Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the science and art of increasing the percentage of site visitors who take the desired action like signing up for a newsletter, filling out a contact form or making a purchase. For B2B marketers who use data to drive their strategies, CRO mastery has transformed from being a nice-to-have bonus into a must-have skill.
“Since B2B sales cycles are longer and decisions often involve committees rather than individuals, improving conversions can multiply the results of your marketing efforts manifold and deliver better business outcomes,” said Ryan Gould, COO & Executive Vice President of Client Strategy at Elevation Marketing.
“In this day and age when markets get saturated due to increased competition levels plus the sophistication exhibited by contemporary B2B buyers keeps rising; just driving traffic to your site won’t cut it anymore,” he adds. “This calls for an elaborate conversion rate optimization strategy, which I have found to be very useful over the years while leading the development of websites for various B2B firms within different industries.”
Large or small, businesses can use CRO to make the most out of their visits by converting passive browsers into valuable engagements. It centers on understanding customer behavior and preferences to turn these insights into actions aimed at improving user experiences and boosting conversion rates.
Whether you’re refining your website conversion rate optimization for the first time or seeking actionable pro tips, the following steps of conversion optimization are your roadmap to success.
Step 1: Define your CRO goals and objectives
“It is critical to set clear, measurable goals and objectives,” says Gould. “Benchmarks will help you set specific targets. Use historical data to choose goals that are achievable but challenging; they should also be aligned with business priorities such as revenue growth.” For example, if the current conversion rate for a key action is 2%, it may be difficult yet possible to aim for a 5% increase through concerted efforts.
You should set milestones along the path toward reaching your ultimate goal. By establishing SMART objectives (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound), you can monitor progress and make sure that your marketing activities are contributing to the overall success of the company. This may mean getting 50 more people to request demos next month, doubling sign-ups for newsletters during the following quarter or improving form completion rates by 30% by the end of next year. Whatever your goals are, they should all tie back into wider organizational aims too. This way, there’s no confusion over what matters most when devising a winning CRO strategy that meets everyone’s needs from top-level management down to junior staff members involved in its execution. This kind of focus, coupled with complete honesty about where you currently stand, will enable you to create effective yet flexible long-term plans.
Measuring marketing effectiveness
Once your CRO goals and objectives are crisply defined, your next step is selecting the right key performance indicators (KPIs) to track progress effectively. Only choose metrics that will directly inform the success of your specific goals and objectives while supporting your overall business strategy. Select KPIs that give you direct insights into your CRO performance. This might include lead quality scores, conversion rates by traffic source or customer acquisition costs. Make sure these metrics can directly influence decision-making and strategy refinement.
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Step 2: Gather and analyze website data
“High-quality data is the cornerstone of any successful CRO strategy,” says Gould. “Understanding how users interact with your website can unleash transformative insights. These knowledge nuggets allow your team to refine user experiences and enhance how they guide prospects through your sales funnel.”
Acquiring a deeper understanding of CRO through analytics
To make your data truly effective, you have to know what you’re looking for and have methods of finding it. In the case of B2B solutions, such insights can be provided by analytics platforms like Mixpanel or Google Analytics, which show how visitors interact with your site.
For example, with analytics tools, you can track various user activities on your website:
Points at which visitors exit: If you know where potential clients are leaving your site, then you’re positioned to figure out how to improve their user experience (UX) or better connect with them through your messaging.
Actions performed by users: By scrutinizing downloads, sign-ups and clicks on specific CTAs, you can tell which ones convert and which don’t, so you can optimize those interactions and the overall user interface (UI) for conversion lift.
Metrics of engagement: Refine your content strategy and placement based on how long people stay on pages as well as the kind of content they engage with most, catering more to their preferences.
Unscrambling visitor behavior
To alter your company’s website so that it makes more money, you need to go beyond the obvious numbers and get to the heart of what your potential customers are doing and why. Here are some tried and tested CRO methods and best practices that have been particularly successful for our agency in B2B environments:
Heatmapping: Tools like Hotjar or Crazy Egg give you visual representations of where your users click, scroll and spend time on your pages. For B2B sites, where each interaction can potentially indicate the level of buyer intent when combined with other data points, understanding these patterns is the marketing gold that enables optimization. It’s important to get a big sample size though because interactions without more context don’t reliably indicate a high level of intent. Download, signups, and the like also come from researchers, competitors, students, marketers, and other visitors who have no purchase intent.
Session recording: Watching real-time recordings of user sessions can give you direct insights into user experiences and difficulties they may encounter on your site. Try this method for unfiltered feedback on user interaction flows and interface usability.
Segmentation analysis: Breaking down behavior by segments—such as industry type, source of traffic, or company size—can yield insights you can use to tailor your website experience to better suit different types of professional users.
Funnel analysis: Identifying where your prospects drop out of conversion funnels is essential for CRO success. This tactic shows you which customer journey stages are losing potential buyers and why. It can also keep you from trying to fix elements that aren’t broken.
Knowing these things inside out will help you develop more targeted strategies that follow the buyer through every stage of their journey to purchasing from you, increasing engagement levels and ultimately driving up conversion rates.
Customized conversations through segmentation and personalization
“Understanding who your website users are forms the foundation of any successful B2B CRO strategy,” says Gould. “To truly connect and convert, we recommend developing detailed personas for your key audience segments.” This step requires a deep dive into your target audience’s demographic information, business needs and behavioral tendencies. Profiling potential buyers ensures that your CRO strategies skip the scattergun approach in favor of tailoring messaging and targeting the individuals who matter most to your business.
Consider, for example, a persona named Enterprise Evan, a mid-level manager at a large chemical manufacturing company looking to streamline operations. Evan’s persona is nuanced. It includes his age, his role in the purchasing process, his pain points and professional goals along with company priorities. Combined with your ICP, this buyer persona empowers you with an understanding of what his company wants and what Evan himself prioritizes as an individual visitor to your site.
A targeted and nuanced B2B ICP at the company level is also very helpful in CRO, especially when combined with an insightful set of individual buyer personas. Some ICPs are company-specific and include information like budget, industry trends, sales cycle and the profiled company’s target audience demographics. It’s always good to know your target’s target. Getting specific ensures your optimization efforts have pinpoint accuracy and relevancy—increasing conversions by addressing the exact needs and behaviors of each segment.
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Step 3: Create and Optimize Content
When you’ve clearly defined who your audience is, you need to create content that will meet their needs and desires. It’s important to make your website readable and engaging. This can be done by improving web design, copy and call-to-action buttons. A user-friendly site with relevant information is most likely to bring about conversion.
Customize messages for accurate targeting
Just as a good tailor makes sure clothes fit the buyer perfectly, so should you ensure that what you sell matches the expectations of your potential customers. For example, don’t try selling a custom-made suit meant for a startup’s CEO to the finance director of an international company; each person has different tastes and needs that must be satisfied specifically.
By doing the same thing with messages on your website, layouts of landing pages as well as CTAs – all tailored around individual traits belonging to each buyer persona, you’ll make their time spent on the site more enjoyable while boosting chances for conversions. “Well-executed personalization appeals to users aesthetically while also making them feel understood on a deeper level,” says Gould. “This alignment can open the door to longer-term engagement and loyalty.”
Good on the go: Optimizing for mobile
Just like the rest of us, B2B decision-makers spend loads of screen time on their smartphones and tablets, including for business purposes, making it mandatory to optimize your B2B website for our ubiquitous mobile devices. Streamlining speed and usability is pretty much a mandatory strategy at this point, essential for boosting mobile B2B conversion rates.
Responsive design and accelerated mobile pages (AMP): Responsive web pages will automatically change their layout depending on what kind of device is being used, regardless of its screen size or orientation. This adaptability delivers that sought-after, optimal viewing experience across every platform. It’s a crucial feature for keeping your mobile users engaged longer and less likely to bounce early, a CRO booster. Combine responsiveness with AMP tech, which simplifies web pages for lightning-fast load times, and you’ll have a mobile site that can draw in visitors and hold their attention long enough to convert them into a lead or customer.
Conversion rate optimization best practices for mobile websites
Streamlined navigation: When it comes to mobile navigation, it’s best to keep things simple and thumb-friendly. To ensure your users can easily find what they need, use large buttons, accessible menus and minimalistic design.
Prioritize content: Make sure you craft content that covers the basics for mobile users. Things they’re most likely to search for include contact information, product or service details and testimonials. Condense the presentation of this essential information to be sure it’s easy to view on smaller screens.
Top mobile optimization tools
Google AMP: Google AMP is like a rocket booster for mobile web browsing. It speeds up loading times by simplifying web pages, which means quicker access and less data used. It’s especially great for mobile users on slow connections, making sure they get to content like articles and videos instantly.
Adobe Experience Manager: This platform is designed to enhance UX and engagement. It offers responsive design capabilities that allow you to craft and manage your content seamlessly, delivering it to any device.
Pingdom: If you want detailed reports and analytics on your mobile website’s speed and performance, Pingdom is worth a look. It offers insights into how well your site performs across different devices and connections.
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Step 4: Implement A/B and multivariate testing
Up next, it’s the experimental part of the CRO process. To find the changes that will optimize your website’s ability to convert, test how different elements perform against each other, integrating only the winning elements. This timeless technique reveals patterns in how your site visitors behave—insights you can convert into better business outcomes.
A/B testing: Simplifying complexity one variable at a time
In A/B or split testing, you simply create a duplicate version of your web page and then change one element to compare results with the original page and test how your change impacts user behavior. Try altering the text on a CTA button—Let’s Get Started instead of Contact Us, for example—or swap out your hero image. When you initiate the A/B test, traffic is divided between the two versions to see which one converts better. That’s the one you keep.
“The beauty of A/B testing lies in its simplicity and specificity,” says Gould. “By changing one variable at a time, you can pinpoint exactly what influences user actions. These are the insights that drive successful CRO. But remember, the key to successful A/B testing is timing. Instead of reacting to early results, it’s important to let your tests run two weeks minimum and up to eight weeks max. And then validate the results with more testing.”
Multivariate testing: The big picture approach
Adding a C and D to your A/B testing takes the comparison power beyond one variable. Multivariate testing lets you switch up several elements in one new version to determine how they work together and influence what visitors do on your site. You might vary your layout, copy, images and CTAs on new pages to explore how different combinations perform. To get reliable results this way, you need to run the test on more traffic than an A/B test.
Both methods require you to analyze their mature statistical results to figure out which changes to implement and which ones you should forget. Combining these proven tests sheds even more light on what’s working, and what’s not, pointing the way to upgrades that yield more conversions.
Sweeping changes: How testing boosts conversions
A B2B company offering commercial cleaning services wants to double how many online price quotes its website brings in over the next quarter. The marketing team runs a classic A/B test with two different landing page headlines. One captures more attention and leads to more conversions. At the same time, the team has a multivariate test going on the page’s quote request form, varying which fields are required and optional, the number of fields and the prominence of the privacy policy. The combination that performs best becomes part of the new page going forward.
The tests show that a shorter form gets submitted more and a privacy assurance placed right next to the submit button converted better. Acting on these subtle insights into user preference was a first step toward a website that caters to customer preferences and capitalizes on their online behaviors, mopping up conversions.
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Step 5: Measure results, analyze and refine
Optimizing your B2B website’s conversion rate is definitely not a one-and-done strategy. It’s more like maintaining a high-performance vehicle in top driving condition. Two things we can count on to keep changing are the digital B2B landscape and user behaviors. That’s why your CRO approaches should, too. “Keep testing, keep learning and keep optimizing to ensure your website stays relevant and continues converting more prospects into customers,” says Gould.
Once you’ve completed Step 4’s experiments with A/B and multivariate testing, you’ll have results and KPIs from these tests. This is the season for harvesting actionable insights. Your performance analysis should focus on content that resonates, formats that capture attention and impactful CRO enhancements. Only implement changes that performed well and you’re on your way to an optimized conversion rate. The more tests and optimizations you run, the more opportunities there are to refine the user experience and boost conversions.
CRO toolkit: Analytics and reporting
Turning your website into a conversion machine is a job that requires tools for data analytics and reporting. Success depends on a reliable toolkit in capable hands. Whether you get there through hiring, training or outsourcing, you’ll need someone proficient using software like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics or Heap. These platforms are complex but rewarding. They can give you valuable insights into user behavior, traffic patterns and conversion funnels. They can also shine light on opportunities and pending pitfalls in real time with nuanced views of what drives conversions and what might be hindering them. “This ongoing cycle of testing, measuring and refining is the cornerstone of a mature CRO strategy,” says Gould.
Building on these foundational practices will make your website work better for your specific B2B customers and prospects, and your optimized content will keep them engaged. Following these 5 steps will set you on the road to a higher conversion rate and ultimately, you’ll find yourself in the land of increased revenue.
Extend your team with elite B2B web optimization experts
Take the first step toward skyrocketing your CRO strategy and metrics to amplify your overall marketing results. Contact Elevation Marketing today for specialized support tailored to the unique challenges and opportunities of B2B marketing.
