Salesforce, in collaboration with ClickZ, recently hosted a webinar focused on helping businesses optimize their websites for lead generation.
The webinar, “How to Turn Your Website into a Lead Generation Machine” is available on demand for a limited time.
In this post, we’ll summarize the key points reviewed from the webinar and share some statistics from a case study that Salesforce presented about Pardot, their SaaS marketing automation platform.
Salesforce Product Marketer, Bill Reed, reviewed how Salesforce redesigned Pardot.com into a successful lead generation tool.
Content produced in collaboration with Salesforce.
Results from the revamp of Pardot.com
We’ll start with the results. After the redesign, Pardot.com had 12% more traffic coming to the website, received 15% more conversions and generated 29% more leads into the pipeline.
Reed emphasized that the first step for Salesforce was to think about their goals for the website so they could develop a roadmap to move forward. To do that, they asked some critical questions.
“The first thing to do when planning a redesign is to question everything,” says Reed. “Begin your project with self-discovery.”
Reed presented a set of questions that businesses can use to help identify what’s currently working as well as pain points and other critical factors to consider when creating a redesign road map.
- What’s working? What isn’t?
- What pains are you feeling with your website?
- If you could fix one thing, what would it be?
- What’s missing from the website?
- What do you want people to do? What is the user path?
- Describe the perfect scenario?
- What does success look like?
Once you have the answers to these questions mapped out, you can set measurable goals. The way Salesforce approached this was by having one-on-one conversations with key stakeholders and presenting the above questions as a conversation. This is also a good way to make sure no one voice outweighs the others.
“No website can do every single thing you want it to do,” explains Reed.
The trick is to find “The North Star”—that is, set up a scope that informs your choices and allows you to focus on key goals.
Salesforce’s road map for the Pardot.com redesign started with a list of measurable goals which included driving more traffic, improving SEO ranking, and improve user engagement, among other things as shown in the below slide.
What Salesforce did to improve Pardot.com
Salesforce focused on turning the Pardot.com website into a storytelling tool, so that users could easily find answers to the most commonly asked questions.
“I am passionate about story,” explained Reed. “People engage with stories. It’s an easy way for us as human beings to hear information and understand what’s happening.”
In order to do this, Salesforce charted a course for website users by focusing on Pardot.com’s navigation. They approached the navigation as a table of contents, so users coming to the site wouldn’t be overwhelmed.
“Make sure the navigation for your website is telling a story and unfolding on a path, particularly when you want to increase conversions.”
Salesforce narrowed the Pardot.com navigation down to five sections: Solutions, Pricing, Why Pardot, Resources and About.
Each section maps to the answer of a specific question that users come to the Pardot.com website to answer.
In the above slide, each section of the main navigation answers a specific question, as illustrated by the red arrows. Salesforce saw an almost 10% lift in pageviews across each of the pages linked to the updated navigation. People were engaging with the story that Salesforce was trying to tell them.
Reed explained that Salesforce also increased the length of internal pages on Pardot.com by as much as 300% by focusing on telling a story around product features. This approach reduced bounce rate by over 14% and increased conversions by nearly 27%.
“By taking our features pages and turning them into solutions content that helped our users understand what we did and how we could help them, we really drove engagement,” says Reed.
Reed suggests that companies speaking with multiple stakeholders, including the sales team and existing customers, to help discover the key themes that customers care about and questions that they have. Salesforce also met with their UX team to distill their plan of action down to what they needed to focus on.
Additionally, using social channels like Twitter and Quora to see what people are asking and issues they care about can help develop meaningful content around a specific story.
Turning your website into a successful lead generation tool is something any business can do. It starts with defining goals and pain points. Integrating storytelling into the content flow and development was also a critical key to Salesforce’s success with Pardot.com.
If you’re interested in getting more details about how Salesforce created and implemented their successful website optimization strategy for Pardot.com, view the complete webinar, “How to Turn Your Website into a Lead Generation Machine.”