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Leveraging Intent, Motivation, and Friction: FunnelEnvy’s Framework for Improving Conversions

The struggle is real. Converting website visitors into paying customers is a common challenge for every B2B SaaS company. Today’s buyers are distracted and bombarded with information. It takes a personalized experience recognizing their intent and motivation to move prospects through the sales cycle. Not only that, but they will click away at the first sign of friction.

SaaS form pages have low average conversion rates relative to other assets, converting an average of .02% of paid search visitors across industries. The upside is that you get a lot of data to work with to optimize for above-average results.

Mapping user intent, motivation, and friction at each stage of the customer journey is the key to improving your SaaS conversion rates and surpassing industry benchmarks.

Then, you can identify opportunities to streamline the sign-up flow, tailor content, and drive more leads through the conversion funnel.

Understanding the User: The 3 Conversion Buckets

Understanding user behavior is the bedrock of successful SaaS marketing. Let’s look at three key “buckets” that influence their actions and conversion rates:

1. Intent. What is the user’s goal when they land on your site? Are they researching a problem, comparing solutions, or ready to convert to a paying customer? Uncovering their intent allows you to deliver the most relevant information and calls to action (CTAs) to maximize trial conversion and, ultimately, paid conversion rates.

2. Motivation. What drives the user to take action? Is it a pressing pain point, a desire for efficiency gains, or the promise of a competitive edge? By pinpointing their motivations, you can craft messaging that resonates and moves them forward in the sales process.

3. Friction. While we can make educated guesses about intent and motivation, friction in the funnel quickly becomes painfully obvious. The good news is that it has a tangible fix. What obstacles hinder the user’s progress and potentially increase the churn rate?

Are there confusing forms, unclear value propositions, a slow-loading page, or a glitchy credit card payment process? Identifying friction points is essential to streamlining the user experience and maximizing conversion rates throughout the funnel.

In the next section, we’ll explore leveraging these “buckets” to map the customer journey and unlock reasonable SaaS conversion rates.

Mapping the Customer Journey for SaaS Success

While the customer journey describes a prospect’s experience at each stage of interacting with your brand, a journey map visually represents the user’s intent, motivation, and friction at each touchpoint.

This map allows you to identify areas for improvement and personalize the user experience for better conversions.

Source: Gustdebacker.com

Here’s a breakdown of how to create a user journey map that considers all three buckets and impacts conversion optimization:

1. Define Your Buyer Personas

Start by segmenting your audience into buyer personas. Each persona represents an ideal customer with distinct characteristics, goals, and pain points.

2. Outline the Customer Journey Stages

Map out the key stages users typically navigate, from initial awareness to final conversion (e.g., landing on your website, browsing product pages, requesting a demo, signing up for a free trial, and ultimately becoming a paying customer).

3. Plot User Intent, Motivation, and Friction at Each Stage

For each stage, crunch the data to determine the user’s intent and motivation to see where friction exists.

Intent. What information are they seeking? What problem are they trying to solve?
Motivation. What drives them towards a free trial or paid conversion? What are their hopes and anxieties?
Friction. What obstacles might impede their progress? (e.g., complex navigation, lack of social proof, lengthy forms, or a confusing sign-up process)

Optimizing Your SaaS Funnel: Addressing User Intent, Motivation & Friction

Now that you have a framework for mapping the user journey, let’s explore actionable strategies for optimizing each stage based on intent, motivation, and friction to achieve reasonable conversion rates:

Awareness Stage. Here, users are just beginning to identify their problem. Examples of content for this stage include:

Informative blog posts
Industry reports
Targeted ads that resonate with their initial pain points

For example, offer blog posts with titles like “5 Signs You Need a [Your SaaS Solution]” or infographics that showcase industry benchmarks. Keep sign-up forms for downloadable content short and require minimal information to minimize friction.

Use CTAs like “Download our Free E-book” or “Watch our On-Demand Webinar” to nurture leads and capture email addresses for further marketing automation.

Highlight your SaaS solution’s benefits and spark their motivation by showcasing success stories and social proof to convert them into leads.

Consideration Stage. Users are actively researching solutions. Content for the consideration stage includes:

Detailed product pages
Comparison charts
White papers that offer a deeper dive into your offerings.

For example, create in-depth product pages that highlight key features and benefits. Utilize case studies that address specific customer pain points and showcase the positive impact of your SaaS product.

Motivate them by showcasing unique features and addressing their specific needs through targeted CTAs like “Start Your Free Trial” or “Request a Demo” to encourage deeper engagement and trial sign-ups.

Minimize friction by ensuring a user-friendly website with straightforward navigation and easy access to valuable resources like case studies that showcase customer success. This path can help guide users toward a free trial conversion.

Decision Stage. Users are comparing vendors and nearing a buying decision. Address their intent with content such as:

Case studies
Customer testimonials
Free trials that showcase the value proposition.

Showcasing customer testimonials and success stories helps quantify the return on investment (ROI) your SaaS solution can help them achieve. Emphasize the ROI and address any lingering concerns to bolster their motivation and nudge them towards a paid conversion.

Reduce friction by streamlining the sign-up process with pre-filled forms, multiple payment options, and transparent pricing structures.

Retention Stage. Even the most highly optimized sales funnels will not matter if your customers ask for refunds or your customer acquisition costs are too high. You can decrease attrition and increase upselling with content such as:

Onboarding information
How to Get Started Videos
Special thank you email with a coupon for next purchase

Remember to look at your results within the Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) context: Calculate the total recurring revenue a customer generates over their relationship with your company. This value helps you understand the long-term value of your customer base.

Minimizing Friction Throughout the Customer Journey

Friction is a rich area for improvement because you have more control over your website experience than your prospect’s intent and motivation.

Some areas to optimize to create a frictionless customer journey include:

Website Speed. Ensure your website loads quickly on all devices to avoid user frustration and abandonment.

Clear Navigation. Make it easy for users to find the information they need with a user-friendly site structure.

Mobile-Responsiveness. Optimize your website for a seamless user experience across all devices, including smartphones and tablets.

Compelling CTAs. Use clear and concise CTAs that align with user intent at each stage to guide them toward the desired action.

Streamlined Forms. Minimize form fields and only request essential information during sign-up to reduce friction.

Multiple Payment Options. Offer a variety of secure payment methods to accommodate user preferences and prevent cart abandonment.

Live Chat Support. Provide real-time assistance to address user concerns and answer questions promptly, improving the user experience.

Conclusion: The Power of User-Centricity

As you can see, understanding user intent, motivation, and friction is the cornerstone of successful SaaS marketing. By leveraging FunnelEnvy’s framework for customer journey mapping, you can gain valuable insights into your audience’s needs and tailor the user experience for optimal conversions.

Tracking the data for this process can seem daunting. As you know, AI tools are now adding new levels of performance and complexity.

Our FunnelEnvy customer data platform enables you to create a personalized experience that responds to your website visitors within milliseconds. Reach out today to get the conversation started.

By Kala P|2024-04-18T10:16:05-07:00April 29th, 2024|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

Top Mistakes in B2B Lead Generation CRO and How to Fix Them

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is one of the top goals for B2B marketers. Why? A significant reason is that improving CRO creates a beneficial ripple effect. It can lower customer acquisition costs by getting more ROI from existing visitors and users. Like a rising tide, when CRO goes up, it can influence other metrics and lead to higher revenue per visitor and more customers.

CRO is the art and science of making your website more effective at converting visitors into customers. Even for relatively simple business models, this process has many variables. It can feel overwhelming to keep track of everything, and even the most seasoned marketers fall prey to the top mistakes in B2B lead generation CRO. Helping simplify the overwhelm is where Funnel Envy can help.

The critical thing to remember is that it’s not just about driving traffic to your website; it’s about converting that traffic into meaningful leads. The overall goal is to understand your audience, tailor your digital marketing experiences to their needs, and continually adjust your strategies based on data-driven insights.

There is so much data to track in digital marketing, especially now with the release of a new AI tool almost weekly. Improving your conversion rate is a moving target.

Where to start? It depends on your business, of course. Organic search is most likely job 1. If budgets are tight, a synergistic combination of organic and smart blogging is an excellent place to start.

You can use this chart from Databox to give you an overview of ideas on where to put your efforts.

Let’s look at some common mistakes, plus ways to fix them.

Audience, First and Always

The success of any lead generation strategy hinges on a deep understanding of the audience. Here are two common marketing mistakes related to audience targeting in B2B lead generation:

Not Defining Your Target Audience

Many B2B marketing strategies falter due to a need for more specific targeting. Not knowing who you are trying to reach with your content marketing, social media, and other efforts can lead to inefficiencies and wasted resources.

A well-defined audience is the foundation upon which marketers build successful lead-generation strategies. Defining the audience requires understanding demographics and your customer avatars’ unique challenges, interests, and behaviors.

Forgetting the Buyer’s Journey

Another frequent oversight is neglecting to factor in the buyer’s journey. The customer journey has multiple stages, from the initial awareness of a problem to the consideration of various solutions and the decision to purchase. Each phase requires different marketing approaches and content types.

For example, blog posts might be effective in the awareness stage, while detailed case studies and product demos are more suitable for the decision stage. Webinars can nudge prospects into decision mode, too.

Aligning your content and strategies with the buyer’s mindset ensures that your efforts resonate with prospects at the right time and in the right way.

Failing to Optimize Your Website

Think of optimizing your website like a lever effect – a well-optimized website can simultaneously knock out several lead-generation mistakes. Search engine optimization is the essential starting point.

Here are some other common pitfalls:

Focusing Too Much on Quantity Over Quality

One of the more common lead generation mistakes is that more leads always equal better results. However, the quality of leads is often more important than quantity. You want to optimize your website to attract, filter, and convert people with genuine interest and need for your product or service.

Poorly Designed Landing Pages

Landing pages play a vital role in converting visitors into leads. However, many B2B websites suffer from poorly designed landing pages. Poorly designed pages have unclear calls to action, lack relevant information, and are visually confusing.

Optimizing your lead capture forms and content to appeal to your ideal customer profile is essential to attracting quality leads. Well-designed forms increase the chances of conversion and ensure better alignment between your marketing campaigns and sales efforts.

A well-designed landing page should be clear, concise, and compelling. It should provide visitors with exactly what they are looking for and guide them smoothly toward the desired action, whether filling out a form or signing up for a webinar.

Lack of Clear Goals and KPIs

Setting clear goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is essential for any successful lead-generation strategy. Goals guide your efforts and help you focus on what’s critical, and KPIs allow you to measure the effectiveness of your strategy.

Common KPIs in B2B lead generation include conversion rates, click-through rates, and the cost per lead. Without these, it’s difficult to gauge the success of your campaigns and make informed decisions about where to allocate your resources for improving results.

Ignoring Data and A/B Testing

Data and testing are at the heart of effective CRO, yet it can be hard to know where to start. Here are some tips:

Testing Without a Strategy

Random testing must have a clear strategy to avoid confusion and misinterpreting results. Each test should be designed with a specific goal, whether to improve the click-through rate on a call-to-action button or increase the number of form submissions.

A strategic approach to testing ensures that you are always learning and improving your lead-generation efforts.

Pro-tip: Test Pages That Are Doing Well

While fixing broken pages is crucial, the low-hanging fruit is improving pages that are performing well. Regularly testing and optimizing all pages, including the high-performing ones, ensures you maximize your lead generation potential.

Multiple Landing Pages: The More the Merrier

Hubspot reports that business websites with 10-15 landing pages increase conversions by 55% over those with less than 10 landing pages. And that’s not all. Increasing to over 40 landing pages improved results by an eye-popping 500%.

So, obviously, multiple landing pages can lead to a dramatic improvement in performance. That doesn’t mean it’s an easy fix. The more pages, the more complex tracking and reporting will be. If you have questions about how to scale your landing page program, we can help.

Not Using Social Media Effectively

With appropriate strategies and implementation, social media is a powerful tool in the B2B marketer’s toolkit. Effective use of social media in B2B lead generation involves more than just posting regular updates.

Like your website content, social content requires a strategic approach, with content tailored to the platform and the audience. LinkedIn is the go-to platform for B2B marketers, offering opportunities for targeted networking, content sharing, and ad campaigns.

TikTok, which started as a trendy haven for GenZ self-expression, now has a rapidly growing B2B sector. Podcasts and YouTube are still the most powerful channels for teaching and trust-building. If your blog strategy is already solid, the next step could be to experiment with augmenting high-performing copy with podcast or video content.

Moving Ahead to Avoid Top Mistakes in B2B Lead Generation CRO

When designing or optimizing complex processes, workflows, or SOPs, a simplified place to start is to be aware of typical mistakes and take preventive action. From optimizing your website’s user experience to fine-tuning your social strategy, optimizing CRO involves constant learning and testing.

AI tools will continue to up the ante for marketing performance. With the right approach and focus on critical areas, you can avoid common pitfalls and drive successful outcomes for your business. At Funnel Envy, we have the expertise and tools to help you dial in your website and landing page performance to increase CRO. Reach out today. We’re here to help.

By Kala P|2023-12-18T21:59:27-08:00December 26th, 2023|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

Optimizing B2B Customer Journey with Paid Ads

B2B buyers don’t want to talk to salespeople anymore. Paid B2B ad spend is way down.

These two converging trends create a window of opportunity to increase sales and market share via B2B paid ads.

What does optimizing the customer journey with paid ads have to do with these trends?

Two converging trends create a window of opportunity to increase sales and market share via B2B paid ads. Click To Tweet

The first trend is that B2B buyers now prefer a self-serve, DIY approach to buying. Gartner’s 2023 research shows that by 2025, a whopping 80% of B2B sales transactions will occur through online platforms.

Not only that, 33% of all buyers prefer a sales experience without a seller, with 44% of millennials being the most allergic to interacting with salespeople.

The second trend is that B2B spending on paid ads has dropped considerably since pre-pandemic levels, and the recovery is uneven. This drop may signal that companies are still grappling with recovery and resetting strategies. Their hesitation means a window of opportunity for proactive fast movers to grab market share.

How can you capitalize on these trends?

One idea is to drive paid traffic to a customer journey optimized for what customers want – frictionless digital interactions, especially on mobile devices.

A place to start is by optimizing the B2B customer journey with paid ads to capitalize on buyers’ preference for using digital channels. At the same time, competitors in your industry may be waffling on paid ad strategy.

This post will guide you through the key strategies for using paid ads to optimize your B2B customer journey.

When to Consider Paid Ads for B2B

In the B2B customer journey, timing is everything. Paid ads can be beneficial at various stages and critical touchpoints in the customer journey, but the key is understanding the customer’s journey and their stages—Awareness, Consideration, and Decision— so you can pinpoint when to deploy paid advertising for maximum impact.

Awareness Stage: Getting on the Radar

At the awareness stage, potential customers recognize that they have a problem that needs solving but may not know the available solutions yet. This stage is an excellent time to use paid ads to create brand visibility.

Examples of content: Blog posts, videos, or infographics can attract prospects and introduce them to your brand.

Consideration Stage: Nurturing Leads

During the consideration stage, prospects actively seek solutions and evaluate options. They are reading reviews, comparing features, and asking their network for opinions.

Examples of content: Paid ads at this stage can drive traffic to more detailed content like webinars, whitepapers, or case studies that position your product or service as the solution to their problem.

Remember that you can use retargeting strategies to keep your brand top of mind with prospects at this stage.

Decision Stage: Encouraging Conversions

At this point, prospects are ready to make a decision. They’ve done their research and are leaning towards a solution. The goal of paid ads here is to get the prospect to take that final step.

Types of content matter. Paid ads should lead to landing pages with apparent calls to action, leading them to convert—whether purchasing, signing up for a service, or contacting your sales team. Consider running tests with promotions, discounts, or exclusive features to lure them to the close.

Ongoing Relationship: Upselling and Cross-Selling

Even after a sale, the customer journey is still ongoing. Existing customers can be even more lucrative than new prospects. Target paid ads to upsell or cross-sell additional products or services or introduce new features that benefit the customer to increase the lifetime value and retain customers for the long term.

By understanding when to leverage paid ads at various customer journey stages, B2B companies can make smarter advertising decisions that yield better results. But the buyer stage is only one part of the puzzle. You need to consider segmenting the audience, too.

Audience Segmentation and Targeting in Paid Ads

Audience segmentation and targeting are crucial for the success of any paid advertising campaign, especially in a B2B context where the decision-making process is often more complex.

Below is a more in-depth exploration of how to implement these strategies for your paid ads.

Understand Your Audience’s Pain Points and Goals

Before you start any campaign, review your understanding of the audience’s needs, pain points, and objectives. A deep understanding informs your segmentation strategy and helps you tailor your ads to resonate with each group. In a B2B setting, consider variables like industry, company size, and job roles as basic segmentation criteria.

Types of Segmentation in Paid B2B Advertising

Generally speaking, the more specific your segment, the better your ad results. If you haven’t revisited your customer personas in a few months, it’s a good idea to review and optimize them for the persona in the context of the ad campaign. Other things you can consider are:

Firmographic: Business entity characteristics, for example, industry, company size, and revenue
Technographic: Technology stacks used by the company
Demographic: For example, age, gender, education
Geographic: Location-based targeting
Psychographic: Interests, opinions, and lifestyle
Behavioral: Previous interactions with your website or app or purchasing behavior

Remember that as you test your ads, the successful ads can also be a feedback loop, giving you more accurate information about your personas.

Tailoring Creative and Messaging

Once you’ve segmented your audience, tailor your ad creative to each group’s unique needs and challenges. For example, a healthcare SaaS company could target hospital administrators with ads focusing on operational efficiency while targeting physicians with messages about patient care and workflow.

A/B Testing B2B Ads for Continuous Refinement

A/B testing allows you to test different versions of your ads to see which performs best for each segment. You can try anything from headlines and calls to action to images and overall layout.

Remarketing and Retargeting Ads in B2B

These strategies involve showing ads to people who have previously interacted with your brand. In B2B, retargeting can be incredibly practical to stay top-of-mind during a long sales cycle.

Implementing Multi-Channel Marketing

Implementing a multi-channel marketing strategy involves deploying your advertising and content across multiple platforms to engage your audience wherever they are. The key to success lies in maintaining a consistent brand message while tailoring the delivery format to suit each channel’s unique characteristics.

Whether using search engines, social media, or email, the goal is coordinating efforts to provide a seamless customer journey. Leveraging data analytics is crucial; it allows you to monitor performance across channels and refine your approach for better ROI.

By embracing a multi-channel strategy, B2B businesses can increase touchpoints, enhance customer engagement, and drive more conversions.

Conversion-Driven Landing Pages

Conversion-driven landing pages are the crucial link between your paid ads and the desired action you want the visitor to take, whether signing up for a webinar, purchasing, or contacting sales. These landing pages should offer a seamless experience that aligns with the messaging and visuals of the ads that led the user there.

Elements like compelling headlines, concise copy, and clear calls to action are essential. Utilizing A/B testing can help you refine these elements for optimal performance. You can also consider dynamic landing pages, where the system uses different landing pages based on a visitor’s journey.

In the B2B context, where sales cycles can be lengthy and complex, a well-crafted landing page can be a powerful lever for business growth, effectively turning prospects into customers.

Moving Ahead

Even with more automation and AI-driven data integration tools, B2B marketing complexity is increasing. Coordinating paid ads, audience segmentation, and conversion-driven landing pages can seem overwhelming.

While it may seem daunting, you don’t have to go it alone. FunnelEnvy can help you set up a system to track and test results at every stage of the customer journey. We work with clients in many industries, from consumer healthcare to industrial equipment. We provide customized assistance to our clients with all elements of their landing page design, from technical aspects like page speed and caching to form fields and CTA design.

Are you interested in finding out more? Just click here to complete a short quiz that we’ve created to help us learn more about your needs and how we may be able to help.

By Kala P|2023-11-01T01:47:19-07:00November 13th, 2023|General B2B Funnel Advice|0 Comments

How AI Improves A/B Testing

Advertisers have been trying to divine what people will buy for decades. Marketers began taking a data-driven approach in the 1920s, testing the performance of different paper coupons. Today’s marketers rely on A/B testing of digital advertising assets. Trying different ad asset versions has been the cornerstone of data-driven decision-making for years.

A/B testing is powerful because it gives marketers unbiased data from real customers, not survey panels. As the online audience grew, digital marketers could run more tests faster while targeting audiences in unprecedented ways.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now emerging as another game-changer for marketers. For context, AI uses algorithms and machine learning to analyze data, recognize patterns, and make decisions.

Read on for an overview of how AI is revolutionizing A/B testing, making it faster, eliminating more guesswork, and ultimately improving results.

How AI is Changing Traditional A/B Testing

Today’s digital marketers are familiar with comparing two variations of an ad asset, such as a webpage, email campaign, app interface, or any other marketing asset. The goal is to determine which version performs better regarding a specific metric, such as click-through rates, conversion rates, or revenue.

A/B testing provides several of the following key benefits:

Data-Driven Decision Making: A/B testing provides empirical data, allowing businesses to make decisions based on real user interactions rather than assumptions or intuition.
Optimizing User Experience: By comparing different versions, businesses can identify elements that resonate better with users, improving user experience and customer satisfaction.

Increasing Conversion Rates: A/B testing helps identify the most effective strategies to increase conversion rates, such as optimizing call-to-action buttons, form layouts, or product descriptions.

The chart below shows the most commonly tested assets.

Source: Truelist and VWO

Overall, AI enhances A/B testing automation, personalization, instant optimization, and the ability to juggle dozens of variables simultaneously. Here are some more details about how AI and A/B testing work together:

Automated A/B Testing: AI algorithms can automate the process of A/B testing by continuously testing multiple variants in real time. Machine learning models can analyze vast amounts of data quickly, allowing businesses to adapt their strategies dynamically based on user responses.

Personalized A/B Testing: AI enables personalized A/B testing by analyzing individual user preferences and behavior patterns. It can customize website content, product recommendations, or email campaigns for different segments of users, ensuring a tailored user experience that leads to higher conversion rates.

Predictive Analytics: AI algorithms can predict which variations are likely to perform best based on historical data and user behavior patterns. This predictive capability helps businesses focus their A/B testing efforts on the most promising variations, saving time and resources.
Real-time Optimization: AI systems can analyze user interactions in real time and optimize the user experience on the fly. For example, AI can adjust website layouts, modify content, or change product recommendations based on user behavior, ensuring continuous optimization without manual intervention.
Advanced Multivariate Testing: AI can handle complex multivariate testing scenarios involving multiple variables and interactions. It can identify intricate patterns and correlations between elements, providing businesses with deep insights into user behavior and preferences.

By leveraging AI capabilities, businesses can optimize their marketing strategies and deliver highly personalized and engaging customer experiences, ultimately leading to improved conversion rates and overall business growth.

AI enhances A/B testing automation, personalization, instant optimization, and the ability to juggle dozens of variables simultaneously. Click To Tweet

AI shines in data analysis, personalization, and adaptive responses, so let’s look closer.

Faster and More Accurate Data Analysis

Before digital marketing, marketers struggled to get sufficient data for high-quality samples. Now, the problem is the opposite. A significant challenge in traditional A/B testing is the sheer volume of online user behavior data marketers need to analyze to make good decisions.

AI excels at processing large volumes of data quickly and accurately. Machine learning algorithms can sift through massive datasets, identifying meaningful patterns humans might miss.

AI can also speed up real-time campaign decisions by generating variations. Take headlines, for example. In traditional A/B testing, marketing teams have to brainstorm and develop all the different headlines to test.

Today, AI can generate a set of headlines based on massive amounts of historical data in less than a few seconds.

Not only that, but marketers can set up all the variations they want to test simultaneously. AI will run tests and keep track of feedback on several variations at once.

AI algorithms can analyze incoming data in real-time, enabling marketers to adjust their campaigns on the fly. This agility ensures that marketing efforts align more closely with variations such as current trends and customer preferences.

Personalization and Targeting

Personalization is the key to capturing customer attention and securing repeat business for a healthy Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). A Salesforce study found that 70% of consumers say that “how well a company understands their individual needs impacts their loyalty.”

It turns out all that granular data from social media data mining is a double-edged sword. Yes, it allows marketers to create refined target audiences, but it also means that consumers are now used to seeing relevant content. Brands that can’t deliver personalized content risk looking out of touch.

The good news is that AI takes possibilities for personalization to the next level. AI algorithms can identify individual preferences and tailor content by analyzing user behavior.

AI-enabled personalization goes beyond addressing the user by their first name or simple demographics. It extends to adapting in real-time to deliver content and experiences that resonate with specific interests and needs. AI results should improve over time in the best algorithms as they continuously learn from user feedback during A/B testing.

AI also improves segmentation, allowing marketers to categorize their audience based on various parameters such as demographics, behavior, and preferences. One example is Sentiment Analysis, where AI analyzes social media posts, reviews, and customer feedback to gauge public sentiment. Refined segmentation creates a more personalized experience, enabling marketers to create highly targeted A/B tests.

By tailoring experiments to specific segments, marketers can optimize their campaigns for maximum impact, increasing the likelihood of conversions.

Adaptive Testing and Continuous Learning

Traditional A/B testing follows a linear process: create variations, conduct the test, analyze the results, and implement changes. AI allows marketers to test many variations simultaneously while tracking test results in real time. This dramatically speeds up the testing process and introduces the concept of adaptive testing and continuous learning.

Instead of static experiments, AI-driven A/B testing involves a continuous learning approach. Machine learning algorithms analyze ongoing traffic to the website, identifying emerging trends and patterns. This iterative process allows marketers to adapt their strategies in real-time, ensuring their campaigns are optimized continuously for the best results.

Automation also plays a crucial role in adaptive testing. Based on tests, AI algorithms can automate traffic allocation, ensuring the right audience is exposed to suitable variants. Intelligent traffic allocation optimizes the testing process, maximizing the impact of each experiment. Marketers can focus on analyzing results and deriving insights, leaving the repetitive and time-consuming tasks to AI-powered automation.

Moving Ahead

By leveraging the power of AI, marketers can gain a competitive edge, reaching their audience with personalized, targeted campaigns that deliver results. As you embark on your A/B testing journey, focus on understanding your audience, harnessing the capabilities of AI, and embracing continuous learning.

At Funnel Envy, we know that even though the promise of AI is promising. We also know the actual implementation raises the bar for complexity in tracking and reporting. Our FunnelEnvy customer data platform enables you to create a personalized experience that responds to your website visitors within milliseconds. Reach out today to get the conversation started.

By Kala P|2023-10-19T09:42:08-07:00October 30th, 2023|A/B Testing|0 Comments

Beyond the Obvious – Drilling Down on B2B Buyer Personas

From the time of Don Draper in the hit show Mad Men to mega Super Bowl ad spends in the 1980s, marketers traditionally relied on demographics and social trends to target and segment broad audiences. In the 2000s, digital marketing revolutionized marketers’ ability to reach more specific segments.

One risk of data is losing sight of the real people behind the numbers. Without analytics, we know nothing about the prospects behind the clicks. In 1985, a software designer named Alan Cooper invented a user persona named Kathy to add human context to the development process.

Over the years, marketers built on that idea to develop buyer personas – profiles of fictional people that embody several ideal client characteristics. Creating buyer personas is a subjective and analytical process based on data and actual customers or prospects.

The idea is to translate the raw traffic like this:

AI and ABM are driving the evolution of buyer personas

Into information to help you fill out a buyer persona template, like this:

Source: Hubspot

Why Buyer Personas Work

The buyer persona helps craft tailor-made experiences for every buyer category. In a time when empathy and personalization are more crucial than ever for funnel performance, teams must develop a granular view of the buyer’s points and journey through touchpoints to a sale.

A well-defined buyer persona can improve demand gen by filtering traffic for top-quality leads exhibiting strong buyer intent. While companies should tailor their personas to their industry and other factors, here are some basics all personas should include:

Demographics: Age, gender, location, income, etc.
Psychographics: Interests, values, lifestyle, personality traits.
Goals: What they want to achieve using your product or service. What are their motivations for considering your product or service?
Challenges: Pain points and obstacles they face in reaching their goals.
Buying Behavior: Is this a B2B or B2C customer? How do they make purchasing decisions?
Preferred Channels: Where they gather information and engage online.

A well-defined buyer persona can improve demand gen by filtering traffic for top-quality leads exhibiting strong buyer intent. Click To Tweet

Behavioral Analysis and Intent Data for Buyer Personas

Effective buyer personas use quantitative and qualitative data to segment data about existing customers, website visitors, and leads. This data may include information from website analytics tools, interviews, social media insights, and customer interactions.

Customer surveys are also helpful in fine-tuning segments and gauging customer intent. Human nature means people don’t always do what they say they might. Analytics data combined with surveys help marketers see how well what people say correlates with the actual behavior of the website traffic.

Analyze data for visitor browsing behavior patterns, content consumption, engagement levels, and purchasing history. This analysis will help you understand their preferences, pain points, and motivations.

Buyer intent refers to prospects’ actions or expected behaviors before purchasing. Analyze the keywords they use in searches, the content they engage with, and their actions on your website. Are they looking for information, comparing products, or ready to purchase? Intent analysis identifies which actions signal intent to buy as they move through the funnel.

AI-Driven Personalization Engines for Buyer Personas

AI-powered personalization is providing new tools to elevate customer experiences. By harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, enterprises can delve deep into extensive customer datasets about online behaviors, transaction history, social media engagements, and demographic insights.

Implementing AI personalization includes:

Data collection and integration into customer data platform (CDP).
Using AI algorithms to segment customers.
Automating marketing messages and content tailored to each customer persona, such as personalized email campaigns.

AI algorithms enable the personalization of the customer journey in real-time, detecting shifts in customer behavior and updating personas. Dynamic content generation can match snippets of content that resonate with specific personas, offering responsive options and recommendations that adjust for buyer personas.

Keeping up with prospects across channels has long been a challenge for marketers. AI can help synchronize personalization efforts and create more of an omnichannel user experience.

AI is rapidly evolving and still very early. Companies need to watch for bias in AI that could have unintended results. Consumers are more sensitive about their data than in the past. Governments are stepping in with privacy and data protection regulations. Companies that adopt transparency and ethical guidelines around the use of data and AI will maintain customer trust.

Account-Based Marketing Personas

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a B2B model that adapts the persona concept to create personalized experiences for entire target accounts rather than individual prospects.

While regular customer personas offer valuable insights into your customer base as a whole, account-based customer personas are laser-focused on a select few high-priority accounts.

This approach aims to develop hyper-personalized strategies that lead to more effective engagement and conversion within these critical accounts.

ABM marketing typically targets large accounts where a buying group decides over an extended period. Account-based customer personas dive into the specific organizational structure, key decision-makers, pain points, objectives, challenges, and opportunities within the target account.

The goal is to gather in-depth insights that you can use to create personalized and highly relevant strategies. For a deep dive into ABM personalization in action, check out our video, The Secret to Making Your ABM Personalization Campaign a Success.

In crafting ABM buyer personas, sales teams should realize that B2B prospects want a DIY discovery process. More than that, 33% would rather not talk to another human to complete the sale. (source: Gartner Sales).

Increasingly, sales will be won or lost by depending on getting the right content at the right time to the prospect via dynamic content generation and B2C UX. B2B prospects also appreciate experiences that “feel” more B2C, such as virtual tours or shopping cart-like check-out processes.

Moving Ahead

Every innovation disrupts the status quo, but eventually, the entire sector smooths into the next level. The 1990s transition from analog marketing to digital is a great example. Today, AI and other innovations are revolutionizing marketing with more personalization and precise buyer persona targeting.

All of these changes may improve results, but they also increase complexity. If you need help figuring out where to start, we can help. Our FunnelEnvy customer data platform enables you to create a personalized experience that responds to your website visitors within milliseconds. Reach out today to get the conversation started.

By Kala P|2023-09-08T11:10:03-07:00September 18th, 2023|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

3 Keys to Optimizing Software Services Landing Pages

B2B SaaS companies compete in crowded industry sectors, selling intangible services that often address complex problems. Landing pages play a crucial competitive role in attracting interested leads and converting them to the next step in the sales funnel.

And it turns out that less is not more regarding landing pages, especially for B2B. HubSpot reports that companies with 40 or more landing pages see a 55% increase in leads.

Optimizing Software Services Landing Pages

Source: Hubspot

Your landing pages are a significant stop for your buyers’ journey. From design to testing, optimizing a landing page can be costly. That’s why even though there are dozens of variables to test, we suggest you start with optimizing three main areas that function as performance levers for landing pages. Landing pages with video testimonials, excellent sales copy, and a friction-free user experience will put you ahead of the game.

Landing pages with video testimonials, excellent sales copy, and a friction-free user experience will put you ahead of the game. Click To Tweet

Video Testimonials to Optimize SaaS Landing Pages

Video testimonials on your landing page are a powerful way to build trust and credibility with potential customers. People are more likely to trust the experiences and opinions of actual clients and customers than any marketing jargon.

Get Specific With Your Testimonials

To make the most impact, create specific testimonials. Ask for statements about how your solution solved a particular problem for the customer. Interview formats work well because the viewer can see themselves in the dynamic as long as you ask the kinds of questions that your ideal client would ask. This approach also builds trust by positioning your brand in the context of authentic conversations.

Production Value Still Matters in B2B Videos

We are in an era where casual video is the norm, and in many cases, that’s acceptable. For testimonials, though, you want to take some extra time to make the recording as polished as possible. Most SaaS companies will benefit from videos that have decent production value.

Smartphone cameras are fairly good; just be sure you use a tripod, have good lighting, clear audio, and a well-framed shot. You want the viewer to focus on the speakers, not be distracted by issues with the video itself.

You can save time and money by batching your production and creating shorter videos from longer interview footage when creating multiple videos for testing.

Straightforward Copy

While online marketing has been around since the 1990s, sales pages predate the internet with direct copy marketers from the 1950s and even earlier. Today’s B2B prospects are busier and more skeptical than ever. While testing will help you identify what’s resonating with your audience, here are some tips for landing page copy that converts:

Build your copy around a single conversion goal: While giving people choices may seem like a good idea, research shows that the more options you offer people, the more they delay the decision. With landing pages, this translates into a higher bounce rate.
Lead with benefits: Describe your services’ benefits before presenting a laundry list of features.
Be specific: Focus on specific pain points and how your solution helps them achieve their goals.
Be succinct: While longer landing pages perform better in some cases, longer doesn’t mean rambling with filler copy. Wandering copy causes busy people to lose interest and click away. Grammarly is your friend not only for correctness but for flagging wordiness. Prospects who can easily follow the structure of the content flow stay on the page longer.
Personalize the experience: Don’t show the same offer repeatedly to a returning visitor that you deliver to a first-time visitor.

Unfortunately, even the perfect landing page copy can’t fix bounce rates from poor user experience. Let’s look at how to improve your visitor’s experience on the landing page.

User Experience Keys for B2B Landing Pages

B2B prospects are busy. Most expect an almost seamless user experience from the sites they visit. From a page design perspective, the book “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug is an excellent resource for improving user experience and conversions.

In addition, check the tech behind the page performance by testing for the following:

Compatibility Across Devices

People use various devices and operating systems to browse the internet. They expect a uniform experience across all devices. The same viewer may start looking at your landing page on their laptop, then leave the office and pull it up on their phone while waiting for a friend at a coffee shop.

Ensuring that your SaaS landing page is compatible with various devices and browsers is crucial for conversions. A responsive design that automatically adjusts the page layout to fit different screen sizes and devices ensures a seamless user experience across devices.

Loading Speed and Performance

Slow-loading pages are deadly to your landing page results. Engaging visual design is essential, yet it should never come at the cost of loading speed and performance. Studies have shown that even a one-second delay in loading time can significantly impact bounce rates.

If your landing page takes too long to load, potential customers might abandon it before seeing your offerings.

Optimize your landing page by compressing images, leveraging browser caching, and using efficient coding practices. Prioritize performance to ensure your prospects have a smooth and satisfying experience, regardless of their internet connection or device.

Moving Ahead with SaaS B2B Landing Page Strategies

At the core, landing pages are an opportunity to build trust and credibility with potential customers. Delivering an excellent user experience and clear value proposition will go a long way in converting visitors into loyal users.

If you think dozens of well-crafted, longer landing pages will lead to more leads, you’re not wrong – but there is a catch. The caveat is that the more complex your outreach, the more essential testing is to be sure you are making the right choices.

And testing is where our expert team at FunnelEnvy can assist. We work with clients in many industries, from consumer healthcare to industrial equipment. We provide customized assistance to our clients with all elements of their landing page design, from technical aspects like page speed and caching to form fields and CTA design.

Are you interested in finding out more? Just click here to complete a short quiz that we’ve created to help us learn more about your needs and how we may be able to help.

By Kala P|2023-08-09T00:31:45-07:00August 21st, 2023|Landing Pages|0 Comments

How SaaS companies should approach pricing pages

Pricing can be controversial in many sectors of the business community, partly due to the general human attitude towards money. According to research by Wells Fargo, 44% of Americans find talking about money more difficult than other serious topics, including politics, religion, and even death. And while it’s easier to talk money in a business context, you’d be surprised how many people are still somewhat sensitive to budget discussions in the B2B realm.

That’s why it can be challenging for startups to address pricing pages properly. Your pricing page is like an online version of a conversation about cost with a sales rep. When done correctly, it can add value to the buyer’s journey and nurture clients toward choosing the most profitable options. Or it could repel prospects if the pricing page poorly conveys value.

Your pricing page is like an online version of a conversation about cost with a sales rep. Click To Tweet

Software pricing can be particularly complex because of its nature. There is no physical product or anything to put in a client’s hand. They don’t receive a box or envelope in the mail. Yet the right business software can be exponentially more valuable than any physical package or equipment.

If you’re a software company or similar startup looking to nail your pricing page, this post will provide some general strategies you can apply to your funnel, no matter what kind of service or product you offer.

Presentation is Key

The way you present different pricing options greatly influences how site visitors perceive your pricing. Consider how a restaurant might have prices on its drive-thru menu or a movie theater would set concession prices. These examples are consumer-based, but the lesson is the same: juxtaposing the cost of your desired option with more and less expensive options can help nudge prospects down the desired path.

Consider the movie theater example. You might be offered a small popcorn for $4.00, medium for $5.75, and large for $6.50. Even if you originally wanted a medium, looking at the relatively small cost difference between the large and medium, you’re more likely to spring for the large.

This hypothetical is just one example: we frequently see strategies involving color, shape, and page placement. Think about the many pricing or subscription pages you’ve viewed over time, and you’ll probably be able to come up with a few ideas or devices that worked exceptionally well.

Another significant concern with the presentation on your pricing page is how you’ll discuss the particular features and benefits mentioned. Typically, this is where software companies might tout their most crucial features or ones that differentiate them from competitors in the field. You may also consider offering a different pricing structure for those companies willing to pay a larger percentage upfront using something like a quarterly payment plan. Remember the old marketing adage here: benefits are more important than features. It’s nice to say what something does, but it’s even better to say what kind of result it will create for the buyer or their organization.

Experiment With CTAs

Calls to action (or CTAs) are vital because they represent the bridge from your pricing page to a prospect converting into a client. You can change many different options here, including these:

Copy. The specific words you use for your CTA can have an impact on how well you’re able to convert page visitors into clients. Use specific action verbs whenever possible, but don’t make them too long.
CTA shapes. The classic option is a rectangular button – you’ve probably seen the type frequently. Some brands might incorporate ovals, squares, or a more uncommon shape to stand out and catch a visitor’s eye.
Colors. The colors you choose for the background, CTA elements, and text will always influence a visitor’s decision to convert. We’ve used color psychology for decades in pricing strategies for all different kinds of companies, both B2B and B2C. For example, blue is associated with trust and safety, while orange is considered aggressive and active.

Make sure that you track pricing page data as you experiment with different CTAs so that it’s clear which ones are moving the needle regarding conversions.

Lean Towards Simplicity

Many software startups provide a relatively complex digital tool for clients, whether because of regulatory concerns or industrial standards. For example, healthcare software companies may have to include an extra layer of security or encryption for HIPAA-related concerns. Manufacturing software providers might need to ensure their clients meet ISO or ANSI standards created for their field.

Even if your software falls into this category, distilling it into the simplest possible terms on your pricing page is meaningful. Whenever possible, have a bias towards fewer options and elements. This idea holds if you want to optimize your existing pricing page or alter your pricing strategy to include a new tier. Whatever new elements you are thinking about adding, be sure they are necessary to add more context to your page visitor or help get them closer to making the best decision for business purposes.

White space is a common design tool startups use in anything from pricing pages to content assets to landing pages. White space can help your pricing page maintain a smooth, clean look and contribute to improved readability – an important element to help visitors learn about your offering and understand why it’s worth the asking price.

Final Thoughts on Pricing Pages

You don’t want to take an “old school” approach to pricing where it’s hard to access or requires a visitor to offer their email address or phone number. Today’s buyer – especially in the B2B software field – is looking for valuable information as quickly as possible.

On the other hand, you don’t want to provide pricing for your product or service immediately on your website before you can add sufficient context. Doing this may be just as off-putting to a visitor as excessively guarding your pricing tiers and strategies.

Instead, your pricing page needs to land somewhere in the middle: you have to offer enough details to give visitors the information they need and allow them to determine whether or not their budget fits your asking price, but not so many details that it causes questions about the worth of what you’re offering.

Finding this balance between informative and simplistic can be tricky if you’ve never created one before. It will take a fair amount of trial and error to determine how exactly to seek this balance for your business, your specific offering, and the kind of people you want as clients.

One of the best ways to help speed up optimizing your pricing page is to seek help from experts who’ve done it before. Our team at FunnelEnvy has years of experience working with clients with all types of pricing pages, from complex tiered subscription models to straightforward lifetime license plans. We can help ensure your pricing page has all the elements needed to maximize conversions without any wasted space. Just fill out this quick form to make sure we are a good fit and learn more about what we offer.

By Raj C|2023-07-26T04:06:14-07:00August 7th, 2023|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

Pipeline acceleration: Why it matters and how to get started

When many people hear “pipeline acceleration,” they might initially think it’s strictly a sales term. We typically speak of pipelines as a sales concept. But pipeline acceleration is a critical business area requiring collaboration across departments for success.

From Meta to Google to Coca-Cola, the most successful companies worldwide have a long history of creating disparate teams and putting them together to achieve important goals. In 2012, Google even conducted an internal study codenamed “Project Aristotle” to study the dynamics of groups within a larger company. Some of its most important inventions have come from unexpected teams or individuals working on something outside their main responsibility.

Pipeline acceleration is one of the most important collaborative projects any organization can take on. When done properly, it can help a business achieve its revenue goals more efficiently and help marketing and sales team members work together to create less waste and redundant work.

What is Pipeline Acceleration?

To summarize, pipeline acceleration means moving prospects through the sales funnel more quickly. It’s sometimes called “sales acceleration” or “closing speed,” but the central idea is the same: getting a prospect from a qualified lead to a paying client faster.

As we mentioned above, pipeline acceleration isn’t just something for your sales reps to be thinking about. Research firm Forrester says the intent is to improve lead management “from cold to close,” but also that it “demands full joint and sales and marketing involvement, commitment, alignment and participation from beginning to end.” That means your marketing team has to take ownership of pipeline acceleration, too, even if many elements are ultimately under the domain of the sales team. For example, the sales team is typically the only part of the company that holds direct meetings with prospects, even though many other people may be involved in helping to set the agenda for that meeting or creating assets for the salesperson to use at the meeting.

Should you even bother with pipeline acceleration? Yes – for several reasons.

The Benefits of Pipeline Acceleration

You don’t have to look hard to see the obvious benefits of moving prospects through a sales pipeline more quickly – when you start experiencing greater revenue and more satisfied customers, the advantages make themselves swiftly known!

Beyond the obvious benefits of closing more deals faster, pipeline acceleration also helps create shared goals and outcomes for different team members at your company. Working towards the same goals builds a sense of unity in the organization, even if your team operates on different projects with various tasks.

Pipeline accelerations also create a deeper understanding of your ideal buyer persona. When you have people from diverse backgrounds and job functions looking to help a prospect reach a decision more quickly, it tends to create a deeper, more well-rounded understanding.

Finally, successful pipeline acceleration will increase communication in general among your firm. Since the process requires such a high degree of collaboration between departments and job functions, your team members will develop a natural rapport and working cadence with one another that will be easy to carry over to other projects. Understanding how coworkers collaborate is important for organizations of every size, even a small startup with only a few people.

You might think communication is better at smaller companies, but counterintuitively there are many examples of large organizations communicating better than smaller ones. Bigger companies tend to have more streamlined processes and workflows that can naturally guide a team into successful collaboration.

Understanding how coworkers collaborate is important for organizations of every size, even a small startup with only a few people. Click To Tweet

These are just a few of the many reasons to implement pipeline acceleration. If you’re convinced it’s important but unfamiliar with how to get started, the next section is for you.

Implementing or Developing Your Pipeline Acceleration Program

Like any other initiative, the first step is taking inventory of where you are currently. What steps have your sales and marketing team taken to move prospects down the funnel faster? What about other departments? In this stage, try not to judge progress or worry about where you are. You want to get a sense of previous measures and their results.

If your audit has determined you are fairly early in the process of pipeline acceleration, that’s okay – it just means you may have to start with a more simplistic approach. Consider steps like holding joint meetings between departments, creating a few shared goals, or even producing an activity you can complete together.

If you’re a bit further along your journey to implement pipeline acceleration at your company, consider the tips below:

Create a living set of guidelines shared across the appropriate departments. Doing this is relatively easy nowadays with the several collaborative team platforms available, from Notion to Slack to Sharepoint. This compilation of guidelines and processes can serve as an internal wiki, helping your team document the pipeline acceleration processes but also allowing them to improve their written communication skills.
Pay close attention to metrics before and after implementing various initiatives to help promote pipeline acceleration. The numbers and data you gather should come from the same places so you can understand how it has changed based on the steps you took. This clues you into the results of your pipeline acceleration so you can better understand what is and isn’t working.
It’s about the client first. Much of the advice in this article has been about what to do from an internal perspective. In analyzing these ideas, it can be easy to lose the forest for the trees can be easy. You must always consider your understanding and communication with prospects and clients. All of the pipeline acceleration work you do should focus on learning how to better meet prospects’ needs, thereby getting them to a sales decision more quickly.

Final Thoughts on Pipeline Acceleration for Companies

It’s easy to come across an idea like “pipeline acceleration” and assume that it’s too complicated for your organization to implement or something that you’ll get to eventually but don’t have the time to focus on.

But even if you’re a relatively small company in the earliest stages of your growth journey, closing deals more quickly is critical. It will help your business get closer to meeting tangible business goals and establish a culture of communication and collaboration. That’s a worthy goal to pursue, even if your business is only a handful of people – small companies often lack the formal guidelines around communication and business initiatives that are present at larger organizations.

Looking to learn more about pipeline acceleration or get some expert help with incorporating it into your business? Our team at FunnelEnvy is ready to help. We’ve got many years of combined experience with funnel optimization, CRO, and other important elements of pipeline acceleration across several industries, from tech to healthcare to manufacturing.

To learn more about working with us and see if we’re a good fit, please fill out this short quiz.

By Raj C|2023-07-13T06:39:58-07:00July 24th, 2023|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

The 4 Top CRO Tips For 2023

It may have taken a couple of decades to perfect the modern internet, but nowadays, technology is getting more advanced by the day. Recently, we’ve been hearing a lot about how AI and blockchain will revolutionize how we do business. It’s critical to stay current on these developments as they relate to your business.

But at the same time, many of the strategies doled out on how to respond to advancing technology look surprisingly similar to “the old way.” Often, tech just asks us to use existing principles of sales, marketing, and business with a new platform or tool.

In this article, we’re diving into four ways to think about conversion rate optimization (CRO) given everything we know about how technology is advancing this year – and beyond.

Revisit Your SEO Practices

We don’t always associate search engine optimization (SEO) with conversion rate optimization. The premise of SEO is getting new traffic to your site, after all. Smart marketers know they should consider user intent long before someone even lands on their page.

Smart marketers know they should consider user intent long before someone even lands on their page. Click To Tweet

That’s because the more people who get to your page, the better – as long as they have the right intentions. Having good enough SEO to attract visitors who aren’t interested in your offering might produce some good vanity metrics but ultimately won’t help you drive business goals. To rectify this issue, you need to consider SEO to attract the right traffic.

You can assess the way you incorporate keywords on different kinds of pages to see if it still makes sense for your intended audience. Don’t forget to examine your fundamental keyword strategy, too. Since most SEO success often comes from going for longtail keywords, if your target audience has changed, your longtail keywords may also change.

Audit the Forms in Your Funnel

Form optimization is a long, dynamic subject matter that could fill up its own blog post (or a whole series). But the foundation of it is the same as it’s always been: go through all appropriate forms and make sure there are no obstacles, distractions, or errors that arise. Ideally, you can break this down into two parts: first, audit your forms internally from a technical perspective, making sure they work with the right software and functions in your business – like a CRM or marketing automation tool.

The second part of the audit is about your users’ perspective. If possible, try to get a person outside your internal marketing team, preferably a prospective customer or someone with similar characteristics. You’ll typically get more cooperation with this form testing when you offer to compensate participants, even if it’s a simple thing like a small discount or virtual gift card.

Here are a few questions to keep in mind as you go through the testing process:

Are people completing your forms in the amount of time you expected?
Is relevant information on form pages easy enough to find?
Are any parts of the form unclear or confusing?
Does the form’s language resonate with users?

Test Load Times and Technical Elements

Load time is a significant factor in getting people to visit your site and convincing them to convert. According to statistics by Google, an increase in load time from 1 second to 5 seconds can increase a page’s bounce rate by 90%. If a critical page of your funnel is loading slowly, it can hinder your marketing efforts.

There are plenty of tools available that can help marketers improve load speed and related technical slowdowns. Google’s PageSpeed test is a good starting point – based on your results there, you’ll either want to develop a plan to cut down on elements slowing down your page or ensure protocols are in place to keep the page loading at optimal speed.

Depending on the nature of the technical challenges you’re running into, you may require outside help. Certain changes to your domain settings may need to be handled by your hosting provider, while more advanced changes to the site itself could require specialized help from a developer.

Diversify Funnel Media Types

Are you using only long-form content and headers on every page throughout your funnel? Does your main landing page use the same video you’ve had for years? Unless your forms and funnel elements are already converting at a very high level, it’s always valuable to improve your content by diversifying its delivery. While prospects in certain industries may be more predisposed to specific kinds of content, no rule says you can’t switch it up.

Video content is becoming increasingly popular in many industries, particularly with the rise in popularity of platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels. There are also infographics, audio presentations, photos, etc. You might even want to consider the presentation of your content with elements like parallax scrolling and carousels. Even if you aren’t drastically changing the information you include when you make these adjustments, you’ll find it could still add a significant bump to your conversion rate – especially on pages and funnel elements that may have been struggling previously.

As you look to add new kinds of media to your mix, remember that you’ll need to track everything in some way. If you’re adding a new kind of video, for example, be sure you have the right software tools to track important metrics and incorporate them into the rest of your analytics.

Last Thoughts on CRO for 2023 and Beyond

The tools we use to conduct business have come a long way from the pen, paper, and snail mail days. Startups can access a wealth of information about people they’ve never met or interacted with. Technology is capable of helping a company achieve some truly inspiring things today.

Yet despite all the advancements, many of the fundamentals about selling remain strong; possibly even strongerr than in the pre-internet days. When you receive messages, emails, and notifications at every turn, the fundamentals stand out as even more important now. The core tenet of conversion rate optimization is getting more people to raise their hands and signify interest in your product or service. To do that, you need to attract more of the right people, remove technical blocks that prevent them from converting, and experiment with different types of content that can better educate them on why they need your offering.

Looking for some help implementing these or other CRO tips into your existing marketing campaigns? At FunnelEnvy, our optimization specialists have spent years studying what it takes to get people interested in our clients’ products and services. We’ll bring an objective eye to your digital marketing efforts while using our decades of combined experience to help you overcome any challenges you may be facing.

To get started, just click here to fill out a short quiz that will help us learn more about your organization and how we may be able to help you meet your marketing goals.

By Raj C|2023-05-03T22:23:27-07:00May 15th, 2023|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

The 4 Most Important Landing Page Elements

We’ve devoted several posts on this blog to discussions of landing pages and their importance within the broader context of your digital marketing. It’s no exaggeration to say that a landing page can make or break your funnel. Even if other elements are well-optimized and you have a great offer that adds value for prospects, a bad landing page can significantly constrain your results.

Too often, we think about landing pages in the abstract. They’re mentioned in passing as if every marketer should know how to construct a landing page by instinct.

Unfortunately, real-world funnels aren’t that simple. Like any complex system, a landing page is only as good as its parts. The specific things you put on a landing page can vary based on the offer, your industry, and the people you want to attract. However, we’ve found that every landing page needs the below four elements in one form or another. Remember to view these tips in the context of your specific funnel and target audience.

Concise, Usable Forms

During many B2B funnel transactions, you will need to collect data from the user to take them further down the funnel. These efforts can be limited or stifled by forms that are difficult to use or unclear to the audience. Ideally, users shouldn’t need to think about forms; they should blend seamlessly into the broader landing page experience.

What exactly makes a good form? HubSpot has created a helpful list of tips, including:

Single-column design: According to design research, it’s easier for the eye to follow and progress through one column of text and fields. It can also feel overwhelming to be presented with two columns full of text and form fields.
Go from easy to hard: Putting a few simple questions at the front of a longer form will help reinforce the feeling of progress. Doing this makes visitors less likely to bounce while filling out your form, since they’ll feel they’ve already made tangible steps to finishing.
Validate entries immediately: If someone provides an invalid response to a form field – like an email address with no domain – make sure the form alerts them directly. They should not need to wait until they try to submit the form to notice and then work backward through it to identify the error.

Succinct Copy

We’ve all met someone who loves nothing more than talking about themselves. Every topic concerns what’s happening in the person’s life with little care for those around them.

No one wants to hear you wax poetic on a landing page: they simply want to know how your offer is relevant to them and what they stand to gain. Click To Tweet

The digital marketing equivalent of this is a landing page with tons of elaborate sentences and flowery phrasing about the greatness of a product or service. No one wants to hear you wax poetic on a landing page: they simply want to know how your offer is relevant to them and what they stand to gain.

That’s not to say long-form landing pages don’t work. Many B2B and B2C marketers have found success with longer, narrative-style landing pages, especially when selling a relatively new product or dealing with an audience that needs plenty of information before making a business decision.

But there’s a clear distinction between a long-form landing page and a page with too much text. Long-term testing will help you pinpoint an exact balance, but in the short term, you can reach out to trusted clients or colleagues to get quick feedback about your landing page copy. You can also use helpful online tools like the Hemingway App to see if you can make your writing more straightforward.

Social Proof

The power of social proof is well-documented and based on a simple psychological principle: people place a lot of weight on the words and experiences of others like them. Seeing that another person had a positive experience can go a long way toward convincing a prospect that your offering is right for them.

Like other parts of a landing page, the specific way you present social proof depends on the nature of the funnel and your audience. Some might like to see a talking-head-style video of a client like them speaking firsthand about how great their experience was. Others may want to look at hard data, like an ROI experienced by your previous clients.

Two quick tips for social proof: don’t go overboard. Many people are suspicious of things they see on pages designed to get them to buy or commit to something. Even if it’s true, an over-the-top client testimonial may appear inauthentic. Second, remember to offer external validation of the people you include on your testimonial page. A social profile or company website link can help visitors believe in what you’re showing.

A Multimedia Element

In 2023, “multimedia” can be defined in several ways. It could be a video, chart, graphic, animation, or even a lovely photograph depending on the specific nature of your offering and the people visiting the page. Multimedia is essential as a way to break up text on your page. It’s also valuable for visitors who may be using a mobile device or tablet and can’t spend a lot of time reading and processing text on a page.

Videos are popular for a landing page because they are easy to produce – all you need is a phone – and engaging for visitors on any device. According to marketing expert Neil Patel, it’s helpful to incorporate the video in the design of the rest of your page and track the video’s analytics closely to see how often it’s being viewed and for how long.

Final Thoughts on Key Landing Page Elements

It’s easy to conceptualize theories about landing pages and discuss ideas about what may or may not work. But for marketers who want to maximize their results, the only way to know what will lead to success is by trying and measuring different options to see which resonates most with your audience.

And remember: changes to your landing page elements or overarching strategy shouldn’t be static items you address whenever you get the time. It’s important to stay committed to frequent assessments of the success of your entire funnel, including landing page elements. By including concise copy, highly usable forms, social proof, and multimedia, you’ll be well on your way to constructing a successful funnel that drives your desired business results.

Looking for a hand with these four items or any other parts of building a landing page? Our team of specialists can help. We have many years of history assisting clients in different industries with their landing page needs. Whether you want a partner who can work with you to build a plan from the ground up or you’d simply like another set of eyes on the various components of your landing page, FunnelEnvy is ready to assist. Click here to fill out a short quiz to learn more about how we can help.

By Raj C|2023-04-05T19:53:14-07:00April 17th, 2023|Landing Pages|0 Comments

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