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How to Incorporate UX Principles into B2B Funnels

There’s something of a paradox happening in many business marketing circles today: everyone wants to ensure their funnels are well-optimized for the user experience, but relatively few marketers can tell you what user experience (UX) actually means!

The truth is, there’s a good reason for this paradox: UX is a huge umbrella term that can encompass several different things to many other groups and individuals. This article will focus on some of the UX concepts most relevant to B2B marketing funnels. The key to successfully incorporating these ideas is thinking about how they may apply to your funnels and marketing campaigns.

Let’s dive in.

Incorporate as Much Feedback as Possible

According to their definition, The Norman Nielsen Group says user experience “encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.” The key term there is “user.” Some misguided or inexperienced marketers might believe they can optimize their user experience without input from their prospects. This approach simply isn’t possible if you want to maximize the improvement of your funnel UX.

For the best results, remember the idea of a specific audience and diverse methodology. In other words, you should have a highly detailed target persona already mapped out before you seek feedback from anyone – otherwise, you’re just wasting everyone’s time. Be as specific as possible about the kind of people you want to take UX information from because this data will ultimately shape your product or service’s development.

Once you’ve settled on a specific type of audience, do your best to offer them several methods of providing input on your funnel and other marketing elements. In an ideal situation, you can build intimate relationships with prospects by creating a community centered around their characteristics and business objectives. Think about what HubSpot did to grow its Inbound.org community, a forum for marketers to share experiences and tactics for the inbound methodology. At its peak, the site was bringing in over 300,000 visitors per month.

Consider building a community within your customer group, even if it’s on a smaller scale. In the era of remote work, plenty of tools are available to bring people together, including Slack and Discord. You can use a more traditional forum-based system for your community – whatever fits best into your operating methods and your customers’ preferred ways of learning about potential business solutions.

Consider building a community within your customer group, even if it’s on a smaller scale. Click To Tweet

Think About Your Microcopy

Adobe defines “microcopy” as “tiny tidbits of copy found on websites, applications, and products.” You probably run into dozens of examples of microcopy every day – think about form fields, button text, disclaimers at the bottom of a page, headlines on popular articles, etc. Even the captions on your images can technically be considered microcopy.

These items may seem pretty small individually, but taken together, they can have a severe impact on the perception of your funnel by users. We already know headlines are important, given statistics indicating that an average user only reads about 20% of the content on any given website. You can find similar studies on the importance of key microcopy within your funnel, such as the call to action found on a button at the end of a form.

While your specific approach may vary depending on the type of microcopy you’re looking to optimize, generally speaking, it’s wise to eliminate as much as possible: the shorter, the better. Most of your prospects don’t have time for unclear or lengthy instructions. Be concise and direct with your microcopy.

Review Your Funnel for Unnecessary Elements

As marketers, there tends to be an obsession with adding the next “thing” that will make your stack even better. In describing his 1980 Los Angeles Lakers team that failed to defend its championship, the legendary coach and executive Pat Riley coined the term “disease of more.” Each player wanted more accolades, money, and playing time, to the point where it started harming the collective team.

Thinking about this in a marketing context, we see parallels to software, email scripts, video courses, new form options, etc. There are lots of shiny “widgets” we can add or tweak with the idea that it will improve our funnel. In reality, several of these add-ons may not be necessary to make prospects convert. Some of them may even negatively impact your funnel’s conversion rate.

One of the best things you can do to optimize your funnel’s UX is to go through the entire thing (start to finish) and see if you can identify unnecessary things. Do your best to put yourself in the shoes of a prospect, trying not to think of it as a marketer. Think about forms, text, images, menu items, footers, headers – anything and everything should be considered. The fewer elements you have on the page, the more likely it will push visitors to the result you desire.

Even with this mental exercise, fully adopting your prospect’s mindset may be challenging. It may be better to ask a trusted customer or outside consultant to give you accurate insights.

Test Constantly and Seek Outside Perspective

Whether you incorporate these or other tactics to improve user experience, it’s important to remember the fundamental tenet of conversion rate optimization (CRO): always test your changes. Collecting data that shows the performance of a new strategy or idea in your funnel builds a concrete foundation from which you can understand what’s working and what isn’t. UX ideas can change quickly, but data will ground your funnel in the specific concepts that get results.

We also suggest that you seek perspective beyond yourself and, if possible, beyond your entire organization. As much as you can try to embody the mindset of your ideal prospect, you’ll never fully be able to get there simply because you aren’t that person. Even if you are a doctor-turned-marketer offering a product or service to the same kind of doctors, you still have the mental experience of developing and selling that offering, which colors your judgment and beliefs.

The best way to overcome this challenge is to get outside help with your UX optimization. Even if you don’t have the means (or desire) to hire an outside contractor to help you, there are options to get an external opinion. You might consider reaching out to a loyal customer, as well as some newer customers, for help evaluating the current elements in your funnel and any ideas you are thinking about implementing.

Of course, working with a group of experts with years of collective experience working on UX improvements for clients can also be helpful. We’ve helped startups and software companies in several industries increase their conversion rates by making their funnels more user-friendly and accessible so that prospects only see what they need.

If you’re interested in getting some UX assistance from the FunnelEnvy team, click here to fill out a short questionnaire, learn more about our pricing and determine if we’d be a good fit to work together.

By Raj C|2023-01-25T21:39:06-08:00February 6th, 2023|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

How to Optimize Your Funnel for Today’s Generation of B2B Decision Makers

Technology, especially digital tools like email, electronic signatures, and marketing automation, has significantly impacted our business operations. But one of the more underrated elements of business change is the evolution of the people involved. Every generation is different from the previous one, and while you shouldn’t hold preconceived notions about individuals solely because of their age, it is possible to draw broad conclusions about age groups as a whole.

In today’s B2B tech and software world, many buyers are from the millennial age range – born between the mid-1980s and early 1990s. Studies have shown that this group has a distinct preference for a few specific styles of sales and marketing. Generally, incorporating these concepts into your funnels can help even if you aren’t specifically targeting a millennial prospect.

Self-service

One of the nice things about the digital era is that it has removed several time constraints that may have previously restricted business transactions. If a prospect desires, they can load a company’s website at midnight and learn about their offering’s important features and benefits. In previous eras of business where buyers relied on suppliers to learn about a potential product or service, this model wasn’t possible.

According to research, many buyers want to do business precisely this way. Forrester’s 2021 B2B Buying Survey reported that the number of self-directed sales interactions in a typical transaction has now surpassed the number of human interactions. Other data shows meetings with potential suppliers now represent a relatively small portion of the B2B purchasing process: Gartner research says B2B buyers spend only 17% of the purchasing process on meetings with potential vendors.

It may not always be possible to show off everything your service or product can do in a way that facilitates self-service, but it’s an important ideal to endeavor to meet. In fact, buyers may get frustrated or abandon your site entirely if you don’t have the right information accessible to them whenever they want it.

Personalization

Not only do buyers want to be able to access sales information at any time, but they also have a strong desire for a customized buying process. Accenture reports that over 7 out of 10 B2B buyers want a more personalized, “consumer-like” purchasing process. This customization can manifest itself in several ways, but the foundation is always the same: a deeper understanding of your prospect’s buying journey. You must be more aware of each prospect’s specific challenges, needs, and biggest concerns throughout the purchasing process.

Buyers may get frustrated or abandon your site entirely if you don’t have the right information accessible to them whenever they want it. Click To Tweet

Another reason personalization is essential is the increasing quantity of decision-makers involved with B2B purchases today. As budgets tighten and hiring slows in uncertain economic conditions, companies are more frequently assembling buying groups to ensure they spend their dollars wisely. More people involved in buying creates a greater demand for personalized content throughout your funnel.

Finally, remember to include a personal touch in each funnel stage. From top-funnel content like blog posts and white papers to your final product demonstrations or purchase negotiations, it’s critical to stay mindful of your prospects’ needs. Understanding their desires requires a skillful blend of early-stage communication and consistent research about your audience.

Responsive Design

Making sure every element of your funnel can be viewed and consumed properly on all devices is vital because of prospect tendencies. Certain studies show that over 4 in 10 B2B buyers use mobile devices during the purchase process. Consuming content is typically one of the primary uses for mobile devices, though, in certain industries or segments, consumers might also use them for communication with suppliers.

Another reason you should ensure your website and all other parts of your funnel load correctly on mobile devices: it’s essential for technical elements of your marketing. A website that loads on mobile devices is critical for search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is also a significant element of most B2B marketing campaigns today. In other words, if your page doesn’t load on an array of mobile devices – especially tablets and smartphones – you risk alienating your prospects and negatively impacting your visibility on search engines.

Form a Human Connection

This tip is especially applicable for persuading B2B buyers of all generations – though some evidence suggests creating personal relationships is even more important with millennial and Gen Z purchasers. Of course, a buyer needs to obtain a service that fulfills their company’s objective, but beyond that, today’s buyers want to feel a more human connection with their suppliers. It’s part of why many purchasers today – both in consumer and business – emphasize spending money with companies that align with their worldview and contribute to solving significant global problems.

You don’t have to offer a cutting-edge software solution to solve a grand problem like climate change to be more human. There are plenty of ways to incorporate personal relationships into more conventional types of business. One easy tip is to try and schedule in-person or video meetings whenever possible, as opposed to communicating via phone or email. These relationships make creating a rapport with prospects much easier, which is especially important for most B2B sectors.

Implementation Tips for Funnel Optimization

Now that you have a better understanding of the specific elements to incorporate into your funnel, it’s vital to take some time to consider how you can use this information in your own funnel. The first thing to know is that it’s impossible to do everything at once – you shouldn’t rush to make sure you meet all of the requirements for the current generation of B2B buyers. Whatever steps you take to make your funnel more appealing, put your company’s authentic spin on it. Don’t try to be something you aren’t just because you think it might broaden your audience. That approach often backfires, alienating your core customer group who appreciates your service for what you do and don’t provide.

Finally, we suggest incorporating technical benchmarks to help determine whether or not these changes were successful. It’s easy to throw out broad suggestions like, “we need to personalize our content to attract the right audience.” But when you can quantify the improvements made with a statement like, “after personalizing our content, the conversion rate on our funnel’s main landing page increased by 6%,” it offers much more value when it comes to informing the rest of your marketing strategy.

Are you looking to get some assistance shaping your funnel to be more in line with the current generation of buyers? The team at FunnelEnvy can assist. We have lots of experience helping clients tighten up their funnels to increase conversion optimization rate (CRO) and bring more success to their marketing efforts. We’ve helped businesses in every sector modernize their funnels to get attention from their target audience.

To find out more about FunnelEnvy pricing and what we might be able to offer, click here to fill out a short quiz that will help us learn more about your needs.

By Raj C|2022-12-15T15:54:03-08:00December 26th, 2022|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

Personalization Strategies to Accelerate Conversion Rate

Once companies have established a functional system for marketing, personalization is typically the next big leverage point to increase their return on investment. Successful personalization can have a significant positive impact on conversion rate and client satisfaction. But how should you implement this idea – what’s the best way to tailor your marketing to the different segments of your audience?

Below are a few essential personalization strategies that can improve your funnel’s efficiency and make your audience feel like you genuinely understand their needs and concerns.

Update Your Personas

Before personalizing something for a specific audience, you must understand them. Most companies don’t make it a regular habit to review and update their buyer personas. A deep understanding of personas is vital if you want to succeed with personalization. Take some time to refresh your knowledge of each buyer persona you’ll be targeting. It may reinforce what you already know, but in many cases, you’ll uncover new trends or ideas related to a specific segment that might help with personalization. For example, is there a significant new industry regulation that one of your personas must now consider as they make decisions?

Even seemingly minor factors can provide insights that translate to more successful marketing. According to HubSpot, addressing concerns on a landing page can increase conversions by as much as 80%. Best of all, the information you learn will be applicable across different funnels and campaigns in the future.

Get Input From Users

It’s always easy to speculate in a vacuum about what users want or how they prefer to receive information. But the best way to understand your target audience is to hear it directly from them. That means talking to current and previous clients about a few significant concerns, including:

What are their biggest challenges at work?
Have any of those challenges changed since they started as a client?
What would make your job easier for the next month/quarter/year?
How helpful have you found other solutions in our industry?

Notice that these questions are more general inquiries about their work and business functions and don’t have anything to do with the specific nature of your offering. While getting feedback from your users about particular points of your service or product is always important, asking them for feedback about your product or service while requesting updated details about their professional needs can be overwhelming.

User surveys are valuable for personalization, but you must keep them concise and tightly focused. Click To Tweet

Beyond that, offering some reward or compensation to users who provide feedback that enhances your personalization efforts can also be helpful. It shows you value their time and the insights they provide, even if it’s just a percentage discount or a small gift card. At the very least, you should explain how you’ll use their feedback to make your offering better and more helpful to users like them.

Source Data From Different Business Functions

Many marketing teams face a similar challenge: siloed data. Instead of understanding the lifecycle of a customer from prospect through to purchase and retention, they can only interpret the needs and concerns of prospects through the lens of marketing actions – whether or not they convert, how long they stay on a website, their job titles, etc. The problem with this approach is that it ignores crucial elements of the customer journey that are vital to the understanding necessary for personalization. Customer interactions outside of marketing can provide a richer picture of what they are looking for from your offering.

For example, let’s say you provide a software solution that helps mortgage companies streamline their internal operations. It’s valuable to know what kind of landing page, emails, and advertisements will get the attention of prospects and convert them into subscribers or customers of your business. Suppose you can access reports on their interactions with customer service or data on which areas of your tool they spend the most time. In that case, you can use this information to personalize marketing messages in your funnel further.

Focus on Key Conversion Points

When personalizing your marketing funnel, some areas are more critical than others. For example, personalization matters on a confirmation page that appears after a user converts, but it’s essential to landing page content that helps convince visitors to take the conversion action.

As you build a strategy for improving your funnel’s personalization, you want to emphasize high-leverage points that give you the most return on the time and money invested. In some of these areas, a few small tweaks in your content and visual design can be responsible for exponential growth in conversions.

What are some of the critical areas to think about when it comes to conversions? It varies depending on your offering and funnel, but the most common ones we work with on client engagements include:

Landing page forms, including things like headlines, body copy, and field text. An easy solution here is running A/B tests that pit one version of a page against another, but there are plenty of other options for improvement if you have the right data.
Social media ads that target your audience on networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and other platforms. These are important because they are often the first interaction prospective customers have with your business. A successful ad will improve brand awareness and drive conversions towards your goal.
Drip emails that nurture clients and prospects towards signing up for your service or purchasing a product or other offering. In most B2B sales cycles, prospects will want to spend some time getting to know you before even agreeing to schedule a meeting – let alone committing to a significant, high-priced purchase. If appropriately composed with the correct elements (subject line, preview text, and body content), drip emails can be one of your most effective sales tools.

Final Thoughts on Personalization

Even in niche B2B markets that don’t represent some of the fastest-growing sectors in the world, professionals responsible for business buying decisions face a lot of noise and uncertainty. Faced with many different options and marketing messages on various platforms, buyers have no choice but to focus entirely on the solutions that seem best for their specific needs.
While it can be harder for marketers to break through to prospects and pique their interests, the scenario also creates an opportunity. A well-calibrated message that speaks to prospects’ needs and pain points can cut through a lot of that noise and resonate immediately with the right audience. That means increased conversion rates, more significant revenues, and ultimately, a more satisfied customer base that stays with you for longer.

Looking for some help from conversion rate optimization specialists on personalization and how to apply it to your funnel? Fill out this quick quiz to see if our services might be a good fit for your requirements.

By Raj C|2022-08-08T05:35:44-07:00August 8th, 2022|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

How to Structure a Successful Landing Page Within a Customer Journey

There’s a lot of discourse about landing pages in the modern B2B marketing world. Everyone has their preferred styles and templates for a landing page, a site designed specifically to push visitors towards a single action.

But a lot of advice today regarding landing pages ignores an essential element of success with landing pages: understanding the customer’s intent and the customer journey. Your landing page needs to be well-crafted, but it also needs to speak to the customer where they are in their journey. In an ideal scenario, your landing page can drive conversions while also providing tangible value to help visitors meet their goals and overcome their challenges.

In other words, two landing pages can be constructed in dramatically different ways and still achieve good results. This article will provide a few tips on how to factor in your customer’s journey as you work to build your landing page.

Consider Intent

Understanding what your customer wants from your page requires you consider what comes before and after. Generally, if they are later in the journey, they need less information; earlier in the journey will likely require more enticing details. Consider the differences between a new prospect who has recently learned about your brand and a previous customer familiar with your offerings. Each has different concerns and objectives, so they’ll likely need slightly different approaches to move them through the sales funnel.

You should construct your landing pages with this idea in mind. A landing page attempting to drive sign-ups to a newsletter will look different from a landing page made to complete a sale or encourage prospects to book an appointment with a sales rep.

Intent also means staying mindful of what your customers need from you. When a prospect shows interest, some marketers make the mistake of overwhelming them. They bombard them with information requests or hoops to jump through, hoping to maximize the amount of data they can gather. After all, the more data you collect, the better you can serve both the individual and future clients like them, right?

The problem with this philosophy is that it ignores the individual prospect’s needs. Asking for too much time or information without providing sufficient value in return is an invitation for prospects to drop out of your funnel before they convert.

Provide Proof in the Right Context

How can prospects be sure you’ll provide what you say you will? Even if you do, how do they know it’ll give their desired results? These two questions are top of mind for people who haven’t done business with you before. Your landing pages are important for answering these two questions, leading to a sale or conversion.

Think about things you could include on your page to make new prospects more confident in you. A few common examples include:

Video reviews are powerful because people are inherently programmed to want to respond to seeing other people speaking. Watching a person talk about the benefits of a product or service has more impact than just reading it as text.
Testimonials can be text-based but, as mentioned above, are best in video format. A testimonial should also include measurable data about how your offering improved the customer’s business or results.
Statistics and/or research can be important in certain fields of B2B marketing. Still, there’s a caveat: make sure it comes from a reputable source, ideally a trustworthy external organization like a university or research firm. If you plan to present your own statistics, be ready to back them up – most prospects will be inherently suspicious of data published by a company about its own offerings.

You should always calibrate the user and where they are in your marketing funnel to the specific elements of proof included on your landing page.

Find Ways to Add Extra Value

Most people are used to the idea of a landing page as a place where they complete a form to receive something in exchange. It’s one of the new standards we’ve developed after years of browsing the web and shopping online.

But what if a user reading your landing page could get more than just an opportunity to convert with a form? Your landing page could also offer them something in return. Even small efforts go a long way; try offering possible solutions for their challenges.

This compilation from the Search Engine Journal offers some great examples of this idea in practice. Check out example 8 from Persistent Systems – notice how the page includes a call-to-action button for conversion in addition to statistics, benefits, and testimonials from previous clients.

Asana’s signup page offers another great example. It’s clear that creating your account is the main focus: the page is largely blank white space, with a simple one-form field and sign-up box centered in the middle. However, you notice off to the right a list of features included with a free trial of Asana, including unlimited storage, tasks, and projects.

(Asana)

Doing this provides a great example of giving users a bit of additional value on your landing page without interrupting their journey, reducing the chance they will convert. Balancing the elements on your landing page to provide enough information to be helpful without overwhelming visitors is down to trial and error. It will take some time and experimentation to find a happy medium, and you’ll want to keep an eye on the data to make necessary tweaks that keep the page performing at an acceptable level.

Conclusion: Treat Each Page Individually

As marketers, we sometimes fall into thinking we can construct every page in the same way, as long as we address the same audience and offer the same kinds of products and services. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case for any page in your funnel, particularly landing pages.

Everyone understands the basic elements of a landing page – some form, a description of the offer, and a confirmation page, so users know they’ve completed the form successfully. Fewer marketers recognize that landing pages can be a great place to nurture prospects and customers further, as long as you do so properly.

You can get more benefits than you might have previously thought from your landing pages by staying mindful of what page visitors want. Help them increase trust in your brand and its offerings by providing additional details that can reduce their professional struggles. Don’t forget to rigorously test the changes you make so that your updates and landing page structure have the data to support them – rather than conjecture.

Looking for help optimizing your landing pages and placing them within the broader context of your marketing funnel? FunnelEnvy can help. Our team has years of experience helping all types of B2B startups and tech companies that want to tighten up their marketing funnels, improve conversions, and ultimately drive more revenue from their current investment in digital marketing.

Fill out this short quiz to learn more about our pricing and schedule a time to meet with someone from the team.

By Raj C|2022-05-18T04:20:00-07:00May 30th, 2022|The Funnel|0 Comments

4 Simple Lead Form Optimization Tips

If your marketing campaigns were a military, lead forms would be the infantry. They are on the ground in the fight for more leads and conversions. Lead forms are the “tip of the spear” for a conversion campaign. If your forms aren’t in good shape, you’ll struggle to meet your marketing goals, putting a damper on revenue and constricting company growth.

Some optimization steps are relatively easy to implement if you want to get your forms in better shape. Starting with this low-hanging fruit is a great way to refresh a campaign that was once successful but has stopped performing to its previous level or as a foundation for reviewing a new campaign before it’s finalized for launch.

Here are four easy strategies to improve your lead forms to increase conversions:

Minimize Friction

When you think about friction, you might imagine tires on a rough road or a marble sliding down a chute. In physics, friction is the resistance a surface encounters when moving over another surface. In a lead form, “friction” is anything that stops a user from filling out your form.

How do you minimize friction? Here are a few suggestions from HubSpot, with additional insights about each point:

Remove extra navigation on the page with your form. Having a standard navigation menu makes it too easy for someone to get distracted while they are trying to fill out your lead form. Even if they don’t, why give them the temptation? Most conversion forms have either no navigation menu options or a single link or button that takes users back to the home page or previous form.
Use precise language in your form. It’s a shame to put in all the work required to attract a lead to your website, only for that person to leave your page without converting because you used confusing language that they don’t understand. Make sure all parts of your writing are clear and concise, from the body copy on your website to the form fields themselves. When in doubt, it’s always best to use fewer short words than a longer, more complicated one. You can use an online tool like Hemingway to grade your page’s written content and ensure it’s understandable for the people visiting the site.
Make forms shorter whenever possible. There shouldn’t be a single unnecessary field that prospects need to fill out to complete your form, especially if they complete it to download a resource or schedule an appointment with someone on your team.

There are many other great resources for conversion rate optimization online – check out sites like Shopify and CrazyEgg for more details about optimizing your forms and other conversion elements.

Use Multi-Step Forms

“Wait,” you might be thinking, “I thought I was supposed to keep my forms as short as possible! Doesn’t using multiple steps in a form contradict this idea?” It may seem that way at first glance. However, if you spend enough time marketing online, you’ll understand that some forms must be completed fully – there’s no way of getting around it. A common example in the ecommerce world is a customer information form that includes payment and shipping information. Another example might be setting an appointment to meet with someone on your team. You wouldn’t want the location or timing of the appointment lost because of an error or oversight on your form.

If you spend enough time marketing online, you’ll understand that some forms must be completed fully Click To Tweet

If you must present page visitors with a lengthy form, the best thing to do is break it up into multiple parts so that it doesn’t feel like a massive trudge to get through. Continuing with the example of an ecommerce transaction, you’ll typically see these form pages broken up by the various phases of the transaction: purchase info, shipping info, customer name, address, etc. This split makes it much more bearable to get through instead of having all of these forms presented simultaneously.

Include Social Proof

As you know, people are social animals. We are conditioned to do things others do so we remain members of our tribe. Millions of years ago, expulsion from your tribe due to non-conforming beliefs or actions meant you had to try to survive on your own in the wilderness. Though most of us no longer live in tribes, people still have a natural tendency to trust and value the actions of others.

That’s why social proof is so valuable in modern marketing. Buyers in the B2B space tend to be less swayed by social proof than consumers, but even the most rational, logic-driven purchasers can still be persuaded to purchase if they know others have done the same. It’s particularly beneficial to get testimonials or social proof from people who are respected figures in a field. Placing social proof on your forms is a great technique for quelling those last-minute uncertainties about finishing.

Consider Form Alternatives

At FunnelEnvy, we appreciate the classic elements of marketing that have worked consistently over the years. But we’re also big believers in looking forward and embracing cutting-edge technology. We suggest considering whether or not you even need to have a form to generate conversions at a sufficient rate. There are a few different options for replacing a form, but the most popular one comes to us thanks to AI and predictive language technology: chatbots.

Chatbots have grown increasingly common over the last decade – you’ve probably seen or interacted with one recently. The premise is that instead of filling out a standardized form, users can get customized assistance for their specific questions or challenges. Although this option isn’t feasible for everyone, some companies might even supplement an automated chatbot with a live customer service agent. But with interactivity and personalization looking like critical pillars of the next generation of marketing, it’s worth considering an automated chat program to replace a form.

According to Forrester, over 40% of American adults believe it’s important for retail companies to offer live chat. And while that statistic may be mostly regarding B2C purchases, the way someone likes to make a purchase in their personal life probably translates to how they prefer to make purchases professionally.

Besides a chatbot, other options for replacing a form might include an interactive calendar or another widget that allows a user to schedule an appointment or call. In many cases, these options are simply a more advanced version of a form – but they’re still worth considering to improve your conversion rate.

Final Thoughts on Form Optimization

You don’t always have to reinvent the wheel to improve your marketing performance. By making the simple adjustments above, you can get more page visitors to fill out your forms and move to the next stage of your funnel, which ultimately drives revenue and growth for the entire business.

If you’d like some input on optimizing your lead forms or any other part of your conversion funnel, fill out this quick questionnaire to learn more about how we might be able to help.

By Raj C|2022-04-20T12:40:33-07:00May 2nd, 2022|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

Beyond SEO: Why Generating Traffic Isn’t Enough

Search engine optimization is a widely-promoted marketing discipline in part because of how impressive it looks to generate traffic increases. For marketing sites that rack up four or even five figures in unique views per month, it can be easy to get caught up in those numbers and focus on meeting certain milestones or a specific month-over-month growth rate.

The problem with having such a strong emphasis on traffic and visitors is it ignores the part of your customer journey that’s equally (if not more) important: converting all those visitors into paying clients. As impressive as it may seem when SEO helps increase monthly views by 50% or allows a page to rack up thousands of additional visits, traffic generation is meaningless unless it leads to a positive increase in revenue.

Understanding Visitor Intent

Ignoring those who accidentally visit your site, are just researching, or have no intention of buying your product or services, every person who lands on your page is at a particular step in their purchasing process. Their current place in the process will govern their intent.

According to McKinsey, there are six specific customer journeys that B2B marketers should be most concerned with: identifying products or services that meet a need, selecting a supplier for an initial purchase, co-developing products with a supplier, dealing with an unexpected event, using and servicing a product, and reordering familiar products or services.

You can break down these individual journeys into sub-steps that take a prospect from start to finish. As you evaluate elements of your website and marketing campaigns, remember to view them through the scope of these steps.

For example, the first part of identifying products or services that meet a need is knowing what’s out there. A B2B company can ensure its brand is identified during this step in several ways, from in-person promotion to search engine optimization based on relevant keywords. The specific methods you use to meet prospects at this point in the journey aren’t as important as addressing the consumer where they are without attempting to push them along the journey faster. Make sure to map your marketing efforts to these steps to maximize results.

Consider Your Conversion Rate

Besides the amount of traffic you generate, you’ll want to consider your conversion rate. While conversion rate is impacted by traffic generation, it’s a separate metric that helps you understand both your marketing efficiency and the quality of your traffic.

HubSpot provides a simple explanation for calculating conversion rate: divide the number of conversions by the total number of visitors, then multiply by 100 for a percentage. If you receive 500 visitors and 25 of them convert, you have a 5% conversion rate.

While conversion rate is impacted by traffic generation, it’s a separate metric that helps you understand both your marketing efficiency and the quality of your traffic. Click To Tweet

How do you go about improving your conversion rate? It varies greatly depending on what you’re selling, but there are a few general places you can start:

Blog. Posts on your site should be informative and well-written. If your blog is a thinly-veiled digital sales pamphlet for your products or services, prospects will catch on quickly and stop reading your posts for objective information and advice.
Forms and buttons. Experiment with different colors, fonts, sizes, etc., until you find one that works best to encourage visitors.
Social proof. This category is broad, so you may want to test several different elements. Consider testimonials, client interviews, security badges, and other indicators that you are a trustworthy vendor.
Facilitating communication. One critical element of marketing for B2B purchasers is a way to get in touch with an actual person from the vendors they’re considering. If the form you’re optimizing is designed for this purpose, remember to let users know they’ll be able to schedule a call or meeting with a real person.

Again, these are a few recommendations based on the general principles of B2B marketing. You should adapt and apply them in a way that makes sense for your specific brand and the audience for which you’ve designed it.

Segment Your Site Effectively

Once you’ve spent some time analyzing visitor intent, you can start to work on addressing the top needs of the most relevant traffic that visits your website.

In a B2B purchasing context, one of the things prospects will seek most is education. This is particularly true for newer clients who may not have been through several purchasing cycles like industry veterans. One of the most common ways companies provide relevant education to prospects is through consistent blog updates, where they can share news and developments that matter to buyers. This can also be accomplished through a longer-form medium, like reports, white papers, ebooks, etc.

Product demos and tests are other considerations – especially for software companies. Before committing a significant amount of their budget to a tool or application, buyers will want to see what it looks like while in use – possibly even use it themselves.

The desire for a test run in the world of SaaS startups facilitated the creation of the “freemium” pricing model. Users are given free access to a limited version of the tool or product, eventually encouraging them to move to a paid plan. B2B freemium models are typically more complex and dynamic – they might involve multiple meetings or presentations and test runs.

For best results, treat these segments like any other conversion element on your website and consistently work on optimizing them. Do prospects seem more receptive to learning from short-form blog posts on your site or longer white papers emailed to them directly? When people accessing your page are looking to connect with someone, is it better to list the phone number or create a pop-in window that allows users to click to schedule a call?

These are the kinds of questions you need to ask constantly instead of solely focusing on attracting traffic that may or may not be interested in your offering.

Final Thoughts on Traffic vs. Conversions

Nothing written here is intended to minimize the importance of generating traffic for successful B2B marketing optimization. Without visitors on your site, you’ll struggle to meet your marketing and sales targets, even if you have a finely-tuned digital experience that helps your prospects deal with all their relevant issues and concerns.

Focusing on traffic and SEO only becomes a problem when it takes away from other crucial parts of your marketing plan. Ignoring everything that happens after someone lands on your site will decrease your conversion rate in the long run. Even if you generate more traffic with this approach, it’ll likely be little more than a vanity metric if your site doesn’t help visitors meet their goals.

As a provider of services or products for other businesses, failing to improve your conversion rate by optimizing your on-site experience can lead to severe problems meeting growth and revenue targets. If you’re looking for help from a team of conversion rate optimization specialists with experience making funnels more efficient and improving marketing efforts, fill out this brief questionnaire so we can learn more about how best to serve your needs.

By Raj C|2022-03-22T12:59:15-07:00April 4th, 2022|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

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

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)

By James Niehaus|2021-05-07T06:34:38-07:00April 28th, 2021|Uncategorized, Conversion Rate Optimization, The Funnel, Experimentation|0 Comments

The Reason Your B2B Website is No Longer Effective

The 1907 Quakers from the University of Pennsylvania were the juggernauts of college football. Heading into a home field matchup with the Carlisle Indians they had not only won, but dominated their previous seven games by a combined score of 189-10.

Their October home game on Franklin field against Carlisle wasn’t expected to be much different. Although the Indians were also undefeated, they were a group of unheralded, undersized players that the 22,800 fans in attendance didn’t give much of a chance against their mighty Quakers.

So what happened? Carlisle demolished Penn 26-6. The most notable play of the game was fullback Pete Hauer’s 40 yard perfect spiral pass that sports historians would later call one of the “three or four signal moments in the evolution of football” and “the sporting equivalent of the Wright brothers taking off at Kitty Hawk.”

These historians attribute Carlisle’s stunning upset that Saturday to Carlisle coach Pop Warner’s exploitation of a rule change that was adopted a couple of years earlier. In order to curb the surging violence in football schools adopted a number of rules changes, most notably legalizing the forward pass.

Warner decisively capitalized on this rule change, confusing the Quakers with long passes and new formations. Penn was playing by the old rules, and caught completely unprepared for the new era of football that they had the misfortune of writing into history that day.

(more…)

By Arun Sivashankaran|2018-10-20T21:47:07-07:00March 7th, 2018|SaaS, Uncategorized, The Funnel, Strategy, B2B|0 Comments

The Beginner’s Guide to Conversion Optimization Best Practices

So you’ve heard about the wonderful gains conversion rate optimization can offer.

A few little changes to your site and boom, before you know it your lists have exploded and sales are through the roof! If only it were that easy!

The truth is that many marketing managers are often disappointed at the success, or lack thereof, of their optimization campaigns. Despite following all of the advice online, they see little to no gains from their optimization campaigns.

Unfortunately, following online advice isn’t enough to get your campaign off the ground. The changes you make and the success they bring depends on your individual audience and their behavior. It means that following the same process as someone else out there isn’t guaranteed to produce the same results.

However, that’s not to say there’s no useful advice for the budding optimization specialist out there. There are plenty of useful tips that can help you see a decent lift in your conversions.

Below, I’ll list 10 of the most widely accepted best practices for achieving a real lift in your conversions. However, before I do, there are a few things we need to cover first. (more…)

By Peter Boyle|2015-10-20T12:04:50-07:00October 20th, 2015|Conversion Rate Optimization|0 Comments

Why CRO offers the Best ROI

What’s your favorite digital marketing channel?

Scratch that. What I should have asked is in which channel do you consider to be the most effective?

Thanks to the multifaceted world of digital marketing, today’s marketing manager has a huge range of potential channels to choose from. Do you focus on SEO to build traffic and visibility? Should you dive into your social media accounts to form stronger connections with your audience? What about direct response, will that help build a better business?

They’re all great options and can bring about some great results. But in my opinion and experience, none of them holds a candle to conversion rate optimization (CRO) when it comes to increasing profits. (more…)

By Peter Boyle|2015-09-07T20:06:18-07:00September 8th, 2015|Conversion Rate Optimization|2 Comments

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