A recent 2011 Marketing study from Demandbase and Focus has found that Corporate B2B Websites are second only to personal contacts and referrals in generating new leads. Although, B2B marketers feel that the websites do underperform in lead generation and they have to utilize the data analytics more to understand the behavior of the users at the websites to convert more leads. More than 48% of B2B marketers say that they do not know when the online user abandons the site. This is an issue, since almost half of B2B marketers are not optimizing the user traffic correctly to convert. This is money being thrown out the door that could reduce the cost-per-lead with increasing lead conversions and allowing marketers to put more money into campaigns that could garner more lead results.
Based on these results, there seems to be an overall issue that B2B marketers really need to pay more attention to their online user experience trends, since opportunities are being missed for better conversions. Make sure, if you are a B2B marketer, understand how your online users are utilizing the site and don’t rely on your sales team to follow-up. The majority of the marketers that participated in the study agreed that their target audiences do the majority of their research on products and services, before they contact a sales person. By improving the user experience by only 10-20%, could significantly increase your ROI by 5X.