B2B Marketing: Learn 15+ Ways to Increase Conversion Rates
How can you grow your business? Increase your online conversion rates. There are many ways to optimize your website that can help turn visitors into customers. Here are just a few that might not break your budget.
- Buyer Personas: Developing buyer personas helps turn your ambiguous audience into a specific personality. Keeping your personas in mind and speaking to them in your website copy can help increase conversions. For more info on buyer personas check out: Why You Need B2B Buyer Personas and How To Create Them.
- Competition: Compare your offer to your competitors and show them why they should buy from you. Customers do their research before they make a decision. If you provide that research, you simplify the buyer’s journey and streamline their decision-making process.
- Contact: Make it visible so that it’s easy for prospects to know how to contact you. Consider live chat options as well as an email address and/or a phone number. In addition, you’ll want that phone to be answered by a real person who can immediately address customer questions or concerns.
- Credibility: Adding seals from the Better Business Bureau or security firms like VeriSign increases trust. Update your website often. Prospects can recognize old, dated copy or images.
- Distraction: Remove any element on the page that will distract a visitor from your offer. Don’t confuse them with a lot of extra visual elements of copy.
- Emotion: We all like to think of ourselves as rational human beings, but research has found that the majority of our decision-making is subconscious and emotional. When appropriate, consider using an emotional appeal and speak to their soul.
- Feedback: When you survey your customers to get feedback, you can use that information to improve your product or service.
- Funnel: Set up a sales funnel. The more points of contact you have with prospects, the better your chances are at turning them into customers.
- Guarantee: Offering a guarantee helps to reduce the risk for prospects and it engenders confidence in your product or service. A longer guarantee is even better. For instance, a one-year guarantee will be more successful than offering one for only 30 days.
- Headlines: the better the headline, the more visitors you’ll attract. The more visitors, the more opportunities for conversion. Headlines are a great place to address a pain point for which your product or service is a solution. Need help writing headlines? Check out this Headline Writing 101.
- Incentives: Offer your prospect a reason to take action right away. For instance, add a fast expiration on the offer.
- Objections: Make a list of all the reasons a customer might NOT decide to buy your product or service and then add information to your copy that will address those concerns.
- Proof: Provide customer testimonials, case studies, industry studies, etc. − anything that will back up your claims. If you have a demo video, use it. Has your product or service been positively reviewed by a third party? Show your prospects where to find it.
- Simplicity: Research shows that when people receive multiple persuasive attempts at once – sometimes as little as 2! – it can significantly lower their chance of conversion. So know what they want to hear, and say it in a persuasive manner – but don’t beat a dead horse.
- Story: Tell your story, and write conversationally. Prospects are people, not corporations. Overly complicated explanations or a lot of industry jargon is unnecessary and might turn a prospect away.
- Test: Do A/B testing. Some things to test are different headlines, page layouts, offers, CTAs or alternate navigation. As you test each element and find which works best, move on to test something else.
- UX/UI: Use simple, clear navigation so that it’s easy to buy from you. Don’t ask them for more information than you need and don’t give prospects too many options.
- Value: Create a clear, compelling value proposition. Clearly explain the benefits of the product and offer reasons why they should buy from you and not your competitor.
Don’t forget to track!
Conversion rates are the key to your success in B2B marketing, and you need to know what works and what doesn’t. By tracking them on a daily and monthly basis, you can fix problems faster and make sure rates are increasing over time. When you’re looking for tracking tools, Google Analytics is a reasonable place to start.