Improving B2B website conversion rates

Websites often need to perform multiple jobs--from awareness and education to conversion. For B2B brands, websites can certainly be used to convert sales, and here are a few tips to help drive sales through website transactions.

• Be compelling. Encourage prospects to turn into customers by showing and explaining your value proposition. Your website must demonstrate why your brand is the right fit. Design is a critical factor. Your total brand story must be strong enough to win the favor of prospects. Being compelling means that the "total picture" comes together with your website: design, messaging, usability, value proposition and call-to-action.

• Clear value proposition. Your product or service value proposition must be well-articulated within your website. Ensure that this value proposition is easy to understand and has enough context to justify an online transaction.
• Supporting information. Without context and supporting information, you will not generation sales online. Consider using downloadable documents, specifications and case studies to provide the necessary support for an online purchase or conversion.
• Strong calls-to-action. Direct users towards a conversion. Be clear in this direction. Work hard to use the most effective language in your calls-to-action, and iterate on placement and style. Align your high-level message with a clear call-to-action to up your conversion rate.
• Upgrade your trust-factors. Trust-factors for websites range from having a contemporary design to displaying security badges. Ensure your website has appropriate trust factors: contact information, location of your business, SSL for eCommerce, privacy policies visible, badges, testimonials and other business references.
• Make it simple. An overly confusing website will yield weak results. Ensure your navigation and page content is easy to scan and read. Make sure users can find their way around. Study web analytics to fix any drop off points.
• Answer questions. Provide enough information to answer the questions of prospective buyers. Most B2B purchases take time and research before completion. Make sure you have enough information within your website and communications to inspire, educate and drive to a purchase. On an on-going basis try to collect feedback and questions from prospective buyers in order to gather more content for your website.
• Email, automation and re-engagement. For B2B marketing, automation and email can be critical to nurture leads into sales. Consider employing an automation system to help identify the touch-points that lead to a conversion and the online behavior that will make great segmentation lists for on-going communications. Most likely, a B2B sale will not be made on a single visit to a website. You need a system in place to re-engage prospects and leads over time. To make your marketing process scalable, you need the right tools to determine ROI from your efforts.