B2B

How Email Marketing Can Create A Frictionless B2B eCommerce Buying Experience

From product discovery to contract negotiations, check out how email marketing can help navigate your prospects through the complex B2B procurement process, convert them into buyers and retain them as loyal customers

If you are a B2B manufacturer, marketplace, or merchant, eCommerce isn’t a newfangled trend you need to think about.

It’s already here, and according to one estimate by Vantage, the market is growing at 18.3% CAGR from $6.92Tn in 2021 to $18.97T by 2028.

User behaviour has also drastically moved in favour of online purchasing, mostly because the buying cohort has gotten younger.

This makes stats like 70% of B2B buyers willing to spend $500,000 on a single eCommerce transaction a massive loss of opportunity if you are not investing enough in eCommerce.

That said, you can’t just spin up a Shopify site and call it quits: unlike B2C, B2B needs plenty of existing and legacy systems to talk to each other in order to deliver the appropriate user experience.

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How Mandela and a poem can help you gain the trust of your website visitors

By Bhaskar Sarma Leave a Comment

webconversion means trust — Nelson Mandela with Francois Pienaar

It’s frustrating, isn’t it?

You have a website up and running. You see traffic but no one clicks on the buy button or fills up the contact form. They land on a page, have a quick look around and then bounce, never to return.

And it’s doubly frustrating when you know you have a good product that is a proven problem solver.

Do you throw up your hands and become bitter, withdrawn and resentful?

No, you don’t. You get inspired by Nelson Mandela.

How to heal a bitterly divided country

In 1994 Mandela became the first black president of a country bitterly divided along racial lines . He knew that South Africa would be torn apart if reconciliation between the privileged white minority and the oppressed black majority didn’t happen.

As he transformed himself from a rebel to a statesman he decided, in the face of all opposition, to throw his weight behind the Springboks, the national rugby team that most blacks saw as the symbol of apartheid.

He promoted the rugby team as a South African team instead of an Afrikaner or a white team and enlisted the help of the captain Francois Pienaar, a big, blonde son of apartheid.

And against all odds, in the 1995 Rugby World Cup organized in South Africa, the Springboks won. The entire country erupted in celebrations and the slow process of reconciliation began.

White South Africans who had reviled Mandela as a terrorist now accepted him as their president and began to trust that he would give them a fair deal. [Read more…] about How Mandela and a poem can help you gain the trust of your website visitors

How to write a whitepaper without getting Force choked by a Sith Lord

By Bhaskar Sarma 2 Comments

On a gloomy day in Coruscant, Darth Vader sat in his office block, breathing more deeply than usual.

The Empire was building a second Death Star and the Emperor wanted him to monitor every phase of the construction.

He was particularly interested in the shield generator for the Death Star which was to be built on the forest moon of Endor.

It was the Death Star’s first line of defence and Darth Vader’s responsibility to make sure that it would do the job.

Knowing the reader

When the news got out about the shield generator trade federations all over the galaxy were excited. The talk went something like this-

Alien #1(manager) – A lot of Imperial credits are riding on this project. Can we bag the contract, team?
Alien #2 (engineering head)- Yes. We have the technology to build this generator and we can whip up the prototype in no time. We are the perfect vendor.
Alien #3 (salesman)- Then get me in touch with the Sith Lord’s office. I am bagging this one. I need to buy that artificial asteroid for my wife.
Alien #1- Brilliant. Prepare a holographic presentation and list out the specs. I will send it to Coruscant.

A Tolkienian formula to writing bewitching case studies that converts like crazy

By Bhaskar Sarma 11 Comments

This post is second in the series of posts dealing with content marketing collaterals and conversion. This first post about landing pages is here . Updated on 20 Jan 2017.

Love a good yarn? Of course you do. You are human.

Stories are the best way to grab people’s attention, whether they are your neighbors or enterprise technology buyers.

And when it comes to stories, JRR Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings ranks up there amongst the best.

When you are using content marketing to reach out to your ideal clients, no collateral can match the effectiveness of a crisply written story, also known as case study, in persuading them to begin the sales conversation with you.

That’s why a good case study (or a customer success story) is worth its weight in gold. The Eccolo Media 2015 B2B Technology Collateral Survey Report found out that 31% of the respondents- the third highest- considered case studies to be extremely influential in providing purchase information.

Why (B2B Landing Page) conversion is like the TARDIS

By Bhaskar Sarma 8 Comments

This is a first in a series of posts about improving conversion rates for different types of content on a typical website. Check out the post about case studies.

The TARDIS is a ship used by Doctor Who, an alien, to travel through time and space. From the outside the TARDIS looks like a phone box, while on the inside it has the square area of a mansion.

What does it have to do with website conversion?

Conversion rate optimization, on the surface is about increasing the click through on call to actions on a site. But dive deeper and the whole subject starts looking like a tapestry with strands of marketing psychology, design, copywriting and other stuff woven in.

Let’s talk about conversion rate optimization for landing pages today. [Read more…] about Why (B2B Landing Page) conversion is like the TARDIS

Site audits- just what the Doctor ordered for an underperforming website

By Bhaskar Sarma 7 Comments

Audit.

That’s a pretty un-sexy word, and it reminds you of accountants, the tax department, endless paperwork and plenty of hassle.

Relax!

I am talking about an entirely different kind of audit that you will actually look forward to.

This one does not involve a government department or accountants.

You don’t need to get involved in it, save for answering some highly targeted questions about your business goals.

And best of all, you get a solid plan that can improve your site and help you properly sell yourself.

I am talking about a site audit. [Read more…] about Site audits- just what the Doctor ordered for an underperforming website

Why short B2B copy can turn prospects into runaway brides

By Bhaskar Sarma 14 Comments

Hi B2B marketer, can you spare a moment to answer a few questions?

Do you enjoy betting against yourself?

Do you want to make the hard job of converting skeptical prospects to clients even harder?

Are you okay with plateauing or even declining revenues and profits?

If you answered YES to even one of these questions, please use short copy to make your case.

But if you want to move the conversation closer to getting a prospect to talk with you face to face you will have to use persuasive content to make your case.

And 8 times out of 10 that involves using long copy.