Conversions. We’re all chasing them, trying to find the best way to engage with them and turn them into successful sales. For the majority of B2B companies, their website is one of their primary lead-generation tools, working closely with other marketing strategies to drive conversions. Without a site optimized for getting the maximum amount of website conversion rates, B2B companies will struggle to convince site visitors to transition from visiting into buying.
There is no exact clarity on what the average B2B conversion rates are, as many businesses keep these numbers closely guarded and don’t often publish them. However, estimates have been made that indicate B2B website conversion rates can range between 2.5 and 7%, with averages closer to 7%. A joint study conducted by Econsultancy and RedEye found that only 28% of companies are currently satisfied with their website conversion rates, while nearly 40% reported being dissatisfied.
Gaining conversions as a B2B company can be more challenging than it is for B2C offerings – the sales process is more drawn out, buyers often represent multiple company stakeholders who need to be part of the buying decision, and helping these buyers move to your company can be expensive. Your conversion strategy will need to be multi-faceted, suitable for multiple platforms, and be tested for improvements regularly.
This is how to improve a B2B website’s conversions successfully in just a few steps:
1. Answer Key Questions
One of the best ways to increase B2B conversions is by answering questions about your services, and questions about the industry that you are in. The easiest method of achieving this is to consult with your sales department and find out what the most commonly asked questions are about your company and services. These questions can then be targeted in marketing materials such as your newsletter, social pages, and blog content. The reason that this is effective is that people that are familiar with your services and are on the cusp of buying can be persuaded once they’ve seen the answers you have put forward.
Try and find what potential clients are looking for in your company’s solution, highlight what you can offer to them, and assuage any objections that are typically raised during the course of a sale by your other conversions. According to PureB2B, businesses can earn $44 for every dollar that they spend on email marketing, and nearly 60% of B2B marketers believe that email marketing is the most effective channel of revenue generation.
You can also target industry-related developments in your content marketing by creating a wonderful content through various content marketing tools. Your services are part of a larger ecosystem that your site visitors will be interested in, and that you can capitalize on for content. Focussing on industry topics will also help you to establish your business as an authority with potential clients and expand their trust in your business.
By further expanding your scope by answering these questions will help establish the value of your B2B offering with potential clients, with the added benefit of being good for SEO.
2. Strategize Around Content
The reality is that content is one of the most popular lead generating tools for B2B companies as it can be used to target all the different buyer personas in their industry. This method of lead generation is often neglected by B2B marketers – only 30% saw their current content marketing strategy as effective for bringing in leads and conversions. At the same time, 92% of these marketers recognized the importance of content as a key business asset.
In order to strengthen your existing content strategy, you’ll need to start by finding the content on your site that brings in the most traffic and try to replicate it. This content is known as “unicorn content” and there are other methods of finding this unicorn content too. You can look for your niche on social media and track what content gets the most engagement, get content ideas from your competitors, or use a tool like SEMRush to find trending topics.
The emphasis should be on the dynamic content on not only the website but on landing pages, emails, and other platforms. Dynamic content is content that changes based on the viewer’s behavior, which allows B2B companies to personalize user experiences. Think about how when logging in to YouTube, users are given recommendations of videos to watch based on their past viewing behaviors. This is an excellent example of dynamic content in a B2C environment.
For B2B companies, dynamic content can take on the form of personalized ads, on-page pop-ups, and product or content recommendations to name a few. The ultimate goal of dynamic content in a B2B environment is to create a “user-first” and personalized experience. Nearly 80% of surveyed chief marketing officers considered dynamic content to be the future of content marketing.
Another strategy is to offer content exclusively and drum up more business around limited time offers, one-time events, or webinars. Exclusivity can be a great marketing tool to convert site visitors into qualified leads. Whether you are offering a downloadable resource list, exclusive services, or limited-time discounts, putting emphasis on the scarcity of your offer will drive more people to engage with your site and become leads that can be nurtured into sales.
3. Optimize Your Call-To-Action
Your website or landing page call-to-action is an essential element when you are looking to increase the conversion rate for the website. All too often, CTA’s are left in the standard “Submit” form, which can cost you valuable leads. The ideal CTA for B2B companies should be short, be commanding rather than demanding, and incite a sense of urgency in site visitors. It should also convey the value of the B2B company’s offer in less than a few words, no easy feat. Your CTA should be a combination of good copy, eye-catching design, and smart placement if it’s going to get you those valuable leads.
For the best results, your CTA will need to be obvious and easy to find. Don’t make potential leads work to sign up for your services! Your CTA will also need to be optimized for mobile use – the majority of web traffic today comes from mobile. When mobile started to become a big part of web traffic, a UX designer named Steven Hoober studied how mobile users interacted with their devices and identified the “thumb zone”. These are the spots that mobile users most commonly reach when scrolling on mobile, and leads to a higher CTA. You should pay attention to these thumb zones when optimizing your CTA for mobile.
Finally, while your CTA may be working, there is the potential that it could be working even better. You’ll want to create several different CTA options and test them to find the most effective version that brings in the highest website conversion rate consistently.
4. Test The User Experience
Finding improvements to your website conversion rates process becomes easier if you take on the role of a user yourself. Take the time to replicate your user’s journey from finding the site, all the way from first site visit through to sales. This will help bring your attention to the parts of the process that work best and also to the parts that you lose the most potential website conversions from. There are other methods of testing the user experience as well. You can do moderated testing, where you are live with selected test participants, and guide them through steps, reply to feedback in real-time and make note of any obstacles.
When testing the user experience, you’ll want to pay attention to your homepage, sales letter pages, landing pages, testimonial pages, and product pages in particular. These are some of the most important web pages to site visitors prior to completing a sale. You can make use of the Hotjar application to get feedback from site visitors on your web page copy, including access to heatmaps and visitor recordings.
There are marketing automation software options out there like Salesforce that offer progressive profiling, enabling you to minimize the form fields potential customers have to complete. Website conversion rates decrease with each additional data point you have potential customers fill in, so you want to stick only to the most important information.
5. Remarketing
B2B companies often set themselves a monthly goal that they plan to achieve in lead conversions. Reaching this goal becomes easier with remarketing and consistent testing. Once you have a starting list of potential leads, you can start running remarketing campaigns. Remarketing refers to targeting your advertising efforts at people who have visited your site before and are more likely to react to your marketing positively the second time around. Research from Kenshoo found that the click-through rate on retargeting ads is ten times higher than normal ads, and the conversion probability up to 70% more. They also found that 30% of consumers had positive responses to being remarketed to, and 25% appreciated being reminded of the service down the line.
Some common remarketing strategies include email drip campaigns, targeted Google Ads search campaigns, and more. Other B2B companies build separate landing pages and newsletter subscription pages for returning leads to provide extra incentives to convert. There are different types of remarketing, like the standard of showing ads to previous site visitors, to video remarketing and distribution lists.
The only way to find a successful strategy here is with A/B testing. You can do the bulk of your remarketing testing on Google Analytics where you can create multiple remarketing audiences and run different campaigns for each audience. You can also set up remarketing on your social platforms, or use more well-rounded solutions like Retargeter, AdRoll, or Perfect Audience.
At the end of the day, the best conversion method for B2B websites is getting to know the customer and putting them first. The user experience needs to be unparalleled, and you can ensure that you are providing that experience by taking on the role of a site visitor yourself. Beyond smoothing out the conversion process, you should focus on answering key questions about your services and the general industry. You’ll likely test many ways to attract leads and engage with them before finding the method that works best for your business. To increase your website conversion rates, you will need to wield the best user experience practices, create conversion paths, and focus on buyer personas. This will drive your lead generation up, which you can target with remarketing later.
Conclusion
Try a few of these strategies as a starting point and find out if your website conversion rates increase for the better.
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