Get Instant Alerts When Your Key B2B Clients Visit Your Website!
B2B User-Activity Real-Time Notifications
About the Author:
Co-founder of Datacop, a digital agency that fulfils marketing operation roles in large eCommerce companies such as OluKai, Melin, Roark, Visual Comfort and Company, Dedoles and others.
In this post, we'll explore setting up a “high-value user activity alert system” using Slack for communication and Bloomreach Engagement for customer data analytics and engagement strategies, ensuring your account team never misses an opportunity to delight key customers.
In today's fast-paced e-commerce landscape, engaging high-value customers effectively is crucial for boosting sales and enhancing customer loyalty. One innovative approach involves triggering real-time notifications when these premium shoppers add items to their cart. Such alerts can be immediately sent to sales representatives, who can then reach out to these high-value customers via phone with customized offers and communication.
B2B vs B2C Customer Segment
In the e-commerce context, B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) customers differ significantly. Typically, e-commerce managers and marketers tend to focus on their customers with a B2C perspective. However, B2B customers, though small in number—often accounting for just 1-5% of the total customer base—have a much higher purchasing likelihood, typically ranging from 15 to 25 times greater than B2C customers, and they purchase much more frequently.
From our experience, B2B customers tend to have customer lifetime values that are 5 to 10 times higher compared to B2C customers. They also exhibit more frequent visits to e-commerce websites. This trend is also evident in other high-value, low-count customer segments, such as VIP customers. Therefore, it is crucial for e-commerce businesses to recognize and cater to these valuable customer segments effectively.
For example, in the context of electronic e-shops, B2B customers are often businesses and organizations seeking to fulfill their IT hardware needs, such as laptops, monitors, and other equipment. Given the distinct characteristics of B2B customers, it makes sense for e-commerce companies to invest in account management tailored to these users, offering a VIP-like service that acknowledges and addresses their specific needs.
B2B account managers can be empowered to proactively offer bespoke bulk discounts, enhancing the purchasing experience for their clients and increasing the AOV. Additionally, these account managers can answer bespoke questions, such as when certain products will be back in stock or how much of a particular product is currently available. By providing personalized attention and services, e-commerce companies can cultivate strong relationships with their high-value B2B customers, ensuring their loyalty and increasing the potential for repeat business.
B2B Real - Time Notifications
In our experience implementing this use case, we've worked with teams that already had account management systems in place. Typically, a single account manager oversees between 500 to 1,000 accounts. Given this extensive list, it's crucial for the account manager to choose wisely when deciding whom to call on any given workday.
Real-time notifications have proven invaluable in this context, enabling account managers to prioritize their daily focus on users who have recently interacted with the e-commerce platform. This approach not only enhances the efficiency of account management but also ensures that high-potential users receive timely and relevant attention.
Thannks to Bloomreach Engagement’s Jinja Personalisation capabilities, there is a lot of options that can be surfaced in the notification. In our example we chose to see what products were viewed and carted by high-value B2B customers.
They could pull in information into the notification about the user like their email / phone / timezone / shipping address
They could pull in information into the notification about the event viewed / carted like its image, title, web URL, etc.
They could pull in information about how many products were viewed and how much of that product was left in stock at the time.
Additionally, these notifications enable account managers to reach out to high-value users who have not interacted with the website for some time. With this knowledge, account managers can communicate differently with these customers, recognizing when they might be at risk of churning. This proactive approach to account management helps maintain strong relationships with valuable customers, ultimately benefiting the business.
Slack Incoming Webhooks
For delivering these real-time notifications, we opted to use Slack as our platform of choice. However, other platforms such as Microsoft Teams or Notion can also be utilized effectively for this purpose. Slack provides an excellent resource on how to enable incoming webhooks for your Slack Workspace, which is a crucial feature for setting up notifications. This guide is accessible at Slack’s API website.
Before diving into the how-to guide, it's important to first determine which Slack Workspace you want to use for the notifications and to identify the appropriate channel where these notifications will be directed. In most cases, creating a new channel specifically for this purpose is the recommended approach. This allows for clearer organization and ensures that the notifications are delivered to a focused audience.
Bloomreach Engagement Scenario
The scenario for this use case, Bloomreach is fairly straightforward. Albeit the screenshsot is only from a DEMO so in reality the scenario would be larger, these are the three main aspects to keep in mind when designing the scenario.
Identify the Trigger: First, determine what event should trigger the notification. In this example, possible triggers are "view_item" or "add_to_cart." These triggers can also be set to trigger once a hour or once a day to generate a list of customers who engaged in a desired activity.
Define Customer Eligibility: Next, filter the eligible customers to ensure that only the desired segment, such as high-value customers, is considered. This prevents the channel from being overwhelmed with notifications from all customers who perform an activity.
Set Up the Notifications: Each Slack channel you intend to use should have its own incoming webhook endpoint. This ensures that the notifications are directed to the correct channel within your chosen Slack Workspace.
JSON & Jinja in the Webhook Payload
Please find the JSON payload example of a the webhook from the scenario that posts the notification to slack below:
{
"text": "{{ customer.email }} viewed a product on datacop.shop.",
"blocks": [
{
"type": "section",
"text": {
"type": "mrkdwn",
"text": "{{ customer.email }} viewed a product on datacop.shop."
}
},
{
"type": "section",
"block_id": "section567",
"text": {
"type": "mrkdwn",
"text": "<{{ catalogs['product_catalogue'].item_by_id(event.product_id).url }}|Product URL> \\n Product Title: {{ event.title }} \\n Total Number of Views for this Product: {# view_items by product_id (lifetime) #}{{ report_value_by_key('6620f79079e21f096c86e41f',(event.product_id))}}"
},
"accessory": {
"type": "image",
"image_url": "{{ catalogs['product_catalogue'].item_by_id(event.product_id).image }}",
"alt_text": "Product image"
}
}
]
}
There are two interesting jinja codes to highlight
This jinja returns how many time a particular product_id was viewed. This is because the report is set to count the view_items per product_id and the “(event.product_id)” part tells the function, which product it should look for (for which row of the report it is meant to return values)
{{ report_value_by_key('6620f79079e21f096c86e41f',(event.product_id)) }}This jinja makes sure to pull the URL item attribute from the catalog “product_catalogue”
{{ catalogs['product_catalogue'].item_by_id(event.product_id).url }}
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