Feature Article - Capturing Value - Part 2

Getting Better Results From Your Corporate Website

The way buyers and sellers in the world of B2B connect continues to significantly shift. Print catalogs, advertising, direct mail and trade shows have served as the primary marketing vehicles for manufacturers, but are now rapidly losing effectiveness and popularity to the Internet. With over 85 percent of engineers using the Internet to research specifications, find more comprehensive product information, source parts, and locate service providers -- the Internet has emerged as the marketing medium that can deliver the most impact and greatest return on investment for manufacturers. As a result, manufacturers can no longer afford to ignore the importance of their corporate website. With that in mind we thought now would be a good time to revisit the business strategy of the B2B website.

With the rapidly changing business environment of the Internet, it is a good idea to review the business objectives of your corporate website on at least an annual basis. Improvements in technology and increasing demands of customers may require your company to consider expanding its online business objectives. Below is a listing of some of the most common business objectives.

Some of your visitors are more valuable to you than others. For example, engineers visiting your website to evaluate your products or services are likely more valuable than a potential employee reviewing your websites job postings. Part of your web strategy should be to identify your companies target audiences and evaluate how well your website meets their specific needs.

We already covered the best ways to identify opportunities to improve your corporate website in our last Newsletter. Just remember the key to effectively managing and improving a website is understanding the relationship between your website, visitor success, and business results. This requires:

• Asking your website visitors and customers for feedback about your website.
• Analyzing your web stats to identify success areas and problem areas.
• Reviewing other successful B2B websites like Gems Sensors
• Getting expert advice.

Most website business managers have limited resources with which to make website improvements, so it is important to begin with the changes that will have the greatest impact on business results. Being able to predict and communicate this impact will enable you to present a business case for change, helping you secure the resources you need and set realistic expectations.

• Which activities are most important to your business?
• Which activities have multiple factors affecting completion rates?
• Which activities attract the most visitors/attempts?
• Which activities affect your most valuable visitor segments?
• Are there areas of the site where improvement would impact multiple activities?
• Which changes are the easiest or least expensive to implement?

Once you have a clear understanding of the visitor activities that support your business, you can measure how many visitors are succeeding. This will show you where you stand and help you set realistic targets for improvement. How many visitors are doing what you want? The completion rate for your visitor activities is the ratio of visitors who successfully complete an activity to those who attempt it. Measuring the completion rate is not as simple as counting hits to the final step of the activity. It is not uncommon for visitors to enter an activity midway, or find an alternative route to the final step. You may choose to define another activity to account for these people, but it is inaccurate to assume they had the same intentions as visitors

Ironically, the most important step in making a change to the website assessing its impact on business results is also the most frequently neglected. In defining success you outlined a number of visitor activities that contribute to the success of your business. You then outlined a way to measure how many visitors were completing those activities and investigated potential ways to increase that number. The best measure of website performance is how many people do the things that support your business. Here are some examples of completion rate targets supporting various business objectives:

Revenue Generation:Our average online sales transaction is worth $150.00. We currently attract 25,000 site visitors per month and our conversion rate is 2.4%. If we could raise conversion rates for existing shoppers by 1 percentage point it would generate $54,000 in additional sales per month.

Lead Generation: A customer lead from the web is worth $350.00 on average (total sales from web leads divided by total web leads). Currently, our website receives 25,000 visitors per month and 3.5% complete lead generating activities. If we get just 0.5% more of the total visitors to complete, that’s 125 incremental leads worth $43,750 per month.

Customer Self-Service: Customers who download technical specification sheets online save us $25.00. Every month our field office gets an average of 800 phone calls requesting technical specifications. If we get 25% of those customers to switch from phoning to request technical documents to downloading them off the Internet, we’d save $60,000 this year.

Customer Support: Each customer who successfully gets support online from our FAQ system and online Technical Support documents saves us an average of $35. A 1 point decrease in abandoned support attempts means a reduction in call volume of 100 calls per month saving the company $3,500 every month.

Now that we have identified several ways to measure the success of your website initiatives it is just as important to identify the potential costs of ignoring needed improvements to your website. So how can you measure the loss of business from you website when it does not meeting the needs of your potential customers that visit your website to source products or services online. Let us assume the average customer is worth $900.00 in sales per year. If you lose 1 customer every business day (approximately 250 days) because your website does not adequately full-fill their needs compared to your competitors website the end result would be $225,000 in annual sales lost per year. Definitely something to think about!

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