Many manufacturers have been in business for decades. Whether family-owned or publicly-traded, there is a persistence and legacy rarely found elsewhere in other industries. Our world is changing, and businesses are rapidly adapting to suit a post-COVID world. Manufacturing is no different, and the first step lies in eCommerce.
But how does it benefit your business? Glad you asked! Let’s explore tactics to increase efficiency, engagement, and revenue.
Efficiency
Often teams get tied up completing tasks like checking order status or filing a PO for a new order. These are all tasks that could be automated by eCommerce for manufacturers. Customers expect easy access to their account information, and your team wants to free up their time to focus on more consultative tasks and relationship building. With manufacturing eCommerce tools, your team and customers have new solutions to get their jobs done better than ever before.
Here are four ways you can drive efficiency with eCommerce:
1. Reduce Your Costs
By providing rich administrative tools and capabilities, your team is freed up and your total cost of ownership is lowered. Many are surprised at how critical experience design is to manufacturers and customers alike. eCommerce tools can reduce transaction costs by streamlining supply-chain management and distribution. If a store expands its product selection online, more orders can be shipped from the warehouse or wholesaler directly to the customer. The store can now serve lucrative niche markets and focus company funds on Sales and Marketing efforts.
2. Reduce The Cost of New Customers
eCommerce enables you to attract new customers through digital marketing and provide tools to channel partners in order to best identify new customers. Aside from occasional maintenance work (ie. work that you don’t need to do yourself), new customers will come to you ambiently rather than just relying on your Sales team.
3. Add Self-Serve Activities For Customers
You can save time and money by enabling your customers to self-serve through customer portals. With an updated eCommerce solution like Adobe Commerce (Magento) or BigCommerce, they can check order status or history, complete payments, get quotes, and have access to product and technical content.
4. Capture Higher Margin Product Sales
A digital commerce package allows you to provide a seamless and systematic method to market higher margin, broader catalog products that customers typically buy from other sources, or even your competitors. It allows for setup of dropshipping functionality and gives manufacturers the flexibility to market more products without substantial recurring advertising costs.
Engagement
Today, anything less than an Amazon or Apple-like experience isn’t going to cut it. Seamless digital eCommerce experiences are now the expectation and the norm. If you don’t deliver the experiences your customers want and expect, your competition will. With B2B eCommerce, you can deliver a better brand experience for your customers, partners and potential customers. You can do that by…
1. Increasing Digital Engagement
Drive digital engagement across critical buyers, influencers and channels. Reach them in their moment of relevance, whether they’re in the field or behind a desk, to drive more revenue and efficiency.
2. Drive Online Channel Migration
With a new channel, you and your team are now able to serve as strategic guides to assist with channel migration from offline to online while reporting KPIs to measure success and identify areas of improvement. SEO can even further these goals with monthly channel monitoring to assist in successfully branching out.
Revenue
There are a number of impacts B2B eCommerce can have on your bottom line. Moving your business online means you can meet your aggressive sales goals by opening new channels, addressing new markets, and providing data-driven recommendations to your current customers. Here are four ways you can drive revenue with eCommerce for manufacturing:
1. Increase & Acquire New Customers
With eCommerce, you can find customers like never before. When you are present and findable online, and you deliver rich product information and compelling content, new customers can find you – and you can grow your market share. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has taken over as customers increasingly shop online –over 85% of consumers use a search engine to find their next purchase. Knowing who your audience is, what they’re looking for, and increasing search engine rankings to garner the wellspring of online customers is critical to the survival of many businesses. What’s more, over half of all businesses put a high priority on SEO, so that’s bound to include competition.
2. Increase Revenue Per Customer
Beyond new and retained customers, you can also grow wallet share by providing intelligent merchandising and search capabilities, personalized experiences and tools to increase conversion rates such as quick order functionality, repeat orders, cross-selling, upselling, and more.
3. Increase Revenue Per Product
In addition to increasing revenue per customer, you can also get more out of your products by providing superior merchandising and data-driven recommendations for next-best product, and for configuring products online. Solutions include the ability to link back to categories or specific pages you know customers will want to go to.
In Conclusion
The solutions and options seem endless, but that’s only because eCommerce has moved so far in the past ten years. There’s no reason to be left behind when bigger, more efficient business could be just around the corner. Invigorate your business and wow your customers. Don’t know where to start? No worries. Tell us a little about yourself so we can help!
