You’re likely spending a significant part of your budget on marketing your SaaS business. From SEO to ad campaigns (and everything in between), you’ve spent quality time, money, and energy getting potential qualified leads to pay attention to your software.
Once a lead is in the door — they’ve found your website, social media page, or exhibitor booth — there are still steps in the funnel before they sign up to be a paying client. So, to maximize your marketing spend, identify ways to optimize your lead funnel. Lead conversion tactics are just as important as marketing campaigns: Making small adjustments now can result in huge returns over time.
Why You Need a Lead Conversion Strategy
Many (but not all) SaaS companies have a marketing and sales process dialed in (in fact, many companies sell the very software that helps with marketing and/or sales). However, there is a crucial intersection where marketing meets sales, when a lead’s information is captured and the sales or lead nurturing process can begin.
Unbeknownst to you, you could have 10, 20, even 50% more people who are interested in your product, but you never realize it because they navigate away before you have an opportunity to contact them. So it’s time to capitalize on each opportunity using every tactic you have available in your arsenal to capture a lead’s information as soon as possible, and bring more prospects to your sales team to convert.
With this in mind, here are four affordable and easy-to-implement lead conversion strategies that can be used to get more from your marketing spend.
4 Lead Conversion Tactics for SaaS
1: Add live chat or a chatbot to your site
Live chat and chatbots give your website visitors the opportunity to bring up their most pressing questions the moment they visit your site (or Facebook page). Rather than navigating through pages looking for answers, they can directly engage with a widget on your website, letting you know immediately what it is they’re looking for and feeling like they have their concerns addressed at the same time.
Here’s the key: Before the chat conversation even begins, you can choose to capture their name, email address, and even phone number. That way, you have the lead’s contact information even if they’re distracted or navigate away from your site. Either way, your lead count is guaranteed to be higher than by capturing information from a call and contact form alone — and we know some of these leads are bound to become clients.
There’s a hidden bonus in chat: You get to the point immediately. A chat conversation can help screen out leads who are looking for something that your software doesn’t yet offer, aren’t interested at all, are spammers, or are simply “window shopping.” That way, your sales team is offered pre-screened opportunities, leaving them with more time to spend on converting quality prospects.
You can staff live chat yourself with software like Intercom or Drift, outsource it to a company like Smith.ai, or use a combination of both to provide 24/7 coverage. Chatbots can offer automated coverage that’s less personal, but still more effective than nothing at all.
2: Use lead magnets alongside valuable content
Much of digital marketing comes down to strong content strategies: You’re building inbound marketing content like blog posts, videos, webinars, and other marketing materials to garner brand awareness and generate and nurture leads. But really valuable content, like eBooks or white papers, can be hidden behind a form that requires contact information to gain access. That, in essence, is a lead magnet.
Lead magnet strategies work alongside your marketing efforts to help turn readers into leads that you can actually contact, track, and nurture. A marketing campaign that contains a lead magnet is likely to capture leads at a 30-40% conversion rate versus an industry average of around 2%. And that makes sense. If everyone who’s really interested in your content is willing to give up their contact information for it, you’ve got an incredible lead capture and lead qualification tool at once.
So work with your marketing team or agency to create content better suited to lead magnets. This is usually something very compelling and targeted, and that solves an immediate and important issue for your leads. This doesn’t have to be an ebook or white paper either. Check out this list of lead magnet content ideas that step outside of the box.
Another option is take your posts and content that’s already the most popular, and hide it behind a lead magnet form. Test it out and see if your conversion rates increase — if they don’t and your traffic falls dramatically, you can always remove the form and you’re simply back to where you started. But the best case scenario is that your conversions will increase dramatically.
3: Respond to calls 24/7
Although more and more leads are now texting businesses, DMing on social media, and using chat on your website, many people are still picking up the phone to call your business. And the ones who are willing to make the effort to speak with a human on the phone are likely to be your strongest leads.
If your SaaS company has a cold calling strategy, you know the importance of having leads on the line. With that in mind, it’s essential that you capture the leads who call you! Not just during workday hours or when your receptionist is available, but 24/7.
There are a couple of useful ways to make the caller’s experience better, and navigate them to one of your sales reps ASAP.
- Make sure anyone who calls your number reaches a person, not an automated menu with multiple complicated options.
- Gauge your call volume and make sure you have enough people available to answer every call during the day — let no one go to voicemail. If your receptionist often has a call coming in while they’re already on the phone, set up your system to overflow to someone else on your team.
- Find a solution for after hours or when your reception is understaffed due to vacation time, sick days, or even just lunch periods. A 24/7 call answering service can offer after-hours or overflow coverage, and they can qualify leads, schedule appointments, and transfer calls just like an in-house receptionist can.
- Make sure anyone who answers the phone (in-house or outsourced) has the answers to frequent questions leads have, so they can offer the value that caller is looking for.
- Set up your process so that leads can be carried to the next step of the funnel on this first call, whether that’s logging the contact for nurture campaigns or scheduling them with a sales call.
Note: For after-hours leads, you can set up an appointment system with your sales team, so that anyone who calls during evenings or weekends knows exactly when you’ll call the next workday.
Ultimately, callers equate to revenue, so it’s important to treat them as such. By answering every call to your business and capturing the contact information to follow up on those leads, you will truly be able to drive more signups and revenue from the money you’re already spending on marketing.
4: Enable your affiliates to sign up and set up clients for you
It’s likely that your company already has an established affiliate program — most SaaS companies do. Affiliates are a great source of new leads that don’t necessarily require any additional marketing spend.
Whether you work with agencies who refer or resell your products or loyal users who get a discount on your software when they tell their friends and family, you’re benefiting from the expertise and community of an external source. So it’s important to enable them as much as possible.
A lot can get lost in translation when someone sends you a new client. The new lead already has an existing relationship with the affiliate, and talking to someone new or repeating themselves could make for an awkward sale. You want all new leads to be excited to sign up!
There are two simple solutions to smoothing out this translation.
- Give all your affiliates a personal contact on your sales team. That way, they can build a relationship and offer a warm introduction to your company via email. Every interaction with the affiliate will build more trust and they’ll be encouraged to introduce their friends to “Sally” not “XYZ SaaS Company.”
- Enable your affiliates to actually sign up a new client. Whether they just need their own signup form or can go through the full process on behalf of the new client, allowing your affiliate to play the part of a sales member takes the actual weight of making the sale off of your shoulders. Note that in addition to making this technically feasible, you may also need to empower your affiliates with sales enablement materials and expertise on using your software.
A strong affiliate is truly a member of your team, so look towards your affiliate program to see where you can drive more conversions from the same marketing you’re already doing.
Conclusion
With all of our talk in the SaaS industry about new marketing tactics, lead nurturing, and funnels, we sometimes forget that the moment our lead is ready to buy is the most crucial of all. Respond to leads the minute they’re interested and offer valuable information, capture their contact information, and enable anyone promoting or selling your product to do the same. These small changes can result in large increases in revenue without a single added dollar to your marketing budget.
About Kelsey Johnson
Kelsey Johnson is the product marketing manager at Smith.ai and a legal tech expert focused on helping businesses with their practices through tech-enabled operations, integrated systems, digital marketing, and communications.
