They also are more likely to become repeat buyers, Forrester Research says.

Getting business customers who buy offline to also buy online brings multiple benefits to sellers, Forrester Research Inc. says in a new report.

“Migrated customers are more open than they were pre-migration to becoming repeat customers and long-term customers,” Forrester says in “The Case for Channel-Shifting Offline Customers Online,” a report released last week and authored by Andy Hoar, principal analyst for B2B e-commerce.  It defines migrated customers as those who in the past purchased only offline, but now also shop online.

The trend is similar to the retail world, where studies have also shown that consumers who buy from multiple channels—web, mobile and stores, for example—spend more than customers who shop only one channel, Forrester says. In the new B2B study, “60% of respondents indicated that their customers spend more overall when those customers touched multiple channels, as opposed to only 9%” who said multichannel customers spend less with them, Forrester says. “This finding is consistent with what we’ve seen in business-to-consumer as well, as in that the more channels a customer uses to interact with your brand, the more money that customer will spend with you.”

The report, based on a survey of B2B executives, also found:

38% of the executives say migrated customers are more likely to try new products than customers who still only buy offline;

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47% say migrated customers are more likely than offline-only customers to become repeat customers;

38% say migrated customers are more likely to become long-term customers;

Sign up for a free subscription to B2BecNews, a weekly newsletter that covers technology and business trends in the growing B2B e-commerce industry. B2BecNews is published by Vertical Web Media LLC, which also publishes the monthly business magazine Internet Retailer. Follow B2BecNews editor Paul Demery on Twitter @pdemery.

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