9 Tips for Creating a High-Converting SaaS Landing Page

Thanks to its high levels of recurring revenue and infinite scalability, SaaS – or Software as a Service – is one of the most lucrative business sectors in today’s digital economy, thought to be generating revenues in-excess of $85 billion in 2019.

The trouble is, it’s also one of the most competitive spaces for business owners to be in.

With a staggering 34,727 products available on software comparison site G2Crowd – including an estimated 6,829 in the marketing category alone – it’s easy to see that bringing your marketing A-game matters if you want your SaaS company to succeed.

At the heart of any SaaS marketing campaign is the landing page – which is somewhere on your website you can drive traffic to in order to show them content that you hope will convince them to sign up for an offer or make a purchase from you.

The trouble is, that if your landing pages aren’t up to scratch, they won’t convert the traffic you’re driving there into new business.

In order for your SaaS marketing campaigns to be a success and for your landing pages to turn into high-converting lead generation machines, I’ve put together 9 of my top tips to help you create your own high-converting SaaS landing pages.

One of the first things you need to do when you’re planning a high-converting landing page is to think about the specific stage of the customer journey that your potential buyer is in – starting with the awareness stage.

First coined as a concept by legendary 60’s Copywriter, Eugene Schwartz in his book ‘Breakthrough Advertising’ – a must have for marketers everywhere, despite the $150+ price tag – the 5 stages of awareness is a classic conversion principle that is still essential in today’s digital world.

To help make your offer as enticing to the reader as possible, you need to consider at which of the 5 stage of awareness they’re at. Are they:

By working on messaging that resonates with the specific stage of awareness your landing page visitor is at, you’re going to stand a much better chance of converting them and pushing them towards the next stage in your marketing funnel.

When it comes to online marketing, one of the biggest mistakes that people make is wasting huge sums of money on advertising that doesn’t work.

In fact, some estimates suggest that 98% of all paid advertising budget is wasted.

It’s not that the advertising doesn’t get clicks, or that the clicks aren’t from targeted traffic.

Oh no, the problem is that when people click on an advert, the landing page they arrive at is dreadful!

Why is it dreadful?

Well, it’s because the messaging on the landing page has almost nothing to do with the messaging on the advert and it feels like they’ve landed somewhere completely alien to what they were expecting.

Message matching is all about creating a consistent link between the copy used in the advert and the copy used in the landing page headline to reassure visitors that they’ve come to the right place.

Doing it properly means you could see as much as a 212.74% lift in conversion rate on your landing page. Doing it wrong could reduce your ad relevancy and increase your cost of customer acquisition.

This is because not only will a failure to match your advertising and landing page messaging result in you radically reducing your conversion rate, but it will also affect your ad quality score, so advertisers like Google will charge your more money per click.

You never get a second chance at a first impression, and when it comes to landing pages, you’ll get less than 15 seconds to capture a readers attention and make a lasting impression on them.

This means, it’s imperative that you get the key information across at first glance, without users having to scroll or click.

In the newspaper industry, the practice of placing important content in the upper half of the front page is known as putting it ‘Above the Fold’ – and you should aim to take the same approach with your landing page.

By placing an eye-catching headline, a short and snappy summary of your offering, and an enticing call to action, up front and centre as the user enters the page, they’ll quickly be able to understand what is in it for them and make the decision to continue reading.

Is your content compelling enough to take readers below the fold?Source

It’s critical that you make sure the content you have ‘above the fold’ is enticing as it sets a precedent for what they user can expect to see further down, with the highest level of engagement happening around the ‘digital fold’ area and a staggering 65.7% of all engagement with your landing page happening below the ‘fold.

However, if you fail to make that initial content punchy, direct, and appealing, then they’re likely to hit the back button in less than 15 seconds, never to be seen again.

One of the most important things you can do as a marketer is to look past what your product does and instead concentrate on why people should buy it. In other words, you should concentrate on selling the benefits of using your product, rather than the features.

No one wants to visit a landing page and read through a list of features like this:

It’s dull to read, and unless you know what they mean already, it becomes a meaningless list of jargon that the average user can’t or won’t relate to.

Instead, you should be presenting the benefits of these features and what the upshot is for the person who buys them, which would look more like this:

Successful landing pages are structured to make sure that all the right information appears on screen to convince and convert readers.

Not only do you need to make sure that you’re getting the right message across, but you also need to make sure that everything you say has a consistent flow that guides your reader down your landing page, answers their questions, and makes them want to read on to the next bit.

Without a well thought out structure, your landing page becomes a hot mess of random information and images that has no chance of efficiently converting visitors into leads or sales.

The good news is that you don’t need to plan out this structure from scratch, you can simply use a proven copywriting formula to do the heavy lifting for you.

These formulas have been developed, tested, and refined, by experts over the course of years. This means that you can use their hard work and hours of testing to help kickstart your new landing page and guarantee that your messaging will stand the best chance of making the highest impact on your readers.

The best landing pages boast a combination of compelling copy, modern and intuitive design, and quality images that help to bring your SaaS software to life.

Generally speaking, the types of imagery you’ll need for your landing page can be split into two categories – product images and illustrative images.

Although a high quality SaaS product image will essentially be a screenshot of your software, it should be:

Alongside your product images, you’ll also need some illustrative images – for most landing pages these tend to be photos of the types of people who’ll use your software, or the types of environments they’ll use it in. These photos will help set the tone and enable your landing pages visitors to quickly relate to what they’re seeing onscreen.

Whether you use stock photography or have your own professional photos taken, you’re going to need to crop, edit, and refine your photos before you can use them on your landing page. Tools like AutoClipping allow you to do this cheaply and easily online, so you can edit your photos in minutes.

Before a landing page visitor will even consider signing up for your offer, starting a free trial, or even purchasing a license for your SAAS product – they need to be able to trust you.

Ultimately, human nature means that people want to be reassured that other people have successfully used your product before they consider it for themselves.

Because 70% of readers will trust reviews from people they’ve never even met, it means that one of the biggest ways to build up trust on a landing page is to leverage social proof.

Are you leveraging social proof on your landing page?Source

Essentially, social proof is a catch-all term to describe a number of different ways to share feedback from existing customers with new users. This could include:

Text is an obvious way to communicate a lot of this social proof information, but don’t forget to consider things like videos, photos, and documents to really bring this information to life and make it more tangible for readers of your landing page.

One of the best ways to improve the conversion rate on your landing page is to concentrate on your offer – what action do you want them to take and what will you give them in return?

The stages of awareness we mentioned earlier mean that you’d need to make sure the offer is relevant to the reader based on where they are in their buying process.

As an example, offering them a 10% discount on an annual plan when they didn’t even realize they had a problem yet is probably not going to convert as well as driving them towards a free webinar on common problems faced in your industry.

Once you’ve established what you’d like your user to do on the landing page – and make sure that it’s appropriate for the stage they’re at – you need to concentrate on making that offer clear.

There’s no point going to the effort of designing a landing page and driving traffic to it, if your call to action sucks.

Make sure that you’re clearly outlining what’s in it for them every step of the way.

As an example, a generic, unclear, and uninspiring call to action would look something like this:

It doesn’t really tell the reader anything about the newsletter, what they’ll get from reading it, or even when they can expect to read it.

Don’t make your readers think! Instead try spelling out the value for them with a super clear and compelling call to action and offering, for example (like on Business 2 Community):

Adding that extra layer of information helps to turn the call to action from uninspiring to compelling, making your offering go from a “no thanks” to a “must have”.

Online marketing is more data driven than ever.

The days of setting up a website or landing page, seeing some decent results and leaving it to run on autopilot are long gone.

Even if you get your landing page to convert traffic into leads or sales, you can always do more to help make the conversion rate even higher – in a process known as conversion rate optimization.

Put simply, conversion rate optimization sees marketers go through a series of stages to measure their success to date, come up with ideas to optimize or improve the page, test those ideas, and then measure them again. By doing this on a consistent basis, marketers can make substantial improvements to their conversion rate over time.

Measuring can be as simple as using tools like Google Analytics to look at the number of visitors your landing page is getting and then combining that with the number of conversions you get, to end up with a conversion rate percentage.

However, to help you understand in more detail what to optimize we’d suggest using tools like HotJar – which includes heat maps, screen recordings, and even surveys – to really measure what your users are doing on your website. This should give you insights into which parts of your landing page are under-performing and ideas on how to improve it.

To test your new ideas – which could be as simple as changing the headline or adding a button – you should use an A/B testing tool like Optimizely to help you run tests and experiments in parallel. This means you can quickly test new ideas against what is currently working, to understand if they’re going to make an impact on your overall conversion rate.

There is no real secret to making sure you have a high-converting SaaS landing page.

If you can make sure that it looks good, reads well, and resonates with your target audience, then there is no reason why you shouldn’t see your conversion rate start to sky-rocket.

The 9 key tips we’ve outlined in this article are designed to help you get as many big wins as you can, as easily as possible. The next time you develop a landing page for your SaaS product, try following the list in order, and by the end of it you’ll have your very own high-converting SaaS landing page.

Do you have any SaaS landing page tips to share? Let me know by leaving a quick comment below.

Source: Business2community.com

Powered by NewsAPI.org

Keywords:

Landing page • Digital economy • S85 (Berlin) • Marketing • Marketing • Landing page • Website • Landing page • Business • Marketing • Marketing • Landing page • Lead generation • First Things • Landing page • Copywriting • Evgeny Schwartz • Advertising • Principle • Awareness • Religious education • Awareness • Landing page • Online advertising • Advertising • Advertising • Advertising • Advertising • Landing page • Landing page • Landing page • Conversion marketing • Landing page • Advertising • Customer • Advertising • Landing page • Conversion marketing • Advertising • Quality Score • Advertising • Google • Information • Above the fold • Landing page • Reading (process) • Above the fold • Landing page • Web browser • Marketing • Landing page • Jargon • Information • Landing page • Data structure • Landing page • Hot Mess • Randomness • Information • Randomness • Structure • Copywriting • Landing page • Landing page • Intuition • Quality (philosophy) • Mental image • Software • Type–token distinction • Mental image • Landing page • Categorization • Image • Image • Quality (philosophy) • Image • Screenshot • Software • Image • Image • Stock photography • Landing page • Landing page • Human nature • Landing page • Social proof • Social proof • Landing page • Social proof • Time • Feedback • Social proof • Information • Object (philosophy) • Information • Landing page • Landing page • Web conferencing • Landing page • Landing page • Business 2 Community • Online advertising • Landing page • Autopilot • Landing page • Conversion rate optimization • Conversion rate optimization • Marketing • Idea • Time • Measurement • Google Analytics • Landing page • Conversion marketing • Website • Landing page • A/B testing • Optimizely • Design of experiments • Landing page • Landing page • Landing page • Landing page •