Software as a Service
Getting More Leads Means Tweaking Your Traffic
OVERVIEW
Key Insights for SaaS
Software marketers use landing pages to get visitors into their funnel and prompt more demos and sign-ups. But when it comes to lead generation, it might be less about what’s on your page than who you’re sending to it.
Email visitors are most likely to execute on forms.
The least likely? People coming from search ads. Check out which traffic channels are converting best on your form-fill pages and see why you might wanna rethink how you’re using your Google Ads budget.
Readability drives conversions—especially for apps.
We said last year that SaaS pages perform best when they’re short and easy to understand. That still holds up, especially for anyone marketing mobile apps.
It seems emotional language does not compute.
Landing pages in the software space have a lower percentage of sentiment words than the baseline for all industries. Find out how certain emotional words could actually help boost your conversion rates.
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Access the full Conversion Benchmark Report for detailed industry benchmarks, in-depth conversion rate insights, top-performing channels, and more.
Conversion Rate: 2020 vs. 2021
What’s this mean? This graph (called a “box plot”) shows how the conversion rates of landing pages are distributed. The dotted horizontal line is the median conversion rate, while the “box” shows where most pages sit. The vertical lines (or “whiskers”) represent the range of the remaining pages, excluding any extreme outliers.
Key Insight: Traffic
Visitors coming from search ads don’t convert on lead forms.
(At least, not as often as the ones arriving from other channels.)
Paid search is the primary traffic source for all types of SaaS landing pages, driving about half of visitors to click-through pages (46.4%) and two-thirds of visitors to form-fill pages (71.5%). Social ads and emails send considerably less—both to click (11.5% and 8.2%, respectively) and form pages (6.3% and 2.5%).
People coming from Google and Bing ads seem to convert about as well on click-through pages as any other visitor, but that’s not the case if you’re collecting leads. The median SaaS form page converts just 1 in 50 paid search visitors. Compare that with social at 1 in 20, and email with a whoppin’ 1 in 5.
What’s this mean? If you’ve already got your visitor’s email address, you can reasonably expect them to provide more contact information by sending them to a form page. And if you’re looking for leads, know that social typically beats search.
For lead gen campaigns, consider spending a bigger chunk of your ad budget on social (rather than search).
Key Insight: Readability
For most SaaS products, simple copy performs better (but not always).
Across the industry, our analysis shows that short, easy-to-read copy tends to correlate with higher conversion rates. SaaS marketers seem to be catching on, too. Since last year, we’ve seen a decent jump in overall reading ease (+11.8%). Nice work, y’all.
There are a couple of exceptions. You can simplify all you want in cybersecurity, but it’s probably not gonna make a noticeable difference in page performance. Same goes for anyone marketing data and infrastructure products: complexity doesn’t appear to have much impact on conversions. (Perhaps because the products are inherently complex?)
But readability does appear to matter when you’re trying to get someone to download your mobile app. You can see from the graph that there’s a steady increase in conversion rate as reading ease improves.
Bottom line? Think about your audience—who’s reading your copy and what they need to know before they’ll convert. Something affordable and easy to understand (like an app) is better marketed in simple terms, but complex software might call for a more elaborate explanation.
Unless you’re selling pretty sophisticated software, try to keep your landing page copy short (under 250 words is best) and write for an elementary or middle school audience.
Readability: 2020 vs. 2021
Here’s how reading ease and word count have changed on software landing pages since our last report.
+11.8%
Easier to Read
+6.0%
More Total Words
Key Insight: Sentiment
Evoking joy and anticipation can help you convert more visitors.
Despite all the emotion you get from a brand like ours (hey—we can’t help the way we feel, okay?), SaaS landing pages tend to have less sentiment on ‘em than those from other industries. That’s especially true for emotions like fear, anger, and sadness.
Maybe that’s changing. Emotional language became slightly more common on software pages over the past year, with the biggest increases coming in the pessimistic stuff. Trouble is, most sentiments show a neutral or even harmful correlation with conversion rates.
Here’s an example: Since our last report, cybersecurity saw a huge spike (65.7%) in words related to disgust. It just so happens that, often, the more disgustingly your cybersecurity page is written, the more your visitors wanna get the heck out of there.
But we said most sentiments—not all. Our research shows that if your copy includes words creating a sense of anticipation and joy, you could expect to see a bit of an uptick in conversions. So, focus on the benefits. Think “achieve project management harmony” rather than “avoid project management torture.” Yikes.
Forget the scare tactics. Try pumping up your visitors with lively, value-focused language that emphasizes the awesome results of your product.
Sentiments: 2020 vs. 2021
These types of emotional language saw the biggest change in use (increase or decrease) on SaaS pages over the past year.
+4.0%
More Anger Words
+11.4%
More Sadness Words
+3.5%
More Surprise Words
CONVERSION OPTIMIZATION
Get more downloads and demos by optimizing for conversions.
Wanna get the most outta these insights? Here’s how we recommend you use ‘em in your marketing.
1. Pick the insights that are most relevant to you.
Do pages in your industry convert better when they’re short? Maybe your copy is giving off the wrong vibes? Take note of the findings that are relevant to your campaigns.
2. Apply the recommendations to your pages.
Create a variant of your landing page and make the changes recommended in this report. Use A/B testing to see how it performs.
3. Get new insights and keep on optimizing.
Use the results from your landing page variant to inform the creation of more variants. Keep improving your pages and watch as your conversion rates climb.
Key Insight: Conversion Type
There’s no sure thing on form pages—but you can improve your chances.
Forms are more important in SaaS than a lot of other industries. You rely on them to get visitors registered for demos or free trials—and to collect leads that you can nurture through an (often) lengthy sales cycle. No surprise that there’s a form on more than half the software pages we analyzed for this report.
But what makes a high-performing SaaS form? That’s tricky. Most of the forms we looked at had between four and six fields, but we can see higher conversion rates when forms are either super short (one to two fields) or kinda long (seven to nine). Weird, right?
Here’s another quirk. In most other industries, requiring a visitor’s name in a form contributes to a lower page performance—but that’s not the case in SaaS. Whether you’re asking for a first name, last name, or just “name,” you can expect your form to convert more-or-less the same.
Keep your forms short if you don’t need a ton of visitor information right away—but also don’t be as worried about form length or content as you might be for other industries.
Optimizing for Form Conversions
Simple copy isn’t as important on form pages as click-through, but you’ll still get your best results writing at a middle school level (or easier).
The sweet spot for converting with form pages is under 200 words. Anything more and the conversion rate correlation starts to flatten out.
Software as a Service
SaaS marketers using Smart Traffic convert 32% more visitors.
At least, that’s what the average lift data shows. Smart Traffic looks at each visitor’s attributes and sends ‘em to the page where they’re most likely to convert.
See how Smart Traffic “automagically” gets you more conversions.