How to double your SaaS product’s customers without increasing advertising spend

It’s a common convention in marketing SaaS products that, if you want to double your customers, you double advertising spend. If you’re getting 1,000 website visits each week, doubling to 2,000 visits will mean that, so long as the ratios throughout your marketing and sales funnel remain the same, you will get double the customers.

However, what if we could tell you that you could keep your advertising spend exactly the same, and still get double the customers? The answer can be found in key conversion metrics in your marketing and sales funnel – in particular, the website conversion rate and lead-to-customer conversion rate (often known as onboarding).

Double spend or double conversions?

Increasing traffic will likely increase the number of new leads your website achieves. But obtaining more traffic via advertising represents just one piece of the puzzle; ensuring this traffic converts is a new challenge altogether. Exactly how focusing on conversion plays an integral role in complementing advertising spend is clear when we look at a practical example:

Let’s assume that your current conversion rate is 5% and it costs £1 to get a single visitor to your website. For every £100 spent, you get five conversions at a cost of £20 each. In order to double the number of SaaS customers to ten based on advertising spend alone, your budget would increase to £200.

Now suppose that, instead of simply doubling your budget to double customers, you work to identify areas on your website which boost the rate at which you convert. Sticking with your budget of £100, an increase to a conversion rate of 10% means ten customers at a cost of £10 each. You are spending exactly the same getting people to your website, but you’re seeing twice as many people convert. Whether this is your website or onboarding conversion rate, small increases in each can have a significant impact on the number of new customers you secure.

Alternatively, you may still wish to up your advertising to £200; in such an instance, you will be securing 20 customers instead of just ten. It’s clear, therefore, that an effective strategy for customer growth entails a complementary relationship between the money spent on advertising and the conversion rate optimisation of your website and onboarding process.

How to increase your conversion rate

When it comes to improving website conversion, refining each stage of the customer journey is essential. Once the customer is on your website, the conversion of traffic into leads becomes the area of focus, with many options available to generate interest in your product:

• Offer free trials of varying lengths to see which has the most impact
• Split test your landing pages and call-to-actions to refine performance
• Reduce the number of distractions on a given page to focus attention on your CTA

Once you have a lead, it’s time to convert into a customer. Within the onboarding process, you should look to:

• Offer in-app support for users of the software
• Review and optimise with the support of existing clients, seeking feedback and comments on usability, key features, problems, etc.
• Limit the number of steps required for conversion to reduce drop-offs
• Provide training and support features to help promote the full opportunities presented by the SaaS platform
• Conduct on-going email marketing campaigns, ideally campaigns that are personalised and targeted

It’s essential that each milestone in the funnel to a paid customer is optimised fully to lead to the next. Only by tailoring your offering according to the necessary stage of the customer’s experience can you hope to complement the money you spend on advertising, ultimately leading to the increase in quantity of your SaaS product customers.

SaaS marketing expertise

Small changes to your website at each stage of the customer journey can lead to big successes in conversions, and often what you might consider to be an innocuous change has the potential to boost your sales greatly.

We’ve worked with many SaaS businesses to increase optimisation rates throughout their sales funnels. If you’d like to discuss how you can increase your optimisation rates, contact Xander Marketing today on +44 (0)330 223 2770 or request your free one-hour consultation.