Five ways to optimize your SaaS conversion funnel
Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2024 5:58 am
Achieving stable growth for SaaS companies means continually acquiring new customers and retaining them for as long as possible.
While this may sound easy, finding new customer acquisition opportunities in the crowded SaaS industry can be quite a challenge.
This is where optimizing your SaaS conversion funnel can help you quickly grow your SaaS business. However, the conversion funnel is often misunderstood and confused with the sales funnel at times.
That’s why it’s important to break it down into stages. This helps you figure out what data to look at and what to optimize from your existing sales processes to get better conversions.
The SaaS conversion funnel consists of the following stages:
Awareness: This is the stage where customers are just becoming familiar with your brand.
Engagement: This part of the funnel is where you attract potential customers into your acquisition funnel, educate them, and be a resource.
Exploration: This is the netherlands phone number library final stage of the acquisition process before prospects become customers.
Retention: This is the post-conversion stage, when potential customers have already become customers and the goal is to retain them so that they remain paying customers.
Importance of a SaaS conversion funnel
On the path to a purchase, customers will reach several different touchpoints as part of their customer journey. How you deliver content, ads, and other brand communications to your target audience will have an effect on how those prospects will convert.
Often, you'll find that no matter how big or effective your business is, there is at least one location that is a choke point in your consumer acquisition funnel.
Blockers represent qualms your target customer base may have when it comes to purchasing your SaaS. Addressing these objections and resolving them at the appropriate touchpoint in the funnel is extremely necessary for engineering conversions.
Optimizing your SaaS funnel will help you identify these obstacles so you can reach more buyers, convert more leads, and sell better.
1. Identify the target user persona
Target personas or buyer personas help you understand your customers’ needs and identify who they are and how to reach them more efficiently. Creating your buyer persona doesn’t have to be a difficult task for an upcoming digital marketing or email marketing campaigns .
A few tips on who your ideal customer should be is all you really need to narrow down your options and identify them. For SaaS companies that want to boost their business in a powerful way, it’s best to start by asking yourself the following four basic questions.
What problem are they trying to solve?
What product features are most important to them?
What objections are they most likely to raise?
What is your purchasing process?
Once you have the answers to all of these questions, you'll have a buyer persona ready to target and be in an attractive position to dominate the market.
2. Integrate Chatbot to filter potential customers
Converting a marketing lead to sales and purchase is often a matter of persistence or luck; however, even that requires a prospective buyer willing to buy your service or at least consider it. As such, qualified leads are the best option to achieve a high conversion rate for SaaS sales teams. Serving qualified leads often means less time is spent on unqualified leads.
Fortunately, with the burgeoning wave of AI solutions, there are many options today to help sales teams separate bad leads from good ones. A chatbot is one such solution and it is smart enough to respond to leads and filter them based on their value and potential.
chatterbot
These bots can also handle customer queries simultaneously about your service or product and assign a lead score to the potential customers based on your existing lead scoring system. These bots then filter the leads based on their score and hand over the eligible leads to the sales reps once the lead has shown that they are willing to move further down the funnel.
Not only does this ensure that less qualified leads are kept in the funnel for further nurturing, but it also wastes less time for sales reps who would otherwise have been chasing a futile attempt to convince an unwilling prospect.
3. Shorten the sales cycle
While it’s an old saying, time really does equal money. And the easiest way to optimize your sales funnel is to close the deals you have faster. The shorter your sales cycle, the less it will cost you to close a deal, the faster it will help you learn, respond, and improve, and consequently, the more successful you will be.
To shorten the sales cycle, there are really only three steps you need to take.
Focus on time traps
Conduct meetings with your SaaS sales team to identify gaps where they are wasting time. Are there any particular issues that they feel are reducing their sales time?
Release some of your questions by brainstorming to uncover some ideas that might help. Like whether demo presentations can be shortened or not, whether using sales proposal and presentation templates makes sense or not, whether customer information needs to be stored centrally or not, among other things.
Use the power of now
While talking to a potential client, don't wait to make decisions and put them off until later. Is there another step your prospect needs to take and they need a little push to do it? If so, don't wait to help them.
If you think they will have any questions or concerns, address them right then and there. Act instantly. So don't put it off until later when they might be easily distracted.
Promoting a culture of learning
Finally, use the data at your disposal to foster a culture of continuous development and building on customer mindset.
Try to gain and accumulate more data on the types of customers who purchase your services the most to see how you can better position your sales process to meet their needs.
4. Take advantage of exit-intent popups
Did you know that according to Conversion Sciences, 10-15% of lost visitors can be “saved” by using exit-intent popups?
SaaS Conversion Funnel
Exit-intent popups help you determine when users may be about to leave your site. These popups add a script to your website that monitors your guests' mouse movements based on the exit-intent framework. On desktop computers, this script displays a popup whenever users move their cursor to the exit button. On mobile devices, the exit-intent script displays a popup when visitors press the back button or scroll up to interact with the address bar.
There are several ways that an exit-intent popup can increase your conversion rate. However, here are some of the most common circumstances where leverage exit-intent popups are used:
To promote a promotional offer.
As a lead magnet.
To redirect guests.
To get feedback on your brand, business or website.
5. Invest in a customer advocacy program
Often, creating a well-designed loyalty program for frequent users is the most effective technique for retaining customers. This is especially important considering that 80% of a SaaS company’s revenue comes from just 20% of its existing customers.
SaaS companies are generally nervous about renewals. As such, implementing a customer loyalty program to drive growth has become completely essential for businesses today. Creating a loyalty program can help you capture the attention of your repeat customers. Plus, boost online conversions and ultimately increase customer lifetime value (CLV).
For a great example of a rewards program, you need look no further than Dropbox. Known for the success of their referral program, Dropbox’s referral rewards were additional storage space. This is something that was key to the use and enjoyment of their product.
This referral program continues to be so successful that 35% of daily Dropbox signups are through the referral program.
While this may sound easy, finding new customer acquisition opportunities in the crowded SaaS industry can be quite a challenge.
This is where optimizing your SaaS conversion funnel can help you quickly grow your SaaS business. However, the conversion funnel is often misunderstood and confused with the sales funnel at times.
That’s why it’s important to break it down into stages. This helps you figure out what data to look at and what to optimize from your existing sales processes to get better conversions.
The SaaS conversion funnel consists of the following stages:
Awareness: This is the stage where customers are just becoming familiar with your brand.
Engagement: This part of the funnel is where you attract potential customers into your acquisition funnel, educate them, and be a resource.
Exploration: This is the netherlands phone number library final stage of the acquisition process before prospects become customers.
Retention: This is the post-conversion stage, when potential customers have already become customers and the goal is to retain them so that they remain paying customers.
Importance of a SaaS conversion funnel
On the path to a purchase, customers will reach several different touchpoints as part of their customer journey. How you deliver content, ads, and other brand communications to your target audience will have an effect on how those prospects will convert.
Often, you'll find that no matter how big or effective your business is, there is at least one location that is a choke point in your consumer acquisition funnel.
Blockers represent qualms your target customer base may have when it comes to purchasing your SaaS. Addressing these objections and resolving them at the appropriate touchpoint in the funnel is extremely necessary for engineering conversions.
Optimizing your SaaS funnel will help you identify these obstacles so you can reach more buyers, convert more leads, and sell better.
1. Identify the target user persona
Target personas or buyer personas help you understand your customers’ needs and identify who they are and how to reach them more efficiently. Creating your buyer persona doesn’t have to be a difficult task for an upcoming digital marketing or email marketing campaigns .
A few tips on who your ideal customer should be is all you really need to narrow down your options and identify them. For SaaS companies that want to boost their business in a powerful way, it’s best to start by asking yourself the following four basic questions.
What problem are they trying to solve?
What product features are most important to them?
What objections are they most likely to raise?
What is your purchasing process?
Once you have the answers to all of these questions, you'll have a buyer persona ready to target and be in an attractive position to dominate the market.
2. Integrate Chatbot to filter potential customers
Converting a marketing lead to sales and purchase is often a matter of persistence or luck; however, even that requires a prospective buyer willing to buy your service or at least consider it. As such, qualified leads are the best option to achieve a high conversion rate for SaaS sales teams. Serving qualified leads often means less time is spent on unqualified leads.
Fortunately, with the burgeoning wave of AI solutions, there are many options today to help sales teams separate bad leads from good ones. A chatbot is one such solution and it is smart enough to respond to leads and filter them based on their value and potential.
chatterbot
These bots can also handle customer queries simultaneously about your service or product and assign a lead score to the potential customers based on your existing lead scoring system. These bots then filter the leads based on their score and hand over the eligible leads to the sales reps once the lead has shown that they are willing to move further down the funnel.
Not only does this ensure that less qualified leads are kept in the funnel for further nurturing, but it also wastes less time for sales reps who would otherwise have been chasing a futile attempt to convince an unwilling prospect.
3. Shorten the sales cycle
While it’s an old saying, time really does equal money. And the easiest way to optimize your sales funnel is to close the deals you have faster. The shorter your sales cycle, the less it will cost you to close a deal, the faster it will help you learn, respond, and improve, and consequently, the more successful you will be.
To shorten the sales cycle, there are really only three steps you need to take.
Focus on time traps
Conduct meetings with your SaaS sales team to identify gaps where they are wasting time. Are there any particular issues that they feel are reducing their sales time?
Release some of your questions by brainstorming to uncover some ideas that might help. Like whether demo presentations can be shortened or not, whether using sales proposal and presentation templates makes sense or not, whether customer information needs to be stored centrally or not, among other things.
Use the power of now
While talking to a potential client, don't wait to make decisions and put them off until later. Is there another step your prospect needs to take and they need a little push to do it? If so, don't wait to help them.
If you think they will have any questions or concerns, address them right then and there. Act instantly. So don't put it off until later when they might be easily distracted.
Promoting a culture of learning
Finally, use the data at your disposal to foster a culture of continuous development and building on customer mindset.
Try to gain and accumulate more data on the types of customers who purchase your services the most to see how you can better position your sales process to meet their needs.
4. Take advantage of exit-intent popups
Did you know that according to Conversion Sciences, 10-15% of lost visitors can be “saved” by using exit-intent popups?
SaaS Conversion Funnel
Exit-intent popups help you determine when users may be about to leave your site. These popups add a script to your website that monitors your guests' mouse movements based on the exit-intent framework. On desktop computers, this script displays a popup whenever users move their cursor to the exit button. On mobile devices, the exit-intent script displays a popup when visitors press the back button or scroll up to interact with the address bar.
There are several ways that an exit-intent popup can increase your conversion rate. However, here are some of the most common circumstances where leverage exit-intent popups are used:
To promote a promotional offer.
As a lead magnet.
To redirect guests.
To get feedback on your brand, business or website.
5. Invest in a customer advocacy program
Often, creating a well-designed loyalty program for frequent users is the most effective technique for retaining customers. This is especially important considering that 80% of a SaaS company’s revenue comes from just 20% of its existing customers.
SaaS companies are generally nervous about renewals. As such, implementing a customer loyalty program to drive growth has become completely essential for businesses today. Creating a loyalty program can help you capture the attention of your repeat customers. Plus, boost online conversions and ultimately increase customer lifetime value (CLV).
For a great example of a rewards program, you need look no further than Dropbox. Known for the success of their referral program, Dropbox’s referral rewards were additional storage space. This is something that was key to the use and enjoyment of their product.
This referral program continues to be so successful that 35% of daily Dropbox signups are through the referral program.