Fresh Egg's 10 B2B Tips for CRO Success
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Check out our 10 top CRO tips for B2B marketing. Learn why it's essential to have a good toolkit and why mobile is a game changer from one of our CRO experts, Joe Doveton. See our video webinar here: https://youtu.be/3f1mCB9pu80
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Fresh Egg's 10 B2B Tips for CRO Success
- 1. CRO for B2B Joe Doveton Business Director – Fresh Egg
- 2. What is CRO? Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the discipline of improving website and app performance through an ongoing programme of analysis, testing and iteration.
- 3. Why CRO? Well, why do you have a website? B2B marketing is mostly about leads To get leads you need to make it easy for website users to interact The principle is the same as B2C marketing; make it easy for the user to gather information and make decisions
- 4. 10 B2B tips for CRO success
- 5. 1. Trust your data
- 6. How much do you really trust your data? Don’t make decisions on inaccurate data - get an analytics health check Are you tracking the right things? Are the correct events being recorded? How is it reported back to the business? Who is acting on it? Trust your data
- 7. 2. Get a process
- 9. Get a process Anyone can do CRO, you just need to follow a clear process Gain an executive sponsor in your business Get a project team (maybe even part time) Spend 80% of your budget on staff and 20% on tools Always have a data gathering / discovery / research phase
- 10. 3. Have a scientific approach
- 12. Have a scientific approach to uncovering the evidence of why users are not converting The HIPPO could be wrong Stop making site changes based on an opinion Collect evidence. Both quantitative and qualitative Quantitative: web analytics, and business reporting Qualitative: UX studies, customer surveys, user testing, competitor analysis (Have clear hypotheses for the changes you want to make) Have a scientific approach
- 13. 4. Page leakage
- 14. In Google Analytics, one of the most valuable reports is page value leakage – this gives you the priority areas to look at To calculate leakage multiply page value by the exit rate This will give you a list of the most valuable pages on your website that feature as part of a converting journey that still have a high exit rate Fix the biggest holes first Page leakage
- 15. 5. Hierarchy of goals
- 16. #5 Hierarchy of goals
- 17. What do you want your users to do on the page? Make this the clear priority. In visual hierarchy, all secondary actions should be downgraded The main goal should have a clear high contrast user action; a call-to- action button is perfect Use language specific to your business such as “request a call back” or “request a brochure” Make those social buttons monochrome and put them below the fold Hierarchy of goals
- 18. 6. Improve those forms
- 20. Optimise your forms B2B sites often have a form completion as a main form of data capture Problems with forms include bad labelling, extraneous fields, unclear outcomes and unresponsive elements Use form analytics to work out which form fields are causing you problems Use form analytics to collect field-by-field data Improve those forms
- 21. 7. Mobile is a game changer
- 23. Mobile web issues that stop conversions include: Site load speed. If your website has lots of bandwidth hungry images this may slow down your page loading on a mobile Use a “mobile first” approach - either a responsive site that renders appropriately for mobile, a specific “m-dot” site built for mobile Ergonomics are different on phones - users will mainly be looking at the screen in portrait Avoid drop downs and enable click-to-call functionality Mobile is a game changer
- 24. 8. Sales & customer service
- 25. You may not know ‘what you know’. Conduct stakeholder interviews with your sales team and customer services What feedback do they get about your website? What improvements to your site are your clients suggesting? Sales & Customer Service
- 26. 9. Get a good tool kit
- 28. Get a toolkit that matches your budget and aspirations. There are options for every budget For the enterprise level, Optimizely and Adobe have the most complete functionality and best support network Equally, at the lower cost end of the market AB Tasty, Feng Gui and Hotjar do a brilliant job at an affordable price Get a good toolkit
- 30. B2B generally has more focus than B2C - some businesses have a finite universe of customers. In fact, segmentation and personalisation is easier in B2B. You can personalise by geo-IP location, time of day, products previously viewed The list is endless Getting customers to log-in and present lists of requirements allows you to build segments of users with similar requirements Personalisation is a journey not a destination Towards personalisation
- 31. Conversion RateOptimisation (CRO) isforeveryone. Especially B2B Following these top 10 tips will help you start eliminating the reliance on opinion in your web design CRO is not just AB or split testing - there are many methods of generating insight - from querying your web analytics, to undertaking user studies, interviewing internal stakeholders and running surveys for your customers There are many alternatives to writing up a lengthy business case and recruiting a team - start small and agile CRO is bringing the spirit of enterprise and experiment to a B2B organisation like yours. So, why not you?
- 32. Thank you Joe Doveton – Business Director, Fresh Egg T: 01903 285857 E: joe.doveton@freshegg.com www.freshegg.co.uk
Editor's Notes
- Good afternoon. Thanks for coming along. I’m Joe Doveton from Fresh Egg and I’m going to talk to you about Conversion Optimisation for Business 2 Business. Fresh Egg is a digital marketing company and we’ve been providing conversion advice for nearly 10 years. Our team has come up with site improvements worth millions of pounds in uplift for our clients. We continue to work with big and small brands in B2B, but also in other sectors such as Retail, Education and Financial Services. In the last year alone, the Conversion Optimisation work that we’ve done for non-ecommerce sites has resulted in an average conversion rate improvement of 33% for non-ecommerce websites. Increasing leads by a third has the potential to transform a lot of businesses.
- But first, what is Conversion Rate Optimisation (or as it is usually abbreviated…..CRO?) Conversion Rate Optimisation is the discipline of improving the performance of your website. Rather than Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) or PPC Advertising/Google Adword -which is about driving traffic to your site- CRO is about improving the experience for customers when they arrive on your site. Usually it involves analysing user behaviour and testing new versions of your web pages to see which one performs the best.
- So why CRO for business to business? Pretty much all businesses that sell to other businesses have a website. And pretty much all of them have websites that generate leads for sales teams. The principle of optimisation for B2B websites is exactly the same as it is for B2C- you need to make it easy for the user to read the site, navigate around it, find content, gather information and take an action. For B2B sites a converting action could be something like picking up the phone or completing a form.
- So for the next 10 minutes or so, I’m going to give you Fresh Egg’s top 10 tips for CRO success in B2B
- The first one is trust your data. Can we have a show of hands, how many people have Google Analytics? Any one using Adobe Analytics? Another platform?
- Your web analytics needs to be reliable. It is surprising and scary the number of businesses that are reporting internally on inaccurate data. This means your executives are making business decisions on wonky information. Luckily there is a quick and easy solution- get a professional analytics healthcheck. Some of the problems we routinely see at Fresh Egg are: Bot traffic…highest we’ve seen is 90% bot traffic. Page/conversion tracking broken due to one-page websites or use of iframes (B2B experience this a lot, they quite often have iframes pulling in booking systems etc.) No call tracking (this is really important for understanding lead generation on a website…how is your B2B website going to make decisions without knowing the success of website?) So when you think about your data, what you need to ask yourselves are: Are you actually tracking the right things? Are the correct events being recorded? How is the information being reported back into the business? And who is acting upon it?
- The second top tip for CRO success is to get a process that works with your business. The key thing to remember is that you need there are broadly three stages in successful CRO. Firstly. some form of research to understand where the problems lie Secondly, an ongoing strategy to make changes- Thirdly- an iterative programme of improvements, usually via AB testing your designs The important word here is iteration- your website should never be “finished”….you should be constantly looking for improvements.
- Get an executive sponsor in the business- someone who buys into the idea of increasing lead generation from your existing traffic and is happy for you to introduce a culture of experimentation. This means accepting that some AB test lose. Luckily there is no “right way” of working and a right toolkit. Anyone can do it. You just need something that works with your business. It’s perfectly acceptable to start small. Just get started. You may not need a full time team- building a virtual project team where you have part of the working week of a web analyst, a project manager, a UX person. This can work too. Start with a process of data gathering. Find out what is wrong with your site?
- Our third top tip is to think of yourselves, for one minute, as scientists.
- There are many options for collecting information.
- Most CRO programmes start with a period of data gathering. Why? Because currently most of the decisions you make are based on opinion. Often one person’s opinion- the boss. However, chances are the HIPPO could be wrong. So you need to collect evidence about why your site isn’t performing as it should. You’ll be looking at performance data from Google Analytics. How is your paid traffic performing? What about traffic from social media? Which geographical locations are providing you with the most leads? You’ll also be looking at your competitors designs? How do they generate leads? What do your customers think about your site- run surveys to find out? All of this will allow you to build up a fuller picture of how people interact with your site and what they actually want you to improve. And once you have evidence, have a clear scientific hypotheses like “if we reduce the clutter around our forms then more customers will complete them because it looks easier”
- A really valuable piece of evidence you can look at is in your analytics- page leakage. Currently your website is like a leaky bucket, whether you know it or not. There are pages or funnels where you are losing customers that could be converting. You just need to know which are the most important pages.
- Page leakage is calculated by multiplying page value by the site exit rate. You can assign page value in the admin tab in Google Analytics under goals. This gives you- in order- the list of the most valuable pages on your website that feature a converting journey that will still have a high exit rate. This means you can identify the pages that are the biggest holes in your leaky bucket and focus on improving those pages first instead of wasting time on pages that are already performing OK.
- When you look at a website it’s not always clear what the website owner wants you to do.
- When you look at a website it’s not always clear what the website owner wants you to do. Have a look at this example from a B2B technology website. These guys sell e-invoicing software online via a Saas model. Here’s the homepage. They’ve got 3 calls to action. Who thinks they want you to click on the “How to order button” Who thinks they want you to click on the “contact us button” Who thinks they want you to click on the “get support” button.
- The point is with that design- there were far too many calls to action all in competition with each other. The user didn’t really have clear direction about what you want them to do. So you need to have a hierarchy of goals- if it is to get users to fill in a form have a big “enquire now” button, in a prominent position, with a high contrast colour. Better still, test alternative versions of CTA language such as “request a call back” or “request brochure”. Don’t clutter prime page real estate with prominent links that aren’t going to get your direct leads. Is your priority to get customers going off to Facebook or Twitter? If not make those social buttons monochrome and put them below the fold. Get users making phone calls or completing forms instead.
- On the topic of forms….. We could run a whole session just on optimising web forms. In the vast majority of cases, B2B web forms need improving. Some of the common problems include: Canvassing data that you don’t really need, adding unnecessary length to the field. Asking for work phone, mobile phone, home phone, fax, inside leg measurement…… Dominating the page with a huge banner image, pushing the form under the fold where the user can’t see it Using confusing drop downs Using a multicolumn layout Having bad error validation so users don’t know where they have gone wrong The bare facts are that short forms work better. Vertical forms work better. Forms above the fold work better. Clear error validation works better.
- Luckily there a whole range of tools you can use to improve forms.
- I thoroughly recommend user testing videos. Have a look at some of your customers struggling to complete your forms. Also, use form analytics. There are great tools like Inspectlet or Formissimo which can pinpoint specifically which fields are the most problematic.
- But while we’re on the topic, don’t forget the phone. Because mobile is a game changer.
- Mobile web traffic has now overtaken desktop traffic. A joint survey between Google and Millward Brown found that 42% of B2B decision makers use a mobile device when researching a B2B procurement. Another Google survey found that 74% of B2B decision makers are more likely to return to a mobile friendly site Mobile usability now has a direct impact on your Google rankings and mobile Google searches have increased by 300%. So you need to think how your site loads and behaves on a phone. Everything is different- usually orientation is portrait. Users are swiping and tapping not using the mouse. The graphic on the screen shows the thumbzone- the part of the screen that can be reached with a user browsing with their thumb. This fundamentally alters how you design your webpage.
- There are numerous common mobile web problems. The biggest is probably site load speed. If your site has lots of bandwidth hungry images that aren’t properly compressed this may slow your page loading. A study by Movi found that if your page hasn’t loaded in 4 seconds phone users will already have started swiping down the page. So you need a mobile first approach- either a responsive site that works well on both desktop and mobile or a specific m.dot. You may even need an app if you have a utility that helps decision makers. You need to consider how customers use the phone, primarily portrait, with fingers and thumbs. So avoid unnecessarily small forms and difficult to use dropdowns. And always allows users to click to call straight through to your sales team.
- Talking of your sales team. Chances are some of the most valuable knowledge you can bring into a B2B CRO programme is locked up in the heads of your sales teams and your customer service guys.
- There is a very good chance that you might not know how much valuable data is locked up in the heads of your employees. The sales team and customer services are speaking to people who are using your site every day of the week. Helping with information queries. Qualifying leads. Helping people get pricing. You need to conduct internal stakeholder interviews with your sales team and customer services. Often they are dealing with queries like “I can’t find information about x on your website” What improvements are being suggested to them by your customers.
- To do CRO you don’t just need people and processe---- you still need a good toolkit
- The fortunate thing is that there are a myriad of options for a good toolkit to fit every size of budget and aspiration.
- In the enterprise space, Established only 6 years ago Optimizely now has the biggest install base of any testing platform but also arguably the best support network. Adobe’s Test and Target is the 800 lb gorilla in terms of complexity, capability and price. And of course price. These testing platforms are complemented by high performance, big ticket tools in the space of click visualisation (such as Decibel Insight) and Enterprise standard web prototyping tools like Axure. Fortunately, there are lots of brilliant tools that will give you some of the functionality of the enterprise tools at a fraction of the cost. Hotjar and bunting do cheap survey and personalisation software. And in the AB testing arena, there are a few options now with AB Tasty and Omniconvert providing the ability to do split testing at a lower monthly cost.
- My final top tip for CRO success is regarding personalisation. This topic has been getting increasing amounts of focus over the last year or so. It’s very closely related to CRO because Personalisation requires a lot of the same skills and often the same tools are used. Adobe and Optimizely both have a personalisation product.
- The important thing to remember is that you will need to move towards personalisation. You can’t get there in one leap. It starts with understanding your customer segments and having the ability to put tailored messages in front of these segments. In many ways, personalisation may be easier with B2B because some of you have a finite universe of potential customers. You will already be encouraging customers to sign up for newsletters or member benefits. You may have data on repeat customers. To this customer data you can add personalisation by geo-IP location, time of day, products previously viewed. Don’t expect to get to highly targeted personalisation straight away….remember personalisation is a journey not a destination.
- So that wraps up my top 10 tips for CRO success in B2B. Following these top 10 tips will help you move out of the dark ages and start introducing data into your design decisions. Real customer information rather than gut feel. Although split testing is great, remember too that CRO is not just about AB testing. There are many other methods of generating actionable insight- from looking in detail at your analytics, to undertaking users studies and especially interviewing internal stakeholders and doing customer surveys. Finally, I would just ask you to stop putting in blockers and just get started. Many organisations are gaining competitive advantage by running CRO programmes. Why shouldn’t yours be one of them?
- Thanks.