The best B2B commerce personalization tactics backed by data
B2B ecommerce personalization has hit the mainstream, with 74% of B2B businesses expecting their websites to generate more than 50% of sales in 2023.
As ecommerce adoption continues to grow, B2B merchants are no longer just looking to launch new ways to sell — they now must meet the customer expectation of hyper-tailored personalized experiences from product discovery to fulfillment.
In this guide, we’ll explore:
- Why we need effective B2B ecommerce personalization
- What is effective B2B ecommerce personalization?
- How and why B2B personalization differs from B2C
- Why personalization requires effective data management
- Effective B2B ecommerce personalization strategies businesses are investing in
- What’s next for B2B ecommerce personalization?
Why we need effective B2B ecommerce personalization
Even though ecommerce trends change and evolve constantly, personalization is here to stay. Simply uploading a description of your products together with generic price points is not enough to meet buyer expectations.
B2B ecommerce personalization has moved from basic to comprehensive. Companies are no longer undervaluing the data they’re capturing on their ecommerce sites. In fact, they’re putting it to work.
With this data, they’re tuning in to buyer behaviors on ecommerce websites to provide marketing and sales with real-time insights about their customers’ purchase history, interests, and needs. Whether the buyer has logged in recently, searched for a product, or viewed a category, that data can be used to sharpen strategies and personalize the B2B ecommerce experience by:
- Automating triggered messages to buyers before and after making a purchase
- Analyzing what buyers are looking for and the search terms they use
- Showing customers what similar buyers are purchasing
- Identifying categories where sales are rising or falling, anticipating customer preferences and needs much faster than market research
What is effective B2B ecommerce personalization?
Effective B2B ecommerce personalization starts with segmentation — the process of dividing customers into groups based on common characteristics. There are several ways to do this, including:
- Industry-specific. You can segment your customers depending on which industry they belong to. This helps to ensure you’re showing relevant content to the relevant people.
- Organization-based. When it comes to your largest clients and customers, hyper-personalization is crucial. Here, you can use such techniques as showing exclusive products or offering specialized pricing across their frequently repurchased products.
- Role-based. Most purchases from a B2B company involve multiple stakeholders with different perspectives. Each experience should match the user priorities, such as an engineer or CTO receiving technical material and whitepapers through tailored email campaigns.
- Based on their stage in the buying journey. Understanding where the customer is on their purchase journey is key to understanding their intent. For instance, if you have a customer who hasn’t made a purchase in six months, you could try winning them back with a re-engagement campaign.
The importance of each approach will vary throughout the buying cycle. The Forrester research shows that personalization targeted to specific needs (such as showing industry-specific products) is best deployed in the discovery stage, while personalization based on organization (such as customized pricing) has greater impact closer to purchase and post-sale.
How and why B2B personalization differs from B2C
Effective B2B ecommerce personalization differs in intent from B2C personalization. While B2C brands aim to encourage spontaneous purchases, most business purchases will involve several layers of research, approvals, and negotiation.
For this reason, B2B merchants should focus their ecommerce personalization efforts on streamlining the procurement process, educating customers, and shortening the time to decide. B2B sellers need to segment registered users, not just by their company or industry but by their role within the buying organization.
Personalization plays a critical role in enhancing the buying experience for B2B customers. For example, packaging manufacturer Sealed Air tailors its platform by requiring customers to log in to view prices specific to their company’s negotiated rates. Additionally, the platform restricts the products displayed to items approved for purchase by the customer’s organization, ensuring relevance and compliance. The logged-in experience can also highlight recommendations based on purchasing trends from similar customer profiles, driving cross-sell opportunities.
Industry-specific personalization is equally vital. For instance, a motor manufacturer might display entirely different products and content to a company producing warehouse conveyor belt systems compared to a customer in the automotive sector, to make sure the offering aligns with the customer’s unique needs.
This level of personalization extends beyond online experiences. It influences marketing campaigns, customer communications, and other channels, creating a consistent, custom experience across touchpoints.
“We can use the data from the ecommerce site to personalize the rest of the journey. Instead of seeing the site as a self-contained silo, it can be part of a multichannel buying journey that provides a consistent and tailored experience for buyers.”
Ed Kennedy
Principal Product Marketing Manager, Adobe
Why personalization requires effective data management
Ecommerce generates mountains of data on every visitor — including behavioral, transactional, financial, operational, and third-party data. This serves as the foundation for personalization.
So, while most companies collect behavioral and transactional data from their ecommerce sites, few are combining their commerce data with information housed in back-end systems — like inventory, order status, product information, price changes, and customer or account order history — to power even deeper personalization. This holds them back from the advanced, hyper-tailored B2B ecommerce personalization their customers are expecting more and more.
Activating ecommerce data from across these different sources is challenging. The data is often constrained by countless silos and fragmentation, making it difficult (but not impossible) to share information across software applications and use it to piece together complete views of the buyer.
From our “2023 B2B Commerce Growth Strategies Survey,” you can see how B2B organizations are using their data today. Nearly three-quarters (72%) are collecting behavioral and transactional data across their ecommerce storefronts, and 68% are using that data to drive personalization across their website in some capacity. Yet, fewer B2B organizations are using data to drive personalization on other systems like marketing, merchandising, and email.
“In general, companies underestimate the value of the customer data on their ecommerce sites. B2B ecommerce websites are a treasure trove of data for marketing, sales, and operations that most businesses aren’t fully utilizing.
Digital signals from different users in different markets or segments can help improve marketing analysis, automate triggered messages to capture sales, and notify salespeople of customers who are ready to buy.”
Ed Kennedy
Principal Product Marketing Manager, Adobe
Effective B2B ecommerce personalization strategies businesses are investing in
Our survey showed that 63% of B2B ecommerce companies are investing in improving their user experience by adding new personalization features. However, 40% of small companies say personalization will be a major challenge for them.
We asked B2B companies which ecommerce personalization tactics are most effective.
In summary, we found that:
Personalized site search is the highest performer
Most B2B merchants (58%) are seeing strong outcomes using personalized search results. Investing in search is particularly important because 40% of visitors use on-site search as a primary way to find what they are looking for when landing on a commerce site.
According to a study by Wakefield, 75% of shoppers will switch to an alternative site if it takes too long to find products. With such large product catalogs, when implementing B2B ecommerce personalization, search should be one of your main priorities.
Beyond ensuring textually relevant search results, the most advanced search solutions even use artificial intelligence to re-rank results so that they are personalized based on customer behaviors.
Search query data can also help your organization understand how your customers search for products, what words they choose to find certain categories, and what products they are looking for that you don’t carry yet. Everything you collect can be used to optimize product line development and merchandising.
Personalized payment and shipping options were second
56% of B2B merchants are seeing strong outcomes using personalized payment and shipping options.
Adding personalized payment and fulfillment options based on the company is key to removing friction in the buying journey and increasing the ecommerce conversion rate. That could mean adding checkout options to pay on account, pay with a credit card, use instant credit, or add a new payment option customers are asking for.
It could also mean letting customers split an order for delivery to different warehouses or on different dates. As a B2B merchant expands to new markets, this could also include customizing their site with locally appropriate payments, fulfillment, and order management.
Personalized product recommendations rounded out the top three
Nearly half of B2B merchants (48%) are seeing strong outcomes using personalized product recommendations. Plus, 66% of B2B customers expect the same level of personalization or better in their professional lives as when shopping in their personal lives. This means that implementing product recommendations can be a critical strategy for meeting those expectations.
Product recommendations are a proven tactic for increasing not only conversion rates but also average order value. B2B merchants need to focus on building long-term customer relationships based on trust and value. The products displayed in recommendation blocks therefore need to clearly demonstrate how additional investment with your brand will have a positive return for your buyer.
For example, when a customer is browsing a big-ticket item, you can display a “frequently purchased together” recommendations block with accessories that can shorten the installation process and help them reduce overall costs.
Product recommendations can also use various ranking algorithms, including behavior-based, popularity-based, item-based, and individual shopper-based metrics.
Below are several examples of how you can apply these strategies to a B2B scenario:
- Showing a buyer items that others in their organization frequently purchase.
- Displaying items recently viewed by the buyer to remind them of any abandoned purchases that they may still be interested in.
- Displaying items frequently purchased together (for example, paint rollers together with paints).
- Showing visually similar products or products with similar attributes to give customers more choice on what product is best for them.
- Highlighting trendy products that have momentum within a specific industry.
Just as with personalized search, product recommendations need to factor in customer-specific catalogs and pricing. When done correctly, product recommendations can lead to exponential success.
When you define a shared catalog for specific customer groups and companies, those shoppers will see recommendations only for products they can access. All recommended products will also reflect correct customer-specific pricing. The language used to recommend should also change. Instead of “Users also bought this,” buyers would see something like “Users in your company also bought this.”
Larger firms are leading in personalization
Large companies with more resources are finding more success with personalization.
Smaller companies are responding by putting some B2B ecommerce personalization features on their to-do lists. That includes personalized payment and shipping options (15.8% of smaller firms plan to invest versus 3.6% of larger ones) and personalized product category pages (15.8% versus 1.2%).
What’s next for B2B ecommerce personalization?
There is a lot to think about when it comes to building a personalized customer journey for B2B buyers. The strategies outlined above, however, should give you an excellent starting point and understanding of what customers are looking for, and the tools you can use to implement the various strategies.
B2B merchants must continue to adapt personalization to the B2B context. Unlike in B2C, it’s not a buyer’s personal preferences that matter in B2B but what they need to do their job efficiently. Merchants must tailor content and options to the buyer’s role and to the kind of company they work for.
Getting started is much easier with a full-stack solution that carries B2B ecommerce personalization capabilities out of the box. Adobe Commerce delivers powerful B2B tools such as customer-specific price books, product recommendations, site search, advanced quoting support, and more.
Through native integration with the Adobe Experience Cloud product suite and Adobe Experience Platform, you can also begin implementing advanced customer segmentation and omnichannel personalization.
If you want to learn more about Adobe Commerce for B2B, contact us to request a demo.
To see the full survey results as well as perspectives from B2B commerce experts, download the “2023 B2B Commerce Growth Strategies Survey.”
Joe Hanson has been a B2B marketer and storyteller for over a decade. He is a senior content strategist at Adobe focused on all things digital commerce — from industry trends to the latest Adobe Commerce innovations.
Maria Gureeva is a solution account manager for Adobe Commerce. Since joining Adobe in early 2022, she’s been helping customers across the UK and Ireland, the Middle East, and South Africa to achieve ecommerce success through best-in-class digital experiences. She is particularly interested in personalization, AI, and trends in consumer preferences.
