Customer and channel partner engagement is crucial for every business-to-business (B2B) brand. Increasing engagement with your B2B brand begins with providing a positive, memorable B2B customer experience. The B2B customer experience stats below tell a story about the actions B2B brands should take to improve customer experience and engagement. In industries where products are often all designed to meet the same standards and function with the same technology, customer experience is critical to standing out from the competition.
Get up close and personal.
The personal value (ex. professional, social, emotional, and self-image benefits) your brand provides has a bigger impact on B2B customer experience than your business value (ex. functional benefits and business outcomes). Customer experience stats from a CEB/Think with Google study reported that business value has a 21.4% impact on commercial outcomes, vs. personal value, which has a 42.6% impact.
Studies show B2B buyers’ increasing expectation of tailored experiences with brands. Personalize as much of your customer and channel partner experience as possible, including:
- Reward Programs: 55% of customers would use reward programs more if rewards were personalized to reflect their needs. (Salesforce)
- Content Portals: 45% of B2B buyers want personalized content portals. (Zippia)
- Offers and Promotions: 56% of customers expect offers to always be personalized. (Salesforce)
- Website Content: 59% of B2B customers expect personalized content when researching a company’s products/services. (MarketingCharts)
Ensure a “happily ever after” for current customers.
Customer experience stats show the results of upselling or cross-selling key accounts.
Businesses have a 60-70% chance of selling to an existing customer while the probability of a new prospect is only 5-20%. (Forbes)
Develop a referral program that rewards customers for referring business.
75% of B2B sales leaders say leads referred from loyal customers are more likely to close. (Heinz)
Divert some lead generation resources to account-based marketing (ABM) efforts.
Customer acquisition is 5 to 25 times more expensive than customer retention, (Harvard Business Review)
Invest in current customers with a loyalty program, better customer service, exclusive offers, etc.
Increasing customer retention by just 5% can yield a 25% increase in profit. (Bain & Company).
Reach customers on everything, everywhere, all at once.
B2B buyer demographics and consumer expectations have changed drastically in the last few years. It’s essential to surround prospects on every media channel and make everything digitally do-able.
Make video content.
80% of marketers say they’ve noticed an uptick in sales after adding video content. (Zippia)
Take advantage of email’s high ROI.
Email has an ROI of $42 for every $1 spent. (Zippia)
Fill your social media with useful info.
55% of B2B buyers search for information on social media. (Zippia)
Launch or expand your e-commerce options.
68% of B2B buyers plan to increase their use of digital shopping channels. (Wunderman Thompson)