At Drift, we’ve helped more than 50,000+ businesses close deals faster with conversational marketing. So we’ve learned a few things when it comes to optimizing your B2B site for conversion. Hint: It all starts with chat.
But upping your conversion rates and shortening your sales cycle encompass so much more than just throwing up a chatbot and walking away. Which is why we’re spelling out our website conversion secrets here.
The catch? Well there isn’t one. In this blog post, we’ll walk through step-by-step examples of how to bring buyers and sellers together, build alignment between your teams and improve the buyer journey all while helping you close more deals.
Ready? Let’s go!
Understanding The Buyer’s Journey
First things first.
To best optimize your site for conversions, you need a deep understanding of how buyers, well, buy things today. They have more information at their fingertips than ever before. And they’ve never had more options to choose from. Combine that with higher expectations and today’s on-demand world and you’ve got a recipe for a pretty tough sell.
So understanding how your buyer’s go through a buying journey will help you capture, nurture, and monetize their attention and intent.
Awareness – Capturing Attention
At this stage, the buyer has a need, a problem, and/or an opportunity. They’re starting to explore what solutions and businesses can help.
And you need them to make their way to you. How exactly you capture their attention is the tough part, especially when doing so is getting harder by the day. To capture buyer attention you need to understand buyer intent.
Ask yourself what’s bringing people to your website in the first place? What’s the intent of people who are engaging with your content? After all, the best possible time to engage is when they’re expressing their intent and giving you their attention.
Consideration – Nurturing Attention
Now that you’ve captured a prospective buyer’s attention, you need to help them understand how you’ll solve their need.
Show them what success looks like and how they can get their faster with your product or service. The buyer is likely considering several options. So determining how you guide and nurture them to choose yours is key.
A few things to keep in mind: Buyers today need education, positive affirmation from people like them, and verbal affirmation that your solution is the best one.
Decision – Monetizing Attention
The final step in the journey is buy-in. It’s ensuring that everyone who’s evaluating potential solutions agrees and sees the opportunity and value in yours. You need to help each prospect clearly understand why you’re the best option.
And this extends to all stakeholders – not just the person doing an initial search. You need to ultimately win over all decision makers to make the sale. This likely includes end users, decision makers, legal, and system integrators.
In this step, it’s all about serving as a trusted advisor to your buyers. And presenting a path to value that’s confirmed by other buyers similar to them. Help them feel confident that your solution is the right solution.
Analyzing Your Funnel
Now that you understand what buyers are expecting and experiencing, it’s time to examine how you actually help buyers move through this journey. The truth is the buyer journey and your funnel are in conflict.
How many people can you reach each month? Why are so few converting into leads and why are so few qualified?
Funnels need to be designed to capture buyer attention when a buyer is demonstrating explicit intent.
Your funnel needs to start and continue conversations and help the customer make the journey down your funnel – ushering future customers to the next action you want them to take on your website. This will increase conversion rates, create more qualified leads and accelerate your sales cycles.
All leading to more revenue.
You need to measure and establish benchmarks for how your marketing and sales funnels are performing. Think about what might be the choke points – the points where you’re seeing poor or decreasing conversion rates.
Answering these questions will help:
How do you generate leads?
- What campaigns do you run?
- Are they evergreen or seasonal?
- Are they online or via email?
- Events? Direct Mail? Content Syndication? Affiliate Marketing?
How do you qualify leads?
What are the most important things you need to know about a lead to make them qualified? E.g. Tech stack? Company size? Budget?
What actions create a qualified lead? E.g. Requesting a demo, booking a meeting, talking to sales, submitting a request through contact us, different behavioral scoring algorithms?
What are the steps in your sales process and how do you define them?
Discovery call (BDR) > Demo (AE) > Email follow up > Close?
Measuring Your Website’s Performance
Now let’s go a layer deeper to examine your website’s performance.
First identify what pages get the most traffic. You can do this in Google Analytics.
Then try to establish each page’s conversion rate. Your homepage probably gets the most traffic but I’d be willing to bet that in most cases it doesn’t even have a conversion rate because you’re not using it to start conversations.
Your website is a bottleneck. It’s open for business but the front door is locked ? You’re gating your content and offers with long forms. Making people wait to talk to you. You spent a lot of time and money generating their attention. But only 2-3% of your visitors are filling out your forms.
Take a look at your pricing page, contact us, and other high intent buying pages. Take note of conversion rates on these. Then look at what channels you’re using to drive traffic to those pages. If an ideal visitor lands on your website, what do you want them to do? Free trial, demo, talk to sales, download content?
Lastly, group your website into three categories:
You’ll use the insights you gather to prioritize what pages have high potential for conversions. AKA which could benefit most from chat. Plus you’ll figure out not only where to put those bots, but what they should say and how they should function. Essentially, what each chatbot is ultimately driving towards.
6 Real Chatbots to Get Started with Today
You did the hard work up front and now you’re ready to implement chat on your site to close deals faster. Here are six chatbots to help you get started today.
1. The Second Net Bot
You have a page that has a form on it to help drive conversions.
It could be a pricing page, long form content, a contact sales page, or request a demo page – and in order for someone to do anything on that page, they have to fill out a form.
But you want to increase the conversions on that page. Add a bot! Here’s exactly how.
Think of it this way: You can either walk into a Starbucks and wait in line to get coffee, or you can order it through the mobile app.
At the end of the day, you get coffee regardless.
2. The Conversation Starter Bot
You don’t have a ton of traffic coming to your site.
But you want to take advantage of the traffic that you do have by driving qualified conversations all over your site. And you want to go live with conversational marketing in a fast and easy way.
Leverage this bot to deliver an interactive and engaging message to the visitors on your site to make every site visitor count!
Which message would you interact with?
“Hey there! How can we help?”
OR
“I’ll give you $500 right now if you click on this and start chatting with me.”
Probably the second one right? Make your messaging so engaging your site traffic WANTS to chat with you!
3. The Pricing Page Bot
You have a pricing page.
It could be a page that shows higher intent. Or it could be a pricing page that is gated with a form. Yet instead of sales conversations, you’re seeing more support questions come through than anything else.
But you want to be able to answer questions on how your pricing actually works and which plan would be best for each prospect, without updating the website.
Leverage the high intent that comes to your pricing page by offering up answers to frequently asked questions but routing in your sales team so they can focus on what they do best: selling!
By leveraging your chatbot to do a lot of the hard work, then passing off your leads to sales you can make sure you’re providing the most delightful buyer experience possible.
4. The Retargeting Bot
You have a lot of traffic coming to your site.
Visitors may come through retargeting campaigns, for your content, or you just have a loyal following of fans, and you know that returning visitors have higher intent and a higher chance of converting.
But you treat those visitors just like first time visitors. You don’t create a custom experience for them on your website.
Imagine walking into your favorite coffee shop, or gym, or studio and getting treated like the new guy.
That’d feel weird and cold, right?
Instead recognize your repeat visitors with messaging like “Hey welcome back” or “Nice to see you again!” or even “Hey I remember you!” so that your returning visitors, that have higher intent, feel recognized.
5. The Paid Ad Converter Bot
You spend a LOT of money on paid campaigns.
And you know that paying for traffic means you need to convert more of those users to make your campaigns successful.
But you drive that traffic to an overview page with a form on it. Or you treat that traffic just like anyone else, making them hand over a lot of information before they can get to where they want to go.
Instead, recognize that traffic came to your site from somewhere else and make them want to stay!
Deliver your value proposition quickly in the conversation and don’t push this traffic to a demo just yet.
Instead, have your main CTA be a piece of content that will educate this traffic and ask if they’d also like a demo once they’ve opted into getting the content.
6. The Account Based Marketing Bot
Your sales team has a list of 100-1,000 dream customers that they’re trying to target.
And you’ve been aiding in that outreach with campaigns like direct mail, ads, etc.
But when that account comes onto the website, they don’t get the red carpet rolled out for them. They have to jump through the same hoops as everyone else. PLUS the rep doesn’t know that the account is on the site and has to follow up with them later.
Instead, give them the VIP treatment. Greet them by name, take them by the hand and show them exactly who they’ll be working with at your company and give them a direct line to that person.
It’s like shopping with a personal shopper versus going on your own. Give your Target Accounts that Personal Shopper experience they should be having on your site.
Ready to get started with a custom website conversion assessment with one of our conversational marketing experts? Sign up here.
After signing up you’ll receive a website conversion assessment worksheet. It includes a marketing and sales funnel assessment, the six plays you can use right now to increase website conversion rates, and six examples of businesses that have used the plays to increase conversion rates and revenue.
Our experts will then walk you through how to:
- Identify the choke point in your funnel
- Pick the play that’s best for your website
- How to connect with leads faster
Based on your use case, they’ll help you set up your first conversational marketing chatbot. You’ll get a clear understanding of how conversational marketing will increase your conversion rates and help you close more business.
Ready to go? Sign up for your free Website Conversion Assessment here.
