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. 

Landing page journey

(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 |2025-05-12T04:36:58-07:00May 30th, 2022|Conversion Rate Optimization|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 Share on X

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 |2025-05-12T04:36:57-07:00May 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. Share on X

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 |2025-05-12T04:36:57-07:00April 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

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

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

Up Next

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

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…)

Go to Top