Breathe life into your site

There can be few B2B marketers who remain unconvinced of the importance of the online channel. As Catherine Lawford, MD of customer experience consultancy Seren, puts it, “Online is more than important. It is becoming – and will continue to be – the single most important tool in a marketer’s armoury. Bearing in mind that the vast majority of customers will decide whether to engage with a company by first looking at its Internet site, creating a poor online experience makes no business sense.”

Yet, despite this – and despite the fact that most B2B marketers know exactly how much this matters – the B2B world is lagging some way behind its B2C counterparts in terms of online customer experience. Martina Schell, head of user engagement at marketing agency Archibald Ingall Stretton, says, “While B2B online experience has developed very little since the early buzz in the 1990s, consumer-facing online experiences have developed around user needs and technology.”

She continues, “This has steeply raised expectations of business websites. Remember that all business customers are also consumers. Today the majority of B2B customer experiences seem clunky, poorly thought out and ill-matched to the complex demands of business customers. This is a great opportunity to lead in your category.”

Part of the problem is that while much has been said and written about how companies should talk to their customers on the phone and how they should engage with them face-to-face, there are few hard and fast rules about what constitutes best practice online. By following these six rules most B2B marketers should be able to dramatically improve the online customer experience they offer, and so gain significant competitive advantage.

1. Make your site easy to navigate
“Still too many online experiences are damaged by the fundamentals not being in place,” says Darrel Worthington, director of information architecture at digital consultancy, Rufus Leonard. “Poor product and service categorisation, insufficient product detail and no online product support to fill the gaps. Poor search facilities and torturous navigation. This all leads to confusion, increased calls to the customer help desk, loss of sales and ultimately brand damage.”

Simon Boydell, marketing manager for Retail Eyes, a provider of customer experience improvement programmes to sites such as O2 and William Hill, offers this advice on how to get it right, “Keep content succinct and to the point and use standard fonts; the best are Arial and Verdana as they are easier to read. And ensure your text has room to breathe, is well spaced and not squashed together. Don’t be tempted to try and cram too much information on one page as this will only turn off a visitor.”

He adds, “Balance your text with images and good visuals to grab attention. Customers only read 25 per cent of the content on a page, so making your site visually appealing will help ensure customers stay longer. But make sure they are good quality images, reflecting the standard of your product or service, and don’t be tempted to use too many flashing images – two per page is the maximum.”

Robert Barnes, operations director at web design agency Design UK, reports that law firm Berwin Leighton Paisner recently launched a redeveloped site with improved navigation and more interesting presentation. The outcome was was higher traffic numbers with the average visitor staying on the site approximately 50 per cent longer. One-page visits are down by a third, he says.

2. Make information easy to find
“Customers don’t have time to trawl through websites,” advises Tom Pelly, senior consultant at customer service software provider Transversal. “They want quick, comprehensive answers to their questions.

Replace keyword search with natural language search that understands questions asked in plain English and provides the right information, quickly and in a format that meets B2B customer needs.”

3. Ensure your site is fast and responsive
“Avoiding slow levels of service online must be a top priority,” argues Graham Moore, e-retail specialist at infrastructure provider Zeus Technology. “Marketers must work with IT to ensure sites can cope with peaks in traffic. This is especially important when launching promotions online – as there’s nothing more frustrating than launching a campaign only to find that the website crashes.”

This is also an important issue if you use a large amount of rich media. Neil Barton, director at web hosting company Hostway, says, “While multimedia content can be visually impressive it can also have a detrimental effect on website performance if not managed correctly. Traffic management solutions are now becoming so intelligent that businesses can start prioritising e-commerce traffic over visitors who are simply browsing, which again can help optimise the online experience.”

4. Integrate with other channels
Do not fall into the trap of seeing your website as an isolated channel. Your customers are not interested in the channel they use to contact you; they only care that you respond in a timely and effective way to their enquiries. So ensure you put in place all the resources and processes necessary to cope with online enquiries. Be clear on your site about response times and then ensure you deliver on that promise.

In the same way, you should aim for a unified platform that gives you a single view of customers and prospects across all channels. Frank Lord, VP EMEA at e-commerce software provider ATG, explains why, “A unified platform is key to delivering a good online experience. B&Q has increased business-to-business sales using a single e-commerce platform. The platform runs across its website, more than 330 stores, transactional catalogues in showrooms and three call centres to provide cross-channel integration and a single customer view. A single unified platform enables B&Q to better understand customer behaviour and anticipate their needs. As a result, B&Q has increased online conversion rates by 40 per cent.”

He continues, “AT&T has also used e-commerce to gain market share with its B2B customer base. It has rolled out more than 50,000 unique sites for its business customers, managed centrally from one ATG platform. Each site is tailored to a particular customer segment – offering B2B customers a personalised online experience, increased satisfaction and new customer acquisition rates. In fact, AT&T achieved a dramatic increase of nearly 100 per cent year-over-year in new customer additions, and it significantly reduced customer churn.”

5. Provide genuinely useful information
More and more B2B marketers are using content marketing as a way of capturing prospect data, engaging potential customers and so generating leads. However, if you intend to request information from visitors to your site you must ensure that you give them something genuinely valuable in return.

You may be surprised to discover what interests your visitors. In its recent ‘Turning the Corner’ campaign, Barclays Corporate set up a site to support its series of regional events and business clinics. Kathryn Taylor, Barclays Corporate’s head of marketing, says, “We filled that site with a wealth of information on every aspect of leading a business out of recession. However, we found that visitors were much more interested in the information on finance than anything else. Looking back, that makes sense – as a bank we’re most credible on that topic. So, we refined our content strategy to provide more articles on financial matters. The site attracted 74,000 visitors with 51 per cent returning at least once.”

6. Test continually
“Conversion rates on websites are very often five per cent,” says Andy Budd, MD at user experience company Clearleft. “By testing not just for the usability of a site but also its desirability we are frequently able to improve that by 100 per cent or even 200 per cent. The simplest way of doing this is to watch people using it. This will show you where they tend to struggle. Very often they won’t complain – they won’t even realise something hasn’t been as good as it could be. Typically we’ll find 20 to 30 problems by doing just this type of testing. It’s the low hanging fruit that a company can solve very rapidly and produce an immediate uplift in conversion.”

Boydell at consumer experience experts Retail Eyes concludes with this advice, “Once your site is up, don’t abandon it. Ensure your website is maintained and updated consistently, in-line with or even before the rest of your business to ensure it always reflects your brand and changing customer needs. Continuous investment in your website is one of the best investments you could make. Neglect it and it could be one of the most costly mistakes you make.”

For more information on content marketing and how to turn your incite and advice into sales, attend our ‘Effective content marketing’ seminar on May 26 2010

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