Examples showing what is needed for a customer-centric B2B website

In a recent post, I talked about the importance of developing a solid B2B digital marketing strategy. A critical part of this is creating an enduring website presence that meets the needs of visitors while also achieving standout, leads and favourability for the business. Making their site more effective for visitors and the business should be a primary concern, but it often hasn't got sufficient attention in the past. But this seems to be changing; 2012 RWS/US research data suggests that marketing budgets are being invested more in websites and web development than anywhere else. Yet I still see a lot of basic requirements of an effective B2B site that are missing. In this post, I'll give examples showing some of the key features.

The seven essential features

Start by defining your requirements. Even…

Google Analytics 'Share Assets' for sharing report customisations within or between companies

I’m not sure if many people have discovered the ‘Share Assets’ option/button within the Profile menu of Google Analytics yet, but I only spotted it at the end of last year. With the launch of Google's New Analytics Solution Gallery which Dave has introduced we thought a reminder about this 'hidden feature' would be useful.

What is Share Assets?

Share Assets gives you a quick way to It’s a handy way of viewing and sharing all segments, custom reports and dashboards from one place. Select the configurations you want to share and then share the URL. The data relevant to each site in the profile isn't shared, it's only the customisation. How long has that been there? I'm not sure, but I'm a regular user, so not long. It certainly makes sharing configurations so quick and easy now. Really handy if you have…

Learning from the global expansion of ASOS

You will probably have heard of ASOS, they are inspiring example of how to achieve online retail growth. Their most recent figures show the scale they have achieved: "ASOS attracts over 17.5 million unique visitors a month, had 8.0 million registered users and 4.4 million active customers from 160 countries who have shopped in the last 12 months. In addition to the global reach of the core asos.com website, ASOS also has country-specific websites targeting the USA, Australia, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. All products on asos.com can also be bought through the ASOS mobile site, whilst ASOS also offers customers the ability to shop through iPhone and iPad applications".

Source: ASOS annual report

I was fortunate to recently work with them for a year as a placement student and Dave Chaffey,…

5 real-world examples showing the value of rich media in Ecommerce

Ecommerce professionals and conversion rate experts have been lauding the benefits of rich media like video and 360 degree views for retailers more and more over the last couple of years.  Yet a huge range of high profile ecommerce businesses are still yet to adopt product video, high resolution imagery or 360’s. A number of the clients I work with have benefitted a lot from adopting rich media and have seen big increases in engagement and conversion. I’ve been talking about how rich media can add value to your proposition and general user experience for ages (such as here on SEJ and here on my personal blog) but I thought it would be useful to feature some quotes from expert retailers who have reaped the benefits. Thanks to…

Two webcasts on increasing conversion rates from the Smart Insights Digital Marketing Priorities 2013 summit

At our recent free summit many viewers asked to share the slide and recordings, so to collect them together we have a short series of posts to point you in the right direction. If you take a look at the end of this post you will see there is one for each topics covering each of the processes of Reach, Act and Convert and Engage in the Smart Insights PRACE digital strategy framework.

The two webcasts focusing on converting site visitors were:

1. Persuasive design priorities for 2013 with Paul Rouke of PRWD

This webcast was presented by user experience consultant Paul Rouke who reviewied of major and subtle persuasion tips & techniques which positively affect user behaviour. It also included live examples of where brands are combining different techniques to enhance the influence on user behaviour.

Related…

Answering the right questions on the path to conversion

Whether you're working on increasing conversions for an online enquiry form, quote request form, e-commerce transactions or an online application process, answering more of your visitors questions will help them and your business. It's a fundamental of web marketing. For more practical examples of testing and optimisation approaches to increase leads and sales, hear Paul Rouke of PRWD speak in a webcast at the free Smart Insights #marketingpriorities2013 Digital Marketing Summit on 11.01.2013. View the full programme of speakers at http://bit.ly/priorities2013. Of course, what you're asking visitors to complete and what your product/service is will dictate the amount and type of questions that they may have, but by identifying and answering typical questions you are more likely to encourage more visitors to ‘do what you want them to’. In this post I'll look at: A case study showing the potential of this approach Some…

Improving your testing workflow to get bigger, quicker wins

Should you test one thing at a time or many at once? A poor experimental workflow can waste loads of your time! Here’s an extreme example: We’ve seen a company take six months to do something that took another company thirty minutes. That’s 8,760 times slower. To grow quickly, you need to implement quickly, so our work with clients goes beyond suggesting what they should test; we build their in-house capability to “get stuff done.” This article describes a framework for speeding up your testing—so you can grow your profits quicker.

Many small changes or one big one?

If you’ve read the case study of our work with Crazy Egg on optimisation, you may recall that the winning challenger homepage was much longer and much more effective than the control: Our winning challenger was much longer than…

Good User Experience = Good Customer Service = More Sales

Christmas shopping has begun and with it, the stress! And no, I haven’t been shopping offline at all, I’ve been shopping online! But this time of the year always brings to the fore one of the most obvious issues that many Ecommerce Managers have control of, but yet remains to be one of the most lacking in terms of solutions. Picture this: you go into a store where a very nice assistant helps you find everything you need to purchase. You’re thinking “Great! All my Christmas shopping done in an hour!”. You walk on up to the till point where the assistant starts totting up all of your purchases, but the sales assistant then suddenly tells you that you can’t actually pay at their till unless you have a specific device. So you…

Checkout abandonment statistics show where you should focus your site improvements

I'm often asked about average ecommerce rates by site owners looking to boost their sales. It's a year-round concern with this compilation showing that even for established brands during sale periods, the average add to basket conversion rate is around 12% during a visit with convert to order around half that at 5.6%. If this sounds poor compared to the conversion rate a physical retail outlet would achieve, that's a fair improvement on ten years ago when we used to speak of a "rule-of-thumb" for average Ecommerce conversion rates of around 2%. The improvement in averages since then suggests the value in conversion rate optimisation. That said, it's inevitable that online conversion rates will be lower than offline with price transparency available through comparison sites and many still researching online and purchasing offline (the ROPO effect).

Reasons for shopping cart abandonment?

To encourage…

How run-of-site template design features can make a large impact

Is this a question often asked by online marketers? When it comes to website optimisation is the footer something you usually consider? Well if it’s not, it probably should be; because how you use your website footer can have a major impact on conversion rates. As part of a full conversion rate optimisation and UX-Driven MVT strategy, we conducted an A/B test for one of our clients, Radley+Co (the luxury hand bag people). It was a simple test, measuring how conversion and revenue would be affected by introducing a mega-footer containing the product list broken down into categories. Once our UX Designers had created the new version we used the Optimizely testing tool to implement this A/B test across every page of the website. We tested a smaller footer only featuring a simple one line navigation menu against a larger mega-footer. Both…