Strategies to engage and retain your customers are extremely important for the success of your B2B e-commerce. When you optimize your conversion rate, you can not only increase revenue per visitor, but you can also grow your business.
The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a specific action after landing on your ecommerce website. A conversion can be defined as anything from purchasing a product to adding item to a wish list or singing up to the newsletter.
In this article, we share some tips and tricks on how you can improve your conversion rate. Ultimately, these best practices will help you to maintain existing customers and attract new ones.
It is important that you provide your web shop visitors with an amazing experience. If your website is not designed or structured properly and customers cannot easily navigate to their desired products or services, will this have an impact on your conversion rate. A website that provides a well-functioning user experience is the first good step to generate more conversions.
Ultimately, there should be no page on your website where a visitor would think, “I want to learn more about this product or service, but I don’t know how.” Visitors won’t spend more than a few seconds looking for the next step, so it's important to anticipate how you can encourage them to convert.
An improved user experience and simple web design will keep your visitors focused on the content that matters.
The faster your website's load time is, the happier your customers will be. If the page takes too long to load, users will bounce, causing your site to lose out on potential customers. In other words, when you optimize your website’s loading time, you can expect to see improvements in user experience (UX), conversion rates (which will, in turn, also optimize your SEO), and ultimately, sales revenue.
If you use an e-commerce platform, find out what configurations are available to improve page loading times. Most platforms offer small adjustments that can lead to significant improvements. Check the speed of your ecommerce site periodically to proactively solve issues. Google’s Page Speed Insights is a good starting point.
According to HubSpot, the highest ecommerce conversion rates occur on pages with load times between 0-2 seconds.
Nobody is pleased when the item they want to buy is out of stock, but it is even more frustrating when the out-of-stock status is not indicated.
In addition to clearly displaying the stock status for each product and product configuration, you can also alert customers when stock is being refilled or give them the option to pre-order, as this will lead to a conversion.
One of the most common reasons for shopping cart abandonment is the lack of shipping information. Studies have shown that B2B buyers, just like B2C customers, are more likely to accept free shipping than any other regular incentive.
The same goes for pricing. By stating shipping costs and return policies upfront, customers know what the costs will be before they place an order. Using a clear price system can boost conversion in your B2B eCommerce by providing customers with the best price.
One of the most important challenges is to make your site accessible to as many customers as possible. No matter what industry you’re in, if you want to increase the conversion rate of your e-commerce website, you need to accurately communicate your products or solutions to the target audience.
B2B e-commerce businesses can use keyword strategy and specific KPIs to create and fine-tune their SEO tactics. Metadata optimization and great content combine to capture leads, while little-known factors, like on-page markup, help to drive conversions.
Implementing an intelligent SEO strategy will help you improve your site’s web presence, boost search engine ranking, and organic search results. How to create an intelligent SEO strategy? Below you can find an example of a step-by-step plan:
The most important thing about setting up an A/B test is determining the metrics. It is extremely important to measure what you want to know. Otherwise, you will end up jumping to the wrong conclusions. It is best to conduct tests based on data that you have already gathered. For example, when a certain product page converts better than another, try to identify what the differences are. Is it because of the lay out, check-out page or call to action?
See if conversion rates are affected when you replace “Add to Cart” with “Buy Now” as the call to action. Or when you eliminate one or two unnecessary steps. Try single-page checkout workflows versus multi-page checkout workflows.
Use the same referral sources for the most effective tests. For some tests, you can split traffic to different pages. For others, you can direct different types of traffic (organic traffic, paid traffic and social media traffic etc.) to the pages they may prefer.
A/B testing does not only have to be used when optimizing websites. You can also use A/B testing in your e-mail marketing campaigns and ads on Facebook and Instagram. The goal in these contexts, too, is to find out what works best for your visitors/customers/target group.
Experiment with how users interact with the different features of your web shop. Rethink your check-out steps and optimize for speed and SEO. Learning how to improve the conversion rate of your ecommerce is not that difficult, but knowing how to implement the several strategies correctly, is not that easy.
Try the above tips & tricks and see what changes they are bringing to the conversion rate of your B2B e-commerce site. And if you feel like you could use some help, do not hesitate to contact us! Our team of experts is happy to help and advice you.