Introducing 10 tips for improved SaaS lead gen
No matter what type of SaaS you run, optimizing your lead generation strategy is a core part of your growth.
Finding more efficient ways to earn and warm up your leads will only make your SaaS more valuable.
Even if the tools and tricks you use to gain, nurture, and close your leads are highly efficient, there’s always room for improvement (right?)
So, here are 10 quick tips to bring in better leads and turn them in to customers faster for your SaaS business.
Be transparent in your ad copy and emails
If you are misleading users with your ad copy or emails, you likely are having trouble pinning down exactly what your user wants to hear. Worse, many advertisers and marketers use misleading subject lines and headlines to attract more clicks.
Unfortunately, there are many ways that your advertising efforts will be thwarted if you mislead users with bad subject lines and ad copy.
Bad Subject Lines
Here’s a scary headline for SaaS emailers: Misleading subject lines are against the law!
Don’t let that deter you from getting creative with your SaaS marketing subject lines.
Pretending you’ve had former conversations, faking purchases, or false subscriptions are all ways to mislead your future SaaS customers.
Before getting in trouble with the law, your company will get blacklisted, unsubscribed and penalized in other ways by your readers.
To keep your email reputation above the acceptable line, it’s believed that your users have to open and respond to a relatively high number of your emails (the average response rate for cold emailers is around 1%).
Relevant Ad Copy
In advertising, you generally don’t want to pay for irrelevant clicks. If you’re a SaaS with a limited marketing budget or looking for positive ROI (who wouldn’t be?) then misleading users to click on your ad will get you nowhere.
Especially with SaaS products that take a lot of research and money to make a purchase decision.
You will never trick a user into seriously considering your software if they were tricked into reaching your page.
Search is virtually inbound marketing. The intent is so direct that users are expecting to see what they searched for, nothing else.
Sometimes, low CTRs can be a good thing because it means you are filtering out bad traffic. It could also mean you are sending traffic to bad keywords.
Don’t be afraid to test
Testing is synonymous with optimizing any SaaS campaign. Whether you are testing new cold email subject lines, landing page lead captures, pricing models, you need to test in order to grow.
You can only make so many guesses about your strategies and product. If you are driving a lot of eyes to your product, then you should be testing (and asking for feedback).
This is the only way to get statistically accurate knowledge about your product.
A/B testing can help you understand your target audience, raise your conversion rates, stay on current trends and ultimately make your business more efficient.
A recent test of a new bidding strategy that Search Click Boom performed for a SaaS calendar client revealed that using a different bid strategy for one of our low funnel campaigns rendered 40% more conversions for the same cost.
Likewise, many of our experiments fail. Each time we experiment we have a hypothesis. Without testing, that hypothesis is just a guess.
Digital advertisers often allocate 20% of their budget to experiment with new bidding strategies, keywords, targeting and more.
Send emails at the right times
If you are a SaaS sending marketing emails for cold and warm users, you might want to focus on when emails get opened and responded to at the highest rate.
According to HubSpot your engagement rates will fluctuate between 1.3% and 34.9% depending on when you send your emails.
That’s a massive difference.
Many marketers believe that focusing on sending within business hours is enough. The data from the previous study agrees that that is where the biggest increase will come from.
However, if you are sending scheduled SaaS emails, try and send them between 9am and 12pm where engagement rates reach up to 34.9% on average.
Only show up where your ideal customer is looking
Consider the channels your SaaS is putting resources into.
Only 30% of marketers believe their use of marketing completely aligns to their marketing strategy.
That means the rest are unsure of what’s right (or sure that they’re using the wrong channels) but going with them anyway.
Search Click Boom has worked with many SaaS’s and seen many different ratios of success.
We actually refuse to work with any companies that aren’t a good fit. It’s that important.
For Google Ads, that means ample search volume, medium-high competition and product recognition.
Knowing which channel to use and when is key to reducing friction.
Don’t only rely on software for lead generation
Especially in the early days of your SaaS growth, relying on software to grow your business will be hard.
- Google Ads takes learning, money and optimization.
- SEO requires loads of work before you even start to see returns (and even then you have very little control).
- Social advertising may never work for your SaaS.
- Automation platforms and CRMs are only really helpful if you have a lot of quality leads coming in.
- B2B lead gen apps like Apollo and Zoom are expensive and often over-emailing will get yor emails sent to spam.
You get the point.
The best way to grow your SaaS from the start is by going into communities where your customers are active and talk to them there.
Offer free trials in exchange for feedback and referrals.
Talk to target users 1:1 to detect their real needs.
Software can take you away from your SaaS’s mission. Don’t get out of touch in the name of efficiency.
Be a master of automation
This will sound contradictory to the last point but, really, these are points for two different stages of growth.
72% of mid-to-late startups agree that automation increases their productivity.
While avoiding software as a crutch is a great idea for small startups. Large SaaS startups use automation to cut costs, increase productivity, reduce dropped leads, increase conversion rates and way more.
When applied correctly, the right automated systems helped 80% of businesses interviewed in this study scale efficiently.
Develop a lead scoring strategy
Dealing with unqualified leads is a time-sucking activity that every salesperson deals with.
Mitigating how much time you spend on these activities is a large part of creating efficient sales teams.
You don’t need to buy fancy software or create detailed algorithms to start lead scoring. Plenty of low-cost CRMs and lead gen platforms will allow you to do this in some ways.
Lead scoring involves looking at a large set of leads, pinpointing key stages of their conversion journey and finding out what they all had in common along the journey.
On the other side of the coin, SaaS sales teams will look at the drop offs (free trials that don’t convert, meeting bookings that don’t show, one time responders who drop off the face of the earth etc…). Finding their similarities to see what makes them stand apart.
Dimensions like open rates, keywords, campaigns, sequence steps, call lengths, web page views and such are where you will begin to separate out the different behaviors.
Behaviors that are correlated with higher conversion rates get better scores and so on.
Once you start feeling like you’re taking too much time on low quality leads, developing a good lead scoring system will go a long way.
Utilize drip marketing campaigns
What do you do with the SaaS leads who scored low in your new lead scoring system? Well you don’t want to waste the resources you used to get them there.
Drip marketing can generate 50% more sales-ready leads.
What’s more, they can generate 80% more SaaS leads at 33% lower costs.
Good drip campaigns offer value to your customers who weren’t scored well early on in their conversion process.
Normally, they utilize automation to keep your brand on their mind until they are ready to convert.
Don’t be afraid to ask for the sale
90% of customers won’t buy unless you ask.
This is especially true for your SaaS. SaaS companies need to spend more time educating their customers and fight closer competition (compared to eCommerce & B2C counterparts).
After that, many SaaSs forget to ask their users to take action. Or they do it wrong.
Mastering a CTA is not as hard as it looks, and basically comes down to setting clear expectations and offering value in exchange for a user’s information.
If you want this you have to offer that.
You ask for a user’s email. You offer them weekly tips on how to grow their SaaS.
You ask potential SaaS buyers to book a meeting with you. You offer a free strategy consultation.
This applies to your landing pages, free trial emails, meeting follow-ups and SaaSs sales emails.
Use ad retargeting to find your best converting ad.
If you have a SaaS site, hopefully you have Google Analytics installed as well.
Retargeting operates on a similar philosophy as drip marketing.
With retargeting, whether on Google Ads or social, SaaS advertisers are able to get more value out of a previous click, visit, sign-up.
It costs a lot more to get someone’s eyes on your product and a lot less to keep them engaged.
The overall value of capitalizing on previous momentum is astronomical.
According to this case study, remarketing can render 161% more conversions for businesses who use it correctly.
Remarketing clicks are more relevant and cheaper than most other paid clicks.
Creating audiences for booking drop-offs or trials that never converted are great ways to increase the value of your overall marketing budget.
Don’t pay for leads you can get for free.
So this is some niche SaaS advice but I see it misused often.
Google advertisers will often do anything to get you to spend your hard-earned SaaS budget in the platform.
Sometimes this manifests as a ‘branded’ campaigns.
If other brands are advertising on your brand keyword and you are no longer showing first for brand-related searches, then go ahead and run a brand campaign.
However, running a brand campaign where you are the first SEO result already with no ads above your result is a waste of money. You’ll end up paying for clicks that you would get with your SEO anyway.
Some advertisers think that there are benefits to taking up more real estate at the top of the search and controlling the landing page experience are reasons to run anyway, but it’s not the best use of your resources.
Double down on the strategies that have worked so far.
This is easy! At Search Click Boom, we often get asked ‘where should we advertise now that Google Ads is working?’
In Google Ads, most of our SaaS campaigns aren’t even reaching 50% of available searches for their current keywords. Let alone the keywords we haven’t tried yet.
This goes for other channels too, i.e. if you are seeing success, with Twitter, don’t start cold emailing without pushing Twitter to its limits.
You’ll get much more ROI out of these efforts. Any SaaS marketer will tell you that there is momentum behind a working channel.
It takes a lot of effort to master a channel, capitalize on whatever success your SaaS has and double down.
Summary
These tips have been picked from watching our SaaS clients grow and improve their lead generation.
While we’ve found that specializing in the SaaS field has helped us understand the businesses we work with much better, each case is different.
Not to mention, each owner has different strengths. I’ve seen nearly identical SaaSs succeed in completely different ways due to the differences in their ownership.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Thanks for reading.