B2B Website Conversion Strategies: Self Service Calls to Actions

In this podcast I interviewed Dale Underwood, CEO of EchoQuote to discuss B2B website conversion strategies. Dale is a 20 year veteran of the IT industry. About three years ago Dale began implementing internet marketing strategies providing tools to convert website visitors into sales opportunities. Here’s an excerpt of the interview. To hear the full 20 minute interview, click or download the podcast above.

When a visitor comes to your website due to your well planned SEO or SEM strategy he or she is not necessarily ready to convert into a buyer, or to fill out a form, or ready to talk to a salesperson. This is especially prominent in B2B websites.

Buyers have many options when they do their research on the web and therefore, they are harder to engage.  Many marketers struggle with how to engage a website visitor.

Marketers must look at their website from the customer’s point of view. Visit your website as a prospective customer. Ask yourself if your website content and calls to action are engaging for visitors at different stages of their buying cycle.

Most marketers have not done a good job of engaging visitors based on where the visitor is in their buying process. Some of the calls to actions marketers have offered such as white papers, are not very compelling or they are sometimes freely available. They often don’t address needs of the buyer at the current stage when they visit the website.

EchoQuote is a group of IT sales people. They came up with a method to provide a website conversion through self service budgetary pricing without displaying pricing on the website.  By offering the website visitor the promise of budgetary pricing without having to contact the company or talking to a salesperson, many visitors are willing to engage.

Often a website visitor wants to know the general price range of your products or services. By offering the ability to provide budgetary pricing the request rates can be very high. But, just because someone requests pricing information doesn’t make them a qualified sales prospect.

When someone asks for pricing info using a link from your website to EchoQuote, the first detail captured is an email address. Therefore, this email address can be nurtured for future sales potential. This method is a good way to build your email list.

Once someone requests pricing they are a “suspect” and it’s a good idea to have a sales person contact the visitor to explore their criteria in order to avoid a situation where they scope your products or services without your input.

EchoQuote is a patented system whose clients are B2B.  Most of them sell a complex product or service with a direct sales force or a knowledgeable channel partner.

EchoQuote client example: a 20 year old company who traditionally does a lot of email marketing. They had noticed a drop in leads from the contact form. When they implemented the EchoQuote self service pricing their lead form conversions picked up by 30%. The client attributed it to giving visitors the ability to receive budgetary pricing in a self service model.

Dale summarizes the podcast interview by pointing out that all situations are different but suggests that all marketers visit their website with your customer’s perspective and assess if you’re providing compelling calls to action relevant to different stages of the buying cycle.

Listen to the podcast for the full interview between me and Dale Underwood.

Bernie Borges
Twitter name: @berniebay

Measuring Web 2.0 Buzz

At Find and Convert we’re all about measuring.   We provide our SEO clients detailed metrics.  You know, the usual stuff including unique visits, page-views, time on site, conversions, bounce rates, keywords, referral sources, yada, yada, yada.  I’m not trivializing it by any means.  The metrics we track for SEO and PPC are very important.

But, as more of our clients enter the brave new Web 2.0 world the question is how do we measure results?  Great question!  Not a simple answer….But, there are ways to measure results from your Web 2.0 campaigns.

If you’re blogging, you can measure RSS subscriptions.  You can measure how many others link to your blog.  Who are they?

You can measure how many social bookmarks you receive from popular sites like DIGG and StumbleUpon and how easily your social media content is found in Technorati and Del.icio.us.

You can certainly monitor and measure the comments on your blog.  You can see the tone of comments and the trends in the comments.  In fact, you may find comments to be invaluable “research.” 

Don’t overlook your web stats reports.  You can track referral sources from social media sites.  When you see social media referrals increase, that’s a trend to watch.  If you run campaigns in social media sites, track your web stats carefully to observe traffic from these sites and time spent on your site.  Make sure to have conversion strategies in place for these referral strategies so you can track them easily.

Don’t overlook tools such as Google Alerts and Yahoo Alerts.  In Google Webmaster you can track links from social sites. 

If you manage a large brand, or multiple brands there are more advance social media tracking tools.  Some of them include Andiamo, Website-Watcher, WathThatPage and Visual Sciences.

Internet Marketing strategies require planning, measuring and revising.  The methods and tools used to measure Web 2.0 results vary somewhat from measuring SEO and PPC, but not drastically.  The web analytics field is evolving.  Keep up to date and profit from the results you can measure.