How to Increase Signups on a SaaS Website

A SaaS signup is a strange ask. You want somebody’s email address before they have seen the product work, in exchange for a login they may never use again.

Most signup pages are built as if the visitor has already decided. They have not. They are on your site and two others, working out which one is worth twenty minutes of setting up.

Below are eleven ways to get more of them through, where the traffic comes from, why so many signups never pay, and what to measure.

How to Increase Signups on Your Website

Eleven ways, roughly in order of what they return. If you are still working out where the traffic comes from, our customer acquisition examples cover that side.

1. Say what the product does

Most SaaS homepages describe a category rather than a product. “The workflow platform for modern teams” tells a visitor nothing they can picture.

Write the sentence a customer would use. It needs three things:

• What it does, in words somebody outside your company would use.
• Who it is for. “For agencies billing by the hour” beats “for modern teams”.
• What it replaces. Usually a spreadsheet, an inbox, or three tools stuck together.

If somebody cannot repeat it back after ten seconds, the button is being asked to do the headline’s work. The landing page statistics show how much the first line carries.

2. Ask for the card later, or not at all

Asking for a card before a free trial costs you a lot of signups. The people who get past it are the ones who already trust you, and on a first visit that is almost nobody.

Take the card at the end of the trial instead, and say so on the button. If your sales team wants the filter, keep a card-required option alongside rather than instead. The same thinking runs through increasing subscription sales.

3. Nobody reads a feature list

SaaS pages default to columns of features because they are easy to write. Visitors are not comparing features. They are imagining a normal Tuesday with the thing installed.

Show the product doing the job. A short loop of the real interface beats any list, and it beats a stock photo of a meeting easily. There is more in building a product page that converts.

4. Your signup form has too many fields

Every box costs you signups, and most SaaS forms want a company name and a phone number before anybody has seen the dashboard.

• Keep: email and password, or a Google button. Nobody wants another password.
• Move inside the product: company name, team size, what they are trying to do.
• Drop: phone number, job title, how they heard about you.

There is more in increase checkout conversion.

5. Show that other people signed up

A stranger on your plans page cannot tell whether you are a real company or two people and a landing page. Logos help. Live signups help more, because they are current.

• Recent signups, pulled from your own system.
• Customer logos from companies that look like the visitor’s.
• Reviews naming the job title, because “ops manager, 40-person team” tells them more than five stars.

Our roundup of social proof examples has the formats, and the social proof statistics show how far they move a decision.

6. Put pricing on the pricing page

Hiding the price behind a call is the fastest way to lose a self-serve buyer, and self-serve is where signups come from.

Publish the numbers, or a range with what moves it. People read “contact us” as too expensive for them, and go and look at the competitor who told them. If you do run offers, our discount strategies cover doing it without training people to wait.

7. The free plan is a marketing channel

A free tier costs you servers and buys you something you cannot get with money, which is people opening the product every day.

Make the limit one they hit through success rather than time. Running out of projects because the team grew makes people upgrade. Running out of days makes them go.

8. Most people never finish setup

Getting the signup is the easy half. If somebody lands in an empty dashboard with no idea what to do, they never come back and you are no better off.

• Sample data, so the product looks like it is already working.
• A template for the job most people came to do.
• One obvious first action, not a tour of everything.

Get them to the thing the product is for inside five minutes. The customer experience statistics put numbers on what that first session is worth.

9. Chase the ones who read pricing

Somebody who got as far as your plans and left was the nearest thing to a buyer you had that day, and most sites let them go silently.

A popup offering the trial rather than a discount, or a retargeted ad pointing at the page they left. Answer the thing that stopped them instead of repeating the pitch. There are patterns worth copying in exit intent popup examples.

10. Say what the button will do

“Get started” tells nobody whether a card is about to be taken or a salesperson is about to ring. That doubt is what stops the click.

“Start free, no card needed” works because it answers both. Our guide to the types of CTAs covers the wording.

11. Ask users to bring their team

Most SaaS products get better with more people in them, so every user you have is a way in to their colleagues.

Make inviting somebody one of the first things the product suggests, and give both sides something out of it. A team that arrives together is far harder to lose than a single user.

How SEO Brings in SaaS Signups

Everything above assumes somebody already found you. Search is where most self-serve SaaS traffic comes from, and unlike ads it does not stop the day you stop paying.

• Write for the problem, not the category. People search for what is going wrong months before they learn what kind of tool fixes it.
• Build the comparison pages yourself. Somebody searching your competitor plus “alternative” is nearer to buying than anybody else who lands on your site.
• Give every integration a page. “Works with Slack” is a search somebody makes when they have already decided they need something.
• Send each page somewhere specific. A guide about a narrow problem should point at the plan that fixes it, not the front door.

Our guide to ecommerce lead generation covers turning that traffic into a list.

Why Signups Never Pay

Plenty of companies fix the signup page and then wonder why revenue did not move. The problem is usually further in.

• They never reached the point of the product. If nothing useful happened in the first session, nothing will happen in the second.
• The free plan was too generous. If nobody ever hits a limit, nobody ever needs to pay.
• The trial ended in silence. Charging a card without warning gets you a refund. Letting one expire without a word gets you nothing.
• One person signed up alone. Products that need a team rarely survive a single user losing interest.

There is a fuller breakdown of the trial-to-paid gap on our SaaS page, and increase sales funnel conversions covers the stages before it.

Getting More Demo Requests

If you sell through demos rather than trials, the visitor is asking for a meeting, which costs them more than a login.

• Say how long it takes. “20 minutes” removes the fear of an hour with a salesperson.
• Let them pick a slot on the page. A form promising somebody will be in touch loses half of them.
• Say who they will meet. A name and a photo make it an appointment rather than a lead form.
• Offer a recorded walkthrough too, for the ones not ready to talk yet.

What happens after the request lands is covered in convert leads into sales.

Signup Metrics Worth Tracking

Most teams watch the signup count. It goes up when you run a campaign, which is not the same as the campaign being worth running.

• Signup rate by source. One blended figure hides the channel carrying everything and the one wasting money.
• Share who do the main action in week one. This says more about next quarter’s revenue than the signup count does.
• Time to first value. How long from signup to the product having done something useful. Minutes, not days.
• Where the form is abandoned. Whichever field people stop at is the quickest fix you will find.

The customer retention analytics cover the numbers on the other side of the sale, and a conversion rate optimization audit will tell you where to start.

How WiserNotify Increases Signups

Tactic five asks for something most SaaS sites cannot easily do. The signups sit in your database and never reach the page, because moving them there is a development job nobody has got round to.

WiserNotify for SaaS reads that data and shows it, without a developer.

• Signup notifications from Stripe, your own app, or 250-plus other tools.
• Usage numbers on the page, so the figures do the arguing instead of the copy.
• Review notifications putting your G2 or Capterra ratings next to the plan.
• Inline embeds or floating popups, depending on whether you want proof inside the pricing table or beside it.

All of it comes from real signups, so a slow week looks like a slow week. There is more on tailoring what each visitor sees in website personalization.

Wrap Up

Describe the product in one sentence, take the card requirement off the trial, and cut the form to two fields. Those three move more signups than anything else here.

Then work on the first five minutes after signup, because that is where the people you just won go quiet.

Also check: How to increase conversion rate in sales

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