A conversion rate is a critical metric for gauging the performance of your efforts as a SaaS marketer. This metric measures the number of prospects who convert—or complete a desired action—across a multitude of different marketing channels, including the website, ads, email, and more.
This desired action could be signing up for an email newsletter, downloading a piece of content, requesting a demo, opting in to a free trial, or buying or renewing a subscription to a product. The conversion rate formula is:
(number of conversions / total number of prospects in the audience) × 100%
Marketing teams need to track many conversion goals. In order to track the effectiveness of your overall marketing program, you should measure the conversion rate of each marketing call to action (CTA), asset, channel, and audience segment. By measuring each of these conversion rates, your marketing team will have reliable data to better iterate and optimize marketing programs and campaigns to achieve your goals and drive revenue.
To help you optimize your conversion rate, we’ll show you numerous SaaS conversion rate benchmarks that you can use as a starting point for your work.
There are two main categories of SaaS business models: low-touch and high-touch. Low-touch businesses focus on getting visitors to sign up for free trials and subscriptions through their website, whereas high-touch ones focus more on enterprise-level demo requests and direct sales. Because the sales process differs for each of these business models, they each focus on different conversion goals.
Here are some examples of conversions in low-touch business models: free trials with no credit card requirements, free trials with credit card requirements, and “freemiums” to paid subscriptions.
For high-touch business models, here’s a breakdown of conversion rate benchmarks showing funnel metrics for each stage of the B2B inbound and outbound marketing funnels.
From top to bottom, new contact to win, the average funnel conversion rate is 0.05%.
From top to bottom, targeted lead to customer, the average conversion rate benchmark is 0.03%.
Although driving conversions and revenue is a marketer’s ultimate goal, there are other important metrics to consider along the way. Here are 5 additional metrics that should be in the forefront of every SaaS marketer’s mind:
Whether you’re trying to increase free trials or demo requests, improving your conversion rate begins with your website. There are various factors on your website that can impede your conversions, no matter which SaaS model your business falls under. Here are some things to think about to ensure your website is optimized for conversions.
Now that you understand the importance of your website in your overall conversion goals, it’s time to begin optimizing it. Here are some conversion rate optimization (CRO) tips for SaaS marketers.
The first step in any CRO program is to measure your current conversion rate, or your baseline rate. Then, you can set your goal conversion rate and start working on strategies and corresponding tactics to get you there.
Some common CRO tactics include displaying customer testimonials on web pages to provide proof and create a sense of FOMO, adding chatbots to your website to encourage your prospect to engage now, and testing a slew of above-the-fold headlines and CTAs to capture your prospect’s attention immediately.
The best way to ensure you’re maximizing your SaaS conversion rate is by testing many of these types of CRO tactics at once to see what resonates and what doesn’t with your audience – and therefore what’s improving your conversion rate and what’s not. At the same time, it’s critical that you provide each visitor to your website with a personalized experience that’s relevant to their firmographic data like their job title, job level, or their company’s industry, as well as to previous behaviors they’ve taken on your website or with your brand on other channels.
Intellimize’s Continuous Conversion™ solution embraces these priorities and makes SaaS conversion rate optimization easy. It uses machine learning to automatically test a virtually unlimited number of your ideas at once and find which combination of ideas on each page is best to show each visitor and therefore help you maximize your chances of converting each visitor.
With Intellimize, SaaS companies like Okta have driven 1,500 more website leads and a 10% lift in free trial conversions in just 90 days, while Snowflake has driven a 60% increase in landing page conversions.
Request your demo today and see how we can dramatically help you improve your website conversion rate too.