touch of digitization and the latest gadgets have become a part of daily life. You can easily see smartphones in every second person’s hand even in most rural areas. This is a new revolution in the country and no business should lag behind this transformation.
We can’t deny the fact that digitization has eased the way of doing business. It has made work faster, smoother and more efficient. This has also brought transparency in business, reduced costs and increased quality and standards of operation. One of the major areas where digitization has made a big impact is e-procurement. It is also known as Electronic Procurement, which is a process where business takes the help of technology and online applications to digitize the procurement and supply chain process.
E-procurement gives a new life to your business operations. It helps in automating all the business processes, eliminates the loopholes and gives your business a better chance to increase. Let’s have a look at a few benefits of e-procurement in your business.
Streamline Process
If you are using e-procurement applications, you can have a clear picture of the purchase from various suppliers. If you are exchanging the documents online, the process will be faster. The automated process will eliminate any chances of mistake that happens with manual data entry work. If there would be any delay in payment it can be easily tracked.
Reduced Costs
E-procurement saves you money by preventing duplicate spending and saving costs associated with paper-based systems. E-procurement will also help in leveraging the volume of purchase.
High Visibility
One of the best reasons to adopt e-procurement system is that it offers a complete view of the procurement process. The e-procurement system includes all purchases, processed orders, payments, and invoices. If you want to make a monthly report, you can get access to all the data from the e-procurement system easily.
Transparent Spending
E-procurement makes it easier to write and analyze reports on your procurement systems, so you can ensure that your procurement procedures are going as per your policies.
Increased Productivity
E-procurement is less time-consuming than traditional procurement. It leads to faster payment at an early stage and brings more transparency in the process. Also, by using templates, paperwork can be filled out more quickly.
Faster Transactions
As we have already mentioned that e-procurement is a time-saving process. This electronic handling system simplifies the purchasing process and speeds up transactions.
Reduction of Errors
When you start doing all the work online there are minimal chances of errors. You can easily access your past transactions and get an idea about the difference.
E-procurement is the future of any business. It is a necessity in the age of technology and digitization. If you want to be ahead of your competitors then you should opt for e-procurement. It takes a business to new heights, increases profitability and eliminates any risk.