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Moving beyond the duscission whether B2B companies should publish their fees and prices on their site, I can always see the puzzled look on client's face when I tell them that we publish fees on our site to help us increase our conversion rates. Many complain that publishing rates on the site cuts down their conversion rate. That is not true. We first need to ask how you define a conversion on your website.
Online conversion goal vs. offline goals
If you are a B2B service oriented site, most likely conversion does not take place when a client fills out an online form. Okay, maybe online conversion happens when the client fills the contact form but the final conversion goal takes place offline. So the final sale happens after you talk to the client and he decides to sign up for your service. So, while your site conversion rate might be 10%, your real conversion is the actual percentage of these contacts that end up singing up for your service. So, if you have 2,000 visitors to your site in a month and only 100 of these visitors contact you, your online conversion rate is 5%. The real questions is how many of these 100 contacts are you able to actually close on.
Assume that you are only able to get 10 out of these 100 prospects to sign up for your service, then you real conversion rate is 10/2000= %0.5. Yep, it is that low. But that is not the topic of this blog.
If you publish your rates, you will notice that prospects who can not afford your services will not fill the contact form. So, that does translate to lowering site conversion rates. However, the prospects who are interested in your services and are comfortable with your pricing structure would actually fill that contact form. As a result, your close rate for these clients will be higher. So, in our example above, we start with 2,000 visitors to the site per month. As a result of publishing the prices, you only get 50 online contacts per month. So, your online conversion rate is at 50/2000= 2.5%. But these 50 contacts are already aware of your pricing structure, so one of the major hurdles in closing them is already taking care of. As a result, you will be able to close on 15 of them. So you are actual conversion rate is 15/2000= 0.75%. That is over 50% improvement in conversion.
These numbers are actually based on a client’s experience, so I hope you get my point. Like it or not, pricing is one of the main reasons sales are not closed. By publishing your fees online, you are eliminating that sector of prospects who can not afford your rates.
What do you think?
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