3 Overlooked Critical Metrics B2B Webstores Need to Track in 2023

A successful B2B web store: it’s what every company that wants to take their business online is looking for. Preferably a web store that customers immediately start using, grows revenues without incident and automatically leads to happier buyers.

In my experience, it’s not that easy. I’ll be the first to tell you that it takes dedicated, long-term effort to create a successful store. And it starts with something very basic: determining which metrics you want to track, so you have the data, insights, and tools you need to improve your buyer relationships online.

Now we all know of the “regular” metrics. The number of customers who start (or keep) using your store. Average order value. Revenue growth. But there are other metrics that can give you actionable insights into the success of your e-commerce.

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Here’s three overlooked critical metrics that will give you a leg up on the competition.

Research online, purchase offline (ROPO)

Simply put: The opposite of you testing out a TV in an appliance store, and then ordering it online for your convenience.

ROPO is an interesting metric that goes to the heart of success in B2B e-commerce. Web stores integrated with a company’s ERP can combine data from both offline and online sources, which makes this a great metric to track. You can see, for example, that a buyer will look at something online, and then decide to send in an offline order for the same item. This allows you to make safe correlations about your web store – or get some qualitative data by calling the buyer and asking them what happened.

Because why would a buyer decide to research on a web store, and then turn around and call a salesperson for this exact item? Well, perhaps the information about the product is not complete. Did you include details on size, transportation, weight on your web store? Could you indicate shipping times or is this missing? Or perhaps they don’t remember if this is the product that they’ve ordered before, and your web store should include their purchase history, so they know what to reorder.

ROPO can give you clues about the reasoning behind cart abandonment, what roadblocks your buyers come across when using your store, and which features, information, or data you should include to make your web store a success.

How to get started:

Ensure you have the tooling available to combine offline with online data. Then establish your “norm” – because some ROPO can be expected – but find a method to sort unusual ROPO behaviors and hand off this information to customer account managers.

Customer lifetime value

Simply put: how much a buyer is worth to you.

If you’re in sales, you usually focus on the big fish. Ensure important buyers receive assistance, listening to their feedback, and generally taking care of those relationships. But most businesses are not founded on big fish, not to mention that your attention doesn’t scale to hundreds of accounts.

Using a metric like Customer Lifetime Value, you get real insight into how valuable a buyer truly is – even if they fly under the radar. Combining offline and online sales in a single dashboard, and the capability of pulling up sales data per buyer, you can determine your most valuable customer relationships. How long they’ve been buying. How much they’ve spent over the years. Both purchase frequency and amount. What they search for inside your web store.

But mostly: if you spot any change in behavior, which could indicate that the customer is ready to churn. Those valuable buyers would warrant a phone call if they don’t put in their monthly order, or if the order value suddenly drops. Perhaps they can tell you what’s missing from your web store, or why they might buy from your competitor. You can not only salvage these critical buyer relationships, you can also solve stumbling blocks inside your store that you had no idea existed.

How to get started:

Calculate your ideal Customer Value Score, and then use the data available to find out who meets these metrics. Build a program to track these customers and gain their feedback on a regular basis, or when you see their behavior change.

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Customer referral score

Everyone knows that hearing about someone else’s positive experience with a product or vendor makes you included to trust them more. It’s a remarkably successful sales tool, but in e-commerce we tend to underuse it. Asking how (un)willing your current buyers are to give you or your products a positive review or reference, can give you insight into how well your web store is doing. It can be the start of a conversation about why not; or it can give you excellent leads for new buyers. A win-win!

How to get started:

Contact those buyers you have the strongest relationships with and ask them to review the products they have purchased via your web store. You can also send your best buyers a unique link and ask them to forward this to a new potential buyer for you. In both cases, you would reward your current customer with a service or discount.

There are about a hundred metrics you can track to give insight into how customers use your web store and which roadblocks they encounter. All of them depend on ensuring your web store has the right tools and analytics included available, so you can start getting insight into buyer behavior. Especially by combining both offline and online information. Because the earlier you fix something that you never knew was a problem, the sooner you’ll start to see B2B e-commerce success.

 

Picture of Emilie Dubau

Emilie Dubau

Emilie Dubau has been leading Sana Commerce’s global customer success teams for over five years. She’s in charge of the Sana Success Track Program, which helps web store managers to reach their strategic e-commerce goals. 

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