Ascend2's managing partner describes best practice strategies for streamlining processes and cultivating online relationships.
A few years ago, you made a substantial investment in developing an ecommerce website. Since then, you’ve increased marketing expenditures in an effort to attract more leads to your website and turn them into online customers. But it hasn’t even come close to meeting your sales expectations and a return on investment is nowhere in sight.
Unfortunately, this scenario sounds painfully familiar to many B2B marketers who haven’t mastered the two essential strategies for rapidly achieving ecommerce ROI-- streamlining ecommerce processes and cultivating online relationships.
Streamlining ecommerce processes
Ecommerce is simply an automated process that requires your potential customer to take an action (such as providing contact information) or make a decision (such as purchasing a product) at each step in the process. The more streamline an ecommerce process is, the more likely a qualified prospect is to take each action or make each decision as intended, to complete the process. But, if a potential customer exits from the process before, at the very least, providing their contact information, the marketing dollars that attracted the prospect to your website are wasted and future sales opportunities lost.
Therefore, streamlining the ecommerce process should focus, first, on capturing a qualified prospect’s contact information, and second, on fulfilling the product information and order requirements. Instead of spending more marketing dollars to continually attract new or re-attract previous leads, this strategy will make you more effective at capturing and rapidly building a database of the leads you have already attracted.
Cultivating online relationships
The majority of the qualified prospects you capture in your database will eventually purchase the type of product they researched on your website. A study of B2B leads showed that 11 percent made a purchase within three months of their initial inquiry. The same study revealed that an additional 42 percent made a purchase in four to 12 months. The question is, will they return to your website to make the purchase from you?
Cultivating relationships with these prospects until they are ready to buy will ensure that they do. But few marketing and sales organizations today have time for the constant personal contact required… unless you do it virtually!
The goal of Virtual Relationship Marketing (VRM) is to build trust and confidence in your company and products during the critical pre-purchase period. Done correctly, VRM will create the perception of personal one-to-one contact in a way that is welcomed by the prospect. Welcomed contact is defined by the prospect as being kept informed by someone who understands their problem and offers relevant information and solutions that will aid in their buying decision.
Without these proven strategies, your chances of ever achieving an ecommerce ROI are DOA. But it’s not too late to resuscitate your website and your return on investment by implementing these strategies now.
Best practices
Following are best practices for streamlining your ecommerce processes to help you more effectively capture qualified prospects, cultivate relationships and reach your online sales and ROI expectations.
Define the steps in the ecommerce pipeline: A process-centric approach begins by defining the sequence of steps in the ecommerce pipeline. This pipeline should give a clear and concise end-to-end view as shown in the following diagram.
Define the rules required to advance through each step in the pipeline: An effective pipeline has clearly defined rules for each step. Examples:
- Communications strategy
- Lead generation and segmentation
- Characteristics for qualifying prospects
- Characteristics for identifying immediate opportunities
- Procedures for converting opportunities to sales
Define pipeline tracking, forecasting and reporting requirements: An effective pipeline will enable management to track opportunities, forecast revenue and report on results. Define the criteria for each of these requirements.
Whiteboard current ecommerce processes to identify gaps: Using the ecommerce pipeline you established as your guide, whiteboard the current ecommerce processes as they correspond with the stages of the pipeline. Analyze each of these activities to identify bottlenecks, costly delays, unnecessary steps, redundancies and inefficiencies.
Brainstorm more efficient paths to accomplishing the objectives: Bring your team together to think beyond current practices and find creative new ways to accomplish objectives. Keep in mind the stages of the pipeline, rules for advancing from one stage to the next, the logical flow of the customer’s buying process, and how technology may be applied to these scenarios.
Map processes to create customer value: Process mapping is a technique for the graphical representation of workflow for each ecommerce process. A good process map represents the process flows from the customer’s point of view, showing how each step in the ecommerce process creates a clear value for the customer.
Map new processes to align with the pipeline and technology: Using the ecommerce pipeline as your guide, it is time to map your more efficient and repeatable processes. By designing new processes to be repeatable, they can be automated using technology your website may already have or can easily implement.
Practice continuous process improvement: This approach will give you the opportunity to continuously improve upon, rather than periodically redesign from scratch, existing ecommerce processes to achieve even greater results going forward.
Additional resources:
This SystematicMarketing white paper will help you streamline your ecommerce processes and leverage technology to do the time-consuming work of cultivating online relationships for you.
Sergio Balegno is a 25-year marketing veteran and managing partner of Ascend2 llc, a B2B marketing process and technology consultancy.