When you hear the word "funnel," you immediately picture a funnel with an open top and a narrow tube attached at the bottom. In this metaphor, a funnel is where you pour your leads into its wide end. As they descend, these leads move through several phases that you established to turn them into prospects, and at the bottom, where the funnel is narrowest, you find your customers who are prepared to buy your product. Working to acquire, validate, and convert leads is a crucial aspect of the success of your SaaS business (software as a service), regardless if you are a new or established organisation. Managing numerous marketing, sales, and retention strategies can be quite challenging. The best tool for structuring your efforts is a well-designed SaaS sales conversion funnel. The SaaS funnel is a diagram that highlights significant phases of the client's journey. Your SaaS conversion funnel can be measured, tracked, and optimised if the appropriate technologies are in place and data is assigned to each stage. Read More: How To Design A Go-To-Market Strategy For SaaS
Phases of SaaS Funnel
When you start unraveling the aspects of SaaS marketing, you will come across an acronym called AIDA, which stands for awareness, interest, desire/ exploration, and action. These stages depict a user’s behaviour and psychology. You must implement all vital marketing strategies if you want to advance your users to the next level. Here, I'd also like to point out that SaaS marketing calls for more than just lead conversion into paying customers—it also calls for their steadfast loyalty to your brand.
So let’s obtain a deeper understanding of these stages and help our product gain and grow.
Awareness
This is where your prospects are becoming aware of your existence and are digging deeper to learn more about you in order to find solutions to their problems. So, convert this into an opportunity and introduce them to your brand strongly and effectively by:
Make promotions about your product or band as much as possible.
Improve your SEO tactics to increase genuine visitors.
Incorporate PR campaigns into your marketing plan.
Interest / Engagement
When a lead revisits your page or your product, or signs up or provides his email, it's time to take the next very important action of making your lead realise how sufficient your product is to solve his problem and pinning him to it by piquing his interest in it. The following might be of some help:
Analyse your customer needs.
Communicate via emails, tutorials, etc regarding solutions that your product offers.
Educate your lead more about your product by guiding them to your product page.
Desire / Exploration
This is the phase where the lead has started to take a keen interest in your product, has started to explore more about your product, and is somewhat analyzing and calculating all the pros and cons (they are even comparing your product with your competitors).keep pushing them to trust your product. On reaching this stage, follow these steps in order to convert your lead into a customer:
To make them believe in your product, provide them with customer reviews, endorsements, analogies etc.
Offer them free trials of your product.
Action / Conversion
You must have understood by now that it's action time now! Finally, you have got your customer who is all set to buy your product after satisfying all his needs. But once the purchase is done, you need to hold and welcome them until they become comfortable. Your most crucial goal is to keep your customers, so start doing it now! Since the SaaS industry is our area of expertise, acquiring customers is not the only task we must do; rather, the actual work starts after that. By doing this, you can turn a customer into a devoted, steadfast subscriber:
Keep a quality check of your product by asking your audience and gathering their reviews and then enacting upon it.
Publish specialised publications or content for the users that include information about new products, business news, and smart industry-related content.
Employ customised attractive deals to engage your users.
How to Optimise Your SaaS Sales Funnel?
The way to make the best or most effective use of the SaaS sales funnel depends solely upon observation and communication. Analyze your SaaS funnel strategy and search for the loopholes that are letting your customers slip away. For instance, if you get ample leads and notice they don't end up buying your product, this indicates a lack of efficiency in showcasing your product’s USP when the lead was exploring your product or deciding to stay back or not. If a lead signs up for your product’s free trial and eventually doesn't end up purchasing your product, then you need to work on your onboarding services. If your customers leave you soon within the subscription period, then this clearly indicates you gave them no significant reason to stay and your product or its services aren't up to par. Follow these steps to optimize your SaaS sales funnel:
Engage prospective customers.
Enhance the user experience on your page by using random user experience testing.
Provide your customers with the highest caliber information and data.
Attempt to gain huge visibility and increase your availability, leave no stone unturned to advertise your brand, because we all are aware that “what is seen is sold”.
The most important factor, though, is communication. Give your product the greatest possible presentation. Give your customers a clear understanding of all the features and the efficacy of your product.
Additional Helpers
If your leads don't like your product after using it for a few days, offer them a refund.
A freemium plan provides a set number of features for no additional cost.
Conduct webinars, they help you generate leads and lets you build confidence and credibility of your product.
To address any consumer questions and demonstrate your product to them, hold live demo sessions.
In exchange for their email addresses, provide your leads some fantastic deals or free access to useful downloads. This would attract ample leads.
Configure pricing such that more features are available with premium plans while fewer features are available with cheaper plans and seek ways to entice more of your audience to purchase premium plans.
Become their go-to product. Once people began using your product comfortably, they would remain loyal to it under any circumstances.
Final Thoughts
Remember, the SaaS industry is all about generating leads and permanently converting them into devoted consumers. To retain and upsell your clients to premium levels, try to implement the appropriate strategies mentioned in this article. We are open to suggestions and feedback. Do share your thoughts regarding this article and if you have anything more to add.