E-commerce shipments make up over 67% of total manufacturing orders. Not only is e-commerce the largest driver of manufacturing sales, but manufacturing e-commerce is actually the number one category across all e-commerce — including online retail.
Because e-commerce is such an enormous revenue driver across the manufacturing industry, manufacturing e-commerce websites serve an important business role and handle a lot of traffic.
Hidden Opportunities
Manufacturers looking to convert their large number of website visitors into paying customers face an uphill battle: 97% of those visitors will remain anonymous — meaning they won’t fill out a form to download content, contact your sales team via the website, or indicate in any way who they are.
This means a visitor could visit your site, visit numerous product pages, read reviews, check out informative guides about the products they’re most interested in, and leave without revealing where they work or who they are.
This frustrating reality leaves your marketing and sales teams in the dark because they don’t know which accounts are actively in-market — aka primed to buy your products. Or if they know that an account is regularly shopping for products like yours, they won’t know which exact products they’re investigating.
Here’s why: When a manufacturing buyer visits your website, they leave a trail of “virtual breadcrumbs” that can reveal a lot about them — including their job role, the company they work for, and more. But traditional marketing tools like Google Analytics can’t associate that information with the accounts performing those visits. We call this black box of buyer behavior the Dark Funnel™.
However, technologies now exist that can illuminate these invisible buying signals and even de-anonymize the activities, concerns, and personas of in-market accounts. Manufacturers can leverage these tools to increase the efficiency of their sales and marketing efforts and — most importantly — drive more revenue.
Let’s look at how ABM in B2C or other manufacturing e-commerce scenarios reveals your critical web visitors, and how you can capitalize on those insights.
Turning Anonymous Visitors into Critical Intelligence
ABM technology like 6sense can uncover the other 97% of website visitors who choose to remain anonymous by matching IP addresses to where that buyer works. With an industry-leading ability to match website visitors to their accounts, 6sense suddenly turns an ocean of anonymous web visitors into a treasure trove of intelligence.
With this ability, manufacturers gain the ability to:
- See which pages your top accounts are visiting most frequently
- Uncover new accounts that are just starting their buying journey — and see what products interest them
- Target their sales and marketing efforts towards the accounts and products showing the most activity — leading to higher engagement and ROI
A manufacturer with an e-commerce website that leverages a tool like 6sense has a much stronger sense of who their buyers are, what products they’re interested in, and a higher probability of converting web visitors into paying customers.
How Deanonymization Powers Smarter Sales and Marketing
Here’s an example of how leveraging an ABM platform like 6sense can reveal critical information about your websites — and deliver big benefits to your business.
Example: ‘ACME Corporation’
Let’s say ACME is an industrial parts manufacturer that creates products useful to multiple industries. Its website has e-commerce functionality for wholesale orders. Because of its wide net of possible customers, it receives tens of thousands of web visitors each month.
For years, ACME has relied on an online customer portal to track how users navigate its site and determine which products they’re interested in. But they also knew that a large majority of visitors never create an account as they browsed. ACME knew it was missing out on critical opportunities for their sales team to identify and work accounts.
To learn more about their web visitors, ACME turns to 6sense. Through 6sense’s laser-sharp account matching, ACME quickly uncovers the accounts that are doing a lot of research on its website — but aren’t creating accounts or contacting the sales team.
ACME compiles a segment of the top accounts visiting its website and the products those accounts are researching. The marketing team uses this information to create hyper-personalized email and advertising campaigns that don’t break the bank but drive high engagement.
The sales team uses that same list of accounts to prioritize their own activities. They start acquiring key contact information for those accounts, performing personalized outreach, and influencing deals earlier in the buying journey.
By de-anonymizing its web activity, ACME creates a clear path toward generating revenue more efficiently, predictably, and at scale.
Conclusion
Manufacturing e-commerce websites are incredibly valuable and drive billions of dollars of revenue across the industry. Anonymous traffic on those sites represents an enormous opportunity to understand what buyers are in-market and what products they’re interested in.
6sense gives manufacturers the ability to deanonymize those visitors and supercharge sales.
