How to Shorten Your SaaS Customers’ Buying Journey

Are you looking for more ways to boost your SaaS conversions?

I bet you are!

One of the most effective ways to increase your conversions and avoid investing more in attracting more traffic is to try and shorten your SaaS customers’ buying journeys.

SaaS Customers’ Journeys Are Becoming Longer and More Complicated

The buyers’ journeys are becoming longer and more complicated, across the board. The average buyer journey is at least twice as long as it was just six years ago.

There are lots of factors behind this trend including:

• The competition is higher, so your buyers have to consider many options before they finally choose one and become a customer. According to AppKong, new technology is rapidly emerging fostering new and new startups in just about any niche. B2B buyers have multiple options to consider before making a purchasing decision, and they take their time.
• The decision making unit (DMU) is getting larger, so there is much more time spent discussing all the options prior to buying. According to Harvard Business Review, the average number of people involved in B2B solutions has increased from 5.4 to almost 7 in 
• The overall web literacy is rapidly increasing, so your customers are likely to know how to use the web to research their options. Your today’s customers are millennials that have developed greater digital literacy than generations before them. They are happy to spend time researching online, and they take the full advantage of that. In fact Google claims, B2B customers conduct vast amounts of independent research using dozens of searches before making a purchasing decision.

To get a better idea of your buyer’s journey, here’s a great visualization from Gartner:

As a result, Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is quickly going up, as 60% of SaaS marketing agree, according to Hubspot.

One of the most effective ways to lower your SaaS company’s CaaC and increase your conversions is to shorten your customers’ buying journey. Here’s how:

5 Ways Shorten your SaaS Customers’ Buying Journey

1. Decrease the number of steps required to sign up

The best way to shorten your buyers’ journey is… to make it shorter. It is actually quite obvious, but surprisingly few SaaS businesses consider this step.

Yes, every step in your sales funnel may seem essential but think of it from your customer’s perspective. At just about any step they may be distracted to never return or have their session expire and lose patience. 

No wonder “Buy now” buttons are being introduced by so many sites in the B2C niche. The fewer steps required, the faster the purchase. 

Try PayKickstart’s customizable checkout pop-up widgets which will allow your customers to pay or upgrade with one click of a button without having to load a new page:

2. Include buyers’ research into your conversion funnel

Online research is the biggest part of your buyer’s journey. How much of that research can be conducted on your site?

Developing a consistent sales enablement content marketing strategy is a must for just about any SaaS company:

• More than half (62%) of B2B customers said they were able to finalize their buying selection criteria based only on available digital content.
• Forty-seven percent of B2B buyers now consume three to five pieces of content before even engaging with a sales person (Demand Gen Report).

You want that content to always take your prospects back to your site again and again.

• Use effective lead magnets to tie your site users closer to your site and reach them via email marketing
• Set up effective forms and CTAs doing a great job capturing your site users’ attention. Make banners that would be able to get them back to your site via re-marketing campaigns.

To make your content strategy even more powerful, use personalization to better engage your returning users. Finteza allows to create re-marketing campaigns based on the user’s previous interactions with the website. It is a great way to personalize and shorten your sales funnel:

Further reading: How to Increase Conversions with Personalized Marketing

3. Use Urgency to Hack Your Conversion Rate

As your SaaS prospects have so many options to consider, why not help them make a decision right away, even if it’s an emotional decision.

Urgency has been used in marketing for ages, and it still works like a charm. Announcing limited-time offers and countdown timers are great ways to create a sense of urgency and increase your conversions.

PayKickstart offers a customizable countdown timer that’s easy to set up and use. You can add a countdown time using PayKickstart by following these steps:

• Ensure that you have your sales funnel set up
• Go to the settings area for that sales funnel
• Locate the specific product and select the checkout options.
• Inside you can enable and customize the scarcity feature:

4. Showcase Your Competitive Advantage

Your platform may be the best on the market but have you done a good job telling your customers how? Whether you attracted your lead from organic search or a Facebook ad, they are most likely to compare you to your competitors before making their purchasing decision. How well are you prepared?

• Evaluate your branded search
• See what comes up in Google Suggest results when your prospects mean to navigate to your site
• Build landing pages comparing your platform to your competitors visualizing how yours wins
• Use useful on-page widgets to eliminate the need to leave the page and interrupt the buying journey
• Think how else you can adjust your landing page strategy based on what your prospects see in Google Suggest

5. Simplify Your Pricing Page

SaaS pricing pages cannot be taken lightly. There’s a lot to tell there:

• Your key features
• Your packages / tiers
• Price comparison, etc.

You want it to convince your leads or free trial users to upgrade but you also don’t want to overwhelm them.

Use Surveys to identify key points your customers have used to make purchasing decisions and reflect those on your pricing page. You may want to use A/B testing to choose a better performing pricing page.

Conclusion

Shortening your customers’ buying journey is no easy task, and it is never quite done. Your competitors will not remain the same as well, so you will have to come up with new and new tactics to keep your prospects on your site and have them complete the buying process without leaving.

I hope the 5 tactics above are a good start! Good luck!

Ann Smarty

Ann Smarty is the Brand Manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas, as well as co-founder of Viral Content Bee. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for over a decade, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Ann is also the frequent speaker at Pubcon and the host of a weekly Twitter chat #vcbuzz

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