Design Your SaaS Website to Be an Online Lead-Generation Machine

At New Breed we like to think of your website as your best salesperson. Christoph Janz, on the other hand, considers it to be your best marketing person.

“If you market a SaaS application using a low-touch sales model, most of your customers will have very little interactions with your sales team, which turns your website into the face of your company. Use this as an opportunity to make your website your best marketing person!”

The primary objective of your website is to attract visitors, turn many of them into trial users or leads, and ultimately win those users as customers. In other words, conversion, conversion, conversion. Your website needs to be an online lead-generation machine that is fine-tuned to convert quickly in order to keep up with the already cluttered SaaS space.

To achieve this, you need to keep visitors on your website longer, because the longer they explore, the greater the opportunity for conversion. We’ll cover how particular design elements can help keep visitors around longer and turn them into paying customers.

Five areas on your site to optimize for online lead generation

1. Value proposition

As a rule of thumb, you should aim to communicate your value proposition within 10 seconds, maximum! This is a statement on your homepage that clearly defines your solution for your personas, and why your solution is the optimal choice over competitors in your industry.

muHive, a customer-engagement solution, went through multiple rounds of site revamps, including its homepage. Prior to beginning the process, the team received feedback that its homepage didn’t clearly state what the company does, resulting in a higher bounce rate. To remedy this, the team created and tested different copy options. An effective value proposition can increase your ROI by approximately 15 percent. So follow muHive’s lead and test it out before you commit. Ultimately, muHive was able to significantly decrease the bounce rate of the homepage through a clear, concise value proposition and testing of multiple versions.

An effective value proposition can increase your ROI by approximately 15%

2. Your blog

Consumers don’t want to be sold to; they want valuable resources from a source they can trust before they buy. Be that source through your blog. Blogging should be a key piece of your lead-generation efforts.

Blogging can be intimidating, we understand that. Consistently producing relevant, valuable and intriguing content on a regular basis may seem like a reach, but it isn’t. Blog posts don’t need to be long written content pieces. They can also be videos, PowerPoint slides, infographics and more. Whatever formats you decide to employ, it’s imperative to get started on your blog ASAP. HubSpot found that businesses with blogs that have accumulated at least 51 posts see 53 percent more traffic than blogs with 20 to 50 posts.

So what are you waiting for? Get blogging to increase opportunities for lead conversions.

3. Pricing page

The pricing page of SaaS websites has become one of the most critical pages a visitor or lead visits during the buyers’ journey. Why? Because it’s the place where people go to decide if they want to use (and pay for) your service or not. For SaaS companies, this means you need to:

1. Have a pricing page.
2. Make it easy to find and navigate.
3. Include different packages or options that speak to your buyer personas.

When designing your pricing page to its full potential, keep these lessons in mind:

• Create different tiers of plans that speak to each buyer persona you are targeting.
• Structure pricing that scales with usage through value metrics, but keep this simple enough so customers understand what value they’ll actually derive from your solution.
• Don’t skimp on design or user experience, but don’t go over the top. Make the design of your pricing page clear, concise and specific.

4. Free trial/demo calls to action

As a SaaS company, take advantage of your inherent ability to let your potential customers use your product before they buy it. An effective free trial can allow for increased lead qualification and ultimately lower customer acquisition cost.

The first step to getting visitors into a free trial is to promote it on your site. This is achieved by creating and placing calls to action for the free trial/demo throughout your website, particularly on your homepage. But more than just throwing a button on your site with some basic microcopy, a free trial/demo CTA needs to be strategically designed or no one will ever convert into a user. In fact, the conversion rate from visitor to trial was just 8.4 percent.

Bizible’s solution for increasing free-demo users was to implement the persistent demo form. It added a global request-a-demo form on every page, including the blog. It leveraged an inline form from HubSpot, which also progressively fills in your information if you’ve downloaded content from them previously. This addition increased demo requests by 40 percent!

Other ways to increase free trial/demo conversions:

• Add “free” to your CTA copy
• Have the form scroll with the visitor
• Make the form short
• Test different color buttons
• Add a human element (imagery)
• Include social proof

5. Use Live Chat

Add live chat to your site to allow visitors to reach out directly to a sales rep at their convenience. Dave Rigotti of Bizible has recounted to us that though their live chat does not generate a large number of leads every month, the leads sourced through the live chat contribute upwards of 25% of their new monthly recurring revenue each month. This makes it one of their top 3 sales channels in terms of revenue generation! This is a great example of effective pipeline marketing and a strategy that all SaaS companies should consider investing in.

There are lots of ways to design your SaaS website to be an online lead-generation machine. Be sure to check back for more innovative and strategic ideas to boost site conversion rates. If you have any questions or comments, be sure to add them below.