3 ways a CRM integration can empower your B2B ecommerce marketing

I personally know from conversations with agencies, clients and other technology vendors that many retailers that are predominantly B2C online have begun to look at the bigger picture.

CRM is a major part of this bigger picture. B2B companies are increasing their technology spend and we’ll soon see more CRM systems combined with flexible ecommerce platforms. Indeed, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and OroCRM are proving to be popular CRM options to combine with platforms such as Magento.

But with all of this extra insight powering a marketing automation platform such as Dotdigital, what does it mean for marketing teams?

1) The ability to see, and do more

B2B marketers are provided with wholesale insight into customers and customer service and a further way to bring in offline order information – making a much deeper level of understanding that many B2B businesses have not previously been able to tap into online accessible. Using this can be business changing with recent Econsultancy research showing that “by migrating B2B customers online, companies have seen a 44% increase in average order value and 38% of the B2B executives agreed that customers have spent more.”

2) Better personalization capabilities

Personalization brings different challenges in the B2B world. B2B sales are more complex with clients having their own individual pricing schema or customer group, existing product knowledge and an awareness of the market and what’s already available.

In order to achieve personalized communications, data becomes more important than ever. Additional B2B data that may sit in your CRM could turn sales focused messages into the individual, educational and persuasive messages required. Browse behavior data for instance is as important as past product or category data for personalization.

3) Making contact at the right time

B2B buyers often adhere to repetitive buying cycles and the buying process can be very long.  Combining past purchase data with clients CRM data helps marketers send emails at the right time for the client on their purchase journey.

Plus, with multiple channels in the process, marketing communications need to reflect the client’s recent activity. Sending a generic ‘120 days after purchase’ email won’t cut it. Behavioral information from email interaction fed back into CRM gives the ‘single view perspective’ which allows for further relevant communications over the phone.

B2B buyers are likely to move themselves through the buying process and have a different way of finding products. Product codes or part numbers will be used and the search functionality is much more important. It’s also likely that catalogs are used or samples requested. This is all data collected within the CRM as opposed to the ecommerce platform but with synced systems, your communication can take these buyer requests into consideration.

The Dotdigital functionality spans both B2C and B2B worlds. We have deep integrations with Magento’s ecommerce platform, Salesforce CRM and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. For marketers, this means getting your data from ecommerce and CRM platforms into Dotdigital is a seamless task. Using the resulting single customer view will ensure your data goes further, empowering you to achieve much more from your marketing.

To discuss your integration requirements, feel free to get in touch.