As noted in our article An Overview of the Path of B2B Buyers, 96% of active and non-active buyers will visit your website first BEFORE reaching out to sales… regardless of which channel or tactic was used to get their attention. This statistic serves as a reminder of the importance of your website. It will almost certainly be the first real meaningful engagement a buyer will have with your company. The pressure is increased when you consider that, according to Nielsen, you only have 59 seconds to grab a website visitor’s attention. For these reasons, you MUST ensure your website user experience is positive for visitors while also helping you achieve your marketing and sales goals.
Goals of a B2B Website
To increase length of stay, your website should act as a sales tool to increase visitor engagement by:
- Providing visitors with what they expect to find
- Giving them the right amount of information so they know what to do and where to click in order to solve their needs
A B2B website should have 2 primary goals:
- Convert the active buyers so the lead can be passed on to sales
- Engage the tire-kickers so they can be nurtured until they are buy-ready
In order to achieve those goals, you need to ensure your design, messaging, content and calls to action are aligned. Your site should be easy to navigate, educational and engaging to visitors so that they call or email your sales team OR download and share your content.
From a functionality standpoint, you must ensure that your site is mobile-friendly and loads quickly because:
- People are 5 times more likely to leave a site that isn’t mobile-friendly
- Nearly half of all visitors will leave a site if the pages don’t load within 3 seconds
Characteristics of a User-Friendly Website
In order to deliver the best possible website user experience, consider these characteristics:
- Responsive Display — In today’s business landscape, it’s critical that your website is responsive, meaning it displays properly on desktop, tablets and mobile phones. Remember, people are 5 times more likely to leave a site that isn’t mobile-friendly.
- Design that Funnels Visitors — Your site should funnel visitors by providing relevant content based on their needs. This can be achieved through the top navigation, hero image sliders, sticky headers and scrolling homepage content. You want to provide visitors with different paths for the different products or services you offer. The goal is to get them to pick a path based on their needs. At Adventure, our paths are either our “full-service” agency solutions or execution of one-and-done or campaign-specific marketing channels.
- Easy Ways to Convert the Buy-Ready — Your contact information should always be just a click away for active buyers. At Adventure, we took it a step further by implementing a chat box on every page in case a buyer prefers to chat online. You can also achieve conversion with triggers like a request for a meeting or a quote.
- Engagement Opportunities for Tire-Kickers — Your site should provide engagement opportunities for visitors who are interested but not ready to buy yet. We recommend utilizing lead magnets, which are helpful, non-salesy content pieces that you provide in exchange for an email address. When the tire-kicker submits their information on a landing page, the article, white paper or manual will download. You can use the information you collect in future marketing efforts. To learn more, read 18 Hacks To Transform Your B2B Website Into Your Best Sales Tool.
The 3% Conversion Rule
Website user experience is where many companies fail, but you can expect quality engagement if you provide a quality experience. In our article 3 Steps to Improve SEO, we introduced the scenario where if you focused on keywords that yielded 10,000 total monthly searches and you ranked #1 in those keywords, you could expect 50% of buyers to click through to your site. Ranking #2 would lead to a 25% click-through rate, 12% at #3, 6% at #4 and 3% at #5. This translates to anywhere between 3,600-60,000 yearly visitors to your website.
The 3% Conversion Rule suggests that if you provide great user experience, you can expect 3% of active buyers to reach out to sales. This translates to anywhere between 108-1,800 sales-ready opportunities a year.
Have additional questions about website design and development or want to learn even more? Call us at 815.431.1000 or submit this form to contact us. You can also visit the Web Design & Development section of our blog.
