Your marketing campaigns might lead plenty of proverbial horses to water, but do your landing pages get enough of them to drink? Time to optimise your conversion rates.

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is about improving the number of site visitors or leads that successfully convert into outcomes. Mostly, those outcomes would be sales, but they might also be subscriptions, downloads, or whatever business value your marketing efforts are trying to generate.

Naturally, these outcomes should be tied to the business bottom line, which is why CRO is a top priority in many businesses. 

Unfortunately, much of the common wisdom on how to improve conversion rates is B2C-exclusive. In B2C, a consumer might convert after a single visit: you see a dress you like and buy it.

However, in B2B, a potential customer might visit your site multiple times over a much longer period before converting. This makes conversion rate optimisation for B2B a whole different ball game.

So, what can you do?

Let’s start with a quick overview of CRO.

What is a good conversion rate?

Of course, it depends.

Generally speaking, the average conversion rate across all industries is a low, low 2.35%, meaning only two or three of every 100 visitors convert. But conversion rates can differ wildly according to your industry and the channel(s) you use.

Examples of conversions across industries include:

  • B2B Tech – 2.4%
  • B2B Services – 5.7%
  • Industrial – 7.4%
  • Financial – 5.8%

These are just averages. By contrast, the top 25 companies to use CRO effectively are hitting conversion rates as high as 11.45%.

Thankfully, boosting a low conversion rate isn’t as difficult as you might think. There are some simple steps you can take to increase your business’s bottom line and help your business grow in profitability.

Adopt an optimisation strategy

To boost conversions, you need a full-on optimisation strategy to improve the results from your marketing campaigns. The good news is that an optimisation strategy can have an impact on your results almost immediately. Instead of trying to attract more traffic, which can take time, you’re finding ways to optimise the traffic you already have.

The key is to refine your targeted keywords and campaign audience criteria. Again, the goal isn’t to attract more traffic so much as attract more of the right traffic: that is, those people most likely to be receptive to your message and convert.

For example, optimising your keyword strategy can improve your website’s rankings in the search results for search terms more likely to reflect an intent to buy. The same approach can also improve the performance of your Google Ads, maximising the ROI of your campaign budgets.

Over time, and with constant measurement and adjustment, you will hopefully begin to see fewer wasted clicks and more visits to your site from people genuinely in the market for what you have to offer.

Using conversion rates to crush competitors

A B2B digital marketing strategy focused on CRO will give you the upper hand against your key competitors by gradually stealing more and more of the available leads away from them.

Get qualitative and quantitative data before you start

There are a number of tools you can use to understand how and why audiences interact with your website. These include:

  • Google Tag Manager
  • Google Analytics
  • Hotjar
  • Crazy Egg

Identifying which areas of your site to address with conversion rate optimisation will take both qualitative and quantitative data. 

Quantitative data gives you the numbers. Qualitative data helps you understand why the numbers are as they are, providing you with key insights into behaviours such as high bounce rates.

Know your audience

A wide variety of people will visit your B2B website, providing different inputs and making critical decisions.

Understanding your audience equips you to improve their overall experience. Use your data to track their journeys through your site and find out where you’re losing them in the conversion process.

Re-engage website visitors

96% of people who visit a website will leave without a conversion. That’s a massive missed opportunity.

Remarketing allows you to keep track of these lost conversions and hopefully get a second chance.

Assuming you’ve already captured their details via a form fill or previous purchase, you might be able to trigger transactional messages (“You’ve left an item in your shopping cart”) or send them targeted promotions to entice them back to your site. 

And even if you haven’t got their contact details, you can still use cookies to anonymously target them with relevant ads as they visit other parts of the internet:

  • Email
  • YouTube
  • Social networks
  • Online searches

Retargeting can boost website visits by 700%. And while remarketing is popular with B2C marketers, surprisingly, it actually works better for B2B.

Key steps to improving your website conversion rate

Improving your website conversion rate is all about making your website operate in a way that drives the most leads. If you do this correctly, you can make your website highly engaging for the audience.

Solve poor UX issues

User experience is everything in a B2B digital marketing strategy. It is vital that you identify and thoroughly understand the interactions and add-ons your website visitors hate – or at least add friction to the journey towards conversion.

Then it’s even more vital that you resist the temptation to use them. 

Pop-ups or ‘interstitials’ are great examples. You might think that a pop-up with your key messaging and call to action is more likely to encourage a visitor to convert. Boom. Here’s the deal. Act now! But the reality is that pop-up just interrupted whatever it is they were already doing on that page, creating a poor user experience more likely to annoy than persuade.

Another stumbling block is poor on-site navigation. A website has to be easy to get around. How easy is it to find whatever they’re looking for? How many clicks does it take to get from the homepage to the point of conversion? 

Add internal links to key pieces of content

Use internal links with easy to understand descriptive text to make it easier for visitors to  discover related pages and content – rewarding their curiosity while also creating more pathways to those pages you want more people to discover.

Add text-based calls to action to your blog posts

While your blog posts should ideally be free of brand or product pitches, you can still introduce calls to action and related links in the areas surrounding your content.

CTAs are a key strategy to send users down the right path. Consider placing a well-written and persuasive call to action in a boxout or widget beneath your article or in the sidebar. That way, if someone is curious to find out more about your related content – or even a relevant product – you’ve provided them with a pathway to conversion without skewing or diminishing the value of the article itself.

Add lead flows

According to Sumo, 10% of pop-up forms convert at 9.3%. 

But wait: doesn’t this undermine my earlier advice that pop-ups interrupt the customer experience?

Pop-ups can work – but only if used correctly as part of a consistent and well-planned lead flow. A pop-up should complement and align with the page on which it appears. And that means you should carefully consider when to introduce the pop-up so it doesn’t get in the way of the information but appears at a natural point in the messaging.

The call-out needs to complement the content too. You only have a couple of lines to convince people to enter their info, so they had better be persuasive and interesting.

Of course, you should also make your pop-ups easy to dismiss – no hard-to-find crosses making it difficult to know where to click – so anyone who isn’t interested can easily get back to the content on the page.

The secret to CRO success: testing

Conversion rate optimisation doesn’t end with putting the right strategies in place. Now you need to make sure your landing pages work.

Average landing page conversion rates in B2B can be as high as 13% – but it’s extremely unlikely you’ll achieve a similar result without plenty of testing, tweaking and testing again to find your most effective iteration.

A/B testing, otherwise known as split testing, is an essential part of digital marketing. When testing your landing page, three metrics to pay close attention to are:

  • Bounce rate
  • Session duration
  • Visitor-to-lead conversion rate

But before you run your A/B testing, it’s always a good idea to perform an A/A test. This uses your chosen A/B testing tool to test two identical versions of the same page. While this might sound useless as, theoretically, the results should be close to identical for both pages. However, an A/A test checks whether you can trust the results you’ll get when you start A/B testing or at least helps you to establish a margin for error in determining which results are significant. 

Conclusion

An effective CRO strategy can help you to increase your number of leads or sales quickly and efficiently. Instead of playing the numbers game, increasing conversions by increasing traffic, you can focus on maximising conversions from those people already showing up. 

A conversion rate optimisation strategy ensures you unleash the full power and potential of your marketing efforts for your business.