Lead conversion is the next step following lead generation. The aim of the lead generation step is to get as many targeted visitors through various techniques to your SaaS website. Getting traffic is hard but getting targeted traffic is definitely harder.
Why all this emphasis on getting targeted traffic?
Getting targeted traffic is the very first step to acquiring customers. If you are getting a ton of untargeted traffic, you conversion rate will be very low. Basically, you are getting the wrong visitors to your SaaS website. No matter what technique you will use in the lead conversion step, no matter what pricing you choose, no matter what features you ship, you will never be able to convert non targeted visitor. Basically you will be going round in circles until you give up or fail.
How will you know that you are getting targeted visitors your SaaS website?
You can never know that you are getting the most targeted traffic. Never ever. You will just have to A/B test different strategies from the lead generation step, target different channels, track leads coming from various campaigns, compare and analyse stats and keep improving on your existing results. The lead generation step and lead conversion step has to work in sync so as to improve and get better results.
Lead conversion can be broadly split up into two main steps:
- Visitor to SaaS sign-up
- Sign-up to paid customer
The reason why you should split these two different conversion points is to be able to capture statistical data that can shed more light as to where improvement is required. For instance, if you are getting a poor visitor to SaaS sign-up conversion rate it can be:
- you are not getting targeted traffic
- you are incorrectly addressing your audience’s pain points
- your messaging is not compelling enough
Whilst if you are getting a fairly good visitor to SaaS sign-up conversion but then failing to convert those sign-ups into paid customers, then you might need to double check:
- your SaaS for any bugs
- for any missing features
- for feedback from existing users
- about rearranging your sales funnel
In this section we will focus on various techniques on how to convert your visitors and sign-ups, through the use of various tools. The techniques are split into accordingly so you can pick and choose the right technique according to where improvement is duly needed!
Website visitor to SaaS Sign-up conversion
Strategy #39: Use videos to get your message across
In 2019 it is a known fact that videos convert much better than any other marketing format, and with Promo.com the top advertising content assets are no longer only available to big businesses. Videos allow you to get your messages across quicker and more effectively, further improving your visitor to SaaS sign-up conversion.
What is Promo.com and how it can help your SaaS?
Video is no longer optional when conducting marketing. The question is how to get the best quality using the fewest resources and, perk, actually enjoying the creative process. Within that concentric circle is where you find Promo.com
Promo.com helps businesses create effective video ads and professional marketing videos quickly and affordably, allowing you to focus your time and budget on the campaigns and strategy itself. Promo.com provides access to 15M+ premium quality video clips and photos, pre-edited licensed music and a user-friendly editor. With Promo.com you can customize award-winning templates, or start from scratch. Choose from a massive content library or upload your own visuals to stand out online and make a serious impact for your business. Apart from this, Movavi software is also a good option that could help you to create effective videos.
Strategy #40: Get your website visitors on the phone
Even if you have the most compelling messaging on your website, going on a 1-on-1 call is by far the best to convert your website traffic. Now this depends on the nature of your business and the kind of pricing you have. But if your business and pricing allows for it, get those visitors on a call. Once you get them on a call, the normal sales cycle will kick in. Hybrid.chat will help you convert visitors to sales call amongst other things.
What is Hybrid.chat and how it can help your SaaS?
Hybrid.chat lets you build and deploy digital employees for your business that help in capturing leads, converting more PPC traffic, following up with customers, vetting leads before passing it on to sales staff, or just wishing your potential seasonal greetings (to keep the leads warm).
The digital employees (or chatbots) can:
- Engage with the website visitors / facebook page audience on your behalf
- Help website visitors navigate through the website
- Answer most frequently asked questions
- Capture contact details (email, phone number, sets appointments)
- Connect to Sales team via Chat or Phone call
Hybrid.chat can be deployed on:
- Your business website:
Automatically engage with incoming traffic as a chat widget at the bottom of the screen. It is well established in the chatbot industry that a live chat widget increases customer interaction by 35% or more. SaaS can use this to capture more leads off incoming organic traffic, automate customer support and speed up website navigation and convert web traffic into phone calls to sales staff.
- PPC landing pages:
Just like your website, Facebook gets its share of traffic that generate leads, specially for local businesses or entities that have a social presence. Chatbots deployed as Messenger chat on Facebook pages automatically engages with this incoming traffic and can convert it into phone calls directly from Facebook chat.
- Facebook pages
Chatbots can also be used as landing pages on Adwords to decrease CPA (Cost per acquisition). Launching a mobile only Adwords campaign that drives clicks to the chatbot landing page that converses and captures the leads, pushing them towards setting appointments or telephonic phone calls with the sales staff.
- Business Phone numbers (via SMS):
Popularly used for cold lead reachout, A bot on SMS can engage with potential leads, working to work them up and push towards closure.
Now that you are familiar with Hybrid.chat capabilities, let’s see how to convert your visitors and get them on a call.
Step 1: Goto Hybrid.Chat Dashboard and Create a New Bot
Step 2: Choose the publishing platform. You will get to choose between Website or Facebook page.
Step 3: Use this spreadsheet as Chatbot template to deploy. Feel free to alter it the way it suits your business. You may need to refer the Hybrid.chat documentation and if you have any problem understanding the spreadsheet, Hybrid.Chat team can build one for you at no cost to you.
Step 4: Publish your Bot by clicking CREATE BOT or UPDATE BOT. Before publishing, it would ask for Twilio Credentials (telephony service it uses to connect your leads via phone call).
Strategy #41: Convert Website Visitors with Exit-Intent Campaigns
What if you can detect those leaving your SaaS website and give them an incentive not to leave? Visitors might leave your SaaS website for various reasons:
- The message is not clear
- The offer is not compelling enough
- Pricing is not clear
- Or your visitors simply don’t have enough time to go through your content and educate themselves about your solution.
What if you can make their effort worth it by offering them a special discount or a free consultation? This is just one way how Sleeknote can help you convert website visitors into SaaS sign-ups.
What is Sleeknote and how can it help your SaaS?
Sleeknote helps online businesses of all sizes engage with their site visitors without hurting the user experience. Sleeknotecreates the most non-intrusive and personalized on-site engagement tools for online businesses. Sleeknote is different than traditional pop-ups because a lot of effort is put in the user experience so as to generate higher conversions.
Using Sleeknote products, SaaS can collect email addresses, increase product sales, connect with their visitors, and guide site visitors for better buying decisions. And the best part is, Sleeknote works with every CMS and e-commerce platform. (Plus, with all major email service providers.)
With the drag ‘n’ drop editor, SaaS can easily create eye-catching campaigns without the need for a developer. Smart marketers love Sleeknote because they can split test different headlines, images, and copy to discover what works best for them, and improve their conversion rates.
Choosing from their wide selection of beautifully designed, pre-made templates, marketers can create high-converting campaigns within minutes. Every element in Sleeknote campaigns is fully customizable. Meaning, SaaS marketers can easily adjust them in order to make their forms consistent with the look and feel of their site.
No two visitors are alike. That’s why Sleeknote comes equipped with Smart Triggers. Using timed, scroll, exit-intent, or manual triggers, marketers can show the right messages to the right users at the right time. The result? Better personalized on-site messages, higher conversions, and more sales revenue.
Using the right on-site messages with Sleeknote exit-intent campaigns, marketers can significantly increase the number of conversions they get. You can offer abandoning visitors an incentive to complete their purchase with an exit-intent campaign. Here’s an exit-intent campaign example:
- Decide on an incentive (discounts, free shipping, and so on) for abandoning visitors.
- Set the exit-intent trigger to show your Sleeknote campaign to abandoning visitors.
- Add the specific URL condition and enter the URL where you would like you campaign to trigger.
Strategy #42: Nudge Visitors with Testimonial Campaigns
Customer testimonials are the driving force behind purchasing decisions. Using testimonials as social proof on SaaS sites, online marketers can improve conversion rates. Even though customer testimonials are highly effective, very few SaaS marketers use them to their advantage. You need to use the right testimonials on the right pages if you want to drive more sales. And product pages are the perfect place to display testimonial campaigns.
Because this is where visitors make the first step toward converting, so use relevant testimonials to nudge them to take that first step and easily convert visitors into sign-ups.
Here’s what a Sleeknote testimonial campaign could look like:
- Choose the top customer testimonials you want to display on product pages.
- Add a specific URL condition and enter the URLs of the pages you want the campaign to show on.
- Set a timed trigger for your campaign to four seconds to increase its effectiveness—without being intrusive.
Strategy #43: Create a checklist to entice the user to activate themselves
Native checklists to get you set up through the journey of activation. Human brains focus more on uncompleted tasks than completed ones. Tasks heavily occupy our minds until complete. This is called as the Zeigarnik effect. Use these kind of checklists for your app. They show a list of tasks to be completed.
To get a checklist integrated with your SaaS, you can use UserPilot. But it’s not only about checklists. See what UserPilot can do for your SaaS.
What is UserPilot and how it can help your SaaS?
Deliver the perfect product experience with Userpilot. Userpilot helps SaaS increase user adoption by allowing them to trigger the right in-app experience to the right persona at the right stage of their user journey. Code-Free.
If you create user onboarding with Userpilot, it can help you convert free trial to paid customer much faster because we help you drive the “aha moment”. It will increase your free trial conversion rate.
Moreover, a good onboarding will help you to retain the users in the longer term. How?
- Easily integrate Userpilot with your product’s UI and pass user data to target a specific segment.
- Build highly customized product experiences that will blend seamlessly with your UI.
- Build contextual product experiences that triggers based on conditions such as user persona, stage of the journey or even mouse clicks!
- React in real-time to in-app user events — such as triggering a modal when a user completes a certain action in your app.
- React in real-time to in-app user events — such as triggering a modal when a user completes a certain action in your app.
Strategy #44: Make your SaaS on-boarding and experience personalized
Userpilot can show the right message to the right customers at the right time via the right channel is the next level of personalization and it is believed that in 2019 we will be seeing a massive increase in the personalization of user onboarding and product adoption funnels. Connecting analytics data to communication channels and in-app widgets will allow us to help users and guide them through based on their past experience with the product and their progress.
Strategy #45: Identify Different User Personas & Onboard Them
If your product is attracting different types of users, then you should segment users in order to be able to personalize their onboarding experience. Such personalization will help increase your SaaS sign-up to customer conversion.
In the example below, we have created onboarding for two different personas using Userpilot
Strategy #46: Interactive Guides as Help Centers to Decrease Support Costs
Automation of customer support helps small teams save time to focus on the product. Most users don’t enjoy auto-answers from bots, read long documents or watch video tutorials. Most users would like to figure things out, they want to get their hands dirty by trying things out. UserGuiding can help you create interactive guides that explain your SaaS step by step as required. Check out this Gmail demo environment. Instead of explaining people how to change Gmail theme over and over again, doesn’t it look much better to interactively showing them how to do it instead of just telling?
What is UserGuiding and how it can help your SaaS?
UserGuiding, is an interactive user onboarding tool, that helps SaaS to improve product adoption by designing interactive product tours without coding. Thanks to UserGuiding’s UI, non-technical product staff can create interactive tutorials, in-app messages, and on-demand guides in minutes.
With the rising trend of “no-code software”, product people currently prefer the tools they can handle themselves. Since the developers are always busy, to develop one onboarding flow takes around ten days, this is without analytics, integration, segmentation and other supplementary features.
For the SaaS Business, retention is a crucial metric. When we observe the retention graph of an average SaaS business, we will notice that a large percentage of visitors are not retained at the end of the first week which means they do not keep coming back. There are a lot of reasons behind that, people are likely to search for alternatives(since there are a lot of alternatives for each kind of product or service out there) when their first interaction is not successful. Visitors tend to use the products & services which are discoverable and easy to use. A well-designed onboarding helps keeping retention levels higher than the usual.
This is where UserGuiding comes into the game. You can easily create walkthroughs and product tours to drive users in action. A good onboarding process help companies turn visitors into users and even into customers because it encourages the engagement with the tool. With UserGuiding you can onboard your new users with an introductory walkthrough, at the same time you can make them take real action and complete real time tasks with our predefined step types. You can also track the analytics of each guide within your UserGuiding panel, analyze the results and improve the continuous onboarding process.
UserGuiding also has a special feature called “UserGuiding Assistant” to provide on demand assistance. Your users can go through the guides you have created for them automatically, or on-demand, in other words, whenever they need. With UserGuiding Assistant, your SaaS users will be able to see all the available guides you have created for them.
Strategy #47: Automate your sales workflow with our qualification process
Not all SaaS sign-ups are equal and they should not be treated equally. Every SaaS company must track, monitor and score each sign-up so as to be able to tell which SaaS sign-up will most likely convert to customers. SaaS sign-up with high score (higher probability of converting) should be sent out to the sales team so as to get a special treatment! To do all this OhMyLead is your tool.
What is OhMyLead and how it can help your SaaS?
OhMyLead is an all-in-one lead management software that synchronizes every lead source in one place, automate the qualification process and lets you measure your Lead Generation Campaigns ROI. OhMyLead helps you to:
- Connect your different lead sources and follow up with prospects instantly.
- Automate the qualification process and your engagement with an intuitive interface leads alert, Welcome Email, lead scoring, number & mail verification, Lead Enrichment
- Qualify easily your new leads and automate your sales and nurturing workflow to deliver automatically the highly qualified leads
- Deliver only high qualified leads to your sales team, the rest are seamlessly send to your marketing automation tool.
Strategy #48: Use a chat prompt to start more conversations
Offering live chat on your website is a fantastic customer service tool. But it’s not quite a sales and marketing tool. Not yet anyway. To really kick off the conversation, you’ll need a chat prompt.
A chat prompt is an automation that will trigger based on certain criteria you set. For instance, you can have a prompt that says, “Hi, welcome to [site name]! I’m here to help if you have any questions.”
Then, it can trigger:
- Only when you’re online
- Or only on certain pages
- Even after they’ve been on a certain page for a certain amount of time (e.g. 3 seconds)
Creating a chat prompt in Gist can be done in a couple minutes. All you have to do is set your prompt’s script, choose some details and set it to display! Here’s a quick gif showing how quickly you can create your own chat prompt within the app.
This way you don’t just wait for a SaaS sign-up to reach out for help, you make the first step and start the interaction with them. But what else can Gist help your SaaS with?
What is Gist and how it can help your SaaS?
Instead of using one tool for your live chat, another to set meetings, one for email marketing and several business software products — Gist is an all-in-one growth platform. If it pertains to marketing, sales and support; we have a solution in one organized package.
Here’s the short list of things you can do with Gist:
- Live Chat
- Chat Prompts (to improve chat engagement)
- Chat Bots (to be there when you’re not)
- Email Marketing (single broadcasts, and campaigns based on triggers you set)
- Marketing Automation (track and set up automations based on visitor behavior)
- Customer Support (create a knowledge base and handle support issues via chat)
Strategy #49: Use a Chat Bot to Guide Visitors
Chat bots may sound like they’re only for the tech-savvy or Fortune 500s, but that’s not the case. With Gist, you can easily have a fully-functional bot helping visitors on intricate portions of your website.
Some examples may include:
- Signing up subscribers/Pitching a lead magnet
- Setting meetings for a demo
- Handling common support/FAQ inquiries
- Welcoming visitors
- Booking appointments
- Accepting job applications
Here’s what you need to know when creating a bot.
- Who’s it for?
- What do they want to know?
- How can you guide them further into your site/content?
From here, you can find out how to best use a bot and turn these answers into the questions/answers for your new bot.
Mapping out and testing the flow of your bot may take some time. But once the details are hammered out — it’s a breeze to input into our builder.
Here’s a quick screenshot of the builder.
Strategy #50: Use Automations to Tag Users
Automations are one of the most exciting elements of the Gist platform. You can set up, what we call, “Triggers”. Based on these automation triggers, you can also create actions to occur when, well, triggered. Gist has supplied a number of pre-formulated triggers, but allows for nearly limitless creativity using “Tags”.
Here’s a gif of the available triggers.
Once a trigger is chosen, you can choose an appropriate action to go along with the trigger. Here’s a quick gif of Gist’s available actions.
So, how do you use the automations to convert sign-ups into customers? Many, many ways. Like, whenever someone visits your SaaS, you can apply a tag to them and see how often they come back, which pages they visit, how long they stay on the site. Then, if said visitor ever gives you their contact data you can know how long they’ve considered your solution.
Or, if a user subscribes for a particular plan, you can send them to a hyper-targeted email campaign. And once, that campaign is finished, you can set up another trigger to move from one campaign to another. So, if they finish your welcome campaign, you can then send that subscriber to your sales-related sequence.
Strategy #51: Personalized your offers according to SaaS sign-up behaviour
Unfortunately most of the sales and marketing strategies are static and practically forces all SaaS sign-ups down a predefined customer journey or funnel. Whilst A/B testing and refining your sales funnel will get you to an improved conversion rate, the best way to go is to personalize your offer depending on the SaaS sign-up behaviour. To be able to do this, you need to track each individual SaaS sign-up and customize the offer accordingly. To do this LeadsHook is the perfect tool
What is LeadsHook and how it can help your SaaS?
LeadsHook is a decision-tree making software for marketing, lead generation, sales conversions and post-sales, product usage and consumption, and service utilization. Here’s an example of a decision-trees from a real campaign. Notice the asymmetry which mimics a real conversation…
With LeadsHook, marketers become observers of prospects’ behavior and based on the path taken and responses, marketers can learn prospects underserved needs and dynamically generate personalised sales copies, offers, product recommendations, reports, PDFs, action-steps, and plans.
LeadsHook produces thousands and even millions of combinations of personalized content and allows marketers to position their content, solutions and products with respect to prospects’ needs, wants, problems and desires — this is personalized product-market fit at scale.
In order to personalise your offer, create a decision tree with logic so leads are directed to the best offer possible. Drag & Drop ‘Nodes’ to create your decision tree…
Decision trees can be created with as many nodes as required. A node is a interaction such as a question like the one below.
An answer to a question can be used to generate a specific path and even a specific piece of content (a combination of text, images or videos). A much more powerful use case is combination of more than one answer to present personalized content.
Image these 3 prospects…
- Prospect with revenue of $1M per annum with 20 employees
- Prospect with revenue of $100,000 per annum with 5 employees
- Enterprise-level client
You can focus on the ideal prospect for your product and stage of growth. Perhaps, enterprise prospects are not a good fit for your product. As a marketer, knowing and learning about the market segment allows you to align your offer and your marketing to increase your success.
With LeadsHook, you learn and create automated workflows at scale.