When it comes to B2B ecommerce, manufacturers and distributors will not find success by simply launching a site. Ecommerce success requires constant monitoring and optimizing – and that’s where our digital growth services team comes in. Offering services like custom analytics, SEO (and now AEO and GEO), and digital advertising, this team helps our clients track their performance and grow strategically.
Analytics are the foundation of all of our digital growth services. As the saying goes, what gets measured gets improved. Our talented team is able to craft reliable, custom reporting that tracks the data related to each company’s unique goals and challenges. These reports allow our customers' digital teams to dive deep into the data, or C-suite execs can get a high-level snapshot of performance.
Let’s take a look at three recent success stories.
Distributor Increases APR with Strategic Promotions
One of our large distributor clients had an ambitious goal of growing its ecommerce business by 10 percent – approximately $5 million – last year. The company already has an impressive market share, so it was not realistic to meet that goal through acquisition of new customers alone. After analyzing the company’s data, our digital growth marketing team noticed that its average purchase revenue (APR) (also known as average order value) was underperforming compared to industry standards. Our team noted that the easiest way to meet the company’s growth goal would by increasing the amount their current customers were purchasing each time.
By how do you encourage ecommerce customers to buy more? Threshold-based incentives – i.e. using promotions to encourage customers to spend a bit more in order to get free shipping, a free product, or other reward.
We often find that B2B organizations are reluctant to use promotions, believing that they are a tactic exclusive to B2C. But we believe they can work well in B2B, too. B2B buyers are often focused on replenishment, so they can often buy a bit more if it means savings in overall costs.
With strategic promotions, the company grew its APR by more than 6 percent, allow it to grow its ecommerce revenue by more than 10 percent last year. Total items purchased were up by more than 20 percent. Promotion code usage grew by more than 60 percent.
The company is also working on improving product discoverability – making sure the right products show up during on-site search and providing high-quality dynamic product recommendations. We helped them implement HawkSearch, and we expect that to have a big impact on this year’s results.
Optimizing Google Ads for RFQs
We have another distributor client that offers extremely specialized products. This company has a very small target audience for its products, and it faces strict regulations around shipping. While many ecommerce sellers use Google Merchant Center to showcase and promote their products on Google’s shopping feature, these challenges made this company ineligible to use the service. The company was still interested in digital advertising on Google, so our digital growth services team needed to find a strategic way to use ads to help the company meet its ecommerce growth goals.
Our team took a look at the company’s analytics and noticed that its users who complete a request for quote (RFQ) were more likely to purchase than other site visitors. By optimizing its Google ads for RFQ conversions, our team helped the company grow its RFQs by 24 percent.
Incremental Changes Leads to Big Growth on a Tight Budget
One of our clients is a small distributor that is still early in its ecommerce journey. With a conservative budget and limited internal resources, our digital growth services team had to be very strategic with its recommendations. Taking a look at the site’s analytics, it was clear that there were some UX issues that were preventing customers from finding the products they needed.
Our user experience design team helped this client make some much-needed design updates to their site to help provide a modern, intuitive flow to the buyer journey. The digital growth services team also recommended that the company add some additional product categories to its site offerings. Because it is so early in its ecommerce journey, the distributor was only offering a small portion of its total product categories through ecommerce. But based on its on-site search data, it was clear that customers were coming to the site looking for products that weren’t currently available. With our strategic recommendations, the company was able to add the most-searched products, requiring only a bit of internal hours – not additional budget. By tackling this low-hanging fruit initiative, they were able to improve their customers' on-site experience. They can continue to slowly add product categories to grow their ecommerce offerings as their time and resources allow.
These strategic, incremental changes helped the company’s ecommerce revenue grow by more than 90 percent.
Kick Off Your Ecommerce Journey with a Free Assessment
If your ecommerce operation is not growing the way it needs to, a free ecommerce assessment from the experts at Xngage can help identify areas for opportunity. Our team will evaluate your tech stack, performance analytics, and goals and challenges to provide custom recommendations for technology, strategy, and opportunities for innovation.