MQL vs. SQL: What’s the Difference?

Jumping to the last page of a book isn’t as impactful as when you have a chance to read the character exposition, plot buildup, and the epic final battle. The same is true for converting your leads.

If you skip to the conversion without the buildup, your leads may not respond to your sales pitch as you hoped.

In contrast, you’ll see incredible results when you can build the tension and present your products in the best light.

How do you know it’s time for the final reveal? Knowing that starts with understanding the difference between MQL vs. SQL.

Discover what these terms mean and how to seamlessly move your leads from the first chapter to the last.

Why Does Understanding MQL vs. SQL Matter?

Marketing and sales qualified leads are tags marketers give to leads to indicate a lead’s readiness for conversion, ensuring you make the most out of your marketing investment.

Converting a lead costs money, especially if you’re using account-based marketing. You have investments in personalization, educational materials, and even sales calls. It also costs valuable time.

If you move too soon on a new lead and try to convert it, you may earn a no when that same lead, with proper nurturing, may have otherwise said yes.

The SQL vs. MQL tags help marketers understand when a lead moves from looking for products to being ready to check out, so you can invest your time and energy where it will be most impactful while personalizing your marketing strategies for each stage.

Here’s a deeper look at the MQL vs. SQL meaning.

Image from HubSpot

Decoding the Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)

The marketing qualified lead (MQL) has shown demonstrable interest in your business. On average, 25% of new leads in the IT and management service industry become marketing-qualified leads.

However, even though an MQL has the potential to convert, they aren’t quite at that point yet.

Instead, that lead is qualified for the marketing team to begin nurturing. Nurturing includes educating, generating demand, and warming the lead up for conversion.

MQL Indicators

Here are several ways to identify when a lead becomes a marketing-qualified lead and is ready for nurturing:

  • Fits your target audience profile: The lead has the finances, buying power, and needs, making them a good match for your products.
  • Shown interest in your products: The lead has demonstrated interest in your products by visiting your site multiple times, subscribing to your newsletter, following you on social media, attending a webinar, and asking about the products.
  • Engaged with marketing content: The lead continues actively engaging with marketing content, like opening emails, downloading eBooks, and liking blog posts.

While these signs show they may be seriously considering your products, none of these signs indicate they have reached the point of purchase. Rather, these are signs a MQL has moved to the SQL stage.

How to Respond to an MQL

What should you do when you have an MQL?

When a lead becomes an MQL, you aim to move them from a marketing-qualified lead to a sales-qualified lead. To do that, you will want the lead to acknowledge a definite need and readiness to buy.

Use educational content on your socials, blog, and email to create a demand for the product and help them acknowledge the need. You will also build trust so that once the lead recognizes their need, they will trust your company enough to buy from you.

Your call-to-action will also reflect this stage in the buyer’s journey. Since the lead isn’t ready to buy, you avoid high-commitment CTAs like “buy now.” Instead, promote small commitments, like joining a webinar or scheduling a free trial.

Decoding the Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)

Your marketing-qualified lead finally acknowledges their need, they have the funds to buy, and they are ready to act immediately. They have now advanced from marketing-qualified leads to sales-qualified leads.

Sales-qualified leads are the ones who are ready to move to the checkout line and close the purchase. However, the leads don’t always take those last few steps alone. That’s where your strong sales team comes into play.

Once a lead shows signs of readiness, the lead moves to the sales team, and the sales team begins reaching out to close the deal.

SQL Indicators

Here are several signs a lead has moved from an MQL to an SQL:

  • Shows interest in buying: The lead has downloaded a demo, signed up for a free trial, or directly told a sales representative they want to make a purchase.
  • Has a need, authority, and budget: The lead has a known need, authority to buy, and the budget to buy.
  • Matches the timing: The lead is ready to buy at that moment and is not planning for a distant event or future purchase.

How to Respond to a SQL

Once you see these indicators, your sales team can begin pushing sales content. This might include an email campaign offering specific products versus educating them on your services. It might also include a direct sales call, which can be especially effective for account-based marketing where you want to take a personable approach.

Your goal is to close quickly once a lead becomes an SQL. The longer you let this stage go, the greater the chance of the lead losing interest or finding a different provider.

How to Tell When a MQL Turns into a SQL

You don’t need a crystal ball to track when a marketing-qualified lead is sales-ready.

It’s a simple numbers game. At least, with the help of AI, tracking leads becomes simple. Most marketers use a system called lead scoring.

This is how lead scoring plays out:

Each action a lead takes has a point value. The point value can be negative or positive. For example, reading emails and downloading whitepapers have positive values. However, ignoring emails or unsubscribing is a negative value.

AI automatically tracks a lead’s behavior, adding and subtracting points. Once the lead hits a designated benchmark, it passes from MQL to SQL.

Some items, like downloading a free trial, might automatically meet the score benchmark and move a lead immediately to the SQL team.

With this automated system in place, the marketing and sales team can receive notifications when a new lead is ready, quickly picking up the lead’s journey with the next natural step toward conversion.

What Is the MQL vs. SQL Optimal Conversion Rate

Your MQL to SQL conversion rate depends on several factors, including the quality of leads, alignment between marketing and sales teams, and the effectiveness of lead nurturing efforts.

Generally, a healthy MQL to SQL conversion rate can range from 10% to 30%, with the average falling at 13%. This number can vary significantly based on industry, target audience, and business model.

Marketing and sales teams should work together to define MQLs’ and SQLs’ criteria to align their goals. This collaboration ensures that you appropriately qualify leads, and you hand off the lead between teams at the right stage of the buyer’s journey.

Convert More of Your MQLs to SQLs

Do you want to turn your lead conversion process into a well-oiled machine?

Hushly’s all-in-one conversion cloud has the tools you need to generate leads, score the leads, and move them seamlessly from MQL to SQL.

With our system running in the background, you can focus on converting those leads into loyal customers.

Schedule a demo to see our conversion powerhouse in action.

Stop Losing Leads: How to Retarget Website Visitors

Generating leads is like collecting seashells at the beach. When the water recedes, you can see dozens of shimmering shells. But before you can collect them, the next wave comes in, returning them to the sea. You’re left with a few stragglers caught in the sand.

Not all visitors to your website stay. And when they leave, they’re often lost for good unless you can retarget those visitors.

Retargeting visitors helps you capture and keep those valuable leads your website brings in. Learn how to retarget website visitors using Hushly’s leading AI-powered tools.

Why Do You Need to Use Website Retargeting?

B2B retargeting reduces your cost per lead while maximizing your return on investment.

If you spend $10,000 to generate 300 leads, your cost per lead is just over $33. However, there are a significant number of website visitors and leads who responded to those $10k worth of marketing strategies but never converted.

Instead of spending $10,000 more to generate another 300 leads, you can retarget leads you already reached, helping your marketing investment go further.

The Goal of B2B Retargeting on Your Website

Businesses often confuse retargeting with remarketing.

Remarketing strategies reengage current customers who lost interest. They might be leads clicking on marketing emails and showing potential who stopped engaging with your nurturing campaigns.

Remarketing may also reach customers who purchased in the past but haven’t repurchased, had a subscription but canceled, or stopped in the middle of the purchase process.

Retargeting, on the other hand, reengages leads who haven’t become customers yet. They could be anonymous website visitors who read a few blog posts before leaving. They may still be valuable customers, but they didn’t see relevant content during their brief visit.

You may also have visitors who filled out the lead generation form but lost interest and didn’t engage with any emails or promos.

Retargeting goals include:

  • Recapturing attention with fresh, personalized content
  • Showing relevant alternatives and new products they might not have seen on the first visit
  • Educating the lead on your company to build more trust

Why You Need More than Native Display Ads

One of the most well-known examples of retargeting is native display ads. Native display ads use cookies to track website visitors. Then, a native ad stream on third-party websites displays your products or business information to try and bring those visitors back to your site.

Google is cracking down on browsing security, with plans to disable cookie tracking starting in 2024.

A cookieless future means fewer tracking options beyond your website.

If you’re wondering, can I retarget website visitors without cookies? The answer is yes.

While you don’t need to delete all your native display ads yet (and shouldn’t), you should look to alternative methods for tracking and retargeting anonymous and captured leads. The alternative methods will target leads who have cookies disabled and will outlast Google privacy changes.

How to Retarget Website Visitors Using Hushly’s AI-Powered Tools

Learn how to retarget your website visitors using five alternatives to native display using Hushly’s AI-powered tools.

1. Personalize the Browsing Experience

Why do people leave websites? The answer is often simple: visitors can’t find the information they need, and the content isn’t irrelevant.

However, just because visitors don’t see relevant information doesn’t mean the website is irrelevant. Often, visitors simply didn’t know where to look.

personalized browsing experience updates content feed in real-time, ensuring visitors see relevant content customized to the viewer. For instance, Hushly’s platform uses traffic sources, user behavior, and forms to understand potential pain points. Then, the platform suggests content relevant to the audience with specific solutions that apply to the audience’s needs.

We also offer ChatGPT-powered interactive content. If audiences don’t see relevant content, they can ask their questions instead of leaving.

2. Use Exit Intent Pop-Ups

Exit pop-ups target visitors who may be about to leave. Certain events can trigger a pop-up, including:

  • Scrolling behavior: When visitors scroll a certain length down the page or start scrolling up
  • Time: When visitors are on a page past the average browsing time
  • Actions: When visitors switch between tabs, go back, or try to close the window
  • Inactivity: When visitors don’t perform any actions in a while

You select the actions you want to trigger a pop-up, then choose the most effective content to reengage those visitors.

For instance, Hushly’s website suggests further reading based on what pages a visitor previewed to try and reengage website visitors. Other businesses may offer a discount or unique offer to pique the visitor’s interest.

Image from Hushly

3. Simplify Lead Capture

Leads are much easier to retarget if you have their information. While you don’t want to lose website visitors before they convert, your secondary goal should be to ensure no visitor remains anonymous if they do leave.

Lead capture forms will vastly improve the effectiveness of your retargeting attempts, as you’ll have a name and email to go along with the user data and behavior.

Keeping your lead capture forms simple will increase the number of leads you can generate. Typeform’s analysis of 10,000 forms saw that forms with three fields had 28% higher completion rates than those with ten questions.

If a customer is a serious buyer, they may not mind filling in 5+ form fields because they’re engaged and ready to buy. However, if someone is on the fence and considering leaving your website, they wouldn’t want to put forth that type of effort. Instead, offer a smaller two-field form that promises more relevant content. They are more likely to complete the form and explore the content.

Additionally, multi-asset forms encourage leads to view multiple assets without reentering information, which will have a greater chance of engaging an unengaged visitor.

4. Begin an Email Campaign

Retargeting isn’t just about reengaging anonymous visitors. You may also need to retarget leads who filled out a contact form and then went silent.

Retargeting leads you are already connected with is easier than anonymous leads because you can gain significant information from their contact form. For instance, their email tells you whether they’re a business or an individual. If they are a business, the email domain tells you which business.

You can also use their behavior on your website to understand what they might have been looking for and how close they may be to purchasing.

Hushly streamlines that process with our AI-powered lead scoring and segmentation tools. You can input those leads into the most relevant retargeting email campaigns. The campaign then uses AI to adjust according to recipient behavior. For instance, you can decide how long to wait between emails before sending the next one and what email to send if the recipient does open and engage with the correspondence.

B2B email campaigns are a powerful way to retarget potential leads, as the average ROI of email marketing is $40 for every $1 of marketing spend.

5. Offer an Incentive

Just because visitors leave your website doesn’t mean they aren’t interested. It also doesn’t necessarily mean they didn’t find what they were looking for.

Some visitors do find a solution to their challenge on your site and want to purchase. However, they did not immediately go through with the purchase or a demo signup because of the cost, timing, or simply because they were distracted.

Incentive retargeting effectively reaches those visitors by offering discounts, promos, or special gifts. Offering an incentive, especially a time-sensitive one, may ease price concerns and push for immediate action.

You can add an incentive to your exit pop-up or retargeting emails. You might also consider adding incentives to your lead capture forms so you can remove barriers before they’re even considering leaving.

Lead capture incentives can significantly increase the number of visitors who fill out the lead capture form, removing anonymity from your retargeting campaigns.

Expand Your Retargeting Efforts and Capture More B2B Leads

What is the best way to retarget website visitors?

The best way is using first-party data and personalized experiences to connect with website visitors so they don’t leave. But, Hushly also offers a safety net to retarget visitors who may still consider leaving without converting.

By expanding your retargeting efforts, you can decrease your cost per lead and increase the number of website visitors who turn into customers.

Recapture more leads using Hushly’s AI-powered retargeting tools, even as privacy laws and cookie blocking continue to rise.

Schedule a demo and stop losing your valuable leads.

6 Best Demo Request Pages and Takeaways

With years of marketing experience, you understand the power of “show, don’t tell.” Your website tells buyers what you offer, but your product demos are a chance to back your words with a powerful demonstration. SaaS companies benefit the most from demos since words only give a glimpse of SaaS products. However, a quality demo allows buyers to dive into the full capabilities of a SaaS tool or platform.

How do you encourage more customers to sign up for product demos?

Explore some of the best demo request pages and learn what each example does well to reach its unique audiences.

What Is a Demo Request Page, and What Should It Include?

A demo request page is a separate landing page or pop-up that encourages customers to sign up for a product or service. A product demo shows customers a product’s capabilities. It’s also a chance to collect lead information to nurture leads into customers.

What should a demo request page include?

  • A simple, straightforward design with only one call to action (CTA): signing up for the demo
  • A quick explanation of what the demo includes
  • A large, clearly identifiable button for requesting a demo
  • A request a demo form to collect the customer’s email and other details to qualify and nurture the lead (The ideal form length is between three and five fields)

6 Best Demo Request Pages That Drive Results

Let’s look at demo landing page examples incorporating those tips and some unique takes on the demo page to learn how to increase demo requests.

1. Hushly

The Hushly demo request page minimizes distractions so customers fully focus on the demo. There’s not much text on the page – just two titles and a sentence describing what’s in the demo.

Why is this demo page design effective?

Customers who arrive on this page are already interested in the demo. The Hushly blog and other web pages did their job of convincing the reader to sign up. Now, the page minimizes any distractions, like long blocks of text, so the reader signs up for the demo before they change their mind.

Hushly also uses a gift card incentive to encourage customers to sign up for the demo. Incentives are an effective strategy to give visitors a little extra encouragement if they’re still on the fence.

Hushly’s demo request form removes all the extra fields and only asks for a business email and country. These details are enough to qualify leads while not being overwhelming for visitors. Remember, visitors are most likely to fill in forms if it doesn’t take too much time or effort.

Image from Hushly

2. Nutanix

Nutanix adds a pop of color to their demo request page to fill in the space without adding any distracting elements. The page only includes one picture, which shows a glimpse of what visitors will see in their demo.

Nutanix also minimizes its text. They have one headline and three sentences that encourage visitors to sign up and explain what the visitor is signing up for. Most visitors on this page came here already interested in Nutanix, so additional details aren’t necessary.

The request form has eight fields, including the essential request for a demo email. While this form is longer than the recommended average, it fits the audience. Nutanix markets to enterprises, which are generally larger businesses. The extra fields, like job title and job function, help the marketing team qualify demo leads to avoid focusing too much on irrelevant leads. It also helps marketers customize future interactions.

The purple submit button helps the demo signup stand out so visitors don’t forget to submit the form after filling it out.

Image from NUTANIX

3. TechTarget

TechTarget’s demo request page looks slightly different from the other two options.

What first stands out is the lack of links. TechTarget streamlines the web page by even removing the navigation bar at the top of the page. They want to ensure anyone visiting the product demo page has only one option: sign up for the demo.

TechTarget has more words on its product demo page than the first two examples. They take extra time to explain the demo, how TechTarget intends to use the visitor’s information, and directions on filling out the form.

TechTarget also uses a longer form with nine fields. The form fields will help TechTarget’s marketing team qualify leads and customize nurturing emails to ensure they address the right audience.

TechTarget takes customization seriously, adding a “Product(s) of Interest” field. This field tells the sales team what products to highlight in the demo and what email offers and information would be most relevant.

Image from TechTarget

4. NVIDIA

NVIDIA offers a different demo request page experience. Instead of just one product or service, NVIDIA offers over a dozen options.

Despite many available demo downloads, it differentiates each option through colors and images and emphasizes the download buttons.

Each demo has an eye-catching image, a title in a different color, and a short description. Most descriptions only have one or two sentences.

The download buttons are bright green, standing starkly against the black background. NVIDIA doesn’t collect information in exchange for the download.

Image from NVIDIA

5. Check Point

Check Point’s demo request page shows another way to showcase multiple demos. While TechTarget asks visitors to choose products from a drop-down menu, Check Point created individual demo signup pages for each product.

Visitors first land in the Product Demo Center. This streamlined page has a one-sentence introduction before listing all four products with a small logo to differentiate them. Then, each product has a quick blurb helping customers choose the most relevant demo. Each blurb begins by highlighting a customer benefit.

Image from Check Point

Once customers click “request a demo,” they arrive on the individual landing pages. Each landing page no longer has a navigation bar at the top but entirely focuses on the demo to encourage visitors to act. A small form asks for the visitor’s email and phone number, staying within the recommended field number.

Check Point does add several paragraphs for each product so that customers can learn more about the products. The description highlights each product’s primary benefits and ends with a book a demo CTA, encouraging the reader to sign up for a free demo. The extra text works well for Check Point because they have multiple product demos. Therefore, they want to ensure each demo clearly outlines what makes it unique.

Image from Check Point

6. Snowflake

Snowflake always offers new live demos audiences can join, which is different than most company demo pages. Yet, it’s still very effective because live sessions allow more interaction. Their initial demo page includes a long list of upcoming demos visitors can join. A helpful addition Snowflake includes is search filters. Visitors can narrow demos by region, workload, and industry to help them find the most relevant demos.

The demo page doesn’t include a navigation bar, which minimizes distractions. Most of the page is blue and white, but the “Learn More” buttons for each live demo are bright orange, catching the eye immediately and encouraging visitors to select a demo.

Image from Snowflake

Additionally, each live demo also has an individual landing page. Like the main demo page, the individual demo pages also don’t have a navigation bar. Snowflake does have multiple paragraphs of information which help readers know what makes each demo unique since there are several demo options.

The individual landing pages each have a form of seven fields that capture the lead’s information and provide key details to customize and qualify leads. Just like the main demo page, the signup button is bright orange, which immediately draws the visitor’s eye.

Image from Snowflake

Capture Qualified Leads with Your Demo Pages

Interested buyers are signing up for your demos. Are you capturing their information efficiently enough to nurture and convert those quality leads?

Hushly makes the lead capture process a breeze.

Our sales engagement solutions easily automate the lead capture from your demo forms so you can respond and nurture leads much faster for higher conversion rates.

Ready to get started?

Find out more about our sales engagement solutions, and check out a free demo.

7 B2B Lead Conversion Metrics You Need to Track

Your marketing team works hard, generating what they believe to be high-quality leads. It sends them in good faith to the sales department expecting a healthy or above-average lead conversion rate.

In an ideal world, your sales team could convert 100% of leads into sales, but everyone involved knows that isn’t happening. Instead, the sales team must first identify the most promising leads and spend time tracking them down.

In the worst case, your sales team can’t manage a decent conversion rate on their leads, and suddenly marketing and sales are blaming each other for lack of results.

How can you, as a manager, determine where the shortfalls lie and correct the processes in time for the next lead generation campaign?

Your only way through a situation like this is to dig into the numbers and uncover some secrets about how your company converts leads. To that end, we recommend a few key metrics that we’ll discuss in today’s guide.

What is Lead Conversion?

In sales and marketing, lead conversion refers to the rate at which leads (prospective customers) finish the buying process and become customers.

A higher lead conversion rate is better since it indicates that a higher percentage of your customers are spending money with your company. A low lead conversion rate is concerning and can directly impact your revenue stream.

Lead conversion is a job not just for salespeople but also marketers. The two work in tandem: marketing generating leads and salespeople converting them.

A low conversion rate is often caused by some combination of these two departments, if not some external process.

A Good Lead Conversion Rate Will Vary by Industry

Keep in mind that what constitutes a ‘good’ lead conversion rate will differ by industry. Some industries, like professional services, enjoy conversion rates over 7%. A real estate agent, however, would see conversion rates around 3%.

Why Tracking Your Lead Conversion Rate Matters

Your lead conversion rate is not just a reflection of how talented your sales team is; of course, they have a great deal of influence over the number.

It’s also a measure of the quality of the leads your marketing team is generating, as well as the strength of your product.

A high lead conversion rate is desirable. It means your marketing and sales are working in harmony, and customers are enjoying the experience of buying from you.

A low lead conversion rate is a problem in and of itself. It means your sales team wastes time on leads that aren’t converting regularly.

Properly tracking the raw lead conversion rate and other related metrics, like the ones listed below, can reveal a tremendous amount of information about your operation from end to end.

For example, low conversion rates could be due to poor sales performance. But it could also be because your demand generation operation is too focused on quantity instead of quality.

Increasing your lead conversion rate, in this case, could be as simple as pruning your lowest-quality leads from the stack before it makes it to sales: a simple solution only visible because you properly tracked and understood your lead conversion metrics.

How Hushly Can Help

Hushly can make the process of tracking lead conversion metrics something you don’t even have to think about it. We’ll do it for you.

Our proven, data-driven approach can help you track and improve your lead conversion metrics.

Hushly understands the myriad reasons that your lead conversion rate could be low. From content to page clicks and abandonment, we consider every aspect of your lead conversion to identify unoptimized processes and implement solutions.

7 Lead Conversion Metrics to Track

Here are 7 lead conversion metrics you can start using today to optimize your conversion rate.

1. Lead Conversion %

It’s crucial that you track your lead conversion rate.

Lead conversion is the ratio between leads who become customers and those who don’t.

2. Cost Per Conversion

This high-level metric tracks the total cost of advertising, marketing, and your sales operation against the number of conversions you’re completing.

Essentially, it’s how much you’re paying for each customer you gain from start to finish.

3. ROI Per Conversion

Related to cost per conversion, ROI per conversion measures how much you’re getting back for each new customer.

To find your ROI per conversion, subtract the cost of your conversions from the value generated by them. Then, divide that sum by your total number of conversions.

4. Cost Per Lead

Cost per lead is your lead generation operation’s budget divided by the number of leads they generate.

This is a metric where higher (or lower) is not always better. You may get lots of leads cheaply, but if their quality is consistently terrible, you won’t be converting much. Likewise, paying a lot per lead doesn’t mean you’re getting high-quality leads.

You’ll need to use this number in concert with other metrics to determine if you’re paying too much per lead.

5. Time to Conversion

Measuring how long it takes to convert a lead is extremely important, depending on your industry.

Though some industries may quickly convert leads naturally, others will move more slowly. It’s important to compare a metric like this to your industry competitors rather than across all businesses.

6. Revenue Contribution of Converted Leads

Take a look at how much total revenue your converted leads are generating. This information is useful on its own but can be broken down in several helpful ways.

You can look at the revenue contributed by converted leads per salesperson, department, and even advertising campaign.

7. Opportunity Win Rates

Win rates are a way of tracking how many deals close. Much like some of the other stats on this list, you can break down opportunity win rates in several creative ways.

We recommend taking a look at win rates and then breaking them down in the following ways:

  • by Opportunity Owner
  • from Converted Leads
  • by Lead Owner
  • by Lead Source
  • by Campaign

Combine Statistics for a Holistic Evaluation

When analyzing your lead conversion rate, the more helpful information you can work into the picture, the more comprehensive it will be.

Remember that your numbers are only as valid as the context they’re viewed in. In the example of raw lead conversion rates, low numbers could be due to several factors, and it would be shortsighted to simply assume that your sales team just isn’t as good as it used to be.

Instead, we recommend a complete and holistic approach to your review process. Start with some of the metrics on our list, and if you’re still unsure of where to start making improvements, remember that Hushly can take this job on for you.

If you’re interested in having Hushly keep track of your lead conversion metrics and maximize your lead conversion rate, contact us today!

A Guide to Visitor Behavior Analysis

Visitor behavior analysis is the process of understanding why users on your website make purchases, browse certain content, or click away. In essence, it’s examining every part of the user experience from the user’s perspective to find out what’s good about your website and what needs improvement.

Other than just understanding what customers are doing, behavior analysis has some significant benefits that your company should use. These include a better understanding of your website, your customers, and ultimately more conversions.

We’ve collected information about visitor behavior analysis in today’s guide so that you can get started using this concept to improve your website.

What is Visitor Behavior?

Visitor behavior in this context refers to how users interact with your website. When evaluating how well your website is performing and how much users like it, you’ll need to be aware of some essential information like:

  • How users find your website.
  • How long users stay on your website.
  • What users are doing while they’re on your website.
  • How often users return to your website.
  • What parts of your website are most popular among users.

There are a few ways to keep track of this information. In the following sections, we’ll go over these ways, as well as some details about how to analyze this behavior.

Visitor Behavior Analysis Explained

Now that you know what we mean by visitor behavior, we can talk about what it means to analyze it.

As with all evaluations within your company, measuring your website’s performance is best done through multiple perspectives.

Quantitative data like pageviews, clicks, content engagement, conversions, and other metrics are beneficial for uncovering shortcomings and what you’re doing right. However, they don’t paint a complete picture. Metrics don’t tell a story on their own, and they require additional context to determine root causes. This is where qualitative analysis, such as analysis of the user experience of your website, comes in.

The opposite of the quantitative approach would be a qualitative one, where the quality of the experience of a hypothetical user is measured directly. Visitor behavior analysis is like putting yourself in your customer’s shoes. By shifting the role and experiencing your company from an outsider’s perspective, you can better grasp how your website succeeds and where improvements need to be made.

Why Does Visitor Behavior Analysis Matter?

You can uncover some vital information through analysis of your visitor’s behavior.

Track Your Website’s Performance in Depth

You may already know how long users spend on your website before they click away. But is there something about your website causing them to click away? A holistic user experience analysis could reveal this for you.

Visitor behavior analysis is best at uncovering the user experience. Once you don the customer role and try your website out, you could quickly realize that some process or prompt is off-putting to customers or that your most popular products aren’t being recommended to shoppers the way they should be.

You could also discover more profound flaws like the usability of your website—i.e., loading times, aesthetics, and completeness.

Identify the Audience You Want

You may have multiple different audiences who appreciate the different products you offer. In this case, it’s helpful to know which potential customers will be the most valuable so you can funnel them into your sales pages or collect their information for follow-up.

On the other hand, you may have users who never buy anything and only come for the content. It’s essential to know the distinction between these two types of users, so you don’t waste time trying to sell to someone who isn’t buying.

By acting as either of these hypothetical types of customers, you can optimize your website and funnel the best prospects toward the products they might be interested in.

Understanding Your Best Customers Better

On the topic of your best customers, these are the people you need to know better than anyone else.

Tracking and analyzing the behavior of your best customers will reveal two important things:

  • What they do on your website.
  • Why they love your product(s).

These key pieces of information will help you create more of these kinds of customers and keep the ones you already have coming back for more.

Optimize Your Advertisements

You need to know which of your ads were most effective and on which users. This way, you’re not spending money on ads for the wrong platform, targeting the wrong audience, or promoting irrelevant products to people who don’t need them.

By tracking where users find your website and where they’re going when they get there, you can glean information on the effectiveness of your advertising content and platforms.

How to Analyze Visitor Behavior

Ultimately, visitor behavior analysis is a broad subject with countless legitimate methods. A good visitor behavior analysis should focus on things like time spent, clicks, mouse movements, and what kind of content is consumed.

Here are some ideas on how to begin analyzing visitor behavior:

Track Website Flow

You want to know how a user finds your website, where they start out, and where they go after they get there.

Users flow through your website through a natural progression of clicks and navigation. If you can identify the ideal flow to get customers to want your product more, then you’ve just performed valuable visitor behavior analysis.

Use Session Recording and Heatmaps

A session recording and heatmap is an excellent combination of quantitative and qualitative data that can paint a complete picture of the user experience.

With this data, you can track the user experience directly from beginning to end.

  • Are users receiving a consistent, quality experience?
  • Are they being prompted with the right messages at the right times?
  • Is your website’s flow natural and easy to follow for customers?

All of these questions and more can be answered with some high-quality heatmaps and session recordings.

Make Direct Inquiries

One direct way to measure how much users enjoy your website is just to ask them.

You can’t predict what kinds of responses you’ll get, so it’s important that you design questions that directly address what you want to know (such as: “Did you find what you were looking for?”), in addition to more general questions (like “how was your experience overall?”).

Use a Content Optimization Platform Like Hushly

One straightforward way to analyze your visitor behavior is to let Hushly do it for you.

Our end-to-end user experience platform keeps track of important quantitative data like lead conversions, pageviews, and bounce rates. It combines that with professional qualitative analyses that we’ve tested and proven across multiple industries.

We can then take this information and craft an improved customer content experience.

Know Your Website Better to Improve the Customer Experience

Customers will associate every experience they have with your company with their holistic user experience. A smooth, easy-to-navigate website is excellent, but if you aren’t directing customers to conversion opportunities or presenting value to them at the right time, all your investment in that great-looking website will be for nothing. By implementing the tips above, you can avoid this fate.

Want to learn more about how Hushly can take over your user experience optimization? Request your demo today!

3 Essentials Most B2B Online Marketing Plans Are Missing

B2B online marketing

In the Digital Age, no B2B company can survive without marketing themselves online.

Even organizations with reputations that go back generations or those that serve the most niche of audiences will struggle without a winning B2B online marketing plan. Many have even gone out of business without this essential strategy.

And yet, the vast majority of B2B companies’ online marketing plans are missing some very important features.

3 Elements Every B2B Online Marketing Plan Must Include

Don’t just settle for coming up with a B2B online marketing plan. If yours doesn’t align with the following essentials, it won’t fare well against any competitor that has invested in each of the following.

1. A Document B2B Online Marketing Plan

According to the Content Marketing Institute, only 37% of B2B marketers actually document their plans. That means more than half of your competitors probably don’t have a formal B2B online marketing plan that’s written down or otherwise documented.

Think about how that limits its results (or maybe you don’t need to).

Without a documented plan, you can’t share it with others in an effective way. Word of mouth is not effective.

You also can’t reference it if team members dispute what the actual plan was. You’ll have a hard time holding people accountable when nothing actually documented what they were supposed to be doing.

Lastly, there will be no formal record of what worked well and what you should avoid investing in going forward. In B2B, many of the best strategies require a long-term perspective. That’s almost impossible without a documented plan.

Don’t be one of the 63% of B2B companies that don’t have a documented plan for their online marketing efforts. Write down what your plan is, what tools it will entail, who owns which activities, what your goals are, and how you’re using your budget. Keep it in a secure place where authorized team members can see it and revise the strategy as necessary.

2. Lead Magnets for Capturing Leads’ Information

There are all kinds of ways to bring potential clients to your company’s website. SEO and paid ads are two of the most common among B2B companies, though social media is picking up speed, too.

The problem for most B2B companies isn’t necessarily getting traffic to their sites, though. It’s that once those leads show up, the companies have no way of reaching out to them later. They go to all the trouble of creating great content to attract and engage, but then they’re left simply hoping the lead will contact them to become a client.

Don’t be so passive.

Instead, invest in lead magnets. As the name suggests, lead magnets draw-in your visitors by offering them the promise of your absolute best content in return for their contact information.

For example, if your B2B company offers IT audits, you might have a blog post that discusses the best possible servers on the market for small businesses working in finance. Then, at the end of the post, you can offer your readers a case study that shows how a small finance company was able to increase their profits by 10% after making just one change to their IT setup.

If you don’t have lead magnets, you will always struggle to generate leads from your site. Good blog posts are no longer enough.

3. A Regular Content Audit to Keep Site’s on Google’s Good Side

Finally, if your company doesn’t currently have a content audit on the calendar, that needs to change.

This is when you literally go through every page on your website and decide if it’s legitimately contributing to your bottom line or not. If it’s not, delete those pages until all you have left is high-quality, high-converting content.

The first time you do a content audit, it will probably take a while. The more pages on your site, the more work you’ll have to do.

That’s why, going forward, it’s so important that you make content audits a regular practice. Consider doing them twice a year or even more often if your company is posting every single day.

Aside from the fact that this will make each audit much easier, it will also make them much more effective, ensuring you benefit from their effects ASAP.

Is Your B2B Online Marketing Plan Set Up to Convert?

At the end of the day, the ultimate test of any B2B online marketing is whether or not it adds to your profits. No matter what you add or do differently, it doesn’t matter if your plan doesn’t increase conversions.

That’s why so many B2B companies rely on Hushly. Our platform is guaranteed to increase your lead generation and ABM conversions by no less than 51%.

Would you like to know how?

Then, contact us today to schedule a demo.

7 B2B Marketing KPIs Your Company Needs to Chase

When it comes to B2B marketing, the goal is simple: generate qualified leads that can be handed off to your sales team. The more conversions they get from those leads, the better your efforts are doing. It’s never that simple, of course. The problem with only tracking conversions is that there are all kinds of […]

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