Is There A Need For A Global Company (Selling Physical Products) To Start Selling Online?

Clearly the answer is yes. Selling online is a must for most companies. However- Kimberly-Clark (owner of Huggies and Kleenex- to name a very few brands) is selling online anyway through various different eTailors.

However. As we have seen with solutions selling, customers are also online looking for answers, solutions and more direct touch with the company and their brands. Gone are the days of just selling a product.

So Kimberly-Clark needs to do something else as highlighted in this article. They need to link together multiple world partners so that you will be able to locate one of their products easily. Which is quite hard when you think that one quart of the worlds population touches a Kimberly Clark product.

This is their goal:

Kimberly-Clark’s digital products also serve as crucial resources for customers that help the company build relationships with the people who buy its brands.
Using brand websites to get a deeper understanding of what consumers want from the company and its brands and then refining the digital experiences accordingly
Identifying and eliminating points of friction in the customer journey
Developing innovative digital companion products that support and enhance the customer’s journey with Kimberly-Clark.

So how does Kimberly Clark get to know customers who don't give too much information out in a physical retail store? They use more tactics than just directly selling online.

Kimberly Clark (KC) uses a company called FullStory:

"By tracking customer interactions (think clicks, scrolls, hovers, etc.) on websites and apps, FullStory helps brands get a real-world understanding of what consumers are seeing, doing and even feeling when on their digital platforms."

What KC noticed was that customers found their products through side channels.

So when they have delivered an online article about one of their brands/ products (co-authored with a medical professional) they can see what people do when they click on the link. What does that person do on site. Does that article drive them to purchase?

What is known is that some articles and external marketing efforts have not paid off. One commercial showed all the things baby will do when it is new to the world. However, parents and care givers didn't understand this. They responded with " I really just want to know about Diaper rash".

Fancy commercials- fantastic as they are, if not solving an issue don't get too much movement in the sales department. For instance. Teach The World To Sing Coke- one of the most successful/ watched commercials ever. Not one case extra of Coke was sold.

3 examples how online selling and customer experience has helped Kimberly-Clark

The comments of one parent — who when faced with a “wall of diapers” at the grocery store, pulled up the Huggies website to compare different options — prompted the team to create a product comparison tool and place it front and center.
The team also realized that parents were visiting product detail pages not just for information on specific products but also to validate their choice by reading reviews, which shifted how the team designed those pages as well. Those small changes and additions, along with other improvements, led to a 50% to 75% increase in time spent on site
Trying to keep in contact with customers? They saw a huge drop-off in form completions from the First Name to the Last Name field, but they also noted that if someone completed the Last Name field, they were much more likely to complete the full form. So, they combined the First and Last Name fields into one Name field.

What has been noticed is regardless of ad spend and various different ways of customer acquisition if the destination has trips, then the end result is poor. This is called grains of sand that cause friction- so small not to consider but cause the ultimate friction that makes the machine run poorly.

It can also flip the other way.

On the old Huggies site you could have a Baby registry. A good idea right? It was rolled out with great fan fare and worldwide. However, 85000 people went onto it and only 12 people used it.

Now, you could say:

if more people went onto it it could be a money earner
or, if you are plowing money into something that is not even shifting the needle a little, then whats the point?

After some analytics, they realised that it didn't even push the needle a tiny bit. So leasons learned, to concentrate on projects that will actually move the needle.

More side door and helper online selling

More and more customers are bare digital savvy. When you have a product that is not- like a diaper or toilet paper, what do you do?

You invest digital items that compliment the product- the product is also helpful to the audience first. So:

Huggies has a poop scanner
Kleenex has a Pollen Pal app. KC noticed though that people were clicking on various buttons and places on the app that didn't do anything. It was noted that customers wanted a deeper understanding of the product and more information- which KC gave after a redesign and now KC has an even deeper understanding of the consumers needs.

So they don't give back completely directly but helps the brand indirectly. As KC state:

“There is not a tangible ROI component to most of these. They are developed in support of our brands, primarily to drive market share more than anything else. But today’s generation of consumers have grown up digitally native, so there is an expectation that there is a digital companion to accompany our physical products.”

For more information about selling online, check out the Jasonera blog here.