Alexis Kestler
Attracting the visitors is winning only half the battle. Turning them into customers is an actual challenge. In this article, we’ll share our experience along with the things that worked or didn’t for boosting the conversion rate of our SaaS website.
1. Build trust and credibility
“There is a serious company behind this website.” It’s the impression your visitors should have once they arrive at your site. Naturally, you’ll need to invest in your website so it doesn’t look cheesy. But it’ll pay off, I promise.
Modern, clean design and trendy graphics are a big part of it. Luckily, we have professional web designers on board who developed Chanty’s crisp look. It was even featured at Webdesign Inspirations.
Including testimonials is another proven way to add credibility to your brand. Having our product in beta, we don’t have testimonials just yet. Instead, we’ve chosen to put up the ‘As seen in’ section on our homepage to list websites like GoDaddy, SEMrush, Foundr, Search Engine Journal where we’ve published our articles.
We’ve also provided our contact details along with a physical address and put together a Privacy Policy page to show we follow the rules and inform our visitors of the data we collect. If you are aiming for a credible website, that’s a step you’ll have to make too.
2. Play with popups
It’s been a subject of intense holy wars in our office. The dev team at Chanty was utterly against the idea of exit popups on the website. “It’s irritating and it would damage our reputation a great deal,” they said. Well, I was convinced it never hurts to try. After all, the conversion rate is all about experiments, isn’t it?
An exit pop up is the window that appears once a user is about to close the tab. We’ve outlined a few ideas for it: …and decided to go with the following illustration:
Pay attention to the texts as well. When you give two options – to sign up or not to sign up, make sure the second one is ridiculously unattractive to your customers. Here are just a few examples I’ve peeked at other websites from different niches:
No, I don’t want more clients
No, thanks, I have enough traffic
No, my business is already perfect
No, thanks, I’d rather learn the hard way
No, thanks, I’d like to pay a full price
Still not convinced if an exit popup is a good idea for your website? Let me just share one number with you. Currently, the exit popup brings us 20% (!) of all signups. Clearly, the effort was well worth it.
Once your site visitor signs up, it’s time to finally breathe out – your job is done, right?
Wrong.
It’s just about time to ask your new customers to help spread the word about your product. Chances are they won’t mind. They are motivated enough to leave an email, so sharing the love on social networks might be no issue for them. Well, unless, nobody asks them to.
Don’t miss a chance to attract extra attention to your brand and implement an after-signup popup at your site. We’ve done it and it helps us spread the word of our brand and, therefore, bringing more signups.
3. Make your signup form ASAP
I mean ‘as simple as possible. Keeping the minimum amount of fields in a signup form has been a rule of thumb for me ever since I’ve read about Expedia’s experiment. It’s on how excluding only one data field resulted in a $12M profit.
We’ve chosen to ask only for an email from our customers. Of course, it’s up to you to decide on the number of fields. However, the surefire advice would be avoiding excessive fields at your signup process unless you hold a monopoly in the niche.
4. Shake those buttons!
For starters, we have a fixed header in our blog. It means when the visitors scroll down as they read, they continue to see the menu with a call to action (CTA). Normally, your visitors wouldn’t notice it until it attracts their attention. But how? It’s simple – make the button move. We’ve applied simple button animation and voila – our CTA is pulsing now!
We implemented this trick at the end of October. As you see, now users click this particular button twice as often as they used to.
5. Drive high intent traffic
No matter how great and conversion-friendly your website is, you won’t make a single sale unless you drive the relevant traffic to it. This is where content marketing comes into play. All the buzz about Content being King is out there for a reason. It’s vital to surround your brand with a ton of useful content that solves issues, educates and engages with your target audience.
E.g. at Chanty, we aim to become experts in the market creating a number of content pillars on team communication, collaboration and productivity. Whenever people ask Google how to improve team communication at work, we have a comprehensive answer to this. When someone is looking for a list of team communication tools, we have an article on this too.
Naturally, people looking to improve team communication or choosing the productivity tool for their team are totally our target audience. Follow the same path and you’ll be able to enjoy the high conversion rates as well.
Wrapping up
It’s hard to say which tip is the most important when it comes to conversion rate optimization. They all work in a combination. Driving high intent traffic and building trust with your audience is equally important for every business, while small website tweaks we’ve shared today require some experimenting and testing.
Hopefully, our advice based on Chanty’s experience will help boost the conversion rate on your website.
