Customer buying behaviour has undergone a dramatic shift, even enterprise clients are switching from traditional brick-and-mortar shopping to the digital realm. A recent McKinsey study reveals that B2B eCommerce is becoming the most preferred sales channel, with 35% of respondents selecting it over traditional in-person sales (26%) and phone calls (8%).
While rapidly navigating online platforms, B2B businesses need a successful customer adoption strategy to unlock the full potential of digital transformation. However, encouraging those accustomed to traditional operation methods to fully adapt to the transition is often challenging. In this article, we’ll delve into the obstacles preventing B2B enterprises from driving eCommerce adoption and suggest effective strategies to overcome the situation.
What is customer adoption in B2B eCommerce?
In general, customer adoption is the process of encouraging your existing customers to learn about your new product or service, thus proactively integrating or using it.
In the context of B2B eCommerce, the ‘new product’ is your recently launched digital channel (e.g., online marketplaces or company websites). B2B businesses that want to increase client adoption need to direct their clients from traditional means of cooperation, such as phone calls and manual order processing, to eCommerce platforms.
What is the difference between customer acquisition and customer adoption?
Customer acquisition and customer adoption are both major stages in the customer lifecycle; however, customer acquisition happens in the initial phase of bringing new customers to the business, while customer adoption is about motivating your existing customers to use your new product.
In detail, the acquisition stage is to get potential customers in the door and generate leads through online and offline marketing tactics. The process typically consists of 3 stages in the customer journey: Awareness, consideration, and purchase. Businesses can leverage social media, email marketing, content marketing, and paid advertising to reach potential customers.
The adoption phase, on the other hand, focuses on current customers and their buying habits, getting them to fully utilise and derive value from a new product or service. This often occurs in the retention and advocacy stages of the customer journey. By providing excellent customer support, offering incentives, and continuously improving the systems, businesses can successfully empower customers to change their buying behaviours.
Why do B2B enterprises need customer adoption?
Acquiring new customers is indeed crucial for business, but adopting them digitally to ensure customer satisfaction and seamless operations is also essential for long-term business success. Key upsides of prioritising customer adoption include:
- Time and effort saving: By getting both customers and staff to utilise their eCommerce website, businesses enable automation, minimising time spent on manual tasks and boosting productivity.
- Streamlined workflow: Digital tools enable customers to proceed with orders more quickly and with a larger volume, without delays or errors caused by manual work. They also facilitate hassle-free information sharing between businesses, improving overall operational efficiency.
- Revenue growth: When customers actively use your website and see the value derived from it, they are more likely to order more or renew contracts, and refer your business to others. This contributes to increased revenue and long-term growth.
- Standing out from the competition: Amongst a range of B2B product and service providers with similar purchase journeys, catering a unique customer experience empowers you to differentiate yourself in this crowded marketplace.
- Lower churn rate: If your product and its sales channel are both of value to customers, they are less likely to abandon or switch to other brands. With a well-rounded strategy that engages clients early and often during the adoption phase, businesses can foster customer loyalty and retention.
Major challenges preventing businesses from adopting customers
The transition to digital commerce, while promising, presents a unique set of obstacles in adopting users. The very first challenge may arise right from internal teams, as they question the potential impact of shifting from in-person sales to online purchasing. Another critical barrier might come from the customers’ familiarity with traditional methods and unwillingness to change. Let’s explore these in detail.
From customer side
- Resistance to adaptation: Any changes in B2B workflows might involve enterprise-level resource reallocation and data security management. Therefore, if business clients haven’t seen the benefits of technology adoption, they may be hesitant to adopt new tools and cooperation methods, particularly if their current processes are working.
- Lack of time to learn new things: Your clients may perceive digital platforms as time-consuming or complicated to learn or use. The digital shift means that customers, especially ones who haven’t had experience utilising software in operations, have to spend a certain amount of time developing the skills to navigate online platforms and complete transactions.
- Desire for personalised support: Some customers may prefer assistance from a single contact point such as a sales representative or account manager rather than relying on public customer service portals. When negotiating with a single person in charge, customers can receive adequate or privileged service, therefore, they value developing personal relationships with suppliers.
From staff side
- Concern about unattainable sales targets: When digital channels become more prevalent, deals from in-person sales will fall short of expectations. That explains why sales teams worry about failing to meet their KPIs and losing potential commission if customers bypass traditional methods.
- Knowledge gap: Internal staff members may believe that they possess more comprehensive knowledge of products compared to content displayed on digital channels. Websites online may show limited or inadequate descriptions of the product, and missing information like unique features or bulk discounts.
B2B eCommerce customer adoption strategies that work
To take full advantage of the digital shift, businesses need to develop an effective strategy for web store adoption that addresses the mentioned potential barriers. The strategy should include tactics towards both employees and existing customers.
Start with your internal teams
- Build a team in charge of the project: To ensure a smooth and effective adoption process, you need a team of key members with clear goals and responsibilities. The team should function as an advisory panel that inspires and guides customers throughout the journey of adaptation to new technology.
- Equip your teams with comprehensive knowledge and skills: You can’t expect your customers to use your website if even your own team aren’t familiar with the tools and their functions. All staff should be trained on the new technologies; however, customer service and sales representatives, as the direct points of contact with customers, especially require comprehensive training to feel comfortable using them.
- Address reluctance to change: Manage fears of KPIs failure and ensure that your employees grasp all the benefits of digital transformation, such as the possibility of increasing order volume or the ease of tracking user behaviour. Offer bonuses to motivate your team to embrace digital tools and customer adoption targets.
Encourage customers to adapt to changes
- Highlight the advantages of software adoption: Identify each customer’s pain points and illustrate clearly how the new systems solve their problems. This may include issues such as order placing during non-business hours, the incapability of tracking order status, and bulk orders with large volumes. Explain why traditional methods can’t compensate for these limitations.
- Motivate customers with incentives: Offer your customers promotional discounts for their first online purchase to encourage them to make the first move. Consider creating offerings based on each customer’s specific needs and concerns.
Provide customers with a personalised shopping experience
- Customise based on specific desires: Influenced by individual B2C experiences, B2B clients might also expect a more personalised and efficient online purchasing experience. Personalization based on customers’ unique needs and wants may include product catalogues, negotiated pricing, quotation-based sales, or requisition lists.
- Upsell with product recommendations and subscriptions: Utilise customer behaviour data to anticipate and suggest products that customers may also want to buy. This can help increase average order value and customer lifetime value. Monthly subscription is also a worth-mentioning model which can drive recurring revenue.
- Choose the right eCommerce platform: Selecting an appropriate eCommerce platform from the very beginning will help align with your long-term goals. With a suitable site, your personalization can scale up easily and integrate seamlessly with back-office systems.
Monitor and adjust continuously
- Collect feedback: Proactively listening to feedback from both your customers and front-line staff can help you refine your workflows and timely address any issues that occur.
- Set KPIs and measure frequently: Identify adoption metrics, set targets for website traffic or conversion rates, and work towards your goals.
- Gain insights from analytics: Track user behaviour and identify trends or potential drop-off points using data from analytics tools. Set up alerts of certain changes such as a sudden drop in conversions but recorded high traffic for prompt actions.
- Learn from best practices: Keep an eye on your competitors or other B2B leaders in the field to get insights into the latest features or innovations, so that you can stay ahead of the competition and deliver exceptional experiences for your customers.
Analyse cohort for maximised effectiveness
- Evaluate each cohort value: To maximise the return on your eCommerce investment, it's crucial to understand the value of each customer cohort. By analysing their purchasing behaviour, engagement levels or lifetime value, you can divide them into different segments like high-value, medium-value, and low-value clients. You may think of investing more in adopting the high-value segments rather than low-value ones.
- Offer different touchpoints for each cohort: Personalization is always preferred, even when it comes to each cohort’s buyer journey. For resistant cohorts, consider incorporating familiar elements from traditional sales methods to ease the transition. Remember, the goal is to leverage the power of digital commerce while maintaining a human touch.
How to measure customer adoption performance?
To ensure alignment with business goals, it's essential to establish clear KPIs and measurement indicators. This enables teams to track progress, identify areas for advancement, and make data-driven adjustments. Depending on each business’s distinct goals and models, there are different KPIs to follow throughout the process. The most common ones include:
Customer engagement metrics
- Email response rate: You may need to send A/B testing emails to see what email subject lines or which kinds of incentives will attract your customers most. The most insightful data to track this could be the email open rate, response rate or link click-through rate.
- Unique user logins: The number of unique user logins points out your customer demands on using the website to make orders or look for product information. Monitoring the number of distinct users accessing the platform also helps you gauge which accounts are fully utilising the website, or handle login issues if occurred.
- Invoice history search frequency: Measuring the number of searches performed by users within the invoice history section can reveal how engaged they are with their financial interactions. Frequent searches may indicate that users are actively managing their accounts or concerned about pricing.
Order management metrics
- Time to first order: The time that a customer takes from onboarding to placing the first order online indicates the effectiveness of your adoption strategies. A shorter time frame typically shows that your customers can find all the product details required, get a reasonable price, and proceed to checkout smoothly. If customers take longer to place an order online than contact by phone calls, you may need to review the process or provide additional incentives.
- Online payment rate: Calculating the proportion of invoices paid online compared to total invoices helps businesses understand their cash flow dynamics. A higher online payment rate typically means your customer preference for digital transactions. Additionally, you may also get insight into which type of payment your customers are likely to use or in need of, then provide them with the right payment methods.
- Reduction in offline sales: By observing the decrease in offline requests for order purchases, or even invoices and order returns, businesses can track the efficiency of the new method and its workflow. A reduction in these demands shows that customers are choosing the digital platform and requiring fewer offline interactions.
Comparing digital channel performance to traditional methods can help you assess the overall impact of your adoption efforts and identify areas for improvement. Regardless of the size, scope, or type of business you’re operating, you need to know how effective your customer adoption strategy is, how your customers behave, and exactly how your business generates revenue.
Conclusion
In general, eCommerce customer adoption is a vital direction for B2B companies in driving long-term business growth. By educating both employees and customers to shift to digital cooperation methods, businesses can streamline their workflow and give customers a better shopping experience, thus significantly driving sales.
In order to reap those benefits, businesses must create a sustainable strategy, from selecting an eCommerce platform that aligns with their specifications to designing personalised customer experiences. Consider reaching out to a trusted eCommerce consulting firm like On Tap, a member of the global B2B eCommerce Association, to discuss your business requirements and get recommendations on successful digital strategies.
