Optimizing Conversational Marketing: A Data-Driven Deep Dive

Transcription

Hey everyone. I’m Arun from FunnelEnvy. I’m sure all of you are aware of conversational marketing and probably many of you have deployed chatbots on your own sites for lead capture and conversion. Now, I’ve been digging into some of the data around them myself and I wanted to share some more that I learned along the way along with some hypotheses on how you might be able to improve conversational marketing performance on your own funnel. So let’s get started. I wanted to establish some shared context first. Now, web chat on B2B and demand generation sites used to be used primarily for customer support, but increasingly whether it’s because of actual results or FOMO, you see the chat widgets all over the place as part of the revenue funnel.

chatbot

Let’s start with some shared context. Webchat on b2b & demand gen sites used to primarily be for customer support. Increasingly, whether it’s because of actual results or FOMO you see the chat widgets all over as part of the revenue funnel. Conversational marketing presents an alternative to the website funnel & forms to engage visitors in what is supposed to be a more human, interactive medium.

Does conversational marketing actually work?

The Google featured snippet here tells us that it’s the fastest and most effective way to guide prospects through the sales funnel and that it provides an authentic experience and real value for your customers. This is despite the fact that 99% of the time it’s a bot on the other side (and everyone knows it). 

Let’s start with the first customer, who uses Drift on their site. 

Customer Engagement with Drift

First up we’ve got a customer who uses Drift on their site. Now, we’re going to be looking at the engagement and conversion metrics based on the number of new visitors coming to the site over a certain time period and using the metrics that each platform sends to Google Analytics. Now, as you can see here, this site isn’t doing too well when it comes to chatbot engagement, less than half a percent of visitors are actually engaging with the Drift bot, but it’s doing even worse when you look at the email and phone number capture rates, less than a 10th of a percent. When you compare that to the form baseline, contact us form in this case, it’s certainly outperforming the chat experience.

Conversion with Qualified. 

When we look at another customer who happens to have Qualified, we see pretty similar results. In this case, again, we’re seeing a small fraction of visitors engage with the chatbot and of those that do, we see a pretty small percentage actually proceed to book a meeting or give their email address. Again, when we look at the form conversion rates, in this case, it’s a request a demo form, it significantly outperforms the qualified chatbot.

But of course, I’ve just been showing you top of the funnel numbers and this is demand generation. So it would be a mistake to only focus on the top of the funnel leads. So in the third example, let’s fit a customer that is Intercom and take a few steps further down the funnel. Now, the top of the phone numbers looks pretty similar. The baseline contacts us form outperforms the chatbot for lead conversion. However, in this case, we segment it by known leads and try to evaluate the effect of engagement with Intercom on the conversion to pipeline or opportunity. And what’s interesting here is we get about 10% of the 4,600 or so known leads engage with Intercom.

down funnel with intercom

So a small number of engaging with Intercom, but those that do convert to pipeline at a much higher rate than the leads that did not have any Intercom interaction. So what can we observe from all of this? Well, despite the fact that Drift used to tell us that forms are dead, from this data here, they clearly are. In the data that we looked at, the top of the funnel engagement with chat is relatively low on an absolute basis and the forms on the site, static web forms outperform chat for lead conversion. But both from the example that I showed you as well as conversations that I’ve had with other marketers, chatbots can have a significant impact lower in the funnel on lower-funnel leads and accounts and their conversion to the pipeline.

Observations

So how do we think about this? Well, like everything on your site experience is all about the friction for the visitor and the value that you’re providing. It’s important to recognize that conversational marketing and chat are a form of interruption marketing. The question you need to ask yourself, of course, is, is that interruption adding or removing friction from the buyer’s journey? So some ways to think about that in the context of your visitors are, what is the context of buying stage and intent of that visitor? What are they actually trying to accomplish in that session on your site? How does that impact and affect their behavior? And finally, what value will interrupt that experience with chat have on their experience and their objectives?

So we can make this a little bit more concrete by considering visitors at various stages of your funnel or buyer journey. Starting with that top-of-the-funnel visitor, they’re typically in an awareness stage with relatively low commercial intent. Now in this stage, visitors are first trying to figure out if what you are selling on your site is even relevant to them and then maybe educating themselves and seeing if they can trust you for a future commercial decision. Now, this type of behavior is characterized by passive content consumption, and introducing or interrupting that experience with chat is likely to increase their friction in that experience.

And let’s contrast that with a lower-funnel visitor that is in the consideration or decision stage that has greater commercial intent. Typically, they’re seeking answers to very specific questions on your site. And unlike passive consumption, they’re actively trying to answer that question, and then they’re doing some focused research. And if they can’t find it on your site, that introduces friction. So in this case, reaching out to chat can actually add value by alleviating that friction of not being able to find the answer to the question on your site and connect them either with a bot or with a salesperson.

Conversations shouldn’t be limited to chatbots

So how do we think about this to improve our conversational experiences? Well, first off, when we think about the top of the funnel, recognize that the concepts of conversational marketing don’t have to be limited to chatbots. They become synonymous with chatbots, but conversations are how we as humans engage with other humans and the traditional static website form which asks for all sorts of personal information upfront is daunting. And that’s why we see a lot of conversion drop-off. But we can adapt that form to be more conversational in nature, more interactive. And when we do that through our multi-step forms at FunnelEnvy and we’ve tested these, we average about 53% improvement in lead conversion.

Strategic Interruptions

This obviously is the added benefit of keeping the visitor on the site experience on the page and presenting less of an interruption than the chatbot. If you’re going to try this yourselves, we recommend leading with some easy-to-answer questions to establish both intent and conversion momentum. Typically two to three questions, initially not asking for personal information, making them very relevant to the visitor and also setting proper expectations along the way, both in terms of the steps that they have to go through and the outcome when they fill out that form.

Strategic Interruptions

Now, when you do choose to interrupt with chat, do it strategically, don’t settle for the standard out-of-the-box transcripts that you get, welcome to our site, do you have any questions? You can be very effective with the chat by understanding and answering and handling common or, and specific questions or objections from that visitor. If you can identify visitors with specific intent and a common example is if they’re on the pricing page lingering there, they usually have a specific question and are close to making a decision. You can very effectively intercept them, interrupt them with chat and answer those questions, or even connect them to a sales person to get them over the line.

Of course, they don’t have to be on a specific page. You can use data to identify known leads, target accounts, even use real-time predictive scoring to identify those high-value, high intent visitors and answer their questions and get them in front of a salesperson faster. One thing to think about might be to reduce the interruption by have them opt into that chat experience through an online and onsite CTA.

Key Takeaways

First off, know your own numbers. I presented some examples from what I observed, but certainly, you should know your own chat and conversational marketing engagement and conversion rates, not just at the top of the funnel, but all the way through by buyer stage and to opportunity and revenue.

Secondly, recognize that forms aren’t dead. And you can apply those same interactive conversational marketing principles outside of your chatbot and to your onsite experience. When you do choose to interrupt, do it strategically, check, and be very effective to handle common questions and intercept those high-value, lower-funnel leads and accounts.

And finally, recognize that not everyone is going to engage with chat even further down the funnel. So there are ways to use the investment in chat to improve your onsite experience. You can do that by studying your chat transcripts, understanding the common questions, objections that your visitors have, and testing different site experiences to better meet those.

If you’re going to go to the trouble of targeting lower funnel visitors with chat, you can also use that to personalize the site experience and change your offers and content to better meet the expectations and needs of your lower funnel visitors. So with that, I want to thank you for listening today.

Customer Journey Analytics Optimizes Demand Generation Marketing

To do it successfully, you need visibility into every step of your customers’ journeys and the means to track and analyze their data to understand what motivates them now and in the future. But how do you do that? Fortunately, customer journey analytics provides valuable insights into your visitors’ behavioral patterns and preferences throughout their entire customer journey. These insights allow you to create enhanced customer experiences that motivate visitors to reach the endpoint in your sales funnel.

What exactly is customer journey analytics, and how can you use it to optimize your lead generation marketing strategies? Let’s find out.

What Is Customer Journey Analytics?

As the name suggests, customer journey analytics is an application that explicitly analyzes customer journeys. This application involves tracking and analyzing the way your customers use various channels to interact with your brand. It analyzes all channels — used currently and in the future — that your customers touch directly.

These channels could include:

  • Channels with human interaction, such as call centers
  • Two-way interaction channels, such as display advertising
  • Channels that are fully automated, such as mobile devices or websites
  • Third-party operated channels, such as independent retail stores
  • Channels that offer live customer assistance, such as joint site navigation or live chat

Why Do I Need Customer Journey Analytics?

Even as customers’ journeys have grown increasingly complex, today’s customers expect their business interactions with your brand — across multiple channels — to be on par with CX leaders such as Amazon and Google. If your customers’ journeys aren’t seamless every step of the way, they will become dissatisfied and quickly move on to a competitor. Conversely, studies show that positive customer experiences drive revenue growth.

Studies also show that investment in customer feedback management isn’t enough to improve your CX levels. This failure is attributed to the fact that feedback is generally only requested at points along the journey. Unfortunately, this means that only some of the customer journey is captured, misrepresenting your customers’ overall experiences.

This incomplete data reduces your ability to gain a complete picture and accurate insights into your marketing strategy performance. It also leaves you at a disadvantage for enhancing customers’ experiences and tying customer experiences to tangible business outcomes.

Customer journey analytics is the bridge between your customers’ behaviors and your business outcomes. A customer journey analytics program enables your business to track, measure and improve customer experiences across several touchpoints and time periods, encompassing the entire customer journey.

Leveraging customer journey analytics enables demand generation marketing leaders to answer complex questions, such as:

  1. What causes our customers’ behaviors?
  2. What past interactions or journeys have our customers undertaken that led them here?
  3. What paths do our customers take on their journeys?
  4. What are the most likely outcomes for each customer or journey?
  5. How will these journeys and outcomes impact our business outcomes?
  6. What are our customers’ goals?
  7. How do their goals align with our business goals?
  8. How do we add value for each customer and enhance their customer experience?

What Are the Benefits of Customer Journey Analytics?

Customer journey analytics is a vital ingredient in an effective customer journey management program. It is the piece that analyzes comprehensive data and generates actionable insights. The insights gained from this type of customer management program are valuable for both customers and businesses alike. Here’s how.

Optimized Customer Experiences

The insights gained through effective analyses of your customers’ journeys enable you to optimize each step along the way for a seamless overall experience.

Ongoing Measurable Performance Results

In addition, ongoing analytics allow you to continuously measure demand generation marketing initiatives’ performance across multiple channels and define the appropriate KPIs to measure each journey.

Data Analyses From Numerous Channels and Timeframes

When you look at customers’ journeys across several channels and timeframes, authentic pain points become evident. Identifying these pain points enables you to take action and positively impact your customers’ journeys.

How Can I Optimize Customer Journey Analytics?

Customer journey analytics is typically optimized by leaders in customer service, analytics, marketing and CX. These leaders adopt customer journey analytics platforms to improve their demand generation marketing strategies and performance measurement capabilities.

These teams optimize customer journey analytics to:

  • Amass customer journey data
  • Resolve multi-channel customer identities
  • Analyze innumerable interactions throughout countless cross-channel journeys
  • Identify CX pain points and their root causes
  • Verify potential customer journey enhancements
  • Quantify CX investments’ ROI

Customer Journey Mapping vs. Customer Journey Analytics

As a demand generation marketer, you may already implement customer journey mapping and feel that it provides the same insights as customer journey analytics. Unfortunately, this is not the case. While journey mapping focuses on qualitative insights, customer journey analytics is more quantitative and incorporates a much larger scope.

Static Snapshots vs. Continuous Detail

Journey mapping provides only static snapshots of some of your customers’ journeys and lacks the required detail to represent the multitude of your customers and their unique behaviors.

Static vs. Time-Based Data

Customer journey analytics is driven by time-based data, allowing you to see how customers’ journeys change over time. The ability to continuously measure complex multi-channel customer journeys and touchpoints along journeys help marketers predict customer journey successes.

Trial and Error vs. Real-Time Testing

Without visibility to up-to-date data on each interaction along the customer journey, businesses are left to experiment with new enhancements on the entire customer journey. Not only does this potentially waste time and resources, it means marketers will be waiting for aggregated results that don’t pinpoint where the issues are.

Customer journey analytics provides marketers with the visibility to see how customers respond to improvements along several touchpoints and time periods. In addition, this application enables marketers to test and track the success of customer experience interaction improvements in real-time.

Powered by machine learning and AI, customer journey analytics enables marketers to identify pain points along the entire customer journey that negatively impact CX. These insights allow data-driven businesses to prioritize opportunities for customer journey optimization and drive revenue growth.

Revamp Your B2B Landing Page: 5 Things to Consider

Today, we’re going to talk about what might be the most important page on your website. No, it’s not your home page, or your contact page, or that snazzy blog post that got lots of clicks. It’s your landing page. 

Landing pages are the pages that leads land on right before they convert. This is the page that should sell your product or service best. If you don’t get your landing page right, your sales are going to be undercut. 

If your current landing page isn’t getting it done, then it’s time for a refresh! 

5 things to consider when revamping your B2B landing page

Below are some of the most critical things to keep in mind when revamping your B2B landing page for maximum effectiveness.

1. Have a clear value proposition

First things first, you need to have a clear value proposition. As soon as your lead starts scanning the page, they should be getting an idea of what your product can do for them. 

This is especially important when you’re offering an unfamiliar product or service. Everyone already knows the value of a cloud storage service, but not everyone will understand why they need NAS drives in their office at first glance. 

That said, familiarity doesn’t translate to a value proposition. If you’re selling in a popular market, then your value proposition is going to be what differentiates you. If everyone already knows what Slack, Zoom, Skype, and email are, then what unique selling point do you have to offer, and what’s the fastest way to showcase it on your landing page?

2. Make sure the journey from your marketing campaign to your landing page is cohesive

Next, you need to view your B2B landing page as your user’s end point in a marketing campaign journey. From the first time someone hears about your product to the moment they’re about to make a purchase, they are on a journey with your brand. 

Visuals are a great way to tie this journey together. Using colors, images, logos, and keywords throughout your marketing campaign to your landing page will help solidify the landing page’s purpose for your leads. Conversely, changing up your visual narrative and tone on the landing page can dissociate the customer’s previous experiences from your landing page, breaking the customer journey at the last moment. Essentially, it’s crucial to stay cohesive with your language, messaging, visuals and call to action. 

3. Have an obvious CTA front and center, and reduce navigation elements

Another key component of a cohesive B2B landing page is a clear call to action (CTA). CTAs are proven methods of pushing engagement, despite how naggy they may seem on the surface. 

Not only do they work, but they help leads make their decision, too. If someone visits your landing page and either A) Doesn’t know what the page is for, or B) Can’t find the CTA, then they’re probably going to scroll around and then click away. 

Don’t let this happen to you! Whether your CTA is a “Buy Now!” button, a sign-up form, or a choice between payment plans, make sure it’s the first or second thing that your visitors see. 

4. Showcase your testimonials and partnerships on your landing page

For our last two tips, we’re going to tie everything together with actionable steps. The first of which is to establish trust quickly. 

In B2C, entry trust (i.e., before the customer becomes a repeat customer) comes from reviews and word of mouth. Consumers want to hear that a product is great from their peers before they hear you say it. 

B2B works much the same way, except that your customers’ peers are going to be other businesses. This means you’re going to want to rely on testimonials and partnerships rather than reviews. 

Having familiar logos on your landing page as well as kind words will quickly ingratiate you with your leads. If they recognize brands that you’ve partnered with or see their needs and issues reflected in your positive testimonials, they’ll trust your product before they’ve made it to the checkout page.

5. Create a video to engage with the visitor

Our second actionable tip is to place a video on your landing page. It might sound crazy, especially if you’ve never invested in video content before. But in the same way that blog content drives leads, video content drives sales. In fact, it often does it better. 

A landing page video should be a concise pitch of your product, about 2-3 minutes at the most. You should quickly explain what your product does, what problem it solves, how its features solve that problem, and if you have time, include a story from someone who has had success with your product. 

In case you haven’t put it together, that’s your entire landing page in one engaging pitch. Except for your CTA, which should be sitting right next to the video.

Boost your B2B landing page performance with FunnelEnvy

While the five revamping tips listed above are a great way to get started, it’s far from everything you need to craft an engaging B2B landing page. And if you don’t have a lot of experience in this area, it can be tough to know how to even implement the above suggestions. 

To supplement your experience, you can partner with FunnelEnvy. In case you couldn’t tell, we’re lead-generating experts, and we have a solid grasp on how to turn your landing page into a conversion machine. We offer services like Lead Gen Experiences, which will help you turn your traffic investment into a moneymaker, and Account Match, which will identify the most high-value accounts for your business and help you target them. 

Reach out to the FunnelEnvy team today and start growing your business like never before.

How To Improve Your Site Experience In A User-Centric World (And Still Generate Leads)

The algorithmic world of web optimization is rapidly moving towards a user-centric paradigm. To keep up, brands will need to prioritize their site experience like never before. 

In this post, we’re going to cover why site experience is key to your success and give you some actionable tips you can use to improve your site experience today. 

Let’s get into it!

Your site experience is key to generating leads

Website experience, or UX, encompasses everything your users encounter when they visit your website. It’s the visuals, the ease with which they can uncover information, and the process they go through to make a purchase. 

In a world that is becoming more user-centric, focusing on user privacy and moving away from keyword-based SEO, lead generation is going to become increasingly entangled with the performance of your website. The better your site experience, the more leads you’ll generate. And, with that in mind, here are our top ways to improve your site experience…

5 ways to improve your site experience

1. A great site experience starts with pages that load quickly

The first thing that anyone is going to notice when they visit your website is how quickly it loads. Or, ideally, they won’t notice this at all.

The goal for any website should be for any page on your site to load in less than three seconds on an average WiFi download speed. If your website takes longer than this to load, you have some work to do. When it comes to mobile, things need to be even faster. Less than two seconds is ideal for reducing your bounce rate. 

One of the first things you should do to reduce a web page’s load time is to compress all of the images on your website. There are free resources online (like TinyPNG) that will quickly compress images for you. 

Plus, white space is also important. Not only is it important to a pleasing design, but blank space loads faster than content-filled space. 

And, finally, ensure that the most important and visible elements of your webpage load first. Typically, buttons and navigation bars should appear first, then your text, then images and media. 

2. Simple and efficient registration and sign-up forms are crucial

Another crucial component of a great site experience is simple registration and sign-up forms. These are the forms on your website that visitors use to sign up for your newsletter, subscribe to your service, and register an account on your website. 

If these forms aren’t easy to use, then visitors aren’t going to use them. When you ask your visitors to complete a task, you aren’t just asking for their attention span, but also their mental effort. Seamlessness is key. 

A simple form process uses as few fields as possible, doesn’t needlessly violate the person’s privacy, and keeps everything on one page if possible. The more information a visitor has to give and the more pages that have to load for them to give, the more likely they are to bounce.

3. Have clear CTAs –– and not too many of them!

Everyone working in the marketing industry knows that CTAs dramatically increase engagement. Direct CTAs, such as “Order this product today!” as well as indirect CTAs like colorful buttons both count. They give a webpage purpose, guide visitors down a path, and most importantly, close sales!

Despite the overt marketing at work here, visitors like CTAs. They’re on your website because they are curious about your business. CTAs make their journey simple. Click here for this information, go here to buy this, and subscribe in these three steps. 

On the other hand, you can overdo your CTAs. Try to keep it to just one CTA per page, and don’t have every CTA be aimed at landing a sale. Maybe have a CTA to your newsletter on your blog instead of a CTA for a product you sell. Or, work on personalized CTAs (or smart CTAs) tailored to different audiences and their specific needs. 

And use clever design and logical flow when placing your CTAs. You don’t need a big red arrow telling visitors to look at your CTA if you place the CTA where they’re already looking. 

4. Follow conventions creatively over creatively ignoring them

A common pitfall that businesses run into is the idea that everything they do needs to be unique to them. So they overcompensate when doing something simple (like crafting a great site experience) and try to stand out by breaking convention.

This more often than not will scare visitors off. Design conventions exist for a reason –– because they work! And because conventions are popular practice, they’re what users expect when they visit your website. 

Moving the navigation bar to the bottom of the screen adjusting all of your text to the right, and having images of your product flash around the screen will help you stand out –– but probably not in the way that you hope for. 

Instead of trying to be quirky, stick to tried-and-true web design conventions. Then, put your personality into them! Follow traditional functional practices while adding unique and personalized aesthetics to your website. 

A pleasing color scheme and clever animation in an otherwise standard website will take you much farther than an obtuse (albeit original) site experience.

5. Save your writing for the blog

Our last tip is pretty simple. Save your writing for your blog! Articles and content marketing perform great there, but they’re not going to perform as well on your landing pages. 

Instead, try to replace text content on your home and landing pages with graphics, blurbs, and bullet-point lists. Video content performs particularly well on landing pages (not so much on your home page). Use text in short sentences to give clarity, flow, and concise information. For everything else, stick to visuals!

Eager to keep learning about how to improve your site experience?

The tips listed above are just a few of the ways that you can improve your site experience. To become a lead generating pro, you can check out the rest of the posts on the FunnelEnvy blog.

And if you’re ready to take your marketing and site performance to the next level, reach out to the FunnelEnvy team for expert advice, guidance, and optimization. 

By |2021-06-04T00:02:20-07:00June 2nd, 2021|Experimentation, Uncategorized, Conversion Rate Optimization, Analytics, Strategy, B2B|Comments Off on How To Improve Your Site Experience In A User-Centric World (And Still Generate Leads)

Revenue attribution: Everything You Need to Know to Ramp Up Your Marketing ROI

Revenue is a top priority for any business, no matter how big, no matter how small. It’s fundamental: without money coming in, you’ll have nothing to cover overheads or invest back into the company. 

We all know that a hard-working sales team is key for bringing in new business and increasing revenue. But revenue is increasingly a priority for marketing teams too. 

Many marketers turn to ROI (return on investment) to determine the profitability of a promotional campaign. In fact, more than 40% of marketers claim their main priority in 2021 is to “better measure the ROI of [their] demand generation initiatives”. 

It makes sense: effective marketing should achieve a healthy return on investment (ROI) and generate new revenue. A portion of this can then be invested back into marketing campaigns to keep bringing in more money, and so on. It’s a cycle of profitability that can help businesses grow and grow. 

And revenue attribution can help you create more effective, successful marketing campaigns. But what does it mean and involve? 

In this article, we’ll explore everything you need to know about revenue attribution and how it relates to improving marketing ROI. 

What is revenue attribution? 

Revenue attribution (also known as marketing attribution) is a reporting process that involves matching revenue brought in, to a specific marketing output. 

For example, you might utilize revenue attribution techniques to monitor the impact that a particular piece of thought leadership content made on sales within two months of its publication. Or you may prefer to track the effect that a new series of videos made on revenue over a shorter or longer period. 

Businesses have more channels — and more opportunities — to reach consumers than ever with targeted marketing campaigns. But it’s unbelievably competitive and marketing teams must take advantage of real creativity to make an impact, especially in the most crowded sectors or niches. 

Employing revenue attribution techniques empowers marketers to hone in on their most effective work and understand how they can keep refining their techniques over time. 

Why is revenue attribution important and how can it help?

Revenue attribution is crucial for marketing teams who want to gain a clear insight into their strategies’ value and learn how they affect customer engagement. Fortunately, there’s a wealth of data available online to help marketers build an accurate overview of campaign performance and ROI. 

Identifying how specific campaigns and strategies have been received by audiences (target and/or general) enables you to make more informed, calculated decisions on future campaigns. 

You’ll have a tighter grasp on what works, what doesn’t, and what elements should be combined to cultivate the most impactful marketing campaigns. You’ll be able to capture more leads, close more sales, and improve ROI thanks to continued analysis. 

Another key benefit is that revenue attribution helps businesses (particularly those in their infancy or experiencing financial challenges) get more out of their marketing spends while still streamlining their budget. 

Essentially, it can make your money go further. You’re not throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks — you’re basing your decisions on provable facts. 

You can jettison those marketing techniques and campaigns that fail to bring in satisfactory ROI. All resources usually dedicated to those will be put to better use on more effective options instead. 

How can you use a revenue attribution model to measure and ramp up your marketing ROI?

We understand what revenue attribution is and why it matters. But how do you put a revenue attribution model to work and start improving your marketing ROI?

While it can appear complicated for newcomers, and more than a little daunting, it will seem far simpler when we take a deeper look. In this section, we’ll cover how to use this model to both track and measure ROI — and improve it. 

What types of revenue and marketing attribution models are available?

First-touch attribution 

The first-touch (or first-click) attribution is one of two single-source models (along with last-touch attribution, below). 

In this model, the first channel with which a converted user engages receives all credit for generating revenue. This could be an in-depth whitepaper, a blog post, a video, or any other piece of marketing content that captures the lead’s interest enough to drive a conversion. 

For example, around half of marketers describe webinars as the top-of-the-funnel format generating the most high-quality leads. 

While a spectacular piece of content can be enough to push users towards a sale, the first-touch model may have a blindspot — a failure to take other interactions following this first one into consideration.

As a result, you may not have an accurate insight into how effective other channels are in swaying users’ decisions. 

Last-touch attribution 

Last-touch (or last-click) attribution is regarded as another easy model. Why? Because it involves looking at the final touchpoint before the sale is completed, which is usually simple to find.

The last touch could be something as straightforward as a well-researched sales call or a webinar that whets the lead’s appetite and inspires them to commit to a purchase. 

However, the last-touch attribution model may overlook previous interactions with a user. These could include a visit to your website or hearing an ad for your business on a podcast. And, again, this could cause you to overlook the value of other channels 

Multi-source attribution

As you can probably assume, the multi-source (or multi-touch) attribution model focuses on all channels that lead to a conversion. Multiple touchpoints will be attributed instead of just one. 

Still, while the multi-source attribution model is more of a holistic approach to measuring marketing success, there’s a crucial factor to consider: it doesn’t provide an accurate reflection of a specific touchpoint’s actual contribution to a conversion. It could lead to a false representation of certain channels’ role in the customer journey. 

Six multi-source attribution models are available:

  • Linear: This is the easier model to implement, providing all touchpoints with the same weight, though it can be hard to determine which were most important (as mentioned above). 
  • Time decay: Touchpoints will be separated by bigger and bigger gaps in long sales cycles. With the time decay model, you’ll apply greater credit to those in the later stages than those in the earlier period. They might not have been as valuable to the eventual outcome, and in particularly long sales cycles, the buyer might have totally forgotten about their initial interactions with your business anyway. 
  • U-shaped: A U-shaped revenue attribution model applies the credit to two main touchpoints, with fixed percentages. These are the initial touchpoint and the last, as well as any between those points. The first and last touchpoint receive 40% of the credit each. The 20% remaining is split between those touchpoints taking place in between. 
  • W-shaped: A W-shaped model is similar to the one above, but it adds an extra touchpoint: when a prospect is converted into a lead. So, this covers the first touchpoint, the last touchpoint, and the occurrence falling somewhere between them. These receive 30% of the credit each, while the remaining 10% is shared among other touchpoints that may be detected between them. 
  • Full path: The majority of the credit is assigned to the key steps in the customer journey and the rest goes to those touchpoints between. Unlike the other models explored so far, this includes follow-up chats between the customer and the sales team. 
  • Custom: Teams can come up with their own weighting shares according to the channels used, customer behaviors, etc. For example, you may decide that a user who subscribed to your newsletter should have more weight than someone who clicked on an ad. 

Weighted multi-source attribution 

Weighted multi-source attribution involves accounting for every interaction during the sales cycle and assigning weight to the most important touchpoints. This model can lead to the most reliable views of a customer’s journey. 

However, it’s one of the most challenging to put into effect, as weight must be applied to a potentially large number of touchpoints. 

Why is it so important for marketing and sales teams to work in partnership?

Traditionally, businesses tend to keep sales and marketing activities separate. They consider marketing teams’ role to create leads and sales teams’ to transform them into paying customers. That’s simple enough to understand — but it could be a big mistake. 

Why? 

Because overhauling and refining your marketing to achieve an increase in leads won’t guarantee a rise in high-quality leads. 

Yes, marketing teams can drive clicks and interest, but a large proportion of leads could be of a lower quality than expected. 

The aim should be to bring in leads more likely to evolve into conversions, based on carefully targeted marketing with specific demographics in mind. 

By uniting your marketing and sales teams, you can start to develop a clearer understanding of which marketing efforts bring in the most valuable leads and, ultimately, conversions. Those that consistently generate the weakest leads and harm ROI should be replaced. 

What are the key benefits of using these revenue and marketing attribution models?

Here are five key benefits of using revenue and marketing attribution models:

  • Improved ROI
    Effective revenue attribution provides businesses with an accurate insight into how much return they gain on their marketing investments. Over time, you can start to cultivate a better awareness of those techniques and strategies that engage your target audience best.

    And you’ll keep reaching the right people with the most appealing messaging. This will increase the number of conversions you can expect to achieve and, eventually, the ROI you earn.

  • Save money on ineffective marketing
    Attribution models reveal the most important touchpoints throughout sales cycles and show how marketing money is best invested. Fewer funds will be wasted on dead-end marketing.

    That may free up money to channel into better marketing or other areas of your business, including sales or post-purchase support.

  • Hone your audience targeting
    Audience targeting is one of the top methods through which advertisers increase demand. And studying attribution data reveals which types of content, messaging, and channels engage your ideal customers best.

    Marketing teams can keep sharpening their material to consistently engage your target demographic(s) and minimize the risk of missteps.

  • Learn how to make products or services better
    Marketers can get a better understanding of target customers through attribution data analysis.

    Over time, this can open your eyes to ways in which you can improve products or services to suit your audience better. For example, the response to a blog post covering specific software features could inspire future releases.

The power of Revenue Funnel Optimization 

Hopefully, you’re now in a place where you can see the key benefits of revenue and marketing attribution to your business. But, one of the most important aspects of attribution strategy is acting on attribution insights. And, that’s where we come in…

We’ve designed our Revenue Funnel Optimization strategy so you can get the most out of your revenue insights. 

FunnelEnvy enables you to generate revenue insights by updating analytics to measure the complete end-to-end customer journey. You can pinpoint the most valuable funnels, offers, and other factors that drive revenue. 

Revenue funnels comprise strategy sets focused on maximizing your website’s revenue generation through targeting the most effective offers to the priority buyer segments in your top conversion funnels. 

Funnels can also be personalized by the user’s stage in the customer journey to maximize revenue further. You also can run campaigns and experiments on your most important funnels. Use direct response best practices to optimize offers, messaging, and more. 

With Revenue Funnel Optimization, your decisions are driven by data and genuine insights into the buyer journey. 

You’ll make stronger choices for your marketing and sales teams — and your business as a whole — by studying the facts. 

Many companies are already achieving success with Revenue Funnel Optimization, with up to 250% growth in revenue and a 10x increase in Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)

Want to try Revenue Funnel Optimization? Start using FunnelEnvy and drive real revenue growth for your business! 

By |2021-06-04T00:02:29-07:00June 2nd, 2021|Uncategorized, Conversion Rate Optimization, Digital Marketing, The Funnel, Strategy, B2B|Comments Off on Revenue attribution: Everything You Need to Know to Ramp Up Your Marketing ROI

Website Analytics & Attribution in the Privacy Era

If you’re wondering how the new privacy landscape will affect your ability to track visitors and customers you’re not alone. In this conversation, we dig deep into the governmental, technology, and other considerations that marketers need to be aware of. Hopefully, we’ll clear up some confusion and misconceptions along the way!

 

 

By |2021-06-01T09:51:21-07:00May 27th, 2021|Analytics, Testing, B2B, Uncategorized|0 Comments

Multi-Step Interactive Experiences (Going Beyond the Form)

Transcript

Hi everyone. My name is James Niehaus from FunnelEnvy. And today I want to talk to you about multi-step interactive experiences and going beyond the form. So this is the third video in a series that we focus specifically on a technique we call multi-step interactive experiences. In the first two videos we talked about how to use this on B2B forms to really drive massive improvements in conversion rates. And today I want to talk about how to use the same technique on other parts of your site.

We Will Cover

  • A quick recap on multi-step interactive experiences
  • Why they work
  • How they can work on other parts of your site
  • 5 popular ways to leverage interactive experiences on your site

Full Recap of Multi-Step Interactive Forms

If you have not watched the introduction and multi-step advance use cases videos, watch these in these given links.

Examples of Multi-Step Form Flows

Here are just some examples of past client interactive experiences. So this should be self-explanatory, but as you see here, all we’re doing is taking your typical static B2B form, breaking it up into interactive steps, and leading with intent questions that make it easier for the user to raise their hand, provide you information, commit to the process and convert at higher rates. And we say convert at higher rates, we do mean higher rates. So here are just some examples of recent conversion lifts we’ve seen on client forms just by moving the static forms to multi-step experiences. So as you see here, it’s definitely pretty powerful and effective. And this is also a reason why we kind of then explored using this technique on other parts of the site.

multistep form examples

Some Key Takeaways from previous videos

With a multi-step form experience, you usually want to ideally lead with intent questions that’s more about what’s in it for them. What features do they care about? How big is their company? What are they looking to do? What’s their role? But the whole idea here is that asking them easy to answer intent questions, helps guide them down the path towards finding a better outcome or helping you better guide them down to the right solution. So that’s the first takeaway.

The second takeaway is also ideally asking them a couple of those questions first because what you want to do is make it easy for them to get started, continue, and create that momentum and commitment to completing that process. And that’s how we get the higher conversion rates.

And then the nice part about this technique is that you then layer on additional strategies, and this is where it gets even more powerful. So on the left, you see an example where we actually start personalizing step two and step three of the form experiences based on what they provided as an answer in step one. So this is where it can get a little more targeted and personalized. Or on the right is a good example where you can use their information to then potentially route them to a different funnel or flow. An example there, they’re using company name, based on the email address, to decide whether they should send them to a scheduler as you see there, or to just give them the rest of the regular form. So this is where you can potentially provide custom experiences based on company size or target account or their role or what they’re looking to do. But this allows you to then go from a one size fits all static experience, to providing smarter, routed experiences that align with your personalization and ABM strategies.

More Powerful w/ ABM + Personalization

Personalize the rest of the form by their inputs

Multi-Step Works Beyond Forms

Multi-Step isn’t just for forms. They can work on most parts of your website. I mainly want to focus on five key areas of the site, or techniques.

Step #1 Homepage: funnel them to a multi-step form flow on the entry

So starting this all off, starting the funnel on the home page. So for most B2B sites, the homepage is typically a static billboard that tries to communicate one message to a broad and diverse set of visitors. So recognizing that you’re probably not going to align exactly to what that user’s intent is, the idea here is that you actually use the homepage real estate to engage the visitor. And in this case, engagement means trying to get them to raise their hand, express intent, and get started with you, and go down a certain conversion funnel right at the homepage. So whether you start interacting then with them, with engaging questions on the left, you see examples there. Or, if they click on a certain action, present out that type of experience. But the whole idea here is that, rather than guess at what their intent is, or how they want to get started, give them some options to make it easy for them to kind of start exploring. And ideally, without even knowing, go start kicking off that conversion funnel from the home page.

Step #2 Homepage: guide and route users to the right content by intent

Use the homepage strategy, and instead of taking them to a form flow, guide and route those users based on their intent, to a better page or a better flow.

So that here is we’re trying to help them by skipping steps and helping them land on the right page so you can cut down on the cycles to get them to where they want to go. So this is more about routing and navigation. But again, the whole benefit of these techniques is that we’re engaging them from the get-go. We’re not forcing them to kind of decide themselves, try to find the right information, and leave it up to chance that they find the right place to go. And this same strategy makes a lot of sense on product pages.

This is an example of one of our clients, where on the left you see their traditional static page. As you see there, it’s your typical solution type page where you provide a lot of content. And give them their choice but through a lot of text and diagrams.

Step #3 Product Page: help them find the right solution

On the right, it’s taking that same content and packaging it up into interactive questions to make it easier for them to kind of, again, find what they’re looking for, raise their hand, express their intent or interest, and you help navigate them to the option that makes the most sense. So we saw some very positive engagement and conversion metrics when we did this technique on product pages like in this example here. But the whole idea here is you’re trying to provide that educated, guided hand that helps them find better what they’re looking for based on what they told you. So in this case you’re being helpful, helping them complete their job better, and in a more timely fashion. And of course, this makes sense on your product and pricing pages. So when you have packages and plans, most B2B sites have your typical good, better, best, here are three or four plans, whether it be based on company size or number of seats needed, or whether it be based on certain features, that’s your typical layout that we’re all used to.

On the product pages, a nice technique is to really use the strategy to help them find the right solution.

Step #4 Plans/Pricing Page: help them find the right package

The plans and pricing page is also another great place to use it to help them find the right pricing package or combination.

So we’re not saying you have to move away from that, but in these examples here they still show those tables of plans, but in both examples here they give options where, if you want to specify your interests or what you’re looking to do, or maybe talk through a questionnaire about who you are and what you’re looking for, they can then narrow down the plan packages to fit what you provided them as far as intent or profile. So the whole idea here is that, when you have a little more complex set of packages and pricing plans, rather than have them guess or maybe choose incorrectly, or maybe just waste their time combing through all of this, you give them an easier path of which they just simply specify what is their key intent, profile questions, and use that information to help narrow and guide them down to the right package or pricing plan that works for them.

Again, you know your product more than anyone else. You’ve seen the success of your products and packages on a variety of clients across your industries. This is all about using that intelligence to better guide new visitors, who first come to your site, come to your pricing page, and help them find a solution that fits their needs and best matches their profile. Because you want them to be successful, and this is your chance to guide them down that path in a more direct way. And both sides will win in the end.

Step #5 Quizzes/Calculators: help them get insights

    And lastly, we shouldn’t forget the fact that, for most B2B sites, they do have interactive experiences typically in things like your ROI calculators, your organizational assessments, your company benchmark, and your various quizzes, right? So by all means, these are great options and techniques. We encourage you to keep using them. So in the end we’re just fans of anything that provides that interactivity. We’ve seen, from years and years of testing, that whenever you can give the visitor a chance to interact, raise their hand, you make it easier for them to get started, you reduce the complexity of that visit by allowing them to be guided down the right path. And you actually end up having more control over where they go through their journey, which is what we really want to do. Ideally, if we had a choice, we’d want to guide each visitor on the right journey for them.

    Since we can’t really predict who they are and what they want, we think interactive experience are the best way to meet in the middle and provide them a set of choices that allow them to kind of really narrow down to their best options based on what their profile is and based on what their intent is. So it’s really a win-win for both sides.

    Key Takeaways

    1. Multi-Step experiences, especially on the forms, work great as a great conversion tactic
    2. It works even better when combined with your ABM/Personalization strategies. So this is a great example where your conversion techniques and your strategic techniques should really work well together because they really compliment each other very well.
    3. They really work well in a couple of key places, like your homepage, your product pages, your pricing and packaging pages, as well as your traditional quizzes and calculators.
    4. Here are 5 ways to get started:
      1. Homepage: Start them in a conversion funnel
      2. Homepage: Route them to the right page by intent
      3. Product Pages: Find the right solution(s)
      4. Pricing/Plan: Find the right package
      5. Quizzes/Calculators: Provide custom insights

    So really want to say here, we want to advocate for it, try it out, explore this on your site, you really won’t regret it. This is, again, better experiences for all.

    And then lastly, as I said, if you haven’t had a chance yet, go visit our site. We have a couple of other videos that talk a little more in-depth about the strategy, especially as it relates to forms and personalization, and ABM. So check it out if you haven’t had the chance yet.

    1. Introduction to Multi-step Interactive Forms
    2. Multi-step Interactive Forms (Advanced Use Cases)

    If you have questions, just drop me an email. And if you want to see our own interactive quiz, you can hit our website. And that quiz will actually help you evaluate whether you’re the right fit for working with us. So check it out and hopefully we can talk soon. With that, take care.

    Maximize Site Revenue with Multi-Step Forms

    Transcript

    Hi, everyone. My name is James Niehaus from FunnelEnvy. Today I want to talk to you about multi-step forms, why our clients love them, and how they can maximize your side revenues.

    So why our clients love them because.

    • They work. We typically can see 20, 30 – 50% improvement in form conversions, so meaningful results.
    • We can often enhance and compliment your existing ABM and personalization programs. So it really adds to the value.
    • It works great on form but also works pretty well across most of your site. We’ll talk about some examples of that in this presentation.

    But how do you make such user-friendly forms?

    We all hate forums. Whether it’s a mortgage form, a tax form, or a B2B lead form, right? So the industry recognizes this. And some industries have actually adapted and evolved.

    So, leading the way, mortgage. So, now we complete a mortgage application online. It’s going to be an interactive multi-step experience. Same thing with taxes, an interactive multi-step experience, to guide you down the path.

    Multi-step forms for B2B

    B2C loves multi-step, whether it’s to guide people down a better path, or especially on lead gen, to help convert at higher rates. But B2B is slow to adopt. So we still typically see static forms on B2B, typically because of operational hurdles. It’s just easier to embed a form. But, if you’re willing to make the effort and like our clients, past and present, and see examples of their multi-step experiences, you can see firsthand that all we’re doing here is taking their simple static forms, breaking them up into multiple steps, making it easier to digest, asking easy and 10 questions at the beginning to get them started. And in the end, it improves engagement and significantly improves conversion rates.

    Key Results

    So things we’ve seen from some past and current clients are significant lifts. These are not small lifts. These are significant lifts that can really maximize and change your funnels for maximizing revenue.

    multi step form results

    And some key things to keep in mind with multi-step forms, we want to make it easy. So if you think about doing it for yourself, think about in your funnel, what are easy and 10 questions to ask to get them started? Also, you want to make sure you ask a couple of questions, so you want to get the ball rolling, create that momentum, and get them committed to completing that conversion process with and completing the rest of the form. So here you don’t want to ask for first name, last name, email, to get started, you typically want to ask for, how large is your team? What is your role? What is your product interest? But things that are more intent-focused so they can get started without hitting hurdles.

    And again, these were great with your advanced programs like personalization and ABM. So on the left, you see an example where we personalizing the rest of the form experience based on the answers on step one. Or on the right, think about maybe we skip the form, based on their being part of a target account. So based on their company name on the email, you can show them, say, a scheduler instead of say, of the rest of the form, or maybe attempt to a Drift Bot. But the idea here is based on their inputs or based on their industry company size, or even if they’re part of your target account, you can personalize from experience that step experience, or even give them different routes and experiences to better convert them.

    And like I mentioned, it works great on forms, it also works really well across the site. So we’ve run this on home pages, on product pages and solution pages, and pricing pages. And typically what we see, is significant improvement engagement, and also uptakes and conversion rate.

    So we definitely recommend you explore this, try this out on your site, and check, see whatever it works for you on your forms and beyond.

    3 Takeaways with Multi-Step Forms

    1. They work. And can often generate a 30-50% lift in form conversions.
    2. They can enhance your ABM and personalization programs
    3. The technique is effective across the site, not just on forms.

    If you are as excited as we are about getting started with multi-step forms, visit our blog funnelenvy.com/blog, jump into our quiz and see if you’re a good fit to work with us today.

    Up Next

    Learn Muti-step interactive experiences (going beyond the form)

    Multi-Step Interactive Forms Advanced Use Cases(ABM/Personalization)

    Hey everyone. My name is James Niehaus, and today I’m going to walk through some advanced use cases for multi-step interactive forms. Specifically, where it can help you with ABM and personalization on your website. And this is actually part two to an initial video I did around introducing everyone to interactive forms, why we love them so much, why they’re pretty effective for our clients, and how you can get started with them as well. So this is kind of part two of that series. All right, let’s jump right into it.

    So we’ll cover here the following things.

    • A quick recap on multi-step interactive forms
    • Why they work
    • Why they are ideal for your ABM and Personalization programs
    • 5 ways multi-step forms can enhance your ABM and Personalization programs

    All we’re doing here is taking your longer static forms on your website, breaking them up into steps, making them interactive, and leading with intent questions that get them to raise their hand and express who they are and what they want to do. So this has converted really well for our clients. As you see here, these are some examples of actual lifts we’ve seen with form conversions on forms that get started and talk to sales and get demos.

    Full Recap of Multi-Step Interactive Forms

    Before we jump into those, just a quick recap of why we think it works well, and what some best practices are.

    So always lead within 10 questions if possible. So what’s in it for them, who they are, what they’re looking for. As opposed to starting with, “What’s your first and last name, your email, or your phone number?” Right? We want to make it easy for them to get started and engage. Secondly, we want to ask a couple of those 10 questions initially, before we show them the rest of the form, because we wanted them to, one, commit, get some easy answers out of the way, and get momentum towards completing their task. So we found that this is definitely a sweet spot to kind of maximize conversions on a multi-step experience. And then lastly, just really set proper expectations. How many steps are involved, and what happens after you submit the form? Just so they right context about time and what’s going to happen next. All makes sense hopefully? Good.

    Examples of Multi-Step Form Flows

    multistep form examples

    Some best practices of multi-step interactive forms

    Results we’ve seen from multi-step interactive forms

    multi step form results

    So let’s jump right into why multi-step forms are ideal for targeting and segmentation. Hopefully, it’s pretty obvious, but in these experiences, and in those first couple of questions where we ask for either profile or intent questions, we’re getting valuable information that they want to share to better customize their experience or get better information from us.  So we want to use that information to provide, one, them a better experience, but also ideally personalize based on who they are and their company. So that’s what ABM and personalization are all about. Personalizing based on who they are and the company they’re from. Based on what you know about them and based on what you hopefully want to achieve with them in partnership.

    1. Use their answers to assign them to a segment

    Use their answers to better assign them segments for analytics and campaigns. That seems pretty obvious. More importantly, use those answers to personalize the rest of that form experience. So as they provide you information about them, provide feedback that you can support their needs, you can provide specific information about their product interest. But use that moment to actually provide reinforcement for what they’re looking for. Also, you can actually potentially use that information to route them to a different funnel or experience. So the whole idea is that not everyone should be treated the same. Your higher value prospects may be given a shortcut to talk with sales. Maybe the less valuable users may be given more of a self-service route. But use their answers and their profile to route them in the most appropriate place to maximize your limited resources, but also provide them the more appropriate experience.

    What’s even more compelling and potentially more exciting is the idea that we actually change the experiences based on who they are and what company they’re from. Now, rather than simply have one form for everyone, the idea here is that we take their answers or their inputs, and based on our business strategy we may serve them a different next step. So an example on the right, you see here based on the email and company domain, based on whether that matches a target account or not, they either can skip the form and go right to the scheduler. Or if they’re maybe not our targeted account, they would get a regular traditional form.

    Here are some examples of getting their answers and then assigning them to a segment

    2. Use their answers to personalize the rest of the form

    Customize the remaining questions, messaging, and visuals to reinforce the benefits of their selection. By using these answers to personalize the rest of the actual form experience. So if they express certain product interest or indicate they’re from a smaller enterprise, you want to reinforce that you are the right business for them, that here are the benefits of that product, or maybe here are the reasons why you’re great for SMB or enterprise, or for this industry, or for this type of role, technical or maybe marketing focused.

    You see an example, a very simple example where, on a contact us form, we just simply asked for their product interest in step one, and we then personalize the rest of the form based on that answer. So this is where you can use that information at the moment to reinforce the benefits of your business, your offering, your expertise, in a way that’s going to reinforce based on who they are and what their intent is. We’ve done this with a couple of clients and we’ve seen pretty nice positive upticks in conversion rates from this simple concept.

    3. Use their answers to route them to a different funnel

    If you identify a top target you can:

    • Skip form
    • Shorten form
    • Change questions
    • Trigger Drift/Chat

    4. Target and personalize in future sessions/other channels 

    We can target and personalize not just at that moment, but also in future sessions, in other channels. We don’t have to stop at the form. So that’s by the information we know about them, use it wherever and whenever you see them again. And then lastly, target. Over time you actually can create different questions based on their profile. So if you have certain key segments that come to your site, you can potentially target them ahead of time and actually serve them with a different actual form experience. A little more advanced, but again, as you’re committing to this strategy, you’ll see more and more ways to use it to your advantage.

      5. Target intent questions based on their profile

      The idea here is, don’t let go of the information after they complete that form. What you want to do is repeat that message, reinforced that information, and follow up interactions, whether it be a session to the site, whether it be another channel like email or display, retargeting perhaps. But the whole idea here is you’re getting valuable information at the moment from an engaged user. Use it for your advantage. Okay. So that would mean if they express certain product interests. When they come back, maybe that homepage here will change to show that product, sort of that category affinity type technique. Or based on their role, reinforce the use cases for their role. Or based on their industry, show again, case studies for their industry, for their size, or any other ideas. An example on the right you see here, where we’re targeting the homepage here all based on their different stages they’re in that we identify in the process.

      And then lastly, the idea here is … and over time, as you refine the strategy, this will become its own strategy. So much as you have with, say, your Marketo email programs, you have different nurture sequences. Or in Drift, you may have different Drift playbooks. The idea here is, over time, you recognize that you have certain key target accounts, segments, and ICPs that you’ll want to route through different form experiences. So rather than having one interactive form for everyone, you may eventually end up where you have different forms for your top segments and groups. So I don’t recommend doing this day one, but as you evolve the strategy, actually see what works, what doesn’t work, you’re going to see natural segments that perform better, or might need more guidance or handholding. This is where the strategy, once it starts getting those double-digit improvements, these are natural ways to further enhance and refine the program. And again, this is going to only make your personalization and ABM programs more targeted, because you’re targeting based on those same attributes that you care about and you want to personalize for.

      So the quick takeaways here.

      Multi-step forms. great conversion tactic. And we recommend you do this on your site today. But we think it works even better, as you’ve hopefully seen here when you combine it with your ABM personalization strategies.

      5 ways to get started:

      1. Segment by their answers they provide you
      2. Customize a form based on those answers for a better conversion rate and better experiences.
      3. Route them by their answers
      4. Target them in return sessions/other channels by their answers
      5. As you get more advanced and more mature in this strategy, start building different forms for your top use cases and your top segments.

      Learn More on Multi-Step Experiences

      Go to our website, funnelenvy.com/blog, and you’ll be able to check out the content and hopefully enjoy this and other content that’s similar. And with that said, thank you for your time. If you have questions, just drop me an email. And if you want to see our own interactive quiz, you can hit our website. And that quiz will actually help you evaluate whether you’re the right fit for working with us. So check it out and hopefully we can talk soon. With that, take care.

      How Marketing Teams Should Optimize Website for Conversions that Align with B2B Sales

      You might have heard before that marketing and sales can sometimes experience the business version of a sibling rivalry, but it’s not quite what you think.

      Within business-to-business (B2B) organizations, marketing’s focus is on generating leads, while sales focuses on getting those leads to close. A disconnect happens when your marketing team (with good intentions) focuses on volume over quality, therefore resulting in passing over a high volume of leads to sales that just won’t close.

      In this article, we’ll walk through a framework for how to categorize leads that come in through your website, how to build website messaging and landing pages that are consistent and relevant for each type of category, and how to optimize for intent as you go.

      A General Framework for Categorizing Website Leads

      It might seem obvious that your marketing team should focus on quality over quantity, or ideally both at the same time, but in practice the two can get a bit muddled.

      We recommend generally categorizing leads into three different buckets:

      • High volume, high intent. These leads should be sent to sales and prioritized.
      • High quality, Low intent. These leads should be sent to a nurture funnel where they continue to be educated and engaged.
      • Low quality. These should get filtered out altogether, or directed to a different offer.

      Ultimately, we’re talking about being more efficient with  qualification by allowing your website to do a lot of the work for you.

      This includes building consistent messaging for each lead category, building and presenting relevant landing pages for those people, and optimizing for intent as you go.

      Create Messaging that’s Consistent and Relevant

      In order to qualify each website visitor as a member of one of the lead categories above, you’ll need to be able to automatically consider two things before displaying website content:

      • How that person got to your website. The messaging on the page they visit should be consistent with the email, ad, social posts, blog post content, or search result that preceded it.
      • Their business demographic. Use marketing automation, CRM and / or 3rd party data to ensure that messaging is also relevant to their business size or industry. Focus on the industries and business sizes that have an expected value for your sales teams, and send all others into the low quality bucket.

      One effective way to do so is to display case studies from relevant industry competitors, if you have them available. 

      For example, if someone from Wells Fargo visits your fintech website, they’ll likely respond more positively to a landing page with logos or success stories from Chase or Bank of America then from Investopedia or Stripe. If that’s not in the cards for you, focus on business size first. Before showing a Wells Fargo visitor logos from a fintech startup, show a success story from Macy’s, Delta, or another enterprise business.

      This example from Shopify that’s optimized to attract businesses in e-commerce fashion. The logos and success stories listed on the page include e-commerce fashion brands, like AdoreMe, Cee Cee’s Closet and Coco and Breezy, immediately signaling to other fashion e-commerce companies that Shopify’s solution might be a good fit for them.

      This example from Shopify that’s optimized to attract businesses in e-commerce fashion.

      FunnelEnvy offers reverse IP, or account matching, and real time data integration to help marketers surface insights that allow them to display industry-specific webpages like these.

      We also help companies display pages based on other types of data, like funnel stage, company size, and more.

      This example from a large call center showcases how experimenting with personalized offers on their website by buyer segment led to an increase in qualified leads. 

      This example from a large call center showcases how experimenting with personalized offers on their website by buyer segment led to an increase in qualified leads.

      In fact, MQLs increased by 10X between March and June of 2020.

      Graph showing MQLs increased by 10X

      Landing pages that set the right expectations

      Your landing pages essentially start the sales process by presenting your products to people for the first time. For them to be effective, they need to accomplish two things:

      • Mimic your sales people. This should be true for every lead category. Once a person converts through your website and makes it to the stage where they speak to sales, they shouldn’t receive an entirely different message than what led them to convert in the first place.
      • Clearly communicate what each site visitor should expect next. This will change depending on the lead category. If your site visitor is categorized as “high quality, high intent” and on their way to talking to a sales person, tell them that. If they’re getting redirected to a different offer or getting more information sent to their inbox, tell them that instead. 

      One common mistake we see companies make is sending leads to a discovery meeting with a sales development representative (SDR) after they register for a demo. They’re expecting to see the product, when in fact, they end up in a frustrating meeting where they’re asked a lot of questions, afterwards which the real demo is scheduled depending on how they’ve qualified.

      One way to rectify this is to make the discovery process part of the inbound flow, like we do at FunnelEnvy.

      Our quick questionnaire helps us to categorize site visitors that convert so that we can set expectations for what will happen next, once they’ve completed the form.

      Take a moment to fill out this questionnaire

      Here’s another example that qualifies leads using company size and sales strategy:

      Example that qualifies leads using company size and sales strategy

      Optimizing for intent as you go

      You’ve created messaging for each lead category and set up your landing pages so that the right expectations are set. Now it’s time to take it a step further by putting in place a mechanism to filter out low-quality leads or show them a different offer.

      If a website visitor that’s not a highly valuable lead for your sales team comes along, you’ll want to be able to identify them with data that reveals their business size, industry, title, or any other identifying signal that makes a difference for you.

      If someone comes along that doesn’t fall into any of the buckets you’ve identified as high value, consider sending them to your self-service solution (if one exists) or including a message upfront that right now, you’re just not the right fit for one another.

      While it might seem scary to direct some leads away from sales, it can actually improve your sales team’s productivity and have a positive impact on revenue.

      Working with FunnelEnvy, one startup increased their monthly marketing qualified leads (MQLs) by 30%, and grew revenue from closed or won deals by 250% the following quarter. Here’s what that success looks look over time:

      One startup increased their monthly marketing qualified leads (MQLs) by 30%

      This success came from optimizing their website to align with their B2B sales strategy, and by only surfacing high quality leads to their sales teams that were ready to buy.

      Bonus: treat your high quality leads like gold

      Those leads that are high quality and have the appropriate purchase intent should be treated like gold. 

      To ensure that your sales team is successful, make sure there’s an established service-level agreement (SLA) on when and how sales is following up on those leads. For example, Marketo’s sales team commits to a 24-hour SLA.

      If a tight 24-hour turnaround isn’t in the cards for you, automate your follow-up process with marketing automation or your customer resource management (CRM) software.

      End the infamous sibling rivalry

      The infamous sibling rivalry amongst marketing and sales isn’t actually a sibling rivalry at all — in fact, it only exists when these teams try to help one another in the wrong way.

      Your website can do most of the heavy lifting to close this gap and help to qualify leads that are sent to sales automatically. 

      If you’re looking for a custom solution to help personalize your website content for leads of different types, FunnelEnvy can help — contact us.

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