How to optimise your B2B website for conversion on mobile

B2B organisations have a serious conversion problem that isn’t going away anytime soon, but is being left ignored, or unsolved. The problem? Mobile.

We’ve often talked about optimising your website for mobile, but the backlash has always been “people don’t buy on mobile”. First of all, that’s not true. Research shows that 50% of B2B queries are made on a smartphone, and 70% of B2B buyers increased their mobile usage over the past 2-3 years.

Secondly, Google prioritises sites that are optimised for mobile. So even if you don’t get many purchases through mobile, not having a mobile-friendly site could cost you that first page on Google.

It’s time B2B stopped believing the myths about mobile, and started optimising their site for new buyers - before it’s too late. Here’s our top tips for optimising your conversion rate on mobile. 

Make sure your site works on mobile devices

This first tip seems extremely obvious, but it’s important. Even if your site is designed for mobile, it still may not work as effectively as it could. 

Research shows that 40% of shoppers will wait no longer than 3 seconds before leaving a retail or travel site - so why should your B2B buyers?

You can meet these high expectations by ensuring the back-end of your site is working as it should be. Check your site speed regularly, and generate custom recommendations for improvement to ensure that your website loads quickly enough to avoid users leaving. Analyse your desktop performance to mobile, which will help you understand what you need to improve. 

After all, if your site isn’t working properly, users don’t have a chance to engage. Before you do anything else, making sure your backend is technically sound is always a great place to start.

prompt users to take action

This tip applies across the board - but it’s particularly important for mobile. Buyers (yes, even B2B) are distracted, and at most times, multitasking. You should expect that an interaction with your site is taking place alongside various other day-to-day activities - whether that’s a brief moment spent on your site while waiting for a train, or a flick through your homepage while eating lunch. It’s difficult to focus during these environments at the best of times, but even more so when the site you’re on isn’t catching your attention.

To actually get distracted buyers to focus, your site needs to grasp their attention immediately. Let’s take call-to-actions as an example.

Call-to-actions

To ensure your distracted user gets what they need, all CTAs need to be straight to the point. Convey exactly what your user will receive by clicking it right away - users are more likely to engage when they understand exactly what they’re getting, and more importantly how. 

• CTA buttons should look clickable (sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how many aren’t).
• Always choose the bigger size (though, not too big) - that small button, while it may look neater, isn’t going to get the attention you need.
• Good CTAs use contrasting colours that make it more inviting to the user.
• They should have fewer ‘fluffy’ words, more that encourage action. Give strong instructions on what users need to do next, whether that’s “add to cart” or “download your free guide”.
• A well placed CTA makes all the difference - keep the user journey in mind, and use heat maps to see where users tend to focus their energy on the page. You should always be A/B testing your CTAs to see which performs best. 

Learn everything you need to know about optimising your website for lead generation

Reduce the amount of actions a user needs to take

We cannot stress this enough - your B2B user is busy. And, contrary to popular belief, they don’t actually want to spend more time than they need to on anything - especially something that should be simple.

1 in 3 smartphone users have purchased from a company or brand other than the one they intended to because of information provided in the moment they needed it.

What we mean is, when a user clicks a CTA (for example, to download a free guide) and they’re taken to a landing page, this is a make-or-break situation. The landing page makes all the difference - if they’re confronted with a huge form to fill out, or no clear indication of what they’re actually getting out of it as a result, then they will leave. 

A visitor may only have a few minutes to spare - if your landing page is unnecessarily long, or doesn’t convey valuable information immediately, it won’t be successful in getting them to convert.

The goal for you is to win a user's information; however, their goal is to get what they want as quickly as possible. So, if you do require users to fill out a form - keep it short and simple. It’s really tempting to request the information you want right away, such as name, email, phone number, company name and job title - but this is far too much to ask.

Users will be put off by forms that ask for too much information, or with questions they can’t answer. You can easily figure out further information later on, be it through retargeting or outreach - so don’t give users a reason to not take action.

This applies across your website. Whether users are downloading a free guide, filling out a questionnaire or even just clicking through different pages, reducing the amount of actions they need to take to reach their goal is always going to help improve your conversion rate - especially on mobile. 

Try out different ways to present information

Sometimes, you’ll make multiple changes to a page on your site, including CTA switch-ups, web copy alterations and more, but still see no change. When this happens, it’s likely that your buyers just aren’t responding to the way you present information to them anymore. 

Only 9% of users will stay on a mobile site or app if it doesn’t satisfy their needs.

So where do you go from here?

First, don’t panic. There are other methods you can try. For example, instead of huge bodies of text, try video!

Video is increasingly becoming a key tool for B2B organisations, and can be used to convey important messages easily and quickly. Of course, how useful video will be for your business will depend on your industry and customers. 

For example, videos can be an excellent way to show users exactly what your product looks like, and how it works. Particularly for complex products or services, videos can be a great way to give users a clear overview of what you’re offering. You can even add CTAs to videos, which can perform very well.

However, if you do decide to use video - remember that it doesn’t work for everyone. Not everyone will want, or be able to watch videos in any given moment. Or, they may simply prefer to read. To combat this, be sure to either offer transcripts (if it’s a long video), include subtitles, or simply offer simple text underneath explaining what the video is. 

Write copy that engages mobile users

Where you do need to write copy, ensure that it’s clear, concise and most importantly, valuable. Too often, you aren’t seeing the conversion rate you’d like to because your web copy isn’t doing its job.

Look at your web pages. Does the copy invite you to keep reading? Does it get you from A to B swiftly and easily?

If it doesn’t, there’s clearly a problem. It may be that your copy doesn’t match user intent,  doesn’t explain what you need it to, isn’t focused on your user, or simply isn’t engaging enough. When trying to optimise conversion rates, often, businesses either forget about copy, or simply don’t think it’s the cause of the poor performance. 

Because people don’t read, right? 

Wrong. That’s a myth. A cop out, if you will. People do read, but only when they find something genuinely engaging and valuable. So if they’re not taking in your content, it’s likely not providing users with what they need. 

This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to rewrite entire pages though - try using different words, breaking up larger bits of text and even rearranging the layout of pages to see if it makes a difference. Copy that works for desktop won’t necessarily translate as well for mobile users - so keeping it as clear as concise as possible is your best bet. 

Not sure if it’s your copy causing issues? Here’s 5 signs it is.

A/B test everything 

Think of A/B tests like doing scientific experiments. You form a hypothesis, and you test it. Split your traffic into two groups, and let each group see a different variation, then draw a conclusion.

A/B tests are the cornerstone of conversion rate optimisation, and the foundation for making your site even better. 

The key to A/B testing is only changing one thing in each variation: whether that’s the colour of a CTA, a different headline - just stick to one alteration. Otherwise, if you do multiple changes, you won’t know which change made the difference.

It’s also essential to let A/B tests run for long enough to generate substantial data to draw your conclusion. You should also try different levels of traffic too - instead of splitting into 50/50 groups, you could try 70/30, for example to see if the conversion rate remains the same. Then, you can see which variation was a success, and implement it. 

You can A/B test almost anything, however a good place to start is with:

• Page titles / headlines
• CTAs (colours, copy, format, placement etc)
• Page copy
• Media (images, video, text etc)

Whatever you decide to test, it should give you a good indication of what mobile users prefer, and what you need to implement to improve their conversion.

These are just some examples of the different ways you can optimise your B2B website for conversion on mobile - there are more, but these are a great place to start. If you’d like to see what you can do to optimise your conversion rate across your whole website, check out our complete guide: 

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT OPTIMISING YOUR B2B WEBSITE FOR LEAD GENERATION.