If you drive a lot of traffic to your website, you can make incremental conversion improvements in a short period by introducing even a small change. Many companies start by reinforcing their webpage message, design, CTA, or value proposition. However, whether you’re building your page on your own or using design agencies, these tweaks won’t work unless you have the right approach and planning in place. So what should you test first, and how should you do it?
Here are a few ideas on boosting your SaaS conversion rate, so you have clarity on what elements you can test and get a good idea on how to carry out the test to make it work.
1Show the result
SaaS pages are often overloaded with jargon, long, intricate sentences, and descriptions of some “awesome” features. However, designing your webpage isn’t like selling a car to an automotive enthusiast—talking about the number of cylinders, horsepower, maximum torque, and other car features. It’s not about features per se.
In your page copy, focus on describing the outcome of what your product can do and how it helps solve your clients’ challenges. If your SaaS helps fuel a sales funnel with hot leads, mention it across the page instead of focusing on describing your product features.
Example: Check out how Convert is doing it. Their main page mentions the goals that their A/B testing product helps achieve better site experience, more revenue, and higher conversion.
2Add trust signals
When choosing to work with an interior designer to decorate your house, would you go with a design agency working with prestigious clients in your area or an interior design student who’s looking to make a little money on the side? Most likely, you’d choose a reputable agency—especially after reading positive reviews from satisfied customers.
It doesn’t mean a talented and ambitious student wouldn’t do an excellent job. But the power of testimonials is hard to oppose, isn’t it?
Even if you don’t have the leading SaaS product in your niche, you can still apply social proof mechanisms on your SaaS web page by integrating trust signals.
Here are some trust signal examples you can consider adding to your portfolio website:
- client logos
- badges
- awards
- number of clients (only if it is big enough)
- countries where you have users
- names of recognized companies or institutions using your product
- positive user testimonials
- average review (only if above 4), number of reviews on Trustpilot, Capterra, or different review websites.
Example: Check out an example below showing how trust signals can be incorporated on the main page under the email signup field (to reassure a user that signing up is a good decision). Also, you can see client logos of renowned SaaS companies at the end of the above-the-fold area of the main page.
3Include CTAs
Call-to-action buttons—whether on the page or included in a pop-up—are one of the most critical elements leading to conversion. Unfortunately, plenty of SaaS pages contain CTAs that don’t offer site visitors an incentive to convert.
They usually contain the standard text such as “Sign up,” “Join,” “Start here,” or similar. While these examples are better than the most generic example ever—“Click here,” there is still a much better way to approach the message of your call-to-action button. Instead of a generic request, focus on a user’s outcome after signing up.
For example, “Sign up and start building” is a CTA Twilio uses under their landing page headline.
Show a user that there’s nothing to lose. Also, include the magical phrase “for free” in your CTA—“Start for free,” “Try it free,” “Try it—it’s free,” or “Start a 30-day free trial.”
4Explain how your product works
Make it easy for users to understand what your product does. Think of what goals users have and how they relate to your SaaS product offering. Don’t write a 1,500-word essay on the features. Remember that users skim and scan text online—if you write a massive wall of text, they won’t bother reading it in detail. So make it easier for users to navigate your page and find what they need faster. The communication on your offering is also a part of your sales strategy.
Example: HotJar is giving a quick overview of what their tool offers. Under each section, they include an actionable summary of goals their target user has when they search for a solution similar to HotJar: “Visualize user behavior,” “See what your users see,” or “Hear from your users.”
5Use live chat
Live chats that merely direct clients to a knowledge base are a thing of the past. Instead, a more effective way to communicate with customers is through a combination of live chat and chatbots.
By branching the topics a user might be interested in and showing options to choose from, you can display concise answers in a chat window—and it all looks like a conversation between two humans. You can also rely on customer support agents whenever a user asks for a human to talk to or has a more complex question a chatbot can’t answer.
Example: Check out how Tidio is connecting the dots between live chat and chatbots. They make it easy to navigate through different topic clusters giving a concise answer to each question instead of sending a user to a long and tedious article in a knowledge base.
This is also a great way to get the majority of questions answered without engaging customer support agents. Instead of answering simple questions, agents can focus on matters where their involvement is indispensable—for example, landing enterprise clients.
Also, remember that after a customer leaves your webpage and wants to contact you through other channels such as Facebook, with this same approach, you can answer your prospects’ questions quicker, using Facebook messenger chatbots.
6Track user behavior
You can’t know what you should change on your SaaS page without knowing what doesn’t work. Use heatmaps and screen recordings instead of relying on guesswork to track what users do on your homepage. By analyzing user behavior, you can understand what attracts their attention, where they spend the most time on the page, and the ideal page lengths.
Tracking your site’s UMV (unique monthly visitors) and MQLs (monthly qualified leads) will provide essential SaaS metrics to help you optimize your pages for better conversions.
It can turn out that your page is too long, and the copy is too spread out as users rarely read more than 30% of the webpage. If that’s the case, you should reduce your word count and describe the core value of your product in the first 30% of the page, leaving the rest as supplementary material.
7Conduct interviews with your target persona
What if you drive enough traffic to your SaaS page, but website visitors don’t convert to leads? You have already used heatmaps and screen recordings, but the only thing they tell you is that users come to your page, read it and leave.
To answer “the whys” behind your site visitors’ behavior, you should implement regular user interviews to learn why users behave the way they do and what blocks them from converting.
Summary
There are various tools and methods to improve your SaaS conversion rate. Start with understanding where your page might be underperforming—ask your users or a buyer persona and think critically on your own. Then, after adding a change to your page, don’t forget to measure the results by benchmarking your conversion to a previous period—i.e., before your change was introduced.
