A key factor for business growth, retaining customers while attracting new buyers is no easy task. This is why conversion rate optimization and CRO strategies are vital tools for streamlining conversion processes. Particularly for software as a service (SaaS) businesses, it’s important that every step – from running a lead generation campaign to clicking on that all-important BUY button follow smoothly in sequence.
Let’s take a look at the first step in your sales funnel: your landing page and its conversion rate optimization. This is where visitors need information tailored to their interests, the moment they touch down on your website.
Attention-grabbing headlines
Landing page titles are the bait that lures customers to your website. Although there’s no surefire route to success through these headlines, every word must reach out to your audience, while fitting seamlessly into each lead generation campaign and showcasing your wares.
On the upside, there are some time-tested approaches that ensure a tighter aim at target audiences. Here are a few tips that will save time and effort, while boosting lead generation
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Make sure your message matches the rest of your campaign, as landing pages don’t float in a vacuum
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Create a unique landing page for each campaign, so messages are tailored to different audiences from specific channels
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Stay straight rather than funny, as easy-to-understand language can outperform more creative alternatives by almost 90%
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Don’t reinvent the wheel – opt for straightforward landing page titles that convey their messages twice as effectively
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Spotlight a specific goal by showcasing a benefit (Here’s a …), a pain point (Tired of…?), value point (Get relief from…), a ranking (The world’s best…), or solving a problem (This is how to …)
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Reel your visitors in by appealing to their interests and building engagement through calls to action (Sign up here for your free…)
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Make them offers they can’t refuse, through coupons or introductory discounts (10% off your first order!)
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Spotlight your brand values (Top quality…)
Traffic-boosting channels
Once your landing page is packed with strong but subtle hooks, it’s time to think about driving traffic to your website. There are a couple of dozen ways of doing this, offering endless mix-and-match strategy options that can easily be scaled, scheduled and customized to target markets.
Some – like PR campaigns, affiliate programs, real-life events, lectures and presentations, trade shows, and community outreach activities – are more traditional and usually offline. Others are Internet-driven and right on the cutting edge of digital marketing practices.
Keeping up with new platforms (think Clubhouse) and making good use of existing channels (like Facebook), they include search engine optimization, paid advertising, content marketing (like viral, relationship, cause, diversity and even undercover marketing!), online PR activities, directed blogs, influencers, and social network campaigns across all platforms.
Three golden oldies that are just virtual (and far more tightly targeted) versions of yesterday’s Yellow Pages, flyers, and word-of-mouth recommendations, specialized directories, emails and referrals are still high-performing components of any marketing strategy.
All these digital marketing tools can be slotted into any specific strategy, they all share a common aim: turning casual browsers into solid leads by steering them to landing pages. The trick is to make sure that these pages are designed to respond to specific visitor needs as they land on the website.
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Content Marketing – Our team creates engaging content that will get shared + attract customers.
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CRO strategy building blocks
So your landing page is packed with solid information and tempting CTAs, and your marketing strategy is driving a steady flow of high-grade traffic to your website. Now it’s time to get full benefit from all those leads through conversion rate optimization. Here’s a brief checklist for crafting a truly effective CRO strategy:
- Focus on trial conversion and purchase conversion rates by tracking user churn figures after signing up for trial versions, and learn why they are opting out, through follow-up emails, preferably with a Sign up Now! discount
- Analyze online behavior to target and re-target qualified potential buyers, listing the factors that affect purchasing choices, underscoring pain points and explaining how your software provides effective solutions to these problems
- Prioritize people, not products, constantly pursuing customer satisfaction and changing course whenever appropriate, steered by user feedback on your software and services, which should be stored in your database for future reference
- Create a customer retention strategy by never disappointing your customers – instead, try underpromising and overdelivering, which is a sure way of building stronger long-term relationships, particularly when backed by lower yearly subscriptions or a free service call
- Polish your UI/UX, because it’s the user interface and user experience that attracts potential buyers and turn them into loyal customers; this means your website must be user-centric, uncluttered, easy to navigate and generously sprinkled with appealing CTAs
- Test sign-up flows with different action statements on sign-up buttons, with brief explanations of what you’re offering, why they need it, and the full range of related services that you offer
- Optimize new user onboarding processes, through analyzing lead to behavior, pinpointing bottlenecks that discourage potential buyers, and streamlining sign-up forms for shorter onboarding times, bringing buyers to their first perceived value point with minimal effort
- Track micro KPIs, particularly growth metrics (like free trial sign-ups, email clicks and referrals) that help bump up conversion rates while also indicating points of friction that need fast attention
- Optimize lifetime value by segmenting your customers and analyzing how they interact with your software, offering brand-loyalty benefits to maximize the total income from each individual customer from sign-up onwards
- Offer limited-time free trials as an effective way of engaging with prospects in real time, seeking feedback on whether your solutions and using email to retarget non-returning trial users for higher conversion rates
- Beef up your marketing strategy with social proof, convincing potential buyers that they should try your software, particularly by highlighting solutions to problems that crop up widely across the industry
- Videos and visuals are understood at a glance, so use them generously, particularly short (under two minutes) videos showing users what they could do with your software and keeping them on your page longer – which is important for Google search algorithms
- Encourage referrals, because people trust brands and businesses more when they are recommended by someone they know – so reward customers whenever somebody signs up through their links
- Investing in customer support not only keeps existing customers happy (particularly through a 24/7 chatbot feature on your website), it also attracts new leads through referrals, reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations
- Keep your promises, because overblown product claims are the fastest way to lose a customer and ruin the credibility of your brand on the market.
Boosting conversions with a strong CRO strategy
Providing solid feedback on the behavior of prospects and buyers, conversion rate optimization underpins a corporate culture of continuous improvement through actionable insights – and that’s a smooth path to higher sales and loyal customers!
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