5 Proven Tips to Boost B2B Conversions
Who do you think plays the role of a lead influencer when it comes to boosting B2B conversions? Is it social media? Or email? Or PPC marketing?
Don’t worry, we will get to the bottom of everything, including why your favourite marketing strategies have lost their lustre. Are you missing out on some secret tips to success that your competitors possess but won’t share with you?
As we said, relax. You will find the answer to all your questions here. So, let’s start with the start i.e. the basics of business sales. Why? Because these basics lay the foundation upon which you lay your business empire, one that will get you a decent amount of leads for your business. And don’t worry, the leads you get from ecommerce marketing will be of high quality, thus maximising your chances of conversion.
Decoding Business to Business Sales
Now that you have decided to learn the basics first, it’s time to amaze yourself. Soon you will realize that there were many things you didn’t know about your wholesale industry, despite having years of experience.
Let’s start with the number of people you need to persuade in order to make that sale. Where in retail, it’s just the customer, B2B sales cycle involves multiple people including many stakeholders and decision-makers. Fail to impress any single one and the deal is out. You will have to start afresh.
Next on our list is the timing factor. How much time do you think a B2C customer would take to make up his/her mind? A couple of minutes? Or a couple of days, max? Now, what do you think a business customer would? Months, maybe years. The thing is, business sales processes involve different stages of ecommerce marketing, that’s why it takes much longer to accomplish.
Is longer duration good or bad for your business?
Now, you can see this longer duration as an opportunity to experiment with your personalization and retarget marketing tactics. However, don’t overdo it because if not exercised properly, these tactics might backfire. Longer durations generally have a way of messing things up.
And so do emotions. Or the lack of them. Especially when business sales are notoriously known for an emotionless process. Well, let us tell you the truth, don’t believe it, despite what everyone says. After all, B2B organizations are also run by humans, the last we checked. This reason alone justifies implementing the emotional factor while working on your conversion strategy.
We believe we have filled you with enough information to get you started. The bottom line of getting you familiar with the basics is to help you feel connected to your business prospects before the conversion process. And how do you feel connected? By taking care of the simple ecommerce marketing things that often get neglected. It might be your content that fails to convert visitors or the web design that is driving them away. Or is it your contact form that is not optimised as per the conversion metrics?
Might be. Might be not.
Let’s find out.
Comparing all the investments that can help you secure your wholesale customers, website design, so far, is considered the best. And it isn’t even much of an investment if you consider the fact that all it requires is a simple, intuitive website to make the difference. Let’s see how.
- Today’s consumers, whether B2B or B2C, are tech-savvy, they love to browse websites on various devices, be it mobile, tablet or laptop. And being a business owner, it is your responsibility to provide them with this feature to help them get the same unique experience on all devices.
- Let us tell you a fun fact. Humans love viewing images much more than they love reading texts. Certain studies also prove this. Don’t you think it is reason enough for you to start using high-quality images on your website?
- Do you know what role CTAs play in ecommerce marketing? Yes, we are talking about those brief, concise sentences that prompt people to take action. It’s about time you start focusing on them. Place them at appropriate places (like above the fold), make sure they look like actual buttons (who doesn’t love to press buttons?), and so on.
- Pay special attention to product details. Make available anything your business buyer might need to evaluate your products. These include all the technical information, 3d models and the date sheets.
- Lastly, work on that outdated content of yours. Featuring high-quality content not only lends an authoritative air to your B2B website but is also good for driving in organic traffic and quality inbound links. Just make sure it includes:
- Webinars
- Advice articles
- Company overviews
- eBooks
- Quizzes
- How-to-videos
- Blog articles
- Pricing sheets
User-Generated Content
There are very few tools in the market that hold the potential to sway customers’ purchasing decisions such as UGC or User-Generated Content. The fact that this type of content comes from other customers belonging to the same field, makes all the difference. It makes UGC much more influential and trustworthy than any typical content you can use for ecommerce marketing.
Unfortunately, the first thing that comes to our mind while thinking of implementing UGC is customer testimonials. Why? Because this is what they have seen their B2C counterparts do. But, as retail and wholesale customers belong to two completely different worlds, so different is the effect these testimonials have on them.
The thing is, retail customers love reading a little detailed info on the product or service. If you combine them with video clips and snippets of reviews, the better. Unfortunately, your B2B prospects are not so easily swayed and might need a little more than that.
A little something like case studies containing the actual statistical data that might show your prospects the worth of your business among the existing customers. Moreover, it should contain real success stories of your existing or past customers. The best way to get these stories is to encourage your customers to offer real, measurable results rather than simple praise.
Marketing Funnel
Ever seen a funnel before?
For those who don’t know, a funnel is a conical tube that is used for panning gold. Its job is to separate the impurities such as dirt etc. from the gold.
An ecommerce marketing funnel works similarly. It is a series of steps that you take in order to separate the golden buyers from the crowd of prospects that have nothing of value to offer. So, by creating a marketing funnel, you can easily and effectively boost your conversion rates. Let’s see how to build one for your business.
- Before you can separate the useful prospects from the useless ones, you need to attract all the prospects you can get your hands on, to your B2B site. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the perfect strategy to use here. It includes various steps of its own such as SEO-optimized content, Pay-per-Click marketing, social media advertising, guest posting etc for wooing the prospects.
- Once you have attracted prospects to your site, you need a way to engage them as well. Here the content of your website will play a vital role. So, make sure your website has everything a prospect might need (such as a blog post, tutorials, product sheets etc.) during his/her visit. The key here is to offer the prospects relevant information about the products they came looking to your site for, as part of your ecommerce marketing strategy.
- Going further down the marketing funnel, comes the lead nurturing. But for lead nurturing, you will need to acquire the email address of your prospects. But don’t worry, you aren’t asking them for free. It would be a sin. Instead, you would be offering them something of value in return, such as a free eBook or consultation, a downloadable worksheet perhaps..
- Now, we have arrived at the end of the marketing funnel. The only thing that’s left for you to do is to make the B2B offer. Just make sure your offer includes a free trial period or a free demo. You can also add something else that you believe can help you seal the deal.
Conversational Selling
If you belong to the baby boomers generation, we imagine you sometimes feel nostalgic for the past? We are talking about the good old days when buying and selling were based on simple face-to-face interactions. People meet, understand each other’s needs and deliver the solution. Nothing complicated at all.
Unfortunately for millennials, this type of interaction, however personal it may seem, won’t take them far in terms of growth. Conversational selling, without a doubt, is an effective ecommerce strategy. One that offers a great way to acquire new customers and nurture relationships. But, there’s a catch. If you plan to personally visit every customer across the globe, it will cost you big.
So, is there a solution to it?
Of course, there is. What are the latest technologies surrounding us for if not to make our tasks more comfortable? There are tons of live chat and messaging apps available in the market which can easily help you maintain that ‘personal touch’ in your B2B relationships. Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp etc. are few such examples. These apps are widely popular among the masses and can make you spend way less than what you were used to.
Conversational selling is not only good at attracting visitors but also at boosting your conversion rates. Let’s see how.
- Personalize the chat by keeping track of all the previous conversations you had with your individual buyers. This way, you won’t just save precious time of your sales team and your customers but will also be able to serve them better deals.
- Another effective ecommerce marketing tip is using real-time notifications. They are a great way of offering helpful information to your prospects. Just make sure the interactions that you have are relevant and contextual in nature.
- It is also worth investing in a robust data management platform that uses a centralized location to store all the customers’ data. It will be much easier for your sales team to access it whenever in need. Plus, it also helps personalize those conversations.
Want to deliver unique customer experience to your B2B customers? Encourage real-time interactions among your sales team. And while at it, ask them to keep all the customer-related information handy so as to better serve your customers.
Leaky bucket
Do you know what happens when you pour water into a leaky bucket? It leaks out, no rocket science here.
Something similar happens with your Business to Business conversions. Any amount of web traffic (water) you pour into your ecommerce marketing funnel (leaky bucket) is useless unless you fix the bucket. Till then, your most promising prospects will bail out on you.
In case you didn’t get what we are talking about, it’s the landing pages or more particularly the conversion forms, your leaky bucket. Yes, the time has come to fix the bucket i.e optimize your conversion forms.
Let’s understand this through an example.
Let’s suppose you pay 300/- for every visit to your landing page. And let’s say, you receive 1000 visits on an average day. Now, with your B2B form conversion rate at 1%, you will have to spend 30,000/- just to see 10 leads getting converted.
Now imagine, after optimizing your form, your conversion rate has jumped to 3%. Do the math. You will receive 30 leads at a cost per lead of 10,000/-
We believe the message is clear here. Just by optimizing your lead conversion form, you will thrice the number of leads for one-third the price.
Now, how’s that for fixing the bucket?
Conclusion:
In the end, it all comes down to the fact that how much you are willing to experiment with the different ecommerce marketing tactics. Plus, how skillful you are in combining them (if need be). Because only by experimenting, you will know what does and what doesn’t work for your business? Also you need the right marketing tools to implement your strategies.
Once you know the answer to this, you will be better able to use your time and budget in order to generate higher returns on investments, a by-product of better conversions.