8 Quick Steps to Double B2B Conversions

8 Quick Steps to
Double B2B
Conversions

www.pardot.com © 2008 Pardot, LLC. All rights reserved worldwide 8 Quick Steps to Double B2B Conversions
Executive Summary
The great divide for business to consumer (B2C) and business to business (B2B) marketers is the definition of conversion. In the B2C world, conversion starts and ends in the same place: the purchase. For B2B marketers with long, complex sales cycles, conversion typically means getting a visitor to fill out a form in exchange for something of value: a white paper, a demo or a free consultation, for example. There are four distinct groups of people that are interacting with your landing pages: 1. Visitors that leave within 10 seconds of arriving at your landing page make up the vast majority of viewers. 2. Visitors that leave when they decide your landing page is not compelling are the next largest segment. 3. Some visitors attempt to fill out your form but fail or give up and then drop off. 4. A small percentage of your visitors successfully convert and become leads. Online visitors are busy and easily distracted. As the information above illustrates, you have a very limited time window to prove your value proposition. In the eight steps that follow, you will learn how to boost the effectiveness of your landing pages and raise the number and quality of your B2B conversions. Some of these steps are simple best practices and others are made possible by recently developed web technologies, but all will contribute directly to your online lead generation program.
www.pardot.com | © 2008 Pardot, LLC. All rights reserved worldwide 2 8 Quick Steps to Double B2B Conversions
Eight Quick Ways to Double Your Landing
Page Conversions
Simplify Your Form Use conditional fields to keep things short and sweet. With landing pages, less is often more. Nothing frustrates a visitor more than arriving at a landing page, seeing a compelling white paper offer, but then realizing she will have to fill out a long and complicated looking form before receiving anything of value. Companies who ask for more than a handful of data points in the first interaction with a visitor are encouraging form abandonment. B2B sales are typically multi-touch and complex, rather than instantaneous, impulse buys. Because there is a long sales cycle, marketers can flesh out a prospect's profile over time as each touch point provides an opportunity to collect more data. A solution called progressive profiling uses what are known as conditional fields to ask for just one or two data points during each interaction and gradually build an in-depth prospect profile. This lessens the burden on prospects while still collecting the valuable information that the marketing and sales teams need to move forward. Picture this: A visitor hits your landing page and is asked for her name, email address and company in exchange for a white paper. Twenty minutes later she requests a flash demo and is asked for her job title. In three weeks, she returns to your site and is asked for her department in exchange for a case study. Finally she is asked about her buying stage when requesting a live demonstration. The same form is used for all the content across your site, but progressive profiling allows the form to intelligently display only the fields that you are missing for a prospect. Marketing automation software uses cookies to identify returning prospects and remember what information they have already given you. Try to keep the first form down to four fields at the most and guide prospects to view other compelling content across your site to gradually obtain additional data.
www.pardot.com | © 2008 Pardot, LLC. All rights reserved worldwide 3 8 Quick Steps to Double B2B Conversions Track Implicit Data in Addition to Explicit Your prospects are telling you a lot more than it seems. You can gain valuable data from prospects on forms, but often even more telling is the implicit information that can be gleaned without your visitors even telling you. By tracking activities at the individual prospect level, you can: . Track the lead source on landing page submissions down to the search term. This shows you exactly where your leads are coming from, so you can optimize your pages based on popular keywords and determine which campaigns are most eff... [download for more]