10 B2B web design tips that lower bounce rates and increase conversion rates
Are you searching for web design tips to help your B2B website succeed? Your website is often the first contact potential clients have with your business. So if your website isn’t professional, engaging, aesthetically pleasing, easy to navigate, informative and user-friendly, it can often lead to failure rather than success.
As leading web developers, the GO Creative team constantly designs and creates B2B websites for a variety of small businesses. We know what works and what doesn’t work. We know how to make your website more visible to clients and we know how to boost traffic to your website. Read on to learn how you can quickly and easily boost your website’s success with a few simple design changes.
Top 10 web design tips
Here are our top 10 web design tips that will help to lower bounce rates and increase conversion rates on your B2B website.
1. Optimise your website’s speed
If your website takes more than 4 seconds to load and be functional, then it’s no wonder that your conversions are low. In fact, if it takes any longer than that, you can easily lose up to 25% of your visitors! That’s because people just don’t have the patience to wait for your website to open, not when other websites open quickly. So making your site as fast as possible is at the top of our web design tips. You can test the speed of your website on the GTmetrix website (it’s free).
2. Secure your website with an SSL certificate
SSL certificates encrypt private and sensitive information so that it can safely be sent from the user’s device/browser to the internet. This is important for a variety of reasons, but if you have a payment gateway on your website or collect a client’s personal information, then you need to do everything you can to keep this information secure. Clients now expect websites to use SSL encryption and the vast majority won’t buy online without this trust factor.
3. Write informative and engaging content
If your target audience is other businesses, your website’s content needs to be focused on their needs and how your products or services can fulfill these needs. Gaining new clients can be an extremely challenging and expensive process, so your website’s content needs to be laser focussed and speak directly to their needs. Content is so important to the success of B2B websites that it’s in the third in our list of top web design tips.
4. Ensure your website is mobile-friendly
With the continuing increase in online searches via mobile devices, your B2B website needs to be mobile friendly. This means it needs to automatically adapt so that everything on the site can be clearly seen and accessed on any device. It also needs to be super fast for those users. B2B clients are busy people and don’t have the time to scroll through pages of irrelevant content to find the nuggets they need to make their buying decision. So only provide the content that’s essential to making a sale and make it mobile-friendly!
5. Feature engaging calls-to-action
Your calls-to-action (CTAs) are where you ask the user to take action, such as calling or making an enquiry. CTAs need to be front and centre, easy to click and compelling. This is even more important for B2B websites than in any other industry for reasons we have already mentioned. That’s because if your content is concise and relevant and your CTAs are highly visible and engaging, then the B2B client will be thankful that they have found what they need and will click on your link. This is one of our web design tips that you can actually test, resulting in high converting CTAs.
6. Include client testimonials in a prominent position
All B2B clients are busy, so they don’t have the time to search numerous websites for the products or services they need. In these situations, credibility goes a long way, so if they see testimonials from other clients on your website, they’re likely to thank their lucky stars and click on the link to ask for a quote or make a purchase. If you don’t include client testimonials on your website, this is one of our web design tips that you can put in place very quickly by reaching out to a few happy clients.
7. Promote benefits, not features
This is all about knowing that your clients are busy, know what they want, but just need to find it from a reliable company. This means that they know what they want, but they need to understand the value you can provide and how it helps them solve their problem. So don’t be concerned with the features of the products you’re selling but focus more on the benefits to your clients. Time poor B2B clients focus on the benefits, as these provide the solution they need.
8. Add high resolution videos and images
Cheesy stock images and poor quality videos do little to promote your brand to B2B clients. This means that you need high quality images and videos that promote your products, services, brand and value proposition. It’s a simple matter to engage a professional multimedia specialist to provide you with all the audio-visual content you need to customise your website. This is one of our web design tips that you can, quite possibly, organise in-house, very quickly.
9. Make forms nice and snappy
One of the most frustrating problems faced by many B2B clients is filling in lengthy online forms. If your website needs forms then they need to be short and concise with as few fields as possible. You just want the essential information, such as their name, contact details and reason for their enquiry (if applicable), and maybe one or two other key fields if necessary. Any other information can be collected once you have contacted the potential client. If you present them with more than about 5 fields to complete, they can often feel too busy and click away. So the fewer the fields, the more likely potential clients will complete your forms.
10. Track your results!
Coming in at number 10 in our list of web design tips is collecting quality lead generation data. This means that you need, at the very least, to have installed Google Analytics (or a similar statistics/tracking app) on your website and any other suitable conversion tracking software. This data will help you understand the demographics of your potential clients, craft relevant content and remove some of the barriers to your success at lead generation.
With these 10 web design tips, you should be quickly able to considerably increase your conversion rates.
