Sales events have become a huge opportunity for e-commerce, especially in the wake of the pandemic. In these two years, buyers have increasingly turned to online portals to research, review, buy, and even ask for product support.
For example, sales hit all-time highs on both Black Friday 2020 and 2021. SemRush reports that online spending for Black Friday hit $8.9 billion in 2021, up from $9 billion the year before. Luckily, with the right marketing tools and strategies, you don’t have to limit yourself to events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM). Prepare your infrastructure, apply the right tactics and launch a stunning B2B sales event any time of year in 2023. Read on to learn how.
Understand the importance of sales events in B2B
Customers now look forward to online events such as Amazon Prime Day, Walmart Rollbacks and More, Costco Member Saving Days, Flipkart Big Billion Days, and others throughout the year. This is often one of the busiest shopping dates of the e-commerce calendar year. Customers expect promotions and discounts from their favorite retailers. In return, companies are rewarded with significant spending.
Did you know that e-commerce influences B2B buyer behavior just as much as B2C buyer behavior? This is especially true as B2B buyers migrate to digital self-service. According to McKinsey, two-thirds of online shoppers prefer digital or virtual in-person interactions.
With the growing adoption of online marketplaces, a greater emphasis on improving fulfillment, and a focus on personalized user experiences, the B2B buyer journey is in many ways similar to the B2C customer journey. These changes make large-scale sales events essential for B2B companies as well.
In fact, most SaaS products with business-focused offerings use this strategy to collect subscriptions and renewals. But to achieve this, you must first optimize your ecommerce strategy and martech stack.
Ecommerce Optimization Tips for B2B Sales Frenzy
Here are eight ideas for optimizing income prospects when running a large-scale marketing and sales event:
1. Find and fix functional errors
Identify and address 404 pages, update plugins and security fixes, and assess the functionality of all ecommerce store features. Examine promotional codes if available and allow upselling and cross-selling to increase average order value. Errors and malfunctions on a website should be minimized as much as possible so that buyers who are guided through your emails, newsletters and ad promo codes find exactly what they were looking for.
2. Improve user experience
Every year more and more online shoppers are using mobile devices. It is therefore important to ensure that consumers can easily access your website regardless of the device they are using. If a website is presented improperly and doesn’t adapt to portable devices (like smartphones or tablets), users are likely to favor your competitors.
Also, the recommended loading time of the website should not exceed two or three seconds. It is among the most influential variables in user experience and can even affect SEO for your B2B sales landing page. And with every second that passes, the chance of a higher bounce rate increases.
It’s important to reduce this possibility by using responsive design and continuous testing before and during each sales event.
3. Use segmentation data for personalization
The segmentation brings clear advantages. Ecommerce managers who go to the trouble of identifying customer segmentation and customizing messaging for each subgroup are seeing ROI gains that regularly justify their investment.
Ultimately, people want to feel like you’re communicating with them in person, rather than broadcasting mass-market sales pitches. This makes an even bigger difference in the B2B space, where many marketers lose the personal touch when targeting entire accounts and companies. The better you know your potential customers, the better you can influence their purchasing decisions.
Top-down segmentation starts with the service or product and aims to tailor the offering to the most profitable market groups. Bottom-up categorization focuses on the consumer’s preferences and personalities, and then attempts to provide the most effective content to the appropriate customers. Customer personas are created as an extension of bottom-up segmentation. Both perspectives are required to devise the most successful marquee sales event strategy.
4. Increase conversions by focusing on the right elements
You have to do testing and location analysis to determine what motivates customers to buy. For example, you can use a program like Hotjar to monitor how users interact with your website. Do the majority of users only interact with items that don’t need to be scrolled (“above the fold” components)? If that’s the case, don’t risk your audience missing out on a promo code by placing it below the fold. Run A/B tests on the most important shopping aspects of your website while you still have time to collect a large sample size.
5. Doubling SEO
Whether you offer physical devices or software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, improving your search rankings can help you stand out from the competition and increase conversion rates. Deploy a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) tester to determine your current ranking.
It is advisable to refine product names and descriptions. This helps buyers discover your items during a search and improves the user experience. You can use free Google tools to identify the ideal phrases or keywords for the product pages. A strong social media presence will also benefit your search engine ranking and ensure you get maximum traffic for your online sales event!
6. Add a timer to your ecommerce site
A countdown clock is a tried and tested way to create a sense of urgency and encourage the customer to make a purchase soon. A countdown timer encourages shoppers to buy something right away, rather than delaying the transaction and potentially visiting a competitor’s site. Additionally, countdown clocks are a great technique to increase demand and anticipation before your sales event goes live.
Consider installing a timer a few days before the event and sharing it on social media. Social updates on a regular basis – leading up to the sale – can also serve as a means of email aggregation. As a result, you have a list of potential customers to engage with once your listings go live.
7. Be creative with offers and discounts
Your selling points and offers will draw people to your ecommerce site. Customers often expect significantly reduced offers. Therefore, you can offer significant discounts on both new launches and old favorites without damaging your brand’s reputation. Here’s a #protip: Coupons add an unnecessary step to the checkout process by requiring the consumer to take an additional action. Instead, you might want to offer blanket discounts and maybe increase the discount amount for loyal customers with whom you have a long-standing relationship.
8. Prepare customer support
To catch up on the number of buyers you attract with your sales event, try investing in an ecommerce chatbot. A chatbot provides instant customer support that can answer approximately 80% of consumer questions. This allows your contact center to promptly respond to the remaining 20% of requests.
Remember that at every sales event there will be brand new customers who are less familiar with your offerings and your buying process. A chatbot can help your consumers find the information they want. With an average order, they may also create custom product suggestions, upsell and cross-sell opportunities that can help you earn more.
Understanding the sales and discount mentality
The key to successfully optimizing ecommerce for a large sales event is understanding the psychology behind it.
It’s in our most natural inclination – almost in our DNA – to grab a good bargain. Marketing content such as discount, clearance sale, deal, sale, 50% off and buy 1, 1 get 1 free – stimulates the release of dopamine in our brain. These deals bypass our rationality and activate our brain’s inherent neural impulses to look for deals and chase them, which is essentially what suggests Value.
In addition, scarcity and community testimonials affect us. FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is not limited to just missing a show or event, it also occurs when we miss a wonderful offer. A marquee sale is indeed able to appeal to the all-too-human proclivities of B2B buyers due to basic human drives and tendencies for good or bad.
However, for B2B companies, it’s not enough to know what’s at stake and how consumers feel about an exclusive, time-bound sales event. They also need to examine their company’s market position in such sales opportunities and current B2B customer behavior (many may wish for a more B2C-like buying experience).
With businesses and individuals anticipating tight budgets over the next few months (due to inflation and recession fears), a well-planned and executed event can attract a lot of traffic. Many will try to maximize these offers to get competitive deals without breaking their wallets.
Our guide to creative Black Friday marketing ideas is a great place to start if you’re looking to start your own “discount day” in 2023. You can also pull out all the top marketing communication tools in your arsenal to engage your customers and prospects ahead of the big day.
