Boost Conversions with These 8 SaaS Funnel Tweaks

The success of your company depends on the performance of your sales funnel. No matter what product or service you offer, it can significantly contribute to getting qualified leads and driving more sales.

Fortunately, when it comes to optimization of your sales funnel, you don’t have to make drastic changes to see desired results. A few simple (yet smart and powerful) techniques that require minimal changes on your website can help you achieve conversion boosts.

Over the past few years, we have been successful in utilizing the proven SaaS funnel tweaks and have witnessed a notable increase in conversions.

In this article, we want to share those eight SaaS sales funnel tweaks that will optimize every part of your funnel. And as a reminder, it’s always important to test these changes for yourself. They helped our company, but it may not stretch across niches.

Top of the Funnel Tweaks

1. Use a Pre-Signup Form

Are you using conventional signup buttons to get users to the registration form? If so, then it’s high time you consider a quick and easy option — a pre-signup form where a visitor just has to enter their email address and nothing else.

Here are some examples of companies using this strategy:

Calendly has the first step of signing up for their services right from their homepage.

On Mention’s homepage, you can get started by simply entering your email.

UXPin has something very similar: big, above the fold section to get people to submit their email address.

In some cases, you may want to ask for the most important information you need from users (which could also be their website URL) to get them interested. The idea is to get visitors’ contact information without making them go through a tedious registration process.

Once they have shared their information, you can direct them to a real registration page where their email address is pre-filled. If you need to qualify the leads, this is where you would do it.

Here is the example from mention.com:

After you enter an email on the landing page and click the signup button, you get redirected to a registration page where your email is automatically prefilled. They take one more step and try to pull your real name (first and last name) from profiles on websites such as Google+, Linkedin and Gravatar.

Simplifying the registration process with a pre-signup form like this may improve conversions because users aren’t overwhelmed with a long registration form. Test out a shorter pre-signup form for yourself to see if it drives more leads.

2. A/B Test Content Hierarchies

We are already familiar with the importance of a/b testing headlines and other substantial elements, particularly those above the fold.

Here, we’d like to present you with a strategy we are using to effectively approach and get more familiar with users’ demands.

For example: if you are unsure whether your product is too expensive, or if you want to have a better grasp of how your potential users perceive the cost, you can avoid showing the price of your product/service on the homepage. We would recommend this for two reasons:

1. It’s a common urge for users to gain a quick glimpse of the pricing even before exploring your service/product. So if you don’t offer freemium or if people have to pay a premium for your product, it’s best to create a separate pricing page and not put it on the homepage.
2. If users navigate to the pricing page after gaining a better insight into your business value, they are more likely to convert. This is why it’s important to educate users about your product before they know your cost. In some cases, it’s better to make sure they learn about the product before they can even signup. These are known as conversion barriers, and while they may reduce conversions in the short term, over the long haul you’ll end up with better leads and possibly even better retention.

Kissmetrics links to their pricing page from their top navigation.

Buffer also uses a separate page for the pricing.

Did you know?With the Kissmetrics A/B Test Report, you can see how a test impacts any part of your funnel. Running a test on your homepage and want to see how it affects lead quality at the bottom of the funnel? Find out in 10 seconds with the A/B Test Report.

More importantly, this strategy will let you track the visitors who browse your pricing page. By looking at the heat maps and scroll and bounce rates, you’ll be able to run A/B tests that can improve conversions.

3. Use Remarketing Alongside Your Content Marketing

The heartbeat of any successful online business nowadays is content marketing, and SaaS companies are no exception. That’s why having a respected blog is incredibly useful when it comes to establishing your authority in your niche.

When starting out, it’s best to produce valuable content for readers that doesn’t promote your product. Once you have a few hundred posts under your belt, an audience, and some traffic, then you can write blog posts promoting your product. These can be new feature announcements, use cases, etc. As a general rule of thumb, you should write no more than one product-focused blog post for every five “regular” posts.

You’ll want to create content that tailors to your target audience. For example, if you have an SEO tool, you’ll want to have a blog that focuses heavily on SEO topics. You know that people coming to these posts are interested in SEO, and some of them may be interested in your product. This is where retargeting comes in. If someone views one or two of your blog posts, you can retarget them with ads for your product. You can even segment it by what your post is about and create ads relevant to those topics.

For example, if you had people visit a blog post about Penguin, you could retarget them with ads related to Penguin and your product. Perhaps something like “Make sure the next Penguin update doesn’t hurt your rankings.” You can then link to a landing page or your homepage. The key is to create product offerings relevant to the content you create.

4. Use Behavioral and Exit-Intent Popups

Try installing exit-intent popups based on visitors’ behavior. This way, you’ll be able to detect the visitors who are about to leave your website and possibly get them to stay.

For example, if users visit the pricing page, it means they at least have some interest in your tool. But if they decide to abandon the site at this point, it might also mean the product is too expensive or they are not yet fully convinced that your tool is right for them.

Using the right hook at the right page will ensure you capture the visitor’s email address. Later, you can follow up with drip campaigns based on their behavior as we discuss in the 5th funnel tweak.

Here is an example from a website that sells personalized jewelry.

When you are about to abandon their website while browsing the products, they will offer you a birthday surprise:

If you try to leave during the checkout process, they will adapt the exit-intent popup:

They could improve this further and offer other options, such as free shipping.

Since you have a lead who has shown some interest in your tool, now it is in your best interest to persuade and make sure they are going to take the next step.

Middle of the Funnel

5. Create Separate Auto-Responder Campaigns Based on User Stage

Before implementing an email campaign, you should first decide the critical stages your users will be moving through before they are ready to use your SaaS app. What kind of product education do they need? What qualifications should they have? How will they know if they’re a good fit for your product? Your drip campaign can help them answer some of these questions.

Secondly, you should segment your users depending on the last stage they completed in your funnel — this could be leaving a lead, completing the registration page, configuring the app, opening an email, subscribing to a service, etc.

Usually, we can split those stages into the following sections:

1. Lead sign up – Users enter their email on the landing page
2. Registration – Users complete the basic registration (password and other mandatory fields)
3. Basic configuration – Users complete a basic service configuration (for example, integration with major services like Google or Facebook to get the most essential data so that the service can start working)

Then, depending on their completion stage, you can target them with appropriate marketing messages through email or remarketing.

For instance, a user might get to the registration page, but might not be prepared to complete it. That’s where you can use a separate autoresponder campaign to convince them to take the next step and complete the registration. You could show them a real-life case of problem-solution or present them with an appealing reward if they complete the registration process. Maybe something like, “signup now and get 10 more free trial days”.

A good example here could also be a cart abandonment email from Incase. I wanted to buy a backpack, but I haven’t completed the checkout, so after a few days they sent me a special offer with a 20% discount:

An example for SaaS businesses could be this follow-up email that comes after a user creates an account and doesn’t complete the onboarding process:

Try to focus on moving the user one step forward with your drip campaigns. Also, don’t expect your visitors to complete the onboarding process at one go. Depending on the product, it can take some time to get completely set up. Analytics tools, for example, often need the help of a developer and require more extensive setup. In those cases, it can take weeks to months to be fully set up. A more personal tool like Dropbox, on the other hand, has a shorter onboarding time and doesn’t require much work.

Expecting too much effort and time when your user is not yet fully convinced can damage your long-term retention by turning them off. As a result, you risk losing users even before they understand your product’s value.

6. Offer a Free Trial Only If a Visitor Doesn’t Subscribe to Your Service

Many SaaS services offer free trials. The idea here is to attract users to try your tool or service without requiring a credit card, which is great and works to a large extent.

However, sometimes free trials might backfire too.

How?

Since you are not asking users to make a commitment for testing the service, they might take advantage of your offer without a real need. However, if you ask for their payment info before a free trial, only seriously interested visitors will come forward to try them. It’s important to note (and tell users) that you aren’t charging their card, but it will be all set and ready to go if they choose to upgrade to a paying plan. This reduces a hurdle when their trial is over.

Now you might ask: what if we lose a genuinely interested visitor who likes to check out the tool before sharing the payment details?

A valid question. Here’s how we tackled it.

When a user doesn’t enter the payment info and thus doesn’t start the trial to our service, we send him/her a follow-up email two or three days later, stating that the free trial was activated without the payment info.

Basically, you are just allowing the user to wait for a couple of days and then use a free trial.

In the subscription activation email, you can say something like, “We require payment details because we only want users who are interested in trying our product. But sometimes we make exceptions. If you would still like to test our tool click here to activate your free trial.”

This way, you allow the user to try the tool without going through the whole setup again. And it’s a pleasant surprise for users.

However, this solution largely depends on the context and the problem that your SaaS is tackling. So it is best to test it yourself.

7. Send Summary Reports

Especially during the trial period, it can be beneficial to send summary reports to users. This report should showcase the results and findings of your tool.

For example, the summary report of an SEO tool can include keywords for which your website is ranked, which competitors rank for those keywords, and so on.

Example of a daily summary report from a search engine tracking tool.

Here is a summary email of a transactional email service, which shows the most relevant statistics for user interactions with the email we’ve sent in the previous week:

This report email informs us of daily mentions of our brand on social media websites:

Kissmetrics sends an email updating the user on the five metrics most important to them:

Show them the exact figures and statistics so users understand the real value of your tool and get reminded that the service is doing beneficial work for them.

Your summary reports will prove the perceived value of your tool to the users and help establish a better relationship with them.

Just remember to send them out wisely. You should set the timeframe after understanding your audience and their background motivations. Don’t send them too often. Shoot them the right information at the right time and frequency. Daily is probably too often — most companies stick to a weekly report. If you can let users choose how often they’d like to receive your reports, that may be an even better option.

Bottom of the Funnel

8. Consider Support Chat Widgets

Lately, many sites have been employing “chat support” services. They pop up as soon as the visitor enters the website. Here’s an example from Sonos, which appears on product pages and pops up after about five seconds of inactivity:

This interaction seems to be great, but do not trick yourself into believing that they are always going to help you.

In some cases, they can be beneficial, especially for companies that are in early stages and are still exploring the right way to present their product to the users.

In those cases, chat widgets can be tremendously beneficial to discover the most efficient ways to present your product to your target audience. You can connect with your users directly and ask them about their motivation for using your service and concerns and problems they might be facing. Later, you can use this information for marketing purposes.

But in others, they might be a burden for your support team because of a lack of proper documentation and tutorials about your service, or sometimes even because of lazy users who might end up wasting your team’s precious time.

Alternatively, we recommend using the ‘Chat Support’ within the tool itself so that only committed users will benefit.

That said, this is a call you should take entirely based on your business model.

You spend time with only serious and qualified leads. You can also hear the good and bad of your product/service directly from the user. It gives you the chance to improvise your offerings on a regular basis.

Final Thoughts

Remember, a happy user won’t hesitate to pay for your tool/service if it simplifies their business process, saves time, and contributes to their ROI. Moreover, rest assured a great user experience and word of mouth also attracts more leads, which boosts conversion rates of your funnel in a significant way.

Try implementing these tweaks and let us know the results and your insights on this journey.

We would love to hear from you. Share the article and tell us what you think in comments below!

About the Author: Aljaz Fajmut is a web analytics and growth enthusiast, serial entrepreneur, and the founder of Nightwatch, a search visibility tracker of the next generation. Follow him on Twitter @aljazfajmut.

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The Rise of “The Quant” – How a Quantitative Analyst Can Improve Your Marketing Strategy

It sounds like the premise for a new sci-fi flick: an advanced species, the Quants, arrive with incredibly deep knowledge on data from a variety of sources, and can test, manipulate and model it to confirm or disprove theories, allowing a far greater understanding of what makes people (and the decisions they make) tick.

Except it’s anything but science fiction. Quants – short for quantitative analysts, are part of the innovation that powers data science. In short, a quantitative analyst looks at trends and data, or proposed models, and leverages that data to make interpretations and verify results.

Sounds deep? It is.

Until recently, most quantitative analysts found their niche in finances – helping stock traders and investors by making data-backed market predictions. Just look at the this clip from The Big Short, which chronicles the leadup to the subprime mortgage crisis:

But these “quants” have also found a surprising new home among marketing teams too – and what they have to offer can be a true game-changer. Here’s what you need to know.

Major Marketing Shifts Demand a New Kind of Scientist

Traditional marketing methods used to throw everything at the consumer in the hopes that some of it would stick. Today’s advertising demands that they be much smarter about how, where and who their ads are targeting.

Although most marketers have a pretty solid idea about who they’re marketing to, and what kinds of content they consume, having a Quant on board can also mean new tools can be developed to predict and target those audiences with greater precision and a more tailored message – the very kinds of connections that customers crave.

One of the underpinning decisions that have shifted the way advertising is handled, is how ads are bought and sold – a specialization that demands Quants chew through copious amounts of data and develop algorithms that spot purchasing opportunities across a sea of media outlets.

Even customers who have the same general interests and purchasing behaviors can vary wildly in their choice of channels through which to consume the media. A Quant, and their marketing cohorts, have to be able to predict and position themselves to take advantage of these changes as they happen.

Understanding How Ads are Bought and Placed

Savvy marketing teams know the general channels and media outlets their customers prefer – but adding Quants to the mix further narrows that laser-targeted focus, and proves it with data. No longer do advertisers have to hope that targeting an ad to a specific demographic will generally get results. With Quants on board, they can have predictive models that demonstrate precisely how the ad will perform given the data they have collected so far.

This isn’t to say, of course, that the emphasis on consumer behaviors powering marketing decisions has fallen by the wayside. If anything, it adds a new layer that magnifies those behaviors and lets marketers deep deeper to make more meaningful connections.

Marketers who forego these kinds of advertising strategies will find their brands are quickly made irrelevant or seemingly “out of touch” with what customers want. It’s a rapidly changing playing field, and advertisers who can draw definitive distinctions from the data they gather will soon be miles ahead from those who are still struggling to maintain relevance.

Benefits of Adding Quants to Your Marketing Team

Quants have seemingly limitless potential when added to marketing teams. Like the secret ingredient that truly “makes” a dish, they can develop predictive advertising models that take into account much more than a user’s location or what products they viewed.

Imagine being able to pinpoint not just a customer’s location, but what other places they tend to visit as well? Imagine being able to glean their interests from not just the social media profiles they follow, but what they post? Imagine not only being able to see current products they’ve interested in, but what they’ve bought in the past – and what they may buy in the future? How much of an impact did your current ad campaign have on them, if any?

This is the kind of data that Quants dive right into, plucking that irresistible-looking, but seemingly-out-of-reach fruit that’s ripe for the taking.

And as more traditional channels like TV, radio and newspapers begin their shift to a more programmatically advertising-backed strategy, you can expect to see the lines between these channels blur even more. The ripple effect may start with the online world, but it will eventually branch out to affect everything from how ads are bought, to how consumers shop.

Quants are traditionally hired by companies working with hedge funds, mutual funds and asset managers, as well as investment bankers. These days, it’s becoming more and more common for high level consulting companies and advertising firms to hire quants as well.

What’s the Difference Between a Quant and a Data Scientist?

When considering hiring a Quant, the question often comes up, “don’t data scientists do the same thing?” The answer is — not quite.

Data scientists know where to find data, how to analyze it and work with it in order to optimize processes and increase customer lifetime value. Data scientists can take copious amounts of convoluted, unstructured information and analyze it to pick out the gold nuggets that make an impact on companies’ bottom lines and customer retention.

Quants also analyze data, but they tend to manipulate it more to forecast potential opportunities and changes. Rather than picking out gold nuggets, quants tend to take the whole and see if they can draw conclusions from it. One specialization isn’t really replacing another or necessarily better than the other.

Also, many organizations and companies can thrive just fine with a team of data scientists — Uber, Airbnb and many others are perfect examples of this. However, if you’re in the business of gauging opportunities, making data-backed predictions and determining how to prepare for and leverage multiple outcomes, having a quant in your corner could make all the difference.

Where Can I Find Quants?

Quants typically hang out in places with large financial sectors — New York, Chicago and even Boston are some of most common locales, but they can be found across the country and around the world. Firms looking to hire quants will look for, at the very minimum, a master’s degree, but they prefer a PhD in a quantitative-related subject like mathematics, finance, statistics or economics. University towns with well-known and respected programs in these fields are also a hotbed for Quant talent.

Are There Any Drawbacks to Hiring a Quant?

Quants are in their element when it comes to data and statistics. But you can’t forget the marketing aspect, either. Quants are typically proficient at identifying patterns and trends, and then creating and implementing campaigns while measuring and verifying the results accordingly.

However, it’s also temptingly easy for them to question everything. While it’s in their nature to want to question things, and use data to uncover answers, as they dig deeper and deeper, they end up with even more questions. It becomes easier to overlook things. When the success or failure of an ad campaign hinges on their ability to accurately predict and model the outcome, there’s also a degree of stress involved.

It’s also possible for Quants to become too confident. With so much data and so much analysis going on, it’s important for them to stay grounded and collaborate with other team members to understand the big picture and the end goal.

Quants aren’t for every company. Small to medium-sized businesses without much of a focus on advertising won’t see much benefit from hiring them. Industries where Quants excel naturally have a great deal to do with math, statistics and programming, including modeling various outcomes.

How Will Quants Change the Industry?

Quants’ place in marketing is still relatively new. Tools that leverage the predictive modeling capabilities of big data and apply it to programmatic advertising are still fairly novel, and there is no “one size fits all” solution for every enterprise.

However, by using a customer behavior analysis tool like Kissmetrics, you can not only gather the kinds of impactful data that help Quants identify and act on trends and behaviors, but you can also deliver it visually – knowing precisely what events trigger opportunities, and capitalize on them at a moment’s notice.

And those are the kinds of opportunities that – Quant or not – everyone can get involved with.
Do you have Quants on your marketing team? How have their strategies and findings impacted your advertising and your bottom line? Share your thoughts and perspectives with us in the comments below!

About the Author: Sherice Jacob helps business owners improve website design and increase conversion rates through compelling copywriting, user-friendly design and smart analytics analysis. Learn more at iElectrify.com and download your free web copy tune-up and conversion checklist today!

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9 Skills Every Social Media Manager Must Have

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