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Optimizing B2B personalization: 5 KPIs you’ll improve with AI search and discovery
If you’re like many B2B organizations, you’re serious about ecommerce growth.
If you identify with those numbers, you’ve checked all the boxes. You’ve transferred your product catalogs online. You’ve launched a website customers can navigate. You’ve acquired expertise to manage digital touchpoints. You’ve set up online processes for payment, shipping, and customer service.
But you’re not seeing the results you wanted. What gives?
Remember the days before ecommerce, when finding products demanded time and physical effort? B2B customers had to visit sales centers, flip through huge catalogs, cross-check endless lists of SKUs, ask questions, and talk to experts.
Leading B2Bs eased the process by personalizing the buying journey. They hired dedicated sales reps to make the process more satisfying and more efficient. Top reps knew exactly what customers needed, made suggestions, and anticipated supply issues. When a weeks-long product search was reduced to a 5-minute call, the business closed more and earned more.
Your website is now that major touchpoint with your customers. More clicks, more conversions, and more revenue are within reach. To get them, you still need to be the best at knowing your customer. You need to create an efficient, engaging customer experience that outshines your competition and makes your store the obvious choice.
This eBook is a primer on how to do that. We outline five optimizations that help you meet your ecommerce business goals faster through AI personalization and drive five important KPIs for your business: CTR, CVR, AOV, CRR, and ROI.
Personalization is not just for B2C ecommerce. In fact, given the size of the B2B market, the stakes are higher and efforts to grow are even stronger than in B2C.
But B2C ecommerce has moved faster. They’re designing shopping experiences full of personalized touches and efficiencies, using advanced AI to build dynamically for every visitor. These powerful, satisfying experiences have created a baseline for customer journeys across the web and heightened our expectations.
Yes, B2B faces unique challenges. The sales cycle is longer. Orders can be higher. Vendors may have special terms in place. The way to navigate these is not to revert to in-person sales, but through advanced technological enhancements.
B2B buyers expect a seamless experience that mirrors the personalized service they’re used to in face-to-face interactions.
49% of B2B decision makers choose AI search solutions for one reason: to personalize the customer experience. Companies that invest in personalization:
AI is no longer a “nice to have.” It’s the key to optimizing your personalization efforts and meeting your profitability goals.
In ecommerce, the search toolbar is the lifeblood of your site. With hundreds or thousands of products to sift through, the power of that toolbar can make or break the search experience.
Search powered by AI personalization gathers and leverages customer event data — views, clicks, and purchases — and customer profile information to understand who your customer is and what they’re interested in. The better data you have, the more relevant the results.
A garden equipment buyer that types “hose” into an aggregate site’s search toolbar doesn’t want to see nylon stockings. AI personalization weighs the customer’s interests, preferences, and requirements against the product catalog to show them exactly what they came for.
Machine learning is the beating heart of that process. User data is captured and used to train the search engine algorithm based on parameters and a relevance strategy you set.
With best-in-class AI personalization, shoppers aren’t limited to shopping by product name. They can type in SKUs, categories, partial product names — even misspelled words and SKUs — and results are still optimized for textual relevance. Top-performing search engines blend semantic search capability and historical search data to make accurate guesses about what your buyer is looking for from the very first keystroke with personalized autocomplete.
When customers consistently see relevant results that anticipate their needs, they convert more, spend more, and visit more.
Besides search, there’s personalization potential in discovery. Page attributes can be shuffled to match user preferences and feature items unique to that visitor. No longer one-size-fits-all, the process transforms the navigation experience into a one-to-one experience.
To generate intuitive and highly relevant product suggestions, user profiles are leveraged with recommendation engines and semantic search. Showing customers items with attributes they prioritize (category, price, etc.), introduces new products, encourages cross-selling and drives conversions. Use it to curate a “Related,” “Frequently Bought Together,” or “Looking Similar” section for the results page or shopping cart.
Another effective optimization is personalized facet re-ordering. Automated insights from AI personalization re-shuffles the facet list dynamically to reflect meaningful attributes for each customer, saving them precious time. Do you have a buyer that handles women’s apparel only? Then demote the men’s categories and move the women’s garments to the top of the list. It shows you value their time and earns big customer loyalty points.
Personalized recommendations don’t have to be challenging to set up. Algolia offers low-code integrations and customizable front-end libraries that integrate easily with native storefronts and leading ecommerce platforms. Pre-built cartridges give B2B organizations quick access to industry-leading AI-powered search and recommendations without extensive development work. With pre-configured templates, simply “drop in” recommendations to your storefront.
In B2B sales, pricing is often negotiable and terms can be fluid, which fits perfectly into the personalization mandate. AI personalization can be set up to offer bulk discounts to repeat customers and promotional incentives to brand new buyers. Some B2B sites have even added a negotiating feature.
Whatever the approach, AI personalization leverages user data and profiles to learn what makes your customers tick and lets you implement techniques that drive the outcomes you want.
Up until now, where personalization has been deployable on ecommerce platforms, this has mostly been done manually or is focused on broad customer segmentations. That’s not only expensive and takes valuable personnel away from revenue-building tasks, it’s error-prone.
AI personalization weighs infinitely more data across more attributes than humans can calculate. It delivers scalability to customization while eliminating the guesswork. With AI personalization up and running, you can proceed with automatically calculated attributes or fine-tune your results for even better accuracy.
Doing both is the way to stand out.
Since AI personalization relies on business strategy, the best incarnation blends AI with full merchandising control. Leading ecommerce tools give your business teams a clear view onto customer data and let them manage, test, and adjust personalization criteria simply and efficiently from an API or easy-to-use dashboards. Algolia’s Merchandising Studio, for example, lets your business teams:
Your AI personalization is only as strong as your data. With Algolia, you can add data from third-party sources such as Segment, Shopify, Google, and Big Query to enrich customer profiles and deliver better search results to enhance the customer experience.
Today’s B2B organizations need to meet their customers everywhere, all the time. Part of AI personalization involves providing a unified search experience. Whether your customer is searching the product catalog, scanning a help article or looking up stock availabilities from their smartphone, search results need to be accurate, personalized, and up-to-date.
B2B businesses have complex, expansive catalogs that cater to a wide variety of buyers. Catalog management and AI personalization lets you adapt that content for different customers. You might create a refined subset of product choices for a particular buyer or purchasing unit. You might offer bundled pricing or a promo on a partial catalog to a different set of shoppers.
Those enhancements rely on next-level indexing performance and flexibility. No matter how big your catalog is, your data needs to be in sync to deliver those assortments with 100% accuracy.
If one customer just put the last 500 items in their cart, you need to surface a stock-ready alternative for the shopper right behind them. If a buyer is heading to the nearest warehouse and compiling their shopping list online, you need to show them prices and stock for that geographical location.
Algolia has the power to re-index massive catalogs containing 100,000 products in under 10 minutes. AI personalization can also be configured for multiple indexes (e.g., one index for the product catalog and one for customer service information, like help pages). That indexing performance and flexibility delivers a best-in-class customer experience that demonstrates professionalism and provides a seamless, efficient experience.
On Salesforce, Algolia significantly reduced indexing times by 40% - 99.8%.
B2B customers shop like everyone else – from their smartphones. Today’s B2B ecommerce platforms need to be optimized for mobile.
That means doing more than making a mobile-friendly version of your ecommerce site. The interface needs to be designed for mobile. Load times need to be blazingly fast to surface those highly valuable personalized results.
B2B enterprises often span multiple departments, each with their own content repositories and document databases. This requires deep customer support teams or extensive background or help documentation.
AI personalization can be leveraged across this content to anticipate what individuals in different roles need to perform their job better and more efficiently.
Getting the exact product sheet at just the right time to the right sales rep could help make that sale. Help desk content from one department can be automatically optimized and personalized for other areas of a business or for external users, freeing up time and saving costs.
An advanced search and discovery solution is a crucial tool for boosting engagement, conversions, and clicks. But your bottom line isn’t only built from the outside in.
Automation affords your teams more time to focus on other revenue-generating initiatives, like campaigns and promotions — and fine-tuning your ecommerce approach to drive sales.
With your B2B ecommerce channel set up, you have the foundation for profitability. Meaningful growth on KPIs like conversion rate, order volume, and customer retention is now a matter of optimization. And today’s most powerful optimization tool is AI personalization.
There are several personalization providers out there. Your current ecommerce platform may even offer rudimentary personalization and AI capability as a selling feature. But why start with an unproven or partial solution? Your customers deserve an AI-enabled personalization journey with the leader in AI search and discovery.
Even with slow growth on KPIs, you might be the ecommerce leader in your corner of the market. However, ecommerce aggregators are emerging as strong B2B competitors. Meanwhile, many customers still value existing relationships, and new customers are looking for the value and expertise you provide.
The way to nurture those relationships and drive sales is through AI personalization. Businesses that do so can see positive movement among these KPIs:
For near-real-time product search and discovery for B2B, Algolia is the best choice. With this speed and capability, Algolia AI Personalization provides astonishingly quick, accurate, intuitive and up-to-date results that satisfy customers and grow your revenue.
Algolia’s end-to-end AI personalization platform provides all the tools, APIs, and dashboards your merchandiser and developer teams need to build exceptional customized experiences. Designed for fast deployment — and user-friendly for anyone in your organization to use — you can start optimizing the sales experience for the sales results you want from day one.
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