SaaS conversion rates are ideally the rates at which free trials convert into paying customers. In a typical SaaS (Software as a Service) company, revenue is more likely driven by the free trials which must convert into paying customers. Therefore, the best thing to do, perhaps, is to devise ways and strategies to increase trial conversion rates to significantly impact on your new customer acquisition. While it is not always clear on how best to improve this, an excellent SaaS trial conversion rate is your key to success. Below are tools to help increase SaaS conversion rates and any SaaS company that wants to increase its trial conversion rate and user signs ups must keep these in mind.
Increasing SaaS Conversion Rates – Insider Tips
1. Correctly Measure Everything
To increase trial conversion you need to measure everything and measure correctly. Measure all the time and find the right metrics to do it. If data and metrics are not your friends, it is high time you bond with them. However, “vanity metrics” or rather wrong metrics may lead you far down the wrong lane or course of action. For instance, when you measure a singe “conversion rate” from your trial signups to your paying customers, you may not fully understand where issues exist. For example, are you bringing in the wrong leads? What about user experience: is it too complex? And your product value: is it too vague to understand?
2. Help your Sales Team by Turning Leads into Opportunities
Since the SaaS business continuously relies on inbound marketing to generate leads, it, therefore, creates the potential unqualified leads, which are just users signing up for a trial without an intent to buy. Such leads may overwhelm the sales team which is always short staffed, hindering them from focusing on interacting and closing lucrative deals.
To build an intelligent qualification process, you need to consider factors such as demographics, source marketing and any other thing obtained from the lead capture process. By studying the SaaS user behavior on the SaaS application, you may be able to identify true buying intent – often a key indicator of how serious users are evaluating the service. Starting with something that makes sense, you should constantly measure and improve the qualification criteria. Finally, you should be able to look at the percentage of qualified leads that are converting as the best metric.
3. Deliver a Promise of Availability
Give your potential customers an expectation of a customer service standard they should expect and ensure you live up to it, more so when a service provider is limited by customer service resources. Understanding from the onset that a reply to their potential issue may take several hours instead of a few minutes reduces their frustration while waiting for your response. This is because your SaaS conversion rates goal is easier to attain with satisfied customers that you can easily handle their issues in a timely manner – it doesn’t matter if the time frame you have set is much longer than what they prefer. When you deliver a promise of availability, you rank high in terms of customer satisfaction, which will help you set and attain relatively higher conversion goals.
4. Customer Service Tools
Much of the success in SaaS business lies in targeting your audience with the right tools that meet and exceed their expectations. For instance, web-savvy users expect superior features that offer them fast service. Offering support chats is one way of doing this. Providing phone support to your corporate customers is also vital, especially for users with less web experience using your platform. A friendly human voice is not only assuring, but also gives customers the confidence that the company behind the SaaS platform is doing their job. Superior customer service is the key to achieving your conversion goals, and offering predictive customer service needs a proper analytics dashboard on your SaaS platform.
5. Monitor Contract Rates
As a SaaS company, you may be having several trial accounts and dedicated sales team meant to facilitate the buying process. However, you should ask yourself this question, “Is your team effective?” Well, the answer to this question lies in two significant metrics:
- Contract Rate: This is the percentage of qualified leads your sales team can contact
- Contact Conversion: The actual percentage of the contacted leads that ultimately convert to paying customers.
Contact rates lets you know if your sales team is capable of handling the inflow of new opportunities. As such, a low rate may be an indication of being short staffed or utilizing the wrong tools to help them connect. On the other hand, contact conversion indicates how effective they are in their interactions. A low contact conversion rate may be an indication of improper training or even incorrect practices.
6. Eliminate Friction from your Process
In increasing SaaS conversion rates, understand that new users may engage with your service to address some of the business or personal needs that they may have. Therefore, the experience you create for them should focus on removing any friction that causes delay in their ability to fulfill that need. While this can be relatively simple for an e-commerce site, a complex SaaS product faces greater challenges. An indicator is the number of those trials that activate – the ability of your users to get their accounts (up and running) without difficulty. “Activate,” in this context, is not just the concept of creating a trial account, but rather about whether a user can take the necessary steps to reach the underlying value.
Conclusion
Potential customers convert (become paying customers) only when they are satisfied with the service – consider it worth the money and offers them an attractive return on their investment (ROI). On a SaaS platform, the process of converting free trial users is more of a marathon race than a sprint – meaning it needs long term keenness/ attentiveness to customer demands (in terms of customer service and analytics). It is best to study your trial, how prospects are evaluating your SaaS service in a granular way and if they understand the value. How easy can they get to an activity? If you manage to track this, it becomes much easier to identify the missing element that could increase your SaaS conversion rates.
