Many of us click around on websites and then leave without doing anything like signing up for a newsletter or actually buying a product. One visitor may simply be looking for information on a product, while another may be the hot prospect that’s ready to buy NOW.
Yet they both navigate away from your website, and you’ve lost a potential sale (or two.) Learning how to harness these abandoned visitors can make the difference between a good year and a stellar one for your B2B business.
There are many different ways to recover abandoned visitors, such as retargeting and remarketing. Some businesses use the classic discount offer to keep visitors from leaving; however it’s not as common for B2B as it is for B2C, mainly because you don’t want to condition your visitors to always leave the website just to get the discount.
No matter your lure of choice, if you include these four psychological tricks, you’ll recapture every one of those visitors and increase your conversions every time.
1) Remove barriers to information
Getting prospects to move down the B2B sales pipeline takes a lot of information and time. Any barriers to that information increases the amount of time it takes to move them forward, and often they’ll leave your site because they just can’t be bothered.
What should you do?
- Ask for a name and email address instead of their complete mailing address when they sign up for a webinar.
- Let them download certain whitepapers and case studies without giving up their contact info, and instead keep the more in-depth, complex ones behind a gate.
2) Make your website fun
In the gaming world, players receive rewards from completing tasks. The more complex the task, the more valuable the reward. The business world has taken this idea and transformed it into the unofficial business philosophy of gamification. Companies that use this tool have employees that are motivated by a reward they value, whether it’s either an actual prize, or something less tangible like a feeling of more control over their own careers. It’s the same principle used in video games.
Rajat Paharia, founder and Chief Product Officer of Bunchball, an enterprise gamification company, offers these suggestions to remove the barriers and entice visitors to move themselves further down your pipeline:
“What if you gave them a set of missions to do? Download the whitepaper. Watch the product video, and answer this little quiz. The idea of turning that experience of passive surfing through the website and giving people a mission, a goal to accomplish, it’s very powerful. People love having goals.”
Implementing the same philosophy on your website helps recapture those visitors who might’ve otherwise left. They’ll move themselves forward in your conversion pipeline, and keep coming back to your site time and time again.
3) Ask for smaller commitment levels from visitors
B2B purchases often involve millions of dollars, which is one of the reasons the entire B2B sales pipeline takes so long. No one’s going to buy a million dollar product after spending 15 minutes on your website.
Ask visitors to commit to smaller buys, and they’re not frightened off. Plus you get to send them more marketing materials at a later date. They’ve moved themselves from visitor to prospect with a simple, little commitment. It increases the likelihood of them moving even further down the conversion pipeline in the future. And once you get an email via a smaller purchase, you can alert them to product launches or company announcements via your newsletter.
4) Simplify your visitor’s decision-making process
B2B products and services tend to be on complex issues, there’s no way around it. However you still need to explain it to your website visitors, or at least give them more context around your solution and how it solves their pain points, right?
A softer approach with visitors often works better in these cases. Especially if your marketing helps support your visitor’s decision-making process. You’re removing another obstacle for them, while explaining how your solution helps them, at the same time.
(Note that B2B NN will be publishing a post on Saturday on how to best make an explainer video for your B2B company)
For example, you could offer a comparison chart of your products with others in the market, or an interactive wizard that narrows down product options based on info visitors supply. This second example actually has a double-psychological effect, as the visitor feels more in control of the process, and will be more likely to come back to buy from you because of it.
Also, include a FAQ section with clear explanations of common questions your potential customers may have. Use analytics tools to track which sections of this FAQ attract the most visitors, and thus you can learn more about what’s confusing your website visitors.
The next time you’re clicking around a vendor’s website, take a look to see if you can recognize these psychological triggers.
Do you have any websites in mind that use all of these strategies? Let us know below!
