Are Long Web Forms Killing B2B Conversion Rates?
We talk a lot here about how important it is for B2B marketers to keep their online forms as short and simple as possible. We also highlight plenty of vendors with tools designed to help marketers do this.
Not everybody is getting the message. And they’re burning money in the process.
Here’s an interesting data point from Demandbase’s recently released 2011 National Website Demand Generation Study. It shows how many fields the respondents – including marketers from more than 100 B2B companies – typically use on their web forms:
Last July, Marketo did its own experiment involving web forms. It offered short (five field) medium (seven field) and long (nine field) forms, and then tracked conversion rates and cost conversion for respondents in each group.
According to a presentation by Marketo VP Jon Miller (and cited in the Demandbase study), here are the results:
- Short form: 13.4% conversion rate, $31.24 cost per conversion.
- Medium form: 12% conversion rate, $34.94 cost per conversion.
- Long form: 10% conversion rate, $41.90 cost per conversion.
In other words, moving to a short form with five or fewer fields delivered a 34% boost in conversion rates while cutting cost per conversion by about 25%.
The key to getting this kind of ROI is to get the greatest possible leverage from that short-form data. You can do that with a data-appending service, you can do it via progressive profiling, or you can try some combination of methods. But when you look at the results from this study – and from many others that say the same thing – you clearly shouldn’t be using long web forms to squeeze information out of your prospects.
-Matthew McKenzie
2012 Sales And Marketing Integration Awards: Seeing The Big Picture
Next week, we’ll roll out one of our most popular and talked-about reports: The DGR Sales and Marketing Integration Awards. It’s no surprise that so many readers checked out our 2011 award winners. These are companies that faced huge sales and marketing challenges – and they found solutions to those challenges that paid off handsomely. In a market where even the experts often find themselves in uncharted territory, these success stories are worth a closer look.
I won’t give away too much about our 2012 winners, but I will say this: A lot of these companies dealt with extremely complex technology challenges. This included integrating new marketing automation solutions with existing salesforce.com environments; migrating from legacy CRM and data sources; and rolling out additional integrations for everything from Microsoft Outlook to the latest web conferencing platforms.
As we pointed out in a recent DGR feature, sales and marketing alignment/integration isn’t just about the technology; if your people and processes aren’t ready to roll, then even the best technology will fall flat. Even so, it’s clear that the best of these companies are investing a lot of time and effort in their technology infrastructures.
In other words, alignment is a classic big-picture challenge: You can’t win unless you’re able to see both the forest and the trees. That’s a trick our 2012 award winners can show you how to pull off.
-Matthew McKenzie
Stay tuned for the 2012 Sales and Marketing Integration Awards Report, launching on DemandGen Report on Tues. June 26.
Happy Graduation, B2B Social Media!
It’s graduation time! While a slew of early 20-somethings enter the woeful workforce, the B2B world has something else to celebrate: its “graduation” into the social media big leagues. Yesterday’s post highlighted that half of B2B marketers are ignoring social media, but recent industry moves paint an interesting picture: One that indicates a positive progression for B2B social media.
More than four years ago I started writing about B2B and marketing automation. We focused on how companies were implementing a marketing automation process (MAP) and tying it to their demand generation efforts. The cool kids in school were taking it a step further with lead scoring and nurturing initiatives.
The very first article I ever wrote covering the retail space was about how retailers were tapping Facebook and MySpace to connect with their customers. The conversation in Retail TouchPoints centered on getting as many followers as possible. The “strategy” was merely an equation:
Lots of names + an interest in our brand = success.
The B2C conversation evolved from populating social networks to creating a more cohesive, cross channel engagement strategy that connected the dots between e-commerce and brick and mortar. While social commerce rapidly emerged as a result, we couldn’t figure out how to spin the story for DemandGen Report. How do you encourage B2B marketers to engage with their prospective buyers and customers on….Facebook? It didn’t add up.
But now it does.
The recent acquisitions of social media solution providers aren’t just an indicator of the market’s growth— they validate the natural progression we’ve seen in the B2B space. That calls for a graduation celebration, because dare I say it — I believe social media for B2B is finally happening on a grand scale.
To mark the special occasion, here’s a timeline of a few marquee social events covered in DemandGen Report:
Q2 2011:
- We start to see socially-focused product features in marketing automation solutions, such as Silverpop, and Salesforce.com’s acquisition of Radian6 ensues massive buzz.
Q3/late summer 2011:
- HubSpot acquires social media firm Oneforty and merges its directory of social media applications with the HubSpot App Marketplace.
- Silverpop partners with Janrain to offer social sign-in capability
- “The Social Enterprise” takes center stage at Dreamforce 2011, where Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff introduced a new framework of apps and innovations that leverage social, mobile and open cloud technologies.
- Vendors take the opportunity to launch social suites at Dreamforce, including Eloqua’s Social Suite
Q3/late fall 2011:
- Marketing automation vendors across the board, including Pardot, eTrigue and Treehouse Interactive, rolled out a number of socially-focused features and functionality to help marketers integrate social media into their demand creation campaigns.
Q2 2012/late spring 2012:
- Silverpop launches free Facebook app to help marketers convert “Likes” into revenue.
- Marketo acquires Crowdfactory and launches social marketing suite
- Oracle acquires Vitrue, a platform that gives marketers a single set of tools to manage their presence on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and other social media platforms.
- Salesforce acquires Buddy Media to combine the platform with Radian6, its social media listening platform, to enable users to listen, engage, gain insight, publish, advertise and measure social marketing programs.
- HubSpot partnered with HootSuite to help marketers connect social media to generating, managing and nurturing leads — to help marketers “close the loop” on social media marketing.
Social Articles Of Interest in DemandGen Report:
Why B2B Marketers Should Embrace Social Sign-In
Tapping Into The World Of Social To Drive Sales
Pinterest and B2B Marketing: Pinning Down The Newest Social Media Player
Are You Ready To Launch Your Lead Gen Team?
Click here to view the full infographic for more lead generation team launch strategies.
The Complete Guide to Successful Landing Pages
This Pardot infographic highlights the new imperatives for landing page optimization, specifically for B2B marketers with long, complex sales cycles. As the infographic notes, the typical landing page loses more than half of its visitors immediately. This infographic offers tips for design and layout optimization, as well as tips to provide value and implement and analytic-based approach to effectively refine landing pages.
How Social is B2B?
This InsideView infographic highlights the growing usage of social media among B2B marketers. A majority (61%) of B2B marketers use social media to increase lead generation, while organizations with a blog report a whopping 67% more leads per month than those who do not have one. This is in line with preliminary findings from DemandGen Report’s Content Preferences Survey, which found that blogs are an increasingly significant source for business executives considering a purchase.
5 Hot Trends In Social Media Marketing
Social Media Examiner just issued the results of its fourth annual Social Media Marketing report. There’s a lot to digest here, but it’s well worth the effort with more than 3,800 marketers participating in the study.
Here are some of the highlights from the 2012 study:
- Everybody is doing it. Well, almost everybody: 94% of marketers said they use social media to market their businesses.
- But NOT everybody thinks it’s important. 83% of marketers “said that social media was important to their business,” which is actually down from 90% in 2011. On the other hand, half of the marketers strongly agreed social media was important, so those who support it tend to really support it.
- Marketers are hungry for hard ROI. According to the study, 40% of those surveyed “want to know how to measure the return on investment of social media.”
- Video content is big and getting bigger. More than three quarters of marketers “plan on increasing their use of YouTube and video marketing.” That makes it the top content marketing investment in 2012.
- Social media can generate leads. More than 60% of marketers say that spending as little as six hours a week on social media can create benefits in terms of lead generation.
The Relationship Between Revenue & Marketing Metrics
As marketers cultivate an increasingly critical role in the revenue discussion, this Eloqua infographic highlights the business drivers behind a greater effort to measure marketing initiatives. A whopping 89% of marketers said they’ve increased their emphasis on marketing measurement in the last 12-24 months.
Infographic: B2B Marketing LinkedIn vs. Facebook?
For many B2B organizations, Facebook is the “elephant in the room” that leaves marketers scratching their heads, while LinkedIn is simply “where it’s at.” This infographic breaks down how marketers utilize each social network to maximize prospect and customer engagement. In this week’s DGR feature, we surveyed marketing automation vendors to find out what tools and functionality are on marketers’ “Facebook wishlist.”
Infographic: Understanding Marketing Automation
While the marketing automation industry has seen rapid, steady adoption over the last two years, industry experts point to a lack of process-based insight as a reason why marketers are not realizing the full value of their investments. This infographic highlights the evolution of marketing automation, as well as some of the key challenges and barriers to success. Additionally, the content explores the best ways to utilize automation to maximize efficiency and enhance prospect and customer communications.
