When it comes to modern B2B marketing, getting people's attention is only half of the battle. We need to convince them to take action. To convert them from passive browsers into viable prospects.

This is why a focus on conversion rate optimization (CRO) is such a key component of effective digital marketing. It helps support long-term, sustainable growth by unlocking the potential of your existing online audience. By improving conversion, you make the most of the traffic you already have. This can be vital, especially when tactics like SEO, content marketing and social media can take time to be effective and convince potential customers to visit your website.

Marketers are constantly seeking out new best practices and quick hacks to improve conversion rates. Yet, in the zeal to ‘optimise’ the process, it’s easy for the human element to get lost. We get so caught up looking at data points that we forget to think about the individuals behind the information.

That is what we want to discuss in this article, namely, how to create a more customer-centric approach to CRO.

What Is Conversion Rate Optimisation?

If you’re unfamiliar with CRO, we cover the basics in ‘Building the Foundations of a B2B Conversion Rate Optimisation Strategy’.

As a brief refresher:

• A conversion goal is the desired action you want your website visitors to complete. It can include both macro conversions, such as making a purchase, as well as micro conversions that move people along the buyer's journey, like subscribing to an email list.

• Conversion rate can be calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the total number of visitors and multiplying the result by 100 (to get a percentage).

• Conversion Rate Optimisation is generally defined as a systematic process of improving your website to boost conversions and increase this percentage.

CRO campaigns can take many different forms, depending on your target key performance indicators. You might split test different CTA buttons or designs for landing pages, update copy on your product pages, or simplify forms. Navigation, site structure, bounce rate, mobile optimisation, accessibility, and page speed are other areas that get a lot of attention in conversion rate optimisation.

Ultimately, it comes back to improving website usability. Through testing, you identify and reduce (or flat out remove) elements that add friction to your user experience.

You start by collecting data and evaluating your website for potential areas of improvement. Once you have developed a hypothesis for how to increase conversions, you create site variations to test against your current version. After measuring which version performs better, you then implement the winning variation at scale.

CRO is often talked about in a very technical, mechanical way. Emphasis is placed on gathering quantitative data that can be turned into conversion percentages, averages, and benchmarks. The conversation is often defined by the techniques and technology you use to diagnose the issues, such as Google Analytics and heat maps. Automation tools are also incredibly important since they allow marketers to run continual testing at scale.

However, all of the rigour and analysis seems to boil down to a checklist of best practices, hacks and incremental changes.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with attention to detail. And CRO can give you a lot of ideas for optimising your website and stopping leaks from your 'conversion funnel'. However, the tactics can sometimes feel cynical, manipulative and... well, a little uninspiring.

What we find is missing from the conversation is a sense of long-term relationship and brand building. In our opinion, CRO strategy can’t be entirely about the numbers.

Prioritising Customers, Not Percentages

Over 77% of buyers say that the B2B buying journey is difficult. But as marketers, our job is to make buying from us easier, more enjoyable and more valuable. Rather than tinkering with promotional processes and fixating on conversion percentages, we should view CRO as a process for understanding our website visitors and to give them the best customer experience possible. 

Concentrating on marginal gains distracts you from what should be truly exciting about CRO. It's an opportunity to turn your website into a platform that engages and delights customers.

Understanding your customers and giving them what they need is ultimately what will improve your conversion rates. Customer-centric CRO aims to get people to take action so they can have a more meaningful interaction with your brand - not just land on your website, read, click out again.

In a customer-focused CRO approach, you still use quantitative data to figure out how users interact with your site. But you enrich it with qualitative analysis to get a better understanding of the ‘why’ behind their actions. For instance, you can use qualitative tools, such as satisfaction surveys, online reviews and user testing to gather customer feedback. You need to be listening to and working with the people who matter to your business.

If you design your CRO strategy to try and keep up with arbitrary standards, it means you are focusing on your competition and not your customers. Instead, when deciding which CRO measures to implement, prioritise opportunities that align with consciously creating a better experience for your customers and that improve the relationship. This will help you get out of a gaming/exploitation mindset and into a value-creating relationship-oriented mindset. By doing so, you will build value over the long term, not just for a particular campaign, product or service.

It is also important that you do not blindly apply standard ‘best practices’. Just because something worked for others in the past, does not guarantee that it will work for you now.

Instead, build a matrix of optimisations and rank your ideas based on the impact on your business and the impact on your customer. Focus your attention on the ones that have a high impact on both. Ask yourself if changing the CTA button from orange to red has any substantive benefit for your customer. And if it doesn't, could you invest your resources and energy more effectively elsewhere? Pay attention to the trees, of course, but make sure your customers get a great experience of the forest.

And if you are going to do that — can you take it a step further? Can CRO be part of a conversation that is more expansive, imaginative, creative and surprising?

Instead of focusing solely on making the most of your website traffic, can you use customer-centric CRO processes to improve your entire marketing plan? Can it challenge your team to think differently about the offer? And can it be the catalyst for changing what you do and how you do it?

Instead of Gaming the System, Change the Game

As highlighted in ‘How to Future-Proof Your B2B Marketing Strategy’, you should focus on effective strategies that provide true value to your organisation. And the winning approach to CRO is understanding and learning from your customers and using those insights to continuously improve your business. 

Once you start to blend customer experience with your CRO considerations, it becomes clearer that you should always make space for radical ideas that could dramatically increase engagement by rethinking customer propositions, experience, co-branding opportunities, etc. Don’t let the standard CRO mindset stop you seeing the forest for the trees. In fact, challenge yourself to think big about the forest.

As you’ve learned, conversion rate optimisation is more than just testing page layouts or call-to-action buttons. It is about giving your customers the best experience possible in a way that encourages them to take action and get involved. If you want to see significant improvements in your conversion rate, you have to gather the right data and ask the right questions. And this means focusing on understanding what motivates, persuades, and deters your users. 

1827 Marketing can help you design an effective, customer-focused CRO strategy for your business. Blending marketing expertise and automation technology, we help you to understand both how and why your customers engage with your online presence. 

Contact us today to learn more.