Why Browse Abandonment Emails Aren’t Optional for B2B Stores

December 13, 2019

Just about every online retailer knows and understands the importance of a cart abandonment email campaign (regardless of if they’re B2C or B2B). However, the fact stands that cart abandoners only account for the 10% of online shoppers that actually make it to the shopping cart page.

And even though “browse abandonment emails” are new enough to the ecommerce industry that there’s still a little skepticism as to how well they work (especially with B2B sales), the fact remains that they allow businesses to approach the other 90% of their visitors with unique messaging that could push them further through the conversion funnel.

With Forrester predicting that B2B sales will hit $1.2 Trillion by 2021, and account for 13% of all B2B sales in the US, it stands to reason that competition will grow much more fierce and online retailers selling to other businesses may need to step up their game if they want a real slice of the pie. Luckily, with the right browse abandonment tool & the proper email tactics in place, B2B retailers are actually in a good place to be able to delight their would-be abandoners, learn about the shopping habits of their visitors & recover a good amount of otherwise-lost sales.

If You Appreciate Good Customer Support, So Do Your B2B Shoppers

In 2020, running a successful online business requires knowledge of all sorts of complicated marketing tech software… and think of how good it feels to get stumped while setting something up and receive outstanding customer support that allows you to finish your project successfully.

The businesses shopping on your site are no different, and value the fact that good customer support can relieve quite a bit of stress. So making customer support the backbone and branding of your browse abandonment email campaign is a necessity in B2B sales if you want to achieve high open rates and encourage re-engagement.

B2B Transactions Aren’t One-Size-Fits-All

Unlike most online consumer sales, business transactions don’t always fit within a one-size-fits-all model. Not only is there often more than one decision maker involved in the purchasing process, but other things like bulk discounts, payment plans, compatibility, and more come into play and create a situation that requires a little more personalization.

This creates the perfect opportunity to personalize your outreach & approach a bit more, and let your B2B shoppers know about all of the different options available to them to make their purchase smoother, like:

A “Request a Quote” page
Financing Options
“Make An Offer”
Bulk Discounts (more on this to come)
Discount Code for First Purchase
Scheduled Delivery Options

Another thing to keep in mind is that the emails you do capture for your browse campaigns are most often going to be business email addresses. Which means that, with the help of Google, you have the ability to gather more contact information on your shoppers that B2C sellers. By setting up real time site abandonment notifications, you could reach out manually to your abandoners within minutes, and catch them while you’re still fresh on their mind.

Bulk Ordering Means More Leverage For You

The complexity & customization that many B2B transactions require may seem counterintuitive to running a successful browse campaign at first. But these complexities can often give you more leverage to use in your campaigns. Take bulk ordering, for example…

According to Science Magazine, your customers are twice as likely to complete a purchase when they feel like they may lose the opportunity to do so. Using your browse abandonment emails to dynamically display inventory levels can often be that scarcity you need to get someone to commit to a purchase…. Especially if they need to order 10 items, and you only have 11 left in stock.

Like inventory levels, bulk discounts are also something that B2B shoppers are not always aware of when browsing your site. So you can either consider this to be ammo for your manual outreach to your abandoners, work it into your automated browse campaigns, or both!

The Perfect Opportunity to Add Value

When defining the best strategy for remarketing to abandoning visitors, businesses often forget to take into account 2 things: Buy Cycle & Basic Content marketing strategies. If, on average, it takes your customers one month between the time they become a lead and a customer, then going directly after the sale the minute they abandon your site may not be the best approach right away.

This provides the perfect opportunity to not just remind them of the items they were checking out, but also add value that will nurture them through the buy cycle and towards becoming a paying customer.

Treat your browse abandonment campaigns as an extension of your company’s outstanding support (which we already defined as the backbone of your entire campaign), and you’ll begin to push your “low-intent” shoppers further through your conversion funnel. Some ideas include:

Success Stories showing how amazing your product/service is
Case studies from successful prior customers
Spec & Data Sheets showing pertinent product information
E-Books, newsletters & whitepapers to teach your shoppers how your product solves the problems they face
Tutorials, videos & webinars to indoctrinate your leads & demonstrate your product’s viability.

Complement Your Site’s Rapport Building Strategies

One of the biggest differences between B2C & B2B sales is that B2B shoppers aren’t just purchasing a product… they’re purchasing you.

While building rapport is necessary for both consumer and business facing companies, B2B sellers have to work a little bit harder at it in order to land bigger, more complex accounts. Buyers need to know not just that they’re getting a good product, but that the company they’re buying from will be good for business in the future as well and the people they work in the process with will make their lives easier.

For this reason, it is a good idea for B2B ecommerce sites to use live chat tools to engage website visitors & begin building relationships as early in the buyer journey as possible.

Once you find success in building rapport with your website visitors this way, your value-driven browse abandonment campaigns can serve as a followup to this transaction. If you remember to keep support the basis for your emails, you’ll automatically & gently nudge your shoppers into paying customers.

Never Pass Up an Opportunity to Learn About Your Shoppers

Regardless of whom you sell to, knowing the reasons for browse abandonment on your site is almost equally as important as your ability to recover the sales.

Abandoned session replay tools allow you to watch your shoppers engage with and react to your site to dial in conversion leaks. Advanced ecommerce analytic tools like Divvit also help provide data to pinpoint causes of website dropoff. And while the abundance of these solutions on the market can tend to give us “MarTech Overload” at times, pinpointing the causes of site abandonment is imperative. It will allow you to better understand your shoppers likes, dislikes & habits to create browse abandonment email messaging that will result in the highest return.

Summary

There is no denying that, as time progresses, one of the most important focuses of your remarketing strategies must be personalization. Blanket marketing campaigns & generalized outreach strategies are bound to fall flat in a world that demands increasingly relevant messaging.

Luckily, a browse abandonment email campaign can afford B2B sellers the ability to accomplish this with ease, using a combination of:

Support-based email reminders to reassure your shoppers
Customized sales processes for each new abandoner
Dynamically injected inventory information to introduce scarcity & urgency.
Value driven content to re-engage visitors and push them through your conversion funnel
Session replays to pinpoint conversion leaks and potential sales opportunities

When you’re ready, you can get started with your own browse abandonment email campaign here! We’ll even help with the setup, design your emails for you, and let you recover $1,000 in lost sales free!