Conversion Rate Optimization: 5 Ways we achieved triple the industry standard website conversion rate

Our website is our main lead generation tool for the business with it’s primary function being to attract visitors, engage them with compelling content and convert them (via form fill) with interesting and relevant content offers.

Once a visitor fills out a form we can start a conversation with them and see if our software’s a good fit for them. The industry standard conversion rate from anonymous visitor to a lead in a marketing database is 3%, we’ve been able to increase that to 9% by following the five principles in this post.

1: Focus on quality of website traffic, not quantity

We stopped looking at traffic and started focussing on what percentage of that traffic we were able to convert to a lead and opportunity.

Display advertising can easily double your traffic in a month, but if that traffic isn't converting it’s an expensive way to promote your brand with no demonstrable ROI.

High traffic does not equal success and traffic going down is not always an emergency, looking at how much of that traffic is converting to a lead and opportunity is a much better metric to determine the health of your inbound marketing efforts.

Key Takeaway: Measure the amount of users completing forms on your site as a percentage of overall unique users, B2B industry average is 3% this will help to see if you’re attracting the right audience to your site, keep close eye on the number of form fills and opps opened from inbound as well.

2: Move to an ABM model

We moved to an account based marketing model around 2 years ago and stopped talking to everyone and started talking to companies that were the size and fit for solutions like ours.

Our corporate site traffic has dropped a little as we’ve moved away from ‘spray and pray’ email campaigns and display advertising that hit a very broad audience.

To smaller, focussed email programs and highly targeted ad programs for very specific initiatives on relevant 3rd party sites.

Read more: Four things I learnt by ABM-enabling our marketing technology stack

3: Measurement conquers all

I’ll hold my hands up and admit that it took us time to get to converting at 9%, in fact when I first measured this early in 2014 we converting just 1.2% of our visitors, it was a very manual process to merge data from Google Analytics and Pardot (our MAP of choice at the time) - it wasn’t a sustainable way to measure this but the exercise had highlighted a problem.

Our solution now uses a combination of Google Tag Manager, Drupal and Marketo, it works in the background each time someone fills out a form and allows us to report on the page, type of content and the user journey that a visitor’s taken to get there. We can quickly work out what our best performing pieces of content are, the best sources for that (paid search, social etc)

*Metrics used are for demonstration only and in no way reflective of reality ;)

4: Reduce objections to filling out forms

No one likes completing forms, in fact I actively avoid them wherever possible. The more details that you ask of a visitor / prospect the less likely they are to take the time to enter their details, we took two approaches to making forms easier to complete.

1. If we already knew who you were from a previous visit we pre-filled your information in our forms so when you came to the website all a visitor would need to do was to click submit!
2. We used a data append service to auto fill some details like country, city and office address and around 20 other firmographic data points on the account. The only form field we need from a visitor is their company name. There are lots of solutions that offer this type of service (ReachForce etc ) but we used DemandBase’s forms product with our Marketo forms (more on how we ABM enabled our MarTech stack here)

Key Takeaway: By using a data append service at the point of form submission you can actually get even more details into your system, but request less from the visitor AND raise the number of people completing your forms.

5: Offer content that people want

We’re fortunate that we make great software that our website visitors want to download or try online. I see a lot of B2B companies that offer the same content downloads time and time again refreshed year after year.

People want something exciting and valuable, their personal data’s precious - give them something they want or need.

Thought leadership articles mailed to their inbox, a complete API reference guide for a tech product as a PDF, or some tutorials are great assets for our audience and help make a great first connection.

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I'd love to know your thoughts on increasing conversions and what people are using to help drive their marketing efforts, please comment below.