How to design a SaaS landing page that will convert
Learn the basics of how to effectively showcase what your SaaS product can provide for your potential customers right on your landing page.
3 November, 2022
For any website, but especially those whose primary goal is to convert visitors into customers, the landing page is arguably the most important page there is. For SaaS, it’s no different.
A SaaS landing page has a lot to live up to if you want it to successfully represent what your company has to offer.
From nailing the structure and grabbing the visitors’ attention from the get-go to constantly making sure it’s properly optimized, the process of correctly designing your SaaS landing page can seem like a lot, but it really isn’t.
With our help today, you’ll quickie learn the basics of how to effectively showcase what your SaaS product can provide for your potential customers right on your landing page.
Types of landing pages
A SaaS landing page is a single web page whose design, structure, and content are aimed at promoting your SaaS service or product to website visitors. Users are expected to give their contact information for a special offer, deal, or information, and ideally, soon become customers.
Overall, there are four types of landing pages. The simplest one is a click-through page that is quite undemanding in terms of structure and is used as the halfway point to where the actual purchase begins. Typically, it’s just an overview of the best features and a few CTAs.
Lead capture pages, on the other hand, offer some sort of incentive to visitors, usually some free gifts like e-books, webinars, etc. Demo and sign-up pages are also offering to start free trials or try a demo, and lastly, thank-you pages are a type of landing page that users are redirected to after signing up or submitting a form.
Study your audience
The first part of preparing to create your SaaS landing page is to establish your audience. Ask yourself - who are you making it for? Try to cater not only to one type of user but a few more prevalent ones for your kind of product.
Take your time and study your target audience. What are their needs before coming to your product, and how can you meet them in the most effective way possible? Your future users will also have pain points you must uncover to present an excellent solution.
A thorough analysis of your audience will come in handy when you will craft calls to action (CTAs) for your page a bit later, and you’ll know which part of your audience will come to you for what purpose.
Define your goals
The second part is clarifying YOUR goals for your product and your business in general. Then transfer those goals onto your landing page. For example, SaaS companies, similarly to other businesses, usually have the following purposes and objectives:
- Create a product that solves real and not imagined problems - for instance, poor internal management, shortcomings with other products in the niche, etc.;
- Attract high-quality leads and subsequently transform them into loyal customers;
- Retain customers by delivering on even more than initially promised in terms of long-term value;
- Build brand awareness and keep your authenticity;
- Maintain the product’s accessibility and scalability while keeping maintenance and overhead costs to a reasonable minimum.
For a landing page, the goals are more specific - to gather visitors’ email addresses and other contact information, to promote a SaaS demo, or offer some useful content that will, in turn, transform leads into potential customers.
SaaS landing page structure
SaaS landing pages have a set of high-converting elements that, when combined, showcase your value proposition to your customers to the fullest.
About your product or service
The very first element and the thing that will immediately catch your visitors’ attention is also what we call a “hero” section of your landing page. It should all be visible at first glance and compelling enough so that people want to keep scrolling through the page.
This part usually consists of a headline, a subheading, and a call to action. Statistics say that a) it takes only about 2.6 seconds for visitors’ eyes to settle on something, and b) up to 80% of people drop out on this section, so it is crucial to quickly and clearly establish your value.
Make sure your headline is concise and explains what solution your product provides. The subheading will elaborate a bit more on that, briefly highlighting your prominent features.
Another essential element to feature in this section is the image highlighting your SaaS product’s star quality and brand personality. Let's look how at it works in real life based on a SaaS landing page Merge created for shipping and logistics solution - Lox.
Product features
Next, you should choose to primarily list and display features that directly solve your target audience’s pain points you discovered earlier. In case your SaaS product is super complex, single out those features that you can clearly explain without technical jargon.
The best way to present your product’s features is to list the problems and then straight away explain how the specific feature solves them. Show your product in action, not just describe your solutions or overexplain.
Social proof
The next thing your page will need is social proof - customer testimonials, reviews, and even some sort of expert appraisal will do. People are social creatures. They like to follow other people’s examples and usually trust their peers’ experiences.
The key to adding social proof is to include testimonials from people as close to various types of your target audience as possible. Make your visitors feel represented.
Other types of social proof include testimonials from influential people, brand partnerships, awards, PR coverage, case studies, etc. Include meaningful statistics, and make reviews stand out using a more visual format, for example, by adding logos, client lists, or examples of purchases.
Call to action
Your page’s very first call to action was already displayed right at the start of your landing page in the “hero” section. However, between that part and everything else you showed them, your visitors might forget what you need them to do, so a timely reminder is crucial.
The final call to action, being previously accentuated by customer testimonials, has to vividly state what action you expect from your customers and, ideally, breed the atmosphere of trust after all the previous elements.
FAQ
One of the sections you can add that will help your visitors clear out any lingering questions that may have accumulated once they scrolled all the way to this part of your landing page is “About us” or “Frequently Asked Questions.”
Try limiting the number of questions you put up to no more than seven or eight - more questions will be harder to present properly when designing a mobile version of your landing page.
Plus, people rarely read all of them, so only try including those that are actually frequently asked. For example, add the answers to the questions about:
- Onboarding process;
- Product features;
- Payment and fees;
- Possible discounts or promotions, etc.
Header and footer
The SaaS landing page header usually consists of your product’s logo, navigation links, and a call to action. If your landing page is, in fact, a single page, then links aren’t really mandatory, or they could lead to some crucial parts of the page, for example, pricing, features, or reviews.
At the bottom, you have a few final calls to action and a condensed paragraph stating your value and summarizing the previous information. The footer will also include a logo and navigation, plus a few social media logos, a newsletter, and company contact info as well.
Images
The images throughout your landing page are just as important as the text, and they should prop up all the product descriptions and the rest of the content.
Images should serve as a visual representation of SaaS features and add an extra layer of clarity for those for whom just reading text descriptions isn’t enough.
Always use high-fidelity pictures and specific shots rather than generic imagery, and avoid images that don’t add anything and don’t showcase any value.
Necessary optimization
Now we’re done with the structure. But there’s one more important thing left. And it’s not one-and-done either. Once your page is up and running, you will need to monitor its performance and optimize it when necessary.
Regularly go over your landing page’s analytics. Performance metrics to check: a) conversion rate that shows how many visitors either filled out the form or clicked one of the CTA’s; b) bounce rate that shows how many left; c) time on page; and d) scroll depth.
More tips for designing a landing page for your SaaS
In addition, we have a few more tips on how to build and design your SaaS landing page:
- Instead of just listing your product’s best features, you can add a comparison table, juxtaposing the features of your SaaS against similar features of other products, preferably without dissing others, just comparing what your product can do better.
- Mix up your calls to action - try offering free samples, demos, special offers, or other types of sign-ups for different kinds of visitors.
- Try integrating a live chat or a chatbot to help people better decide on your SaaS solution’s value proposition.
- Simplify the process from the visitor first clicking on your CTA to actually becoming your customer as much as possible. That stands for free trials as well - no long, tedious forms or asking a credit card information straight away.
- Try providing a reason for any action you want your visitors to do. If they provide an email address, they will get a free sample. If they add more contact information, they will get a more personalized demo, etc. Make any interaction mutually beneficial.
- Another great way to showcase your product in action is to add a video to your landing page. Keep in mind the rather short attention span of an average visitor, so don’t overdo it with the video’s length.
Wrap-up
As you can see, your SaaS landing page is one of the most functional parts of your product’s marketing campaign. Nailing its design, structure, and content is a guaranteed way of making sure your future customers get a taste of the best that your product has to offer.
Ultimately, you won’t get a second chance to make a first impression. Make an effort to build an elegant and helpful landing page, and your visitors will respond by becoming your loyal customers. Use our tips today as the first step toward that.
