6 Best Practices to Drive Customer Adoption of B2B eCommerce Sites

Part of building a great site is marketing the site when it is ready for launch. Conversion, average order value and loyalty are meaningless if your customers aren’t actually using the site.

I received this question the other day:

We are creating this great experience for our customers with great tools to help them do their job easier, now how do we get them to use it?

In other words, how do we get customers to adopt our new site or customer adoption?

6 Tips to Encourage Customer Adoption

A great question, but it doesn’t have just one answer.  Here are a few successful tactics I have seen:

1. Listen to your customers – use the launch as an opportunity to listen to your customers.  Ask for their feedback, and get them involved in the project.  They are more likely to use your site if they contributed to its development
2. Build excitement prior to launch – use email marketing to gather feedback and to communicate what is coming and when it is coming.  Get your employees excited about it so they are talking about it.  Create videos and fact sheets to explain the upcoming features and how it will add value.
3. Soft launch your new site with just a few loyal customers. Get their complete adoption.  Understand how they use the site, and use that data in the subsequent steps.
4. Create how-to launch videos – at launch date, create video tutorials on the new site place directly on the home page.  Videos are an excellent way to educate.  Create popups that they can click to dismiss, to display the tutorial video. Make it a big deal “BRAND NEW FEATURES FOR OUR CUSTOMERS.” As you see customers using the new site (through analytics), reach out to them and gather their feedback and opinions.
5. Internal adoption – the number one way to encourage adoption is by your internal team having the confidence that online is the best place to go for information and ordering. If your internal team has confidence, whenever a salesperson goes to a customer, they will show the customer  the site, or pull it up on their iPad. Whenever there is a customer service inquiry, the CSR points the customer to the site by sending them an email link directly to the question and answer. In a chat session, the CSR can do quick training,  transmitting links to tutorials or the answer to their exact question.
6. Create an email campaign – launch the new features when you are confident through your email lists. Ask for their feedback and make the campaign about listening to your customer and adding value.

It is not ONLY about tactics

If you were to ask Gary Vaynerchuk or Seth Godin this question, they would say you have to be where your customers are at.  Tell the story of your site. What medium(s) are they using?  If they open emails, use emails.  If they like phone calls, then send your inside sales team after them.  LinkedIN, FaceBook, Twitter, Industry forums – yep.  Market where your customers are at.  Don’t market to your customers like it is 2007.  Watch this video: