Long after digital pioneers like Amazon and eBay began perfecting the art of personalization, B2B companies thought they could ignore it. They had put their extensive catalogs online, but most sales still took place face-to-face at trade shows, over the phone, or on the golf course—nothing felt more personal.
Personalization seemed like a smoke-and-mirrors game used by Amazon to nudge you toward an “impulse” buy—like those oven mitts to go with the baking tray you just ordered.
While that notion was flawed to begin with, it reached its expiration date when digital natives matured and moved into leadership roles in B2B. For millennials, it’s second nature to expect B2B eCommerce to be as smooth and engaging as the websites and apps they use to buy sneakers, book vacation rentals in Reykjavik, or invest in Bitcoin.
As business lunches, golf rounds, and impromptu sales visits became less necessary—or worse, a waste of time—personalization became inevitable.
With the digitalization of the B2B buying journey, buyers began engaging directly with sellers much later in the decision-making process. Sales teams had to reinterpret their roles because the customer knowledge they built over years lost much of its power. It became marketing’s job to recreate that expertise on digital channels—by building a personalized omnichannel customer experience that leads to conversion.
Of course, personalization in B2B looks different than in B2C. In this guide, we occasionally refer to these differences, but only to sharpen the lens on business-to-business transactions.
The core message is this: The B2B buyer is not browsing your website for fun—they’re there to get a job done. The easier you make that job, the more likely they are to buy from you—or return to do so again. It’s as simple as that.
This whitepaper explores why personalization is essential in B2B eCommerce, which parts of the customer journey benefit most, and how to implement an effective personalization strategy.
Personalization is as old as commerce itself. Before digital technologies emerged, the B2B customer experience was personal from the start: a buyer picked up the phone to speak with a supplier.
Today’s B2B buyer doesn’t want to pick up the phone but prefers to be as autonomous as possible during the decision-making process. At the same time—and paradoxically—they want to feel like “you,” meaning the experience you’ve created, understands their needs and can solve their problems.
They must rely on the customer experience you’ve set up—which is a technological challenge, as we’ll see.
A great example of how personalization builds trust is providing access to real-time inventory and pricing. Nothing is more important to a buyer than knowing what they’ll pay (often a unique price just for them) and when they can receive it. If your experience provides clear, actionable pricing and stock info, the buyer can proceed with their order without reaching out—something they prefer to avoid because it wastes precious time.
B2B customers value optimized and reliable business processes; they will take their business elsewhere if they encounter friction or conflicting information across your channels.
In the next section, we’ll explore how and where personalization can enrich the customer experience by removing friction and building trust.
Your customers may not contact you directly, but they do say “hello” by logging in. Your webshop will recognize the customer and greet them with a personalized homepage. That’s where it starts.
Homepage
There are many ways to personalize the homepage. It can serve as a dashboard containing info that’s useful for the customer—and only for them—such as order history, open orders, or alerts about stock levels for frequently reordered items.
The page shows products relevant to this buyer (and others with the same persona within the company) and highlights special offers or discounts likely to appeal to them. The homepage banner shouldn’t be generic but directly relevant: perhaps you’re launching a new product or service, running a clearance sale, or speaking at an event the customer is likely to attend.
Your thinking must be customer-centric; don’t personalize just for the sake of it. Just like buyers dislike pushy salespeople, irrelevant “personalization” quickly becomes annoying.
Custom pricing
One of the main reasons B2B companies think eCommerce isn’t for them is the complexity of their pricing structures. But that’s no longer an excuse; modern eCommerce platforms include powerful pricing engines or seamless integrations with systems that house financial data.
Pricing isn’t interesting to a B2B customer unless it reflects the actual cost for their order. Many factors determine this: order volume, negotiated discounts, standard discounts per market, delivery terms, and more.
B2B buyers are increasingly comfortable placing large online orders—even for new products. A self-service portal that lets them calculate contract pricing increases that confidence.
The crucial requirement is that all your sales channels display the same price—no matter how complex the order. Inconsistent personalization is a serious pain point and often a dealbreaker. We’ll revisit this topic when we talk about omnichannel.
Custom catalogs
B2B companies often have deep product ranges with tens or hundreds of thousands of SKUs. It’s unlikely your customers shop every part of your assortment, and even within a single company, different stakeholders may only order from specific categories.
These businesses or individuals can be assigned a custom catalog via backend segmentation. This not only feeds the homepage with relevant products but also makes search more intuitive and faster—because they’re filtering 30,000 SKUs, not 300,000.
A frustrating search experience is a major pain point. It wastes time and feels personal to buyers—they perceive it as a sign that you don’t value them.
Personalized content
Customers should only see content that’s relevant to their order history or browsing behavior—or based on industry or persona segmentation you’ve defined. You want users to log in and “become” personas, and they’re more likely to do so if you follow up with curated content, messaging, and offers. The incentive should be: “I get a better experience if I identify myself.”
Useful content goes beyond what’s shown on the homepage—it must run deep through the experience. For instance, an architect researching boilers will need technical specs, not an installation video intended for electricians.
Likewise, they may not care about sustainability credentials, but a property developer might—especially if that information is needed for project approval.
Consider QSTA, a fresh food marketplace that serves specific segments like bakers, butchers, and hospitality. A baker wants content and products about gluten-free cakes—not burger seasoning. But for butchers, burgers and BBQ content is highly relevant, especially in summer.
Personalization enables you to provide each role or persona with only the product information they need—reducing content noise and reinforcing that you understand their business.
Personalized email campaigns
Marketers still invest time and money in email campaigns, but they want to maximize conversion. This is harder in B2B than in B2C, since business-to-business transactions usually involve multiple decision-makers (which is why B2B personalization isn’t based on impulse-buy recommendations).
Emails using the recipient’s first name are more likely to be opened—but if the offer isn’t relevant, it still counts as spam.
Poorly personalized emails could be considered micro-aggressions. While you might not lose that customer immediately, it damages your brand and, over time, erodes trust.
To create personalized email marketing, you must ensure that the content is relevant to each audience segment. This necessity is a great motivator to examine your customers' needs and align value delivery with sales goals.
Additionally, it’s critical that any offer shown in an email is also visible on your webshop. There’s no point capturing attention only to link to a promotion that doesn’t appear on your homepage or product listing. Everything must connect.
The benefits of personalization are significant—but so are the pitfalls. A personalization strategy unsupported by an omnichannel marketing approach will undermine your efforts. If your sales team, warehouse, support staff, showroom, or webshop provide conflicting answers to the same question, you’re not personalizing—you’re creating friction and confusion.
Still, businesses have no choice but to go all in on personalization. We'll explain why in the next section.
When a B2C site suggests you buy oven mitts to complement the baking tray in your cart, the seller isn’t solving a problem. If you really needed them, you’d have searched for them yourself.
Upsell personalization based on impulse suggestions doesn’t work in B2B—especially since a B2B purchase rarely depends on a single, persuadable buyer.
What B2B personalization can and should do is solve problems. That was especially important in the past year, as the global economy faced supply chain disruptions and inflation spikes not seen in decades.
If an order is delayed due to a supply bottleneck, you need to act with scenarios that mitigate the issue. One solution might be to suggest an alternative product. Another is to offer the same product from a different warehouse or production site—maybe in a smaller quantity but with a confirmed delivery date that avoids major setbacks for your customer.
Likewise, if a product is unexpectedly out of stock, personalization enables you to present alternatives or versions from different locations with alternate delivery times.
Personalization doesn’t replace the sales process. In complex situations, sales reps can add value by supporting personalized recommendations. Whether or not the buyer accepts the offer, you’ve demonstrated helpfulness and authority—which builds trust.
Because implementing a personalization strategy has broad technological implications (as we’ll cover later), it’s difficult to pinpoint ROI precisely.
McKinsey tried, and found a direct correlation between personalization and market share. Businesses that hadn’t invested significantly in personalization saw only modest growth—while the B2B sector overall gained market share in line with increased personalization investment.
While that’s good news, it shouldn’t be the only reason to personalize. B2B buyers want—and expect—personalization. That means you have to rise to the challenge.
You can’t create a seamless customer experience without knowing your customer. The challenge in B2B eCommerce is that the "customer" isn’t just the company you’re selling to—but also the various stakeholders and roles within it.
This section gives a general overview of the challenges B2B businesses face in implementing personalization strategies. In the next section, we’ll explore how to overcome them.
Without good data, you’re serving personalized content to a segment or persona that doesn’t exist. But what do we mean by “good” data?
Customer data isn’t the only data that matters. You’ll also need access to product, pricing, inventory, and delivery data throughout the customer journey.
No eCommerce solution in the world can natively collect, store, and distribute all your data—unless you’re willing to invest millions in a monolithic system that’s hard to use, maintain, and upgrade.
These systems are like oil tankers: slow to turn when customer demands require you to be agile and responsive.
Your eCommerce platform must seamlessly integrate with your ERP to provide real-time pricing and inventory data. Crucially, the ERP must also listen to the front end, as inventory levels change with every order—and you don’t want personalization to fail due to inaccurate data.
Other core systems to integrate include PIM, CRM, and CDP. Many platforms offer these natively or as add-ons—which is worth considering. But the main point is: to create a personalized customer experience, all your data sources must work in harmony.
eCommerce isn’t a tool—it’s a strategy. Many digital transformation projects fail because a single person or department was made “owner” of an initiative that needed organization-wide support to succeed.
Marketing is best positioned to lead personalization—but it should never be a one-person or one-team project. Leadership, yes. Isolation, no.
Everyone agrees that a project’s success depends on having the right people involved from day one. Yet companies often fail to prepare adequately.
Do we have the right mix of skills across the business? Are we aligned in what we mean by “personalization”? I’ve invested in a great eCommerce tool—but do I need to budget for staff training or expansion too?
As we’ve seen, B2B personalization is largely about building trust between your customers and your brand. That trust is destroyed if you lose control of customer data—even if it’s not your fault.
Facebook arguably never recovered from the series of data breaches it suffered in 2018 and 2019—and still hasn’t.
B2B and B2C customers alike want personalization and are willing to sacrifice some privacy for its benefits. But there are limits—both legal and ethical.
Compliance is a legal obligation, but you should go further and treat it as another way to build trust with your customers.
The need to personalize is never abstract; B2B companies usually know there are pain points in their customer experience that only personalization can solve. As always, it’s essential to put yourself in your customer’s shoes—and when appropriate, ask them directly what frustrates them.
This shouldn’t be difficult, as nearly all B2B suppliers are also B2B buyers as part of broader, complex supply chains. That’s why personalization should be a company-wide priority—because marketing can learn valuable lessons from their colleagues in procurement.
Here’s a high-level four-step plan to build your personalization strategy:
1. Collect and analyze customer data
Every personalization strategy must be backed by a data strategy. A marketing campaign that broadcasts to everyone won’t perform as well as one built on rich, current customer data used to refine messaging and incentives. Finding the right message starts by analyzing your data to group customers into target personas.
2. Segment customers and create personas
B2B customers aren’t the same as B2C customers segmented by age, gender, occupation, income, or purchase history. B2B segmentation also includes order history—but ties this to roles, accounts, and markets. One example of market segmentation is a chemical manufacturer operating in regions with different compliance regimes, where products must be formulated differently. Segmentation ensures that a product search yields only compliant results (since non-compliant ones can’t be purchased).
A market itself can also be a segment. Take Van Gelder, the Dutch fruit and vegetable wholesaler. Van Gelder serves both large hotel chains and Michelin-star restaurants—two markets that must be addressed differently. A special offer for a hotel chain is unlikely to be relevant to a high-end restaurant, and vice versa. By “personalizing” its markets, Van Gelder makes smart suggestions and boosts conversion.
3. Personalize the customer journey
B2B customers want custom prices (including VAT where applicable) and real-time stock data. But earlier in the journey, you want to capture attention with curated offers based on order history. Businesses order regularly or cyclically to replenish stock or supply their production lines. Personalization can be a simple reminder to reorder—or an incentive to place a larger or earlier order. The more thoughtfully you plan and execute your strategy, the more freedom marketing has to surprise customers with relevant offers that convert.
Discounts are attractive—but for B2B buyers, the purchase process is part of the total cost. That’s why a seamless customer journey matters. Custom catalogs and content save time and effort while creating a dialogue with the buyer—this should guide how you map out the journey for each segment.
4. Measure and optimize your personalization strategy
As mentioned, it’s hard to quantify the ROI of personalization—especially since digital transformation often goes hand-in-hand with better data management, design, and usability.
But there are KPIs that can benchmark expectations and results. Site traffic might not rise immediately, but you should see increased session duration if your homepage and content are personalized. Targeted discounts should convert better, sales teams should receive fewer pricing inquiries, and downloads should go up (since users can now find what they’re looking for). Over time, personalization will boost retention—because you’re giving loyal customers what they need.
The success of B2C personalization led to an ecosystem of tools and services to automate and optimize the process. Google Optimize is a common self-service option, while some agencies fully manage personalization implementation.
Whichever route you choose, here are key capabilities that support your personalization initiatives:
Your eCommerce platform should offer out-of-the-box integration with your ERP and other core systems—especially PIM, which some vendors include as standard. Your platform may also include a “personalization toolbox” with many of the capabilities listed above. For others, it should offer intuitive integration options.
Relationship management
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is a vital component of eCommerce marketing and personalization. It stores and segments your customer data. When combined with personalization tools, CRM lets you deliver highly personalized marketing at scale.
Customer Data Platform (CDP)
A Customer Data Platform collects, integrates, and manages customer data from multiple sources—websites, apps, CRM systems, social media—and builds a unified customer profile. CDPs offer deep insight into behaviors, preferences, and needs—transforming data into actionable intelligence.
Review platforms
Word of mouth has always mattered in B2B—and digital tech gives you a megaphone to amplify it. The new generation of B2B buyers trusts social proof over sales pitches. If you offer great products and service, don’t shy away from showcasing customer feedback.
Email Service Provider (ESP)
Sending large-scale email campaigns manually is time-consuming. But even automated emails must be relevant. Integrating your ESP with your eCommerce platform and personalization tools gives you the best of both worlds: delivery efficiency and high open rates.
Analytics and tracking
You already track your sales and marketing results—these metrics can reveal CX pain points solvable with personalization. Once your initiatives are live, analytics will show what’s working and what could work better. The more detailed the data, the more you can optimize.
In a post-COVID B2B sentiment survey, marketers were asked to name their top three challenges.
First: understanding buyers’ changing needs and requirements (63%). Second: engaging buyers in the right channel at the right time (57%). Personalization came third, with just under half (49%) saying it was difficult to create personalized campaigns and content that attract buyers.
Personalization plays a role in all three. Segmenting by role and market provides insights into evolving needs and when your message will resonate most during the customer journey.
Everyone knows personalization is essential. In the same survey, 74% of marketers said personalized content, messaging, and journeys were “important,” with 25% saying “somewhat important.” One-third cited increased account engagement—i.e., trust—as personalization’s top benefit.
That underscores the article’s central theme: relationships are the foundation of eCommerce sales, even when transactions are fully self-service.
Your customers want nothing more—and nothing less—than to do their jobs well: quickly and independently. That’s what you want too. And personalization helps you get there.
eCommerce isn’t a cat-and-mouse game with your customers. You’re on the same side—their goal is your goal: to successfully place and fulfill an order. Personalization is the best way to show you understand that—and that you're always on their side.
A modern eCommerce platform is the essential foundation for any personalization initiative. Want to see how CloudSuite can solve your personalization challenges? Contact us today.
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