Is your SaaS landing page getting traffic, but no conversions? You’ve put a lot of effort into design and copy, spent money on ads, and still nothing? Are you struggling to figure out why? Join the club.
Here is the deal: first impressions matter, and landing pages are often the first point of contact potential customers have with your SaaS business, which makes landing page conversion rate one of the key SaaS marketing metrics.
The upside is that you can improve landing page conversion rates by implementing the tactics that have been tried and tested, without spending any additional ad money.
In this guide, we will take a closer look at the 10 most effective and proven landing page CRO tactics, with a detailed breakdown into why each one of them matters, why it works, and how you can implement it, along with real-life examples.
Let’s jump right in.
Now, there are plenty of landing page CRO tactics you can try out and hope that some of them stick. However, this can cost you not only time, but money.
This is why we are focusing only on the following strategies that have been battle-tested by actual SaaS businesses, both large and small, and which have produced measurable results.
The most obvious reason is that people make very quick decisions nowadays. They also get easily distracted and move on to something else if you aren’t able to grab their attention. You only have a few seconds until they’re gone forever.
This also means they might not even take the time to scroll and click on your CTA. The solution? Make it visible by placing it above the fold.
One of the reasons is the primacy effect, which is a type of cognitive bias where users tend to focus on the info they came across first. That is why you should always have the following 4 elements of your landing pages above the fold:
The first three are usually visible on most landing pages, but CTAs tend to get buried further down, and unfortunately, lost.
ABsmartly packages all of the above-mentioned elements in a neat little block that is always shown above the fold. Does that mean that users never want to scroll?
Absolutely not, but eyetracking studies show that 80% of viewing time is spent above the fold.
Top Tip: Make sure to let your visitors know that there is actually more content below the fold and that it’s not a “false bottom”.
You can do this by adding the button to scroll down for more, or simply by allowing some of the content (other than your CTA, visuals, and value proposition) to show up above the fold.
It all comes down to why people buy SaaS products. Customers don’t care about your product's features because, in most cases, they aren’t even sure what they are.
However, they are very interested in the problems they face, their aspirations, and their desires.
Benefits not only tap into that, but they also make for much better storytelling material. For example, Slack can reduce the number of internal emails by $48.6%, which is great, because most people hate emails.
To get a better idea about what your potential customers want and need, you can generate your customer persona with WeGrowth’s powerful Persona AI tool that helps you define everything from your target niche, challenges, and goals, to exact messaging and content.
Try to think about selling a car to a customer instead of SaaS products or solutions for a second. Do you think stuff like horsepower or fuel economy is what gets them excited?
No, because those are features. However, more horsepower helps them get from A to B faster and gives them a thrill while doing so, while fuel economy helps them save money and be more eco-friendly. Those are benefits.
Put into SaaS terms, your customers care less about features and more about:
Shopify, the biggest eCommerce platform, keeps it simple but brilliant with its free trial landing page. They get you started for free, and then pay just €1/month for 3 months, with the ability to cancel anytime.
When a customer comes across a landing page that has zero reviews, testimonials, client logos, or usage stats, it usually means one of two things:
Let’s say it’s the former. According to the numbers, 92% of consumers will hesitate to buy a product if no reviews are available.
How can you fix this and improve landing page conversion rates? Here are the most effective ways to provide social proof for your SaaS product:
There is a whole slew of reasons why social proof is so effective, including:
There is no better example than Senja, which is a tool designed to collect testimonials. Their homepage shows recent customer sign-ups, their testimonials, and the number of customers (20,000+) right below their CTA.
Stock images feel generic, as do abstract illustrations, and AI images give customers that uncanny valley feeling that can be unsettling.
While great written copy is the backbone of every landing page, using UI screenshots, GIFs, or even video of your actual product can improve landing page conversion rates by as much as 64%.
This is exactly what Crazy Egg did, and wrote a detailed case study about it.
Swipe Pages, which is used to create landing pages with the help of AI, uses videos to show actual templates being designed in front of your very eyes in mere clicks. It doesn’t get any clearer and more illustrative than that.
According to Neuroscience Marketing, you can increase revenue by as much as 9% on average by adding a small countdown timer, with some businesses reporting a massive 332% increase in sales after adding them.
When a potential customer comes across a deal, trial, discount, or a beta offer on your landing page that is available for a limited time only, it can push them to take immediate action.
By introducing temporal scarcity, you can trigger your customer’s innate FOMO and have them act immediately instead of prolonging their decision-making process.
Here are some ways in which you can trigger their FOMO:
Usermaven, a SaaS analytics platform, ran a Black Friday deal that offered 30% off on their annual plan for first-time subscribers.
Although you will have plenty of sources telling you that you should optimize your product’s landing pages for SEO, you may want to hold off on that.
Why? Well, letting Google crawl and index your landing pages can actually hurt organic performance. How so? It’s simple: you run the risk of cannibalizing your own rankings.
Or in this case, why it doesn’t work. Here is how keyword cannibalization happens if you’re not careful:
The solution is fairly straightforward, though. Mark your SaaS PPC landing pages as noindex, and create them on a subdomain.
Obviously, most companies and businesses aren’t too keen on broadcasting these sorts of mistakes on their part, so case studies or research, if any, don’t disclose their actual names.
This is such a vital component of every landing page, yet it goes overlooked so many times, even though it can boost conversion by 212.74%!
If ad copy doesn’t match the content on your landing page, there is a message mismatch, which can kill your landing page conversion rates and increase your bounce rate.
But if the intent and the wording match, it builds momentum and nudges customers toward conversion.
Message match signals trust, and helps maintain a smooth customer journey from clicking your ad to taking action. Not only does this improve landing page conversion rates, but it also lowers your CPC through better Google Ads Quality Score.
Here is how you can ensure message match:
Monday.com, which is one of the most popular SaaS project management platforms, keeps the visuals across its ads and landing pages very similar, as well as the copy, which focuses on “no credit card needed” and “free plan”.
Their homepage:
So, you’ve done everything right so far, and there is traffic on your landing page, but sign-ups and demos are still too few. Why?
In all likelihood, you are making it difficult for customers to sign up. Are you using long forms? Is your landing page slow to load? Do you have multiple choices?
If the answer to one or more of these questions is yes, you’ve identified the reasons why landing page conversion rates are tanking.
If customers are interacting smoothly with your landing pages, your business feels more trustworthy, and your product more valuable.
Removing friction boils down to the following in most cases:
Once again, we have Shopify on our list, which was able to boost conversions by 30% by cutting its page load time by one second.
[Source: https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/blog/site-performance-page-speed-ecommerce\]
Your CTA is the final boss of CRO, and the moment where your customer either signs up or leaves. That is why the design of your CTA button and every single word of your CTA carries a lot of weight.
A simple “Submit”, “Learn more”, or “Click here” is not going to work in SaaS. What will work is phrasing that leaves zero doubt in your customers’ minds about what they should do next.
Because it’s been proven that using clear and benefit-oriented CTA can improve landing page conversion rates by as much as 161%.
How do you get there? By following these simple guidelines:
Kajabi, which is a business platform aimed at course creators and coaches, blends a clear CTA that not only uses concise and direct phrasing but also stands out visually.
A/B testing removes guessing from the equation and gives you an answer on what actually converts. By testing different versions of landing pages, you get access to real insight into what drives customer action.
In the SaaS niche, even the slightest tweak can lead to a huge uptick in landing page CRO and compound your growth over time.
Instead of relying on assumptions, biases, or inaccurate data, you test two or more variations of your landing page to figure out which one drives better results.
Here is how to do it:
Thinkific, a SaaS platform aimed at course creators, tested over 700 landing pages for messaging, promoting, webinars, and trials of new products. This resulted in over 150,000 conversions in less than 2 years!
They also doubled their traffic and conversions, and saw an increase of 50% in webinar signup rates! All of that by A/B testing their landing pages.
Improving landing page conversion rates is a challenging process with lots of moving parts. But, if done right, even something as simple as a change in CTA wording can yield some pretty dramatic results for your SaaS.
You can start by implementing some of these high-impact moves first:
Stack a few of these together for starters, and see how your landing CRO changes.
And that’s exactly what we do here at WeGrowth. We identify the easy wins hiding in plain sight, and then create tailor-made solutions, such as SaaS marketing templates, so that your business’s landing page is pulling its weight.
Do you want to see what that could look like for your SaaS business? Book a growth strategy call with us, and let our team turn your landing page into a place where actual conversions happen!
Our free growth marketing plan is an opportunity to dig deep into your SaaS and uncover growth opportunities. No strings attached, just value.
