Highlight Products and Promotions
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Identify buyer expectations for the B2B shopping experience.
- Explain how to showcase products, campaigns, and messaging on your storefront.
- Describe the benefits of delivery tracking and split-order deliveries.
Who Manages Your Storefront Content?
Are you a commerce manager, marketer, merchandiser, or admin? If you create and maintain information that helps your buyers with their purchasing decisions on your Salesforce B2B Commerce storefront, you’re in the right place. This module is designed for roles that manage content on your Salesforce B2B Commerce on Classic storefront, which we'll refer to as Salesforce B2B Commerce in this module. Of course, role responsibilities vary by company—so, whether you manage a storefront or just want to learn more about improving the B2B buying experience, let’s get started.
Help Buyers Buy Online
More B2B companies are selling their products and services online than ever before. And for some companies (and their buyers), this is a new way of making purchases. So how can companies give their buyers everything they need to choose the right products and feel confident placing an order? With Salesforce B2B Commerce, you can:
- Use content to promote products.
- Add product details that help buyers make decisions.
- Target discounts at certain buyers.
- Tell buyers about different shipping options available.
- Sell your products internationally by localizing storefronts for multiple languages and currencies.
All these features are available right away—although some require a little more work than others to get ready. If you want to take your solution even further, your development teams can customize, extend, or even completely override default behavior.
The Salesforce B2B Commerce on Classic provides a demo storefront for a business called Capricorn Coffee. Your Salesforce B2B Commerce Administrator can download it with these two special permission sets. Once your Administrator has the demo storefront set up, you can see examples of the features we describe here as well as complex product and pricing scenarios. The demo storefront is a great way to see use cases in action before you implement them. Don't have the demo storefront? No worries. We show you some examples throughout this module.
Let’s start by learning about standard features you can use to provide more information about products and influence sales.
Sell More with B2B Commerce
You might be thinking that people using your storefront don’t need as much guidance or content as regular shoppers do. Although it’s true that your buyers are likely purchasing products as part of their job, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Internet of Things has changed everyone’s expectations. In fact, B2B buyers are expecting the same experience in their professional online purchasing journey that they have in their personal online shopping experience. Buyers expect to find detailed information, imagery, and even videos of the products they are buying.
B2B buyers also expect to find information that can help them manage their business, like checking invoices, making payments, managing delivery schedules, applying for returns or credits, and many other industry-specific use cases. When you deliver the best shopping experience, it makes their jobs easier, cultivates loyalty, and boosts your sales.
Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can enhance your buyers’ experience with Salesforce B2B Commerce, like:
- Spotlight and featured products
- Messages, coupons, and promotions
- Targeted promotions
- Delivery tracking
- Split-order deliveries
Spotlight and Featured Products
Do you have a new product line that just arrived? Do you want to showcase those products as soon as buyers visit your storefront? With spotlight and featured products, you can show products on your home page in prominent, eye-catching locations. This is a great way to boost sales of certain products—because the more your buyer sees your product, the greater the chance they’ll purchase.
What’s the difference between a spotlight product and a feature product? The main difference is the location on the home page. Both appear at the top of the main content on your home page, but spotlight products display first, and featured products second. To maintain a good user experience on the home page, include no more than three spotlight products and no more than 20 featured products.
For example, Ursa Major Solar, a solar power equipment manufacturer, uses spotlight products for their best-selling, high-value items and uses featured products for items they want to showcase during a particular week, such as batteries and inverters.
Promotions
You’ve seen how to highlight products for buyers; now let’s look at how you can highlight promotional messages across your storefront.
Promotions are marketing campaigns that use images and links to inform and direct your buyers. You can use promotions to tell buyers about shipping discounts or direct them to newly launched product categories. Plus, you can schedule promotions ahead of time so they run simultaneously with your coupon and discount activities.
Your promotions can be placed on several pages within your storefront.
- Home page
- Product Detail page
- Product List page
- Shopping Cart page
On each page, a promotion can appear.
- In the splash widget that sits directly below the page header
- As a banner across the top of the center, main content column
- In the left or right column
Ursa Major Solar, for example, uses promotions to schedule discount advertisements in the left and right columns of the storefront page, while the splash banner shows brand content about their business and its products.
Learn more about best practices when creating promotions for your storefront.
Targeted Promotions
What if you have a promotion that only applies to certain buyers? You can set your promotion to display only to buyers whose account belongs to a certain account group. (You can also show a promotion to all buyers except those in a certain account group.) Account groups tie a set of products and a price list to a particular account. Accounts are made up of buyers who have access to the specified products and prices.
For example, Ursa Major Solar wants to offer a 10% discount on its basic solar panel install kit to buyers in its top buyers segment. All top buyers are in the account group called Gold Accounts. Ursa Major Solar uses promotions to offer Gold Account buyers a discount on this special by showing an image with the discount (and its associated coupon code) in the right column of the home page. This promotion image displays only for users in that group. Even better, Ursa major Solar has scheduled the promotion to start and finish so employees don’t have to worry about forgetting to turn it off.
Delivery Tracking
In a traditional B2B purchasing workflow, a buyer has to contact their sales rep or call center to check order status. But through an integration with your order fulfillment and delivery tracking solutions, your buyers can view the status of orders they’ve placed directly from their storefront. And that’s important for buyers that expect self-service and speed of consumer shopping.
Plus, your sales reps and call center reps will benefit from promoting self-service capabilities on your storefront—getting time back in their day to do what they do best. Even better? These self-service features can be localized for buyers around the world. More on that later.
Split-Order Deliveries
With line-level independence, your buyers can choose to send parts of the same order to different delivery addresses. That’s right—no more placing separate orders for buyers who want their order delivered to different locations. And if you add a promotion highlighting that buyers can split their orders, they’ll start using the feature in no time.
Let’s Put It All Together
The storefront features like spotlight products and promotions can make a real difference to your customer’s buying experience and impact your sales strategies. You can tailor these features so that you’re showing the right content to the right buyers at the right time.
Speaking of the right content—let’s talk about detailed product content in the next unit.