If you're involved in marketing for a business-to-business (B2B) organisation or you work in an agency with B2B clients, then you need to be doing or encouraging the organisation to practice conversion rate optimisation (CRO). CRO is all about increasing the percentage of visitors to your website who take the desired action, whether that's making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, booking a demo or downloading a white paper.
In other words, CRO is the process of turning website visitors into paying customers. And in today's competitive marketplace, it's more important than ever to make sure that your B2B organisation is doing everything it can to optimise its conversion rate.
So what exactly is involved in CRO? Before we do, lets ensure we really know what it is and what it entails
What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?
Conversion rate optimisation is the process of increasing the percentage of visitors to your website who take the desired action. This could be anything from making a purchase to signing up for a newsletter or downloading a white paper. In other words, CRO is all about turning website visitors into paying customers. In business, the goal is always to increase revenue while reducing costs. One of the most effective ways to do this is through conversion rate optimisation (CRO)
Since even a small increase in conversion rate can have a significant impact on revenue, CRO is an essential tool for any business that wants to stay competitive.
How Does B2B Conversion Rate Optimisation Work?
There are two main components to CRO: data collection and analysis, and experimentation.
1. Data Collection and Analysis: The first step in any CRO initiative is to collect data on website traffic and user behaviour. This data can be collected using Google Analytics or other similar tools. Once the data has been collected, it needs to be analysed to identify areas where conversion rates can be improved.
2. Experimentation: The second step in CRO is experimentation. This involves testing different changes on the website—such as changes to copy, design, or layout—to see which ones have the biggest impact on conversion rates. Experimentation is important because it allows businesses to make informed decisions about what changes to make to their website.
Why B2B clients Should Care About Conversion Rate Optimisation?
CRO is something often talked about in B2C and Direct to Consumer circles, where marketers have long strived to make every dollar work harder, especially in super competitive landscapes like social media ads. B2B marketers seem as a general rule to get to CRO later in their journeys, yet the role it can and should play in B2B is arguably greater than it plays in B2C. There are therefore several reasons why B2B marketers should care about conversion rate optimisation:
1. Shorter sales cycles: The most obvious reason to care about CRO is that it can lead to increased revenue. Even a small increase in conversion rate can have a significant impact on revenue, so CRO is an essential tool for any business that wants to stay competitive. However CRO implemented right is breaking down the funnel steps that lead to revenue - so actually we're starting by trying to get users to spend longer on your site, then we're working to get more upper-funnel actions like lead generation form fills, then more demos, then more meetings an finally, more direct sales. CRO is therefore iterative and turbo charges the whole digital funnel.
2. Reduced Costs: Another reason to care about CRO is that it can lead to reduced marketing costs and customer acquisition costs. By increasing conversion rates, businesses can get more leads and customers without having to spend more money on marketing. Or the same money invested drives more leads and upper funnel volume, which translates through to a healthier pipe.
3. Improved User Experience and all important prospect first impressions: A third reason to care about CRO is that it can improve the user experience on your website. By testing different changes and seeing which ones have the biggest impact on conversion rates, you can make sure that your website is optimised for users' needs. There is nothing worse then a long sales cycle which breaks down when a prospect can't find what they need on your web properties
4. Increased Customer Lifetime Value: Finally, caring about CRO can also lead to increased customer lifetime value (CLV). CLV is the total amount of money that a customer will spend with your business over the course of their lifetime. By increasing conversion rates and getting more customers, you can also increase CLV.
So we can see the immense value of CRO, but how do we go about doing it?
B2B Conversion Rate Optimisation Techniques - How To Demonstrably Improve Your Websites Performance
There are a number of different techniques that can be used in order to optimise your conversion rate. These include A/B testing, landing page optimisation, and personalisation.
A/B Testing
A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a method of comparing two versions of a web page in order to see which one performs better. Version A is the control; version B is the variation. Visitors are randomly shown either version A or version B, and whichever version results in more conversions is declared the winner. A/B testing should follow a process of testing big changes through to smaller ones. You'll be amazed at how much of a difference a button colour can make.
Landing Page Optimisation
Landing pages are stand-alone web pages that are designed for a specific purpose, such as promoting a product or service or capturing leads. An effective landing page will be clear and concise, with a strong call-to-action (CTA). Landing page optimisation is the process of improving your landing pages in order to increase conversions.
Personalisation
Personalisation involves tailoring your website content and offers to the individual user or if you're running Account Based Marketing - named accounts. This could be anything from showing relevant products based on previous purchases to using the user's name in communications. Personalisation has been shown to increase conversion rates by up to 18%.
Session Recordings
Sometimes even the most detailed analytics - like ahem FunneFuel's! - don't reveal exactly what is wrong in the bare stats. Sometimes you need to watch screen recordings and see exactly what your user saw. Did a form not load? Did the page take longer to load than expected? Does the site look terrible if someone views it on Chrome on an iPad? Session recordings can teach the CRO umpteen valuable lessons around the companies product and offering, and what is and is not working.
Page Load testing
Sometimes the poorer front end performance has nothing to do with the website content, layout, messaging and offer - and instead the challenge is more technological. Slow page loading kills conversions, especially in an age where the majority of people will load your site on mobile devices, perhaps whilst commuting and perhaps with weak signal. Nothing kills performance like a page that takes >2 seconds to load.
Traffic sources
Additionally, the CRO expert needs to understand that web traffic isn't all created equal. There are a lot of very low value clicks available in the digital ecosystem - from cheap app based placements on colouring in apps to fraudulent traffic. CRO needs to take this into account, and its also why we need to be working off of a solid sample page (where the performance is proven) and then work to improve it by scientifically splitting the traffic
Putting It All Together; The Four Steps To Optimisation A B2B Page Or Website
- Examine - Develop insights based on business goals and market research.
- Implement - Design, develop, iterate.
- Test - Collect data so you understand if improvement occurred.
- Verify - Make your your results are statistically significant.
CRO done right needs to follow the above process. The examination phase should include spending a lot of time with your voice of customer aggregators - the people in the business who spend the most time with customers; hearing their pain points, satisfaction, roadmap ideas and general sentiment.
From using tools like session recordings and heat maps, we can form some hypothesis around what can improve the website. We then move onto implementing, where we create new landing page designs, develop them and iterate them.
We then test these ideas using a robust A/B testing toolkit. This lets us examine the performance of the new page and the ideas it contains against the original page, letting us verify that the new ideas work against statistically relevant data sets
Conclusion:
Conversion rate optimisation is an essential part of any successful B2B organisation's digital marketing strategy. By utilising techniques such as A/B testing, landing page optimisation, and personalisation, you can increase the percentage of visitors to your website who take the desired action—whether that's making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or downloading a white paper. So what are you waiting for? Start optimising your conversion rate today!
FunnelFuel is here to help!
As we have learned, in order to execute a conversion rate optimisation strategy, we need to collect robust data (analytics) and have access to CRO tools like heat maps, A/B testing and session recordings.
We recognised this when we build the FunnelFuel Analytics product. We wrapped full enterprise web analytics (with a strong B2B flavour) with CRO tools like the ones mentioned above, to give B2B marketers a one-stop-shop for improving the marketing ROI.
Click below to book your free demo and discovery call, and we'll personally show you how our tools can help