The ultimate guide to getting your customers to shop online
Imagine you’re a customer that has been placing orders over the phone with a trusted sales rep for years and now you’re asked to switch to online ordering. It seems unfair to expect customers to know how to cope with the shift on their own. So why wouldn’t you do all you can to make this process easier?
This is where onboarding can help. Effective onboarding plays a vital role in nurturing customer trust, fostering loyalty, and driving web store adoption— making it a crucial component of your overall business strategy.
What is customer onboarding in b2b e-commerce?
Onboarding for B2B customers in e-commerce is the process by which a business would educate customers about the web store’s functionalities, features, and benefits. By doing this, businesses can encourage regular usage and maximize the value customers derive from their e-commerce platforms. This process should be to encourage and support customers so they can navigate around the web store seamlessly to use it to make purchases. Examples of methods you can use to educate customers include courses on an e-learning platform, scheduled calls, training manuals and so much more. You can create your onboarding content to suit the needs of your customer.
Whether you’ve had a web store up and running for a while or are launching one in the future, it’s never too early or too late to work on your customer onboarding strategy. Before we look at how to begin, let’s understand the why?
Why is customer onboarding important?
Onboarding for B2B customers in e-commerce is the process by which a business would educate customers about the web store’s functionalities, features, and benefits. By doing this, businesses can encourage regular usage and maximize the value customers derive from their e-commerce platforms. This process should be to encourage and support customers so that they can navigate around the website seamlessly to use it to make purchases. Examples of methods you can use to educate customers include courses on an e-learning platform, scheduled calls, training manuals and so much more. You can create your onboarding content to suit the needs of your customer.
Whether you’ve had a web store up and running for a while or are launching one in the future, it’s never too early or too late to work on your customer onboarding strategy. Before we look at how to begin, let’s understand the why?
Proper onboarding saves time and resources for both you and your customers:
If your customers are properly onboarded, you save your customer’s the time and energy spent on manually placing orders. By reducing this type of manual work, you increase customer satisfaction and perceived value in the purchase process, which in turn results in building long-term relationships.
What about your internal teams? We’re talking about the hours they must be spending manually inputting orders only to spend a few more on the correction process when errors occur. These activities may not be done by the same team, but accumulated hours could be put to better use. Forcing these additional hours of manual input on your staff also causes job dissatisfaction and an increase in staff turnover within your internal teams. And we all know that with the current labor market, we cannot afford to watch good people walk away over issues that e-commerce can easily fix.
Onboarding increases web store adoption and engagement:
Lagging in providing onboarding support and assistance to your customers will force them to continue to use over-the-phone ordering, which renders your business outdated. This leaves customers no choice but to switch to a competitor that can keep up with their ever-evolving needs. Developing a comprehensive onboarding process for customers means you need to create an environment where they can comfortably adapt to the procedures at their own pace. Teaching your customers through onboarding makes them more likely to enjoy using your web store and therefore increases their online buying.
Onboarding enhances customer experience:
Onboarding allows you to show your customers how much you value them. By dedicating time and effort to scheduling training meetings, creating e-learnings, follow-up calls, and offering general support, your customers feel that their business is important and as a result, are more likely to adopt your web store. Customer experience is also a large contributor during the decision-making phase. Your business is top of mind when your customers know their ordering process will be pain-free and seamless.
Onboarding customers means more opportunity for upselling and increases ROI:
Onboarding your customers properly gives them the trust and confidence to take advantage of special offers, cart discounts, and place orders for other items they may not have been aware of. When these promotional activities are aimed at attracting repeat orders, but your customers aren’t seeing them, you’re missing out on low-hanging fruit. By using customized landing pages, customers can shop with ease and go straight to the products they usually purchase. Upon checkout, you can offer similar products or complimentary products to increase the chances of upselling that would have otherwise been too time-consuming to try to sell over the phone.
A personalized onboarding experience is good for your brand:
Prioritizing this level of personalized guidance and training during the onboarding stage demonstrates a commitment to customer success, which also increases the chances of customer loyalty and engagement. When customers know that you have their best interest at heart, it’s easy for them to trust you with their valuable orders. It’s difficult to quantify the ROI when it comes to creating a personalized onboarding experience for each customer but by acknowledging individual customer’s e-commerce journey, you make them feel seen and heard.
More engaged and satisfied customers also mean more advocates of your business, providing valuable feedback through reviews and acting as free advertising to potential customers. Read more about how Food & Dairy Co have 80% of their buyers ordering online which increased brand advocates and referrals.
How to make onboarding as easy as possible for your customers
Step 1: Have incentives to make the switch to e-commerce more beneficial.
Incentives can come in the form of “20% off your first purchase” or “free shipping” and can give your customers that extra push toward seeing the e-commerce purchase process through to the end. This is mainly to get your customers to realize the added value and convenience that switching to buying online could bring. Creating different types of customer incentives shows that you care for their interests.
But how do you pick the perfect incentive for so many customers with different needs?
You can start by creating three different types of incentives and keep a record of which works the best. Creating coupon codes that customers can apply at checkout is an easy way to do this, meaning that the sky is the limit when it comes to what you can offer.
Step 2: Schedule onboarding calls to walk customers through the process.
Our customers need extra assurance that we support them. Having a call or meeting with customers shows that you’re willing to invest time into their success. This is the moment when customers can ask questions, discuss hurdles and be transparent about any hesitations. This kind of insight is valuable when deciding what content to create. Recording these conversations or documenting their questions is a crucial starting point when creating your “knowledge base.”
Step 3: Allow customers to make practice orders.
Practice orders have two key benefits: Firstly, you allow the buyer a safe space to get used to your web store. You get the opportunity to remove the anxiety standing between your customer and ordering online. By showing them how easy it can be, you directly exhibit how much time they could save. Secondly, practice ordering also allows you to get insights into your customer’s hurdles and pain points.
Step 4: Have easily accessible “help” content available for when you aren’t.
Having a library of content where your customers can easily read help articles, troubleshooting tips, and step-by-step guides will also contribute toward a smooth and seamless transition. This means customers feel that they are never alone, even when your team isn’t available to help them.
Step 5: Follow up, follow up, follow up again.
Once you’ve taught your customers to swim, don’t leave them stranded in the ocean. Your buyers will appreciate the follow-up calls or meetings that show that you’re willing to go above and beyond to ensure their e-commerce journey is a successful one.
Struggling to keep your customers on your web store?
Read our guide to customer adoption.
What is the difference between onboarding B2B and B2C customers?
B2B:
Sales cycles are longer: Don’t bother comparing yourself to a B2C web store whose buyers are onboarded within a week. With pre-sales and post-sales lengthening the journey, B2B purchases have more stakeholders involved therefore requiring a lot more time and energy.
More emphasis on building relationships: While placing an order on a B2B website, the quantities and costs are usually far higher than that of a B2C web store. This means customers risk more when it comes to placing the final order and making the payment. Having a personal relationship with a customer makes this step easier. Building that safety net of trust is an essential part of B2B e-commerce.
Requires more personalized experience: We see in B2B that tailored solutions, customized workflows, and specific integrations are more common than not. Creating a need for a more personal and individual onboarding approach.
B2C:
More flexibility: Customers undergoing onboarding on a B2C web store can take place at any time and the pace of the customer. If they have questions or concerns, they can also reach out via their preferred channel.
Tips to improve onboarding experience:
Keep the communication clear
Setting clear and open communication channels can help your customers to avoid unnecessary confusion or crossed communication. By introducing a ticket system or chatbot on your website, you make your services easily accessible to the customer and give them peace of mind. Exhibit to your customers how to make use of these features and give a clear deadline for when they can expect support. Setting expectations and meeting them from the very beginning is a surefire way to win trust.
Internally, it’s also crucial to set up learning objectives for every piece of content that you create for onboarding purposes. You can measure the success of these learnings by keeping track of the questions asked once the onboarding is complete. If your customers ask any questions that resemble your learning objectives, this means the learning did not achieve its goal and the content needs to be relooked.
Keep the feedback coming
The biggest mistake you can make with onboarding is thinking that launching training and various content makes the job complete. There will always be improvements that can make the user experience more comprehensive. You can find points of feedback by sending out surveys to customers or adding a pop-up questionnaire to your onboarding training courses for customers to give their feedback with questions like “How are you enjoying your onboarding process?”.
Keep to the basics
Technical language and industry-specific terminology may create a “barrier to entry” for your customers to complete your onboarding training. By doing this, you deem e-commerce as an overcomplicated process and decrease the likelihood of adoption. Keep your language and processes simple. You can test this internally by asking individuals in non-technical roles within your organization to review your content. This will make sure that nobody is excluded from participating in onboarding due to a lack of understanding.
Keeping to the basics, it’s also important to be mindful of not making courses too long or too short. In onboarding best practices, it’s good to stick to “bite-sized” content that makes sure the learner can achieve the learnings of the onboarding. This can be done by dividing large lengthy learnings into smaller 10-minute segments with clear topics so that the customer doesn’t have to set aside hours when they cannot afford to do so. Smaller mini onboarding topics also create a better user experience and make onboarding more convenient for the customer.
Keep it visual
Research shows that viewers retain 95% of the information in a video in comparison to only 10% when reading the information in text format. What this means is that creating videos will help your customers grasp the message you are trying to convey in your onboarding strategy. Pairing bodies of text with photos or images is also more visually appealing and makes reading easier.
Conclusion
Onboarding customers to your B2B web store could reap incredibly rewarding benefits. Having an onboarding strategy with clear learning objectives and a structured flow of feedback could drastically improve customer satisfaction and improve internal and external efficiency. With low-cost involved, it’s an impactful way to create and foster great relationships with customers and keep them shopping on your online platform.
Struggling to keep your customers on your web store?
