Essendant Update CONTINUED FROM PAGE 54 limited opportunities for those visits, the printed catalog became increasingly irrelevant. To address this, we introduced a digital offering of the catalog called EasyFlip. The EasyFlip version provides the same opportunity for a salesperson to reach out to a customer and present their product offering. Since it is digital, it also provides more user-friendly features like search, enhanced product content, customization opportunities and the ability to keep current by making updates throughout the year. Another new sales piece we will have available in 2021 is the Dealer Capabilities flyer. This eight-page flyer will reinforce the key points within a dealer’s value proposition. This will be a critical story every dealer will need to tell. As many businesses moved to work from home, they decentralized supplies ordering and, in many instances, empowered their workers to manage their own office supply decisions. Often, individuals chose alternative suppliers outside of the dealer their company works with. As businesses begin returning to the office, dealers will need to focus on customer retention. To do so, they will need to reinforce their value to their customers, to bring back the volume they lost during the pandemic. The Dealer Capabilities flyer will support this discussion. In
a concise and compelling way, it will highlight the differentiated value dealers bring to the customers they support. This resource will not only help with customer retention, but will also be invaluable for customer acquisition.
Marketing responds to e-commerce growth
The pandemic will have a lasting impact on marketing, specifically digital marketing and e-commerce. In Q2 2020, e-commerce’s share of retail sales increased in just a few months at a rate that previously took 10 years. E-commerce will continue to grow as new adopters who discovered the convenience of online shopping will find it hard to go back to their old ways of shopping. As a result, these gains will be sustained and form a new baseline for e-commerce to continue its growth. Getting into e-commerce is not an overnight proposition. Our investment and innovation within digital marketing and e-commerce over the past few years have established an essential foundation of the necessary tools to support dealer success within e-commerce. The exponential growth of e-commerce earlier this year reinforced those investments and encouraged us to continue to put more resources there. A key way in which we are
moving forward in developing our innovation pipeline is by adopting the e-commerce strategic mindset. This is centered on the e-commerce revenue equation of Traffic x Conversion Rate x Average Order Value. These three components are the key levers that drive revenue in e-commerce. Managing the mix around them and optimizing each provide the building blocks for growth.
Website traffic
Traffic refers to the number of customers visiting a dealer’s website and the activities that get them there. Many dealers haven’t adopted newer practices in acquiring customers and driving prospects to their sites. Through our analysis using tools like SEMrush, we found that when the pandemic began earlier this year, dealers that had implemented strategies like search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) were able to significantly increase the number of new users visiting their sites; whereas dealers not using these strategies experienced significant decreases in site visits. These strategies need not be used exclusively, but they can be complementary to the traditional methods of customer acquisition currently used by many dealers. To address this, we hosted
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INDEPENDENT DEALER
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