What are the key metrics your SaaS marketing strategy should be measuring and how can you improve lead conversion?
Before your SaaS company looks at improving its lead conversion metrics, you must first understand how your lead conversion metrics relate to your sales funnel.
Take A Good Look At Your Sales Funnel
Critical to understanding how to increase SaaS lead conversion is realising the importance of the, almost universal, sales funnel model for a SaaS enterprise:
- Site Visit
- Free Trial
- Paid Subscription
- Upgrade
Your lead conversion tactics should identify where about your leads are on your sales funnel in order for you maximise your ability to convert them. Depending on where they are will influence how you generate content, how you contact them and what you say.
Improving Your Lead Conversion Metrics
You need to understand your lead conversion tactics before you can start up selling and working out how much you can make from your signed up and locked-in-to-a-year-long-plan customers. Looking at your Sales Funnel, what can you do to get people from site visits to paid subscription customers:
- Free Trials
It’s not just about offering a free trial of your software but making sure that your visitors are actually going to try it out. If your product as good as you say it is, when they try it, they are going to buy it - so long as you have generated the right kind of leads to visit your site.Giving away a free trial will help your lead understand the product better and it will introduce them to everything that your product can do. The key is to get them engaged and keep them engaged. The only way they'll be engaged is by understanding the value of your product. The next method is the key to ensuring that they do:
- Marketing Automation
Not only can marketing automation help detect and generate the interest levels of your leads, it can also ensure that they have every opportunity to engage with your product during their free trial. Automation isn't about making an email robot to take the place of human interaction, it’s about making the contact process more relevant to lead them down your sales funnel.Once a user has signed up for a free trial, make sure they start to use it. Marketing automation can help by sending free user guides, how to’s, video guides, instructions, benefits and customer testimonials. But if they don’t start using the product, it can also offer timely reminders to them that they have a solution to their problems right in front of them ready to go!
- Coupons/Discounts
Offering up a financial incentive for using your products can help drive registrations and offer customers some momentum in travelling down you sales funnel. It is also a great way of tracking ROI and conversion when they use your offer code. You can use coupons to encourage a timely take up by offering a time-limited discount, or you can use them to re-engage those that didn’t take up earlier offers.
- User Guides
Having a clear library of guides and product demonstrations enables users to easily learn the benefits and features of your software. It has made them one of the most successful SaaS companies and experts at lead conversion. Your ‘How To’ guides should be attractive, engaging and user friendly. Technical difficulty should be left at the developer's door! You’re here to help.
- Create resources on your website
- Have a quick-response Support area
- Have video tutorials
- Write blog posts on how your software can overcome customer pain points
Improve The Response of Your Lead Conversion
There are also plenty of design-response you can take to improve signups from visitors to either your offer page, ads or landing pages:
- Test your offers
Use different offers and layouts to see which ones are the most engaging and produce the most leads, then use these as your offers and promotions.
- Add testimonials
To encourage those visiting your landing page that your product is to be trusted, add some testimonials from previous customers. People buy from people and knowing that someone has done so before is an excellent trigger for making a decision.
- Calls to action
These must be clearly identified and relevant to why your lead clicked in the first place. Make sure your landing page has easy to find CTAs with a real purpose and offering a clear benefit for entering their information.
- Consistency
Make sure that whatever your message in your ad was, it is the same as on your landing page, inconsistency breeds doubt in customers, making them less likely to click on any CTAs or enter their information.
5 Real-life Tactics SaaS Companies Can Use To Improve Lead Conversion
- Email Drip Campaign
Users often fall away during their buyer journey. By using a long-term drip email campaign that incorporates using offers and services sent out by email at regular intervals (more initially, then spreading to weekly and then fortnightly) can re-educate and encourage leads to return and increase their interest
- Live chat
Considering that the top of the sales funnel is often the most important time to generate interest, it makes sense to make the effort to get engagement here. Using live chat is one way in which defences can be breached, questions answered and benefits explained.
Kate Leggett from Forester states:
'Web chat grows as it provides customers a low-friction channel to interact with agents. Online chat adoption among customers has significantly risen in the past few years, from 38% in 2009 to 43% in 2012 to 65% in 2015'.
And for further stats to back up the value of Livechat - Abhirop Basu from Zopim (Zendesh) put together a nice infographic with some interesting numbers from Forrester Research:
Image originally posted on Zopim Live Chat Blog
According to Melissa Miller from Hubspot, she say they use SnapEngage which has brought some fantastic results when it comes to Lead Generation:
"The average close rate of prospects on live chat is 2X higher than those requesting a demo through a standard landing page.”
- E-Books
For a cost-effective way of adding value, create an e-book to help your target audience overcome their pain points.It can offer help, gain trust and optimise lead conversion.
- Freemium Products
As an alternative to offering a freemium model / free trial of your product, creating a free to download version of your software can introduce your leads to a limited version of your product. It should offer enough to allow them to identify the benefit and ease of using it whilst removing a core piece of functionality that will encourage them to buy the upgrade or convert to a paid subscription.
- Blogging
If you are concentrating on inbound marketing then blogging needs to be high on your agenda. The topics should be aimed at what is highly relevant to your audience. Over time it will gain you more leads, increasing conversion rates and decreasing your cost.
