While there are several ways to increase your conversion rate, the very first part to pay rapt attention to is your website design. Remember, it’s the first thing your customers will meet when they get to your website.
A well-designed website is one of the most critical parts of your success online.
In a recent study, marketers say building a website or a landing page and testing them is one of the five challenges faced by B2B marketers.
Having a well-optimized website can double or even triple the number of leads you generate from your campaign.
But how do you know if you’re doing it right?
Because there are so many variables to consider in the construction of a lead generation website.
In this post, you’ll learn all the best ways to maximize conversions on your B2B website.
1. Build your product or offers with the user in mind
Your product is the reason why you created your website or landing page in the first place, right?
And it’s meant to solve your users’ challenges — it makes sense if you look at the offers to determine whether they are the best deals you can provide for your prospect. [source]
Then you can develop ways to make the offer irresistible. You could give additional value by adding extra high-quality products to their cart for free if they purchase your product.
The first step to maximizing conversions from your website is to have a great product that effectively solves your customer’s challenges.
This will most likely shape everything you do on your website to maximize profit. For example, it’ll trigger excellent reviews on Review Websites which you can include on your website to help you boost your conversion.
In fact, in a recent study, 68% say positive reviews make them trust a local business more vs. 72% in 2014.
It’ll shape your value proposition and will allow you to create content that appeals to your user’s emotions — this will likely resonate with your website visitors and could land you a sale.
And with this, you can focus on telling your visitors about the benefits of your products and not your product’s features.
Make every effort to ensure that the product doesn’t only meet your user’s requirement — but also has an intuitive user interface that’s not confusing to use.
Overall, don’t create a bad product, no amount of optimization will make a bad product good. Instead, it’s an easy kill. This is an important variable to consider before even thinking of optimization.
2. Use directional cues to guide users through your website
You got your B2B website or landing page design ready and hopefully, you’ve got everything in place and ready to start promotion.
Directional cues are visual elements that guide or lead website users toward important sections of your website or landing page. Take a look at the arrow in this landing page, it’s a typical directional cue.
Assuming you’ve got a video on your website that will likely increase your conversion, how do you ensure that 90% of people who visit your website watch that video?
It’s a bad idea to leave it out to chance. For your marketing effort to pay off, it’s important you show your website users exactly what to do on your website when they first get there.
Using directional cues also known as visual cues can influence the visitor’s activities on your website and compel them to take action.
By the way, what are directional cues, you ask?
They are visual aids such as arrows or eye gaze that points directs users to the most important elements of your website. For example, your CTA, lead capture form, testimonials, videos, or video.
Here is a practical example:
The first thing a person observes when they get to this page is the GET MY FREE COPY button, right? And it’s because of the arrow.
That’s the essence.
Visual cues could also be in the form of a person staring at an element. For example:
Or even, lines:
Visual cues are a great way to increase conversions on your B2B website or landing page.
3. Narrow your content focus to reach the most targeted audience
Do you know your audience well enough?
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If you want to attract your target leads to your website and have the chance to convert them to customers, you should create engaging content that is focused on solving your target audience challenges.
This is especially important if you’re concerned with maximizing your marketing budget. Stop creating content for everyone. Focus your energy and investment on compelling content that will benefit your target audience.
Customers love customized content. When the right prospect reads your personalized content, it resonates with them and they tend to buy from you.
In fact, it’s so important that 74% of customers feel frustrated when a website content is not personalized.
4. Create a responsive website to cater to users on any mobile device
Do you know that By 2019, mobile advertising is expected to represent 72% of all U.S. digital ad spending?
And it’s not surprising that 80% of internet users own a Smartphone. Every business savvy entrepreneur will take this very important statistics and consider creating their website responsive enough to cater to their users on different devices.
Google is a strong advocate for responsive design. Mashable named 2013 “The Year of Responsive Design,” this isn’t just a hype, you could be losing a lot of conversions if your visitors land on your website which is not responsive and they find out that they are not able to use the website effectively because it looks nice on desktop but broken on mobile devices.
User experience is really a great factor that when improved can go a long way to boost your bottom line.
Here is an example of a responsive website:
O`Neill Clothing is also an example of a brand that has seen a lot of success with responsive design.
When they made their website responsive enough to support iPhone and iPod users they increased their conversion by 65.71% and they increased their conversions even more by over 407% — that’s a lot of conversions.
5. Create a landing page for every campaign message
In internet marketing, a landing page is a special web page created specifically for the purpose of marketing or advertising campaign.
If you want to get the best out of your marketing campaign, it’s a bad idea to point all your marketing campaigns to your homepage. In fact, it’s pointless.
Unfortunately, a recent study by Kissmetrics reveals that 52% of B2B PPC ads point towards a homepage, not a landing page.
That’s bad. And can be one of the worst advertising mistakes you can make in your business.
You should create separate landing pages for your campaigns and advertise specific products on those pages.
Since you should have ad campaigns targeting users at different stages of your customer’s journey, it’s important you send a unique message at each point and to do this you need a separate landing page for most of the stages of the campaign as well.
6. Embrace multi-channel content marketing
Multi-channel marketing is a great way to keep your customers in sync across your different marketing touch points.
According to Forrester, 86% believe successfully integrating multiple channels under a single integrated marketing strategy is critical to long-term success.
There are a lot of reasons you should embrace multichannel marketing, one important one which is that you must be where your customers are.
Customers are very smart nowadays and they expected you to be able to measure up. You don’t want your customers to outsmart you, do you?
7. Use non-intrusive popup forms to capture email address and build trust
Email marketing is an age-long effective digital marketing strategy. You probably have heard the saying that the money is in the list, of course, it’s still true.
Using intrusive pop-up on either your landing page or website is a huge mistake. It’ll kill your conversions.
Using non-intrusive popup forms will ensure you don’t annoy your website visitors. For example, the popup form could appear when the user is about to exit your website, or when they click to download your ebook.
That way, the form doesn’t interfere with the content they’re reading. Here’s an example:
Capturing the email address of potential customers from your website is a very critical part of your business considering that most visitors might not come back after browsing through your website.
The best idea is to get them to stick around your brand and build a relationship with them. And the best way to do this is through emails.
But the challenge is the means to capture the email addresses. Especially with the new GDPR policy by the E.U., You need to use tools that don’t forcefully collect visitors data without their knowledge and not give them a chance to choose opt-out.
Have you visited a website where the only option was to subscribe or close the page completely?
Instead of showing your customers an opt-in form immediately they land on your website, it makes sense if you allow them to read the content to a large extent — from 70 – 80% into the content is the right time to initiate a pop-up.
At that time, the customer will likely be ready to give you their email address, and not feel pressured.
In 2017, Google started cracking down websites that used intrusive pop-ups. They stated that websites with intrusive pop-ups will not rank high in search engines.
Conclusion
Every B2B website should be designed with the user in mind. This will ensure that the conversion goals are met.
It doesn’t matter how long you have been running your business, if you can implement the web design best practices as laid out in this post, you’ll boost your traffic, acquire more leads, and grow your sales exponentially.
