B2B marketing is an entirely different ball game compared to consumer-based marketing. The market sizes are generally smaller, lead times are longer and finding communities online for organic growth can be difficult.
While there’s no shortage of information on driving leads to B2B websites as well as optimising on-page conversion, integrating website behaviour into wider business platforms is an underutilised area of optimisation and business growth.
I’ve focused this post generally on WordPress API integrations, due to its ubiquitous market size (74m sites worldwide use WordPress) and its popularity among business websites—in the top 1,000,000 sites in the world, it is 5x more likely the site is running WordPress than any other CMS.
Here are the top WordPress integrations for B2B website optimisation.
Much like WordPress, Salesforce CRM is the most popular business CRM and is synonymous with enterprise CRM software. In ZDNet’s 2017 CRM Watchlist, compiled annually by CRM legend Paul Greenberg, Greenberg places as one of the highest awarded elite business CRMs in the world.
In the 2017 MarTech Conference eBook, Hubspot’s VP Platform Ecosystem, Scott Brinker, listed API integrations as one of the 5 disruptions changing the marketing landscape and noted Salesforce as a market leader in operating in an API-managed environment.
B2B websites offer many opportunities to capture data points on visitors and customers and it’s important that this information can be shared quickly with the platform that powers your entire business—your CRM. There are many benefits to synchronising your WordPress and Salesforce data.
The most common form of capturing lead information is the contact form. By integrating your WordPress contact form with Salesforce CRM, you ensure that leads generated by your website go straight into your business pipeline. Within Salesforce, your sales team can then respond, assign, tag and update as required, ensuring no lead gets lost in the process. Your team can now see the entire history of the lead’s interactions, enabling you to deliver a superior customer experience as they advance through the customer journey funnel.
If you are using an account-based or member-based WordPress implementation, then not only are you going to need to store account information in your CRM, your website needs to be able to store your user activity and update activity histories within your CRM. You can also use this integration to manage and update user account information, billing methods and subscription plans as well as utilise push messaging based on CRM data.
As an example, the UK India Business Council were able to store every user interaction in Salesforce, providing valuable data on the conversion rate of users into customers. Every user recorded interaction is stored in Salesforce against a ‘contact’ to give UKIBC’s sales team valuable data for conversion of their users into customers.
Salesforce provides the ability to segment customers and leads as well as help determine what action they make in the future, or which items are more likely to make them convert. This is why Salesforce, or your chosen CRM, should be at the centre of all of your business decisions. By integrating Salesforce with WordPress, you get consistent historical information on customer browsing and buying behaviours. This can be used to target customers and site visitors with more specific marketing messaging and product promotions, as well as enable you to more effectively track customer response and conversion rates.
The internet has eliminated geographical and technological barriers between buyers and sellers. Any business can now provide payment options through their website. For those that do, including eCommerce WordPress sites, it’s critical to ensure your payment gateway is safe, secure and connected to your business banking and CRM platforms.
The benefits of offering secure payment on your site is a vast increase in the likelihood of conversion. If a visitor is required to call or take another action to arrange payment, such as direct deposit or write a cheque, it decreases the likelihood of conversion. Qube Global Software saw an immediate increase in revenue after integrating the SafePay payment gateway in their website backend.
Recurring billing can also be setup, making it easier to manage subscription service sales, and the integration will make it easier for customers to update their subscription plan or payment method on the site instantly. Having this kind of integration also means payments can be recorded immediately in your accounting platform, meaning your cash flow and revenue reporting is always up to date and accurate.
Whichever payment gateway you choose to integrate your WordPress site with (SafePay, PayPal, Authorize.net), these gateways lend greater credibility to customers looking to make a purchase from you. Particularly for new brands, your customer may not fully trust the brand yet, but they trust the PayPal or Visa payment system.
Whether you’re running a B2B training organisation or require your clients to book in your support services, a booking and reservation integration not only enables clients to easily book from your WordPress site, but this information can be synchronised with your CRM, accounting and other business services.
This allows you to provide better customer service by offering 24/7 booking capabilities, and by integrating with your payment and CRM systems, you can capture the sale right then and there on your website, eliminating any barriers to payment.
Dream Yacht Charter, the largest privately owned charter company in the world, were able to achieve an 85% increase in homepage engagement through a unique API integration with SEDNA, an an advanced real-time yacht management system. The book system was integrated with multiple payment gateways and Dream Yacht Charter’s CRM, allowing the company to capture all leads and process all transactions on the site, with all information flowing through in real-time to their CRM.
If you’re operating with your website and CRM, payment or booking systems independently, it’s likely that you spend a lot of time exporting spreadsheets or manually copying and pasting information from one platform to another to accurately reflect the latest data. This adds a tremendous strain to your resources and also introduces the possibility of human error in the data entry process. API integrations means all systems are automated and synchronised with each other, eliminating the need for manual data entry or introducing the possibility of human mistake.
In his 2017 marketing and digital trends blog, Econsultancy CEO Ashley Friedlein said that delivering on customer experience was at the top of the priority list for marketers and that automation would play a key role in that. Automating the sharing of data between WordPress and your marketing and customer platforms is the start of that customer experience journey.
WordPress API integrations with Salesforce, payment gateways such as SafePay and PayPal, as well as other business platforms means the most powerful B2B website CMS is now synchronised with your entire business. Ensuring WordPress API integrations are aligned to business objectives and customer journey funnel will not only help help you deliver an exceptional customer experience, but offer tangible business benefits such as increased ROI and resource efficiencies.
Need to integrate Salesforce with your B2B WordPress site? Looking to add payment gateways with SafePay or PayPal? Moove Agency has the expertise to provide WordPress API integration and development services that link 3rd party applications and websites via standard or custom APIs, offering two-way data flows to both capture and publish data. Contact us today.
