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SEO and link building consultant Gina Hutchings offers up some tips on boosting a website’s conversion rate, turning general site visitors into paying customer.
Are your website hits increasing month on month? Did your Google AdWords campaign bring more traffic than ever before? Are your sales increasing? No? Then you need the A-C of boosting your conversion rates.
On average, B2B sector websites are expected to yield a two to five per cent conversion rate, from visits to sale. This varies depending on the industry and the value of the goods or services. Typically for IT sectors the conversion rate of two per cent is medium performance with four per cent being the top of the scale. If you are getting a conversion rate of five per cent you are still performing better than 75% of the other websites in your industry.
A lot of marketing effort and spend goes into driving traffic to your website and enquiries about your product or service, but not a lot on nurturing leads. In fact, 79 per cent of marketing leads never convert into sales. Why? Because the leads are not adequately directed through the sales funnel to completion.
What does it take to get to over a five per cent conversion rate? Follow these three steps to improving your website.
1. Keep it simple
When we are faced with too much choice the natural reaction is to switch off. We back away from complex processes and this is where some of your website visitors may be falling down. Make doing business with you as easy as possible.
Here are some easy pointers:
1. Include an express checkout option. Not all users want to register, allow an option to buy without registering.
2. Make your contact information clear and easy to find.
3. Ensure every page has a call to action, e.g. Is there a button on the page for more information? To purchase? Or to download a guide?
4. Reduce the number of clicks needed to obtain the information. If the information required to make the purchase is buried too deep on the website it is likely that visitors will give up looking.
5. Reduce the number of fields in your registration or purchasing forms; people get tired of complex or long form filling.
6. Offer various payment methods and show that you are adaptable to your customer.
Once the barriers to purchase are down, you can look at building your prospects’ trust in your site and product. Include case studies, testimonials and guides that viewers can read and build a picture of your company.
2. Keep your copy targeted and easy to read
If you are an MSP (Managed Service Provider) the majority of your target audience and website visitors are going to be from business backgrounds. Do not assume that working B2B means your customers will understand your industry lingo. Here are some simple tips:
1. State the benefits of the product or service in bullet points, make it clear and simple so the customer knows what they will be getting.
2. Explain the importance of your product or service and how it will help the client.
3. Do not alienate visitors by using technical industry specific terms. If it is necessary to use technical terms, explain them.
4. Ensure each page has a headline. Brainstorm headlines for each page and choose the one that best explains the content.
5. Small adjustments to your website, print or digital marketing can yield huge returns. Experiment with your marketing to find what works best for your business. A safe and measureable way to do this is through ‘split testing’ using an appropriate tool. Perhaps use different colour CTA (Call To Action) buttons or different headlines and split test between your audiences.
C. Track your visitors
Being able to track the consumer journey and follow their path, especially those that drop out at the last minute, can be incredibly telling about where your site is failing to push leads to close.
Installing software on your site like website call tracking technology, provided by companies like Mediahawk will help you to close the loop on your marketing by tracking the entire user journey. The technology works by generating a unique telephone number for every web visitor. So, should they call you, the software instantly logs the caller’s user journey on site right up until the phone call – and it tracks any webpages they’ve viewed once they hung up. This graphic demonstrates how website call tracking works:
This type of data can be vital at pinpointing holes in your sales funnel and where many of your prospects might be dropping out, so ensure that you track your calls and web visits.
Companies who apply lead nurturing tactics, some of which are mentioned here, on average see a ten per cent increase in revenue in the first six to nice months, and those companies that stay the same see a seven per centdecrease. It pays to nurture your leads.
Image source: Shutterstock
