Create a B2B customer experience that rivals the best in B2C

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As a B2B marketer, I love to compare B2B and B2C customer experiences, although it makes me a little ashamed of B2B marketers. I'm always jealous of personalized content, omnichannel marketing, and one-click everything. At this point, I have a pre-scheduled annual email response to my CEO for Shopify's year in review email release day explaining why we can't do this.

The question for those of us who work in B2B is: is it really necessary? Of course, our buyer journeys are much more complex, the purchase is more expensive, and the process is more important. But that just means we have more touchpoints, more lifetime value, and more interest from our buyer to learn more about our solution.

Really, we should be leading the way when it comes to exceptional customer experiences.

Unfortunately for our buyers, this is not the case. B2B still has a long way to go to catch up with B2C when it comes to customer experience. The good news is that the experiences aren't as disconnected as they seem. With a technology stack that connects customer touchpoints in the digital space, you can create rewarding experiences that attract, engage and delight your customers, and even make it easier for your customers to pay.

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Transform 2022

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register here Personalize the journey across all touchpoints

Say what you will about United Airlines, but I was rightfully thrilled with the digital experience on my first post-pandemic flight. When I landed I received a text message telling me which gate I was arriving at, where my luggage was and a map of the terminal in the app. The company known for breaking guitars was now telling me via omnichannel messaging where I could pick up my guitar.

While I was thrilled with the experience, it didn't come out of nowhere. Instead, it was orchestrated by a data-centric view of my journey. Although we don't have their itinerary in hand, we can recreate the United experience by integrating customer touchpoints into the CRM.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is one company that puts this approach into practice. In 2020, WWF needed to think about how its customer journeys would work across all of its segments, including governments, businesses, communities and individuals, to achieve the agency's goal of solving pressing environmental issues. To create a personalized digital experience for all of these stakeholders, WWF needed visibility — and data — to inform how customers interact with its website. By integrating the agency's website with its CRM, WWF created highly segmented groups of users based on the content they interacted with on its website. The agency then used this data in its content and email strategies to create personalized journeys for its clients and saw a significant increase in contacts and form submissions over the course of the campaign.

Create a rewarding partnership by connecting your sales and marketing

Like many, I have become a little too dependent on food delivery services over the past couple of years. The silver lining is that it gave me the opportunity to observe how these companies are innovating to better meet customer needs. Take DoorDash for example - after submitting a recent order, I received a pop-up message asking if I wanted my Dasher to buy ice cream on the way. It had been a...