We always recommend short or prefilled forms on B2B websites to reduce friction and thereby boost conversion for various CTAs like whitepaper download, webinar registration, request for quote, and so on.
We’re now happy to propose another type of call-to-action that’s even more frictionless: Social sharing.
By avoiding forms altogether, social sharing can bolster website conversion even more than short or prefilled forms. Here, prospects and customers land on a company’s website to learn more about its products and services and simply click a button to share the webpage on their social networks. In return, they receive content, price or signup confirmation without filling any form.
Let’s illustrate this with an example.
We recently ran a promotion campaign for our our SAP Mailing List product to give away a free sample of 100 contacts (worth US$ 200). We decided against asking visitors to fill any kind of form to request the giveaway. Instead, we gated the content with a social sharing action, whereby visitors simply had to click two buttons – one to tweet the page from their Twitter account and the other to follow our company on LinkedIn. (In addition, we continued with the EMAIL360 button on the right hand side of this page.)
In devising this CTA, we wanted to make it as frictionless as possible for visitors to request the giveaway, yet have some way of nurturing the hand raisers until they were ready to buy.
This CTA helped us achieve a good uplift in conversion.
Much to our delight, there was a totally unexpected collateral benefit of our new CTA. Our product and company names started appearing on the feeds of Twitter Followers and LinkedIn Connections of all recipients of our free giveaway. Subsequent clickstream analysis conducted using our EMAIL360 tool showed that some of these Followers and Connections visited our website. This set off a chain reaction when some of those visitors requested the free giveaway by clicking the two social sharing buttons or submitted a lead by clicking the EMAIL360 button.
Based on this experience, we’re convinced that social sharing boosts lead generation on B2B websites. And have rolled it out to another page on our website and to some of our customers’ websites.
Now, it could be argued that social sharing does not provide full contact info compared to a form. That’s true. But we’d counter that objection by noting that the viral action triggered by social sharing more than compensates for the the insufficient contact info. Besides, as our analysis showed, visitors who were ready to buy inevitably clicked the EMAIL360 button to request for a quote (while the social sharing action was taken by the window shoppers among the visitors.) Therefore, a combination of EMAIL360 and social sharing can help in automatically qualifying leads and putting them in the appropriate funnel stage in your marketing automation or CRM system.
Now, for some caveats with using social sharing as a CTA:
- Use it to trigger website actions that most visitors don’t mind sharing with their Friends, Followers and Connections e.g. whitepaper download.
- While using it, don’t remove your forms. There are times when website visitors might want to communicate one-on-one with a company e.g. to request for a quote. They’d not like to publicize such actions to the whole world via social sharing. For them, a short and, preferably, prefilled form is still the best CTA.
Make sure that the message generated by your social sharing action is designed to create a positive buzz about your product or service on social media – you don’t want negative vibes to go viral. Good news is, it’s now possible to use various tools to pre-develop boilerplates. For example, “HEATMAP360 is awesome! I just signed up for my heatmap for free. You can too! http://goo.gl/MrXYn via @GTM360”.- Respond quickly to social media mentions of your company or brand that are triggered by social sharing actions. Your website visitors are conditioned to expect responses to their forms only during normal business hours. However, social media is on 24 x 7 x 365 and response time in hours, if not minutes, is the norm.
If all this seems like too much work, we’re there to help.
Let me conclude by practising what I preach. Click the button below to share this post on your favorite social media.
