86% of buyers will pay more for a good customer experience.
89% will take their business elsewhere after a bad interaction.
The first place they interact with you? Your website.
And I hate to break it to you, but if your website is like most websites, it’s filled with friction.
That’s why we built the Website Friction Slayer. It’s a free tool that will identify ALL of your website friction, like:
- Friction that’s creating a frustrating and slow website experience
- Friction that’s costing you sales
- Friction that’s costing you (and your customers) valuable time
How does Friction Slayer work? We’re glad you asked! All you have to do is enter your website URL. Then, Friction Slayer analyzes your site, gives you a website performance assessment, provides some helpful tips, and sends you on your way to a streamlined, frictionless web experience your visitors will love.
We analyzed 20 top technology companies with Drift’s Friction Slayer to understand how they’re performing – and give you a few hints on what you can do to improve your website experience.
If you want to read along and compare against your score, give Friction Slayer a try now.
Here’s what we found:
How 20 Top B2B Companies Scored with Friction Slayer
We pulled 20 of the best of the best tech companies we know – household names, startup unicorns, and software workhorses our team can’t live without.
We already know and love these brands (we’re even power users of some of them)…but the overall average score of their websites came out to 65 out of 100.
Friction Slayer calculates this score by adding up the five key elements of friction: page performance, accessibility, innovative experience, Conversational Marketing, and forms, and then dividing by the total number of points available. It also adds bonus points for things like security, a ‘contact us’ page, and readability.
That’s not bad! But it’s not what we were expecting – and it means that there’s plenty of opportunity for even some of the best B2B companies we know to deliver a better experience to their customers.
That number goes up for smaller companies, with the most frictionless experiences coming from companies with 500-1000 employees, a sweet spot that brings the average score up to 73. Several of our companies in that bracket had scores as high as 77.
But the larger the company, the less likely it is to have a customer-focused website experience. Competing business units, forms on forms on forms, and complicated text brought down the scores of some of the bigger companies above 5000 employees, with scores as low as 36 bringing the average for that bracket down to 53 out of 100.
5 Elements That Make or Break Your Website Friction
Let’s break it down further to see where the biggest improvement opportunities are (and how your business might compare):
1. Lightning-Fast Website Performance
Who here remembers the sweet, sweet sound of dial-up internet? 🙋
Thankfully, those days are long gone. Now, your customers expect your website to load instantaneously. And they’re not going to wait for that spinning wheel of death to learn more about your service.
The top B2B companies we analyzed know this well – the average overall performance score among them was a respectable 7 out of 10.
But only one company scored a perfect 10 on our entire list, meaning there’s plenty of opportunity to increase page speeds with a little technical know-how, like compressing files larger than 150 bytes, reducing page redirects, or improving your server response time.
You want to make sure your pages load in less than three seconds. Otherwise, a bad landing page experience means lower conversion rates, reduced pipeline, and ultimately lost revenue.
2. An Accessible Website for Everyone
If you want to create a better website experience, you have to make it better for every single visitor. That means making sure everyone can interact with every element of your website, from title tags to video transcription and image captioning. But it’s also about making your site easy to navigate, like including on-site sitemaps, using breadcrumbs, and structuring your website in a way that makes sense.
Accessibility is a clear priority for the B2B companies we analyzed – no company received lower than a 7 out of 10, and the average score was a 9.
Accessibility is the building block of a great website experience. If your website visitors can’t find what they’re looking for, then why would they do business with you?
3. Personalized Web Experiences
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to web experiences. It has to be tailored to your audience and what they need, from a visitor’s first touch with your brand to signing on the dotted line.
And it works.
Tailored experiences can increase repeat purchases and future buying intent by as much as 20%, according to Gartner. Successful personalization programs drive up to a 15% increase in revenue.
Most importantly, it’s what your customers want. More than 78% of consumers want personalized marketing communication. If you’re not personalizing your website, you’re way behind the curve.
Friction Slayer adds five points if it detects website optimization tools, and zero if it does not. 79% of the companies we analyzed were already using website personalization of some kind to give users an optimized experience, which held true across company demographics:
Constantly testing and learning what users like can help you deliver better experiences and increased conversion rates.
4. Real-Time Conversations with Conversational Marketing
50% of customers buy from whoever responds first, according to InsideSales.
That’s one way to get a sense of urgency. 😱
But you don’t have to be online 100% of the time – or force your sales team to pull all-nighters – if you want to be there when visitors are ready to pull the trigger. That’s where Conversational Marketing comes in.
At Drift, we define Conversational Marketing as the fastest way to move buyers through your marketing and sales funnels through the power of real-time conversations. It builds relationships and creates authentic experiences with customers and buyers so your website feels personal again.
The best B2B companies know how valuable it can be. Of the B2B companies we analyzed, 95% are using some form of live chat, chatbots, or AI-powered chat.
Only companies in the larger bracket weren’t using any forms of Conversational Marketing.
Larger companies may have armies of sales teams, but they’re missing the most important piece of the sales cycle: Engaging with customers in real-time 💡
5. Eliminating Static Forms
Forms = friction.
They’re an immediate turn-off that can bounce potential customers right off your site – or worse, slip through the cracks in lead nurture.
That’s why Friction Slayer deducts points for every form it finds on your website, as well as the number of fields it requires.
This surprised us the most. Of the companies we analyzed, only five had actually eliminated forms from their website. That left 75% with some number of forms on their site. Friction Slayer even deducted more than 20 points from one company 🤯
The biggest surprise? The highest number of forms came from smaller companies, not bigger ones. These same companies were all using Conversational Marketing – meaning they have everything they need to completely eliminate forms on their site already.
It’s time to say goodbye to forms for good.
(But if that sounds like too much too soon, we still have your back. Drift recently introduced something that can help you drive more qualified pipeline from your lead forms. With Drift Fastlane you get to keep your forms and fast-track qualified buyers to sales – instantly – or let them book a meeting for later.)
Try Friction Slayer for Yourself
Now that you’ve got a benchmark to start from, try Friction Slayer for yourself. It’s super easy to use – just enter your URL here, and we’ll analyze your site from top to bottom to help you understand how to build a more streamlined, frictionless web experience your visitors will love.
Is a bad web experience costing you your next customer? See how your website stacks up with Friction Slayer.
