How to Build a High-Converting SaaS Website [Ultimate Guide]

on 11 Jun 2024, by Bogdan, in Blog, WordPress, Cloud, Guides

by Bogdan

Struggling to turn website visitors into paying customers? This guide is here to help you do it.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through implementable tips to help you create high-converting landing pages with a SaaS website builder and suggest a few tools to get it done. Throughout this guide, we’ll cover the following:

What elements make landing pages convert
How to understand your target audience
Steps you need to take in designing your landing page
Best practices for designing a high-converting landing page
Examples of high-converting and low-converting landing pages.

On the surface, optimizing certain critical elements within your landing page can generate significant revenue, increase your conversions, improve customer lifetime value and retention, and more. For instance, according to studies, using video content on your landing page could increase your conversions by as much as 89%. Sounds great, right?

Depending on the goal you want to achieve with your landing page, this guide will focus on proven techniques that cut across all lead-generating landing pages.

Let’s begin by understanding a conversion-optimized landing page to know exactly what we’re doing with a SaaS website builder.

Overview: What is a high-converting SaaS landing pages

A landing page is a standalone webpage that is designed to promote a SaaS product, convert visitors to customers or trial users, etc.

These landing pages typically highlight the value proposition of the software, demonstrate key features, and aim to get your customer to act in a certain way. For instance, signing up for a free trial, purchasing a product, scheduling a demo, subscribing to a service, making an announcement, inviting people to a conference, and more.

How effective SaaS landing page templates should look like

SaaS landing pages can also help you capture leads. According to HubSpot, at least that's what nearly 44% of online marketers report as their goal. Another 34% say that their foremost priority with landing pages is getting direct customer purchases.

These pages are critical in online marketing.

After spending tons of time and resources driving traffic to your landing pages, the next step is to focus on creating landing pages that convert. The transition from the ad to your landing page should offer a compelling reason to act. It isn't just writing some text, adding a few photos or videos, and a call to action (CTA) button.

There's a craft to it. Let’s start with the first step.

Step #1: Understand your target audience

Firstly, landing pages are usually tailored to a specific audience. For this reason, it’s crucial to understand the mindset of your buyers. As an online business owner, this info can help build an effective landing page around your customers’ needs and expectations. Make them want what you have to offer.

For instance, if a buyer has made a purchase or taken any other action on your site, find out why they took that action. Take your time to discover what is going through your buyers' heads.

Don’t just analyze the paying customers only.

Instead, ask, listen, and talk to other customers as well. This can be your former/one-time buyers, free-trial (non-paying) customers who haven’t yet decided to subscribe to a paid service, or those paying customers who canceled their subscriptions.

Ask them different questions. For example,

You can ask paying customers what convinced them “ultimately” to sign up for a service.
If it’s a free-trial user, ask them what would make them sign up for your service.
If a customer cancels their subscription, ask them what’s obvious. Why did they cancel? And many questions like that.

Sometimes become the customer yourself to see first-hand the good and not-so-good aspects of your customer experience.

Step #2: Designing your landing page

A prospect has a specific need and is looking to buy a solution to meet it or address a concern. By listening to your audience, marketers can easily recognize their customers’ needs, intent, persona, and behavior.

Do they really need your product or service? Are there alternatives? During this decision process, prospective customers will look for reviews, pricing, etc.

Your landing page has to answer some of these questions for it to be highly converting and effective.

After gathering info about your audience, the next is to start designing. We’ll focus on effective SaaS landing page elements required to create a page that converts.

You can innovate, but don’t leave out anything essential.

Key elements of a high-converting SaaS landing page

The following are key elements of creating a highly converting SaaS landing page. We’ll discuss every element individually.

Compelling headline

Usually, the headline is the first thing your visitors see when they land on the page. It acquaints them with your offer.

For your headline to grab attention and entice visitors to stay on the page, it must be creative, straight to the point, create urgency, and solve a particular problem.

Infuse the headline with curiosity rather than the over “buy me” approach:

Instead of: "Buy Our Time Management Software Now!"

Try: "Discover the Secret to Gaining 10 Extra Hours Every Week!"

This approach sparks curiosity and invites visitors to learn more, making them more likely to engage with the content on the landing page.

Include a supporting headline

Use this every time to provide additional context or details to the main headline. It should reinforce your message and give the reader a reason to read all your copy and not just skim.

Cloudera does it right for both its headline and subheadline.

A strong and prominent call to action

A landing page’s call to action asks visitors to do some action. For example, Get started for free, Request a Demo, sign up now, etc.

For it to successfully convert visitors, it needs to be simple, clear, and a clickable call to action. You can use a link, but a button is preferable because they easily grab attention.

Create engaging visuals (image or video)

This can be a headshot, a picture (a visual representation of your service), or a video.

Most importantly, augment your message with a video. It allows visitors to watch, instead of read. The video can demonstrate features and benefits a picture can’t explain.

A well-produced video can also enhance the user experience.

NOTE: Some people will want to read about your features, while others will want to see them, but most want both. Write about a feature, and then show how it looks with your software.

Highlight core features and benefits

This will be a list or sections explaining key features and the advantages of your offer to users. To appeal to customers and inspire them to take action, highlight the core benefits of your service on the landing page.

Simplify navigation

Generally, it’s not advisable to have external navigation on your landing page. But if it’s what you decide make it simple and user-friendly like this:

Or like this template design:

Make the navigation minimal and internal. Or no navigation to keep the focus on the CTA.

Include social proof (optional)

You can also add real customer testimonials to your landing page. Testimonials can increase your sales and establish trust in your brand by showcasing real results to potential customers. However, it's important to use testimonials only after you have achieved results for other customers. If you are just starting out, this is optional. Additionally, include trust signals such as security badges, awards, certifications, or guarantees to reassure visitors.

If you need help designing your landing page (or don’t know how to start), we have a landing page builder to help.

Create a high-converting landing page or website with Brizy Builder

Brizy is a page builder that allows you to create landing pages and business websites that convert easily. It incorporates crucial features and design elements to help you build, optimize, and carry out A/B tests to determine what works and what doesn’t on your landing page.

The following are the key features that can help you design quickly.

An easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface. It is user-friendly and intuitive allowing you to drag and drop design elements required to design and customize a landing page.
A host of pre-designed templates that should help jumpstart your project and save time.
Full customization options. Business owners will enjoy full editing control. You can customize every element like the header, hero section, feature section, etc of their landing page to make it unique to their business and brand.

Integration with popular marketing and CRM tools such as HusbSpot, MailChimp, etc. to streamline your workflow and enhance functionality.
SEO optimized. Brizy integrates with WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast to increase your landing page's visibility on search engines.
Build fast-loading landing pages. The code for each element and template is optimized and lightweight to help you design faster pages, improve user experience, and boost conversion rates.
Conduct A/B tests seamlessly to determine which versions of your landing page perform best and optimize accordingly.
And more functionalities you’ll discover during the designing process.

A highly converting landing page doesn’t stop at the design alone. Next, we’ll look at some SaaS website design best practices for developing convert landing pages.

Step #3: Best practices for designing a high-converting landing page

As a site owner, if you want to design a landing page for maximum conversions, keep the following best practices in mind.

Create a clear user interface and experience

The focus of a landing page isn’t about you. It’s about your target audience. So, for your landing page to work, focus on site visitors or the end user. The user interface needs to be clear.

Align every element around your user’s needs, expectations, behavior, or preferences.

Keep the design simple, clean, and uncluttered.
Guide the visitor's eye to the most important parts of the page (e.g., headlines, calls to action) using size, color, and placement.
Ensure the page works well on all devices. This is something you can achieve with Brizy.
Use consistent colors, fonts, and styles that align with your brand identity.

Have a narrow focus

A narrow focus on a SaaS landing page implies concentrating on a single, clear objective or message.

Instead of trying to present multiple offers or pieces of information, target only one primary goal.

If it's trying to get visitors to sign up for a free trial, schedule a demo, request a quote, or watch an introductory video, etc. It's better to create a separate landing page for each goal instead of combining them all on one page.

NOTE: Don’t create a landing page for a topic that isn’t trending. After coming up with a topic, use tools like Google Trends, GoogleKeyword Planner, and social media networks to see if there’s demand.

Explain what customers would get at each level

Sometimes, customers aren’t aware of the impressive array of tools they’d get a paid membership.

To avoid all of this, break down precisely what features and benefits are included at each pricing tier or subscription level on your page. This way, prospective customers can easily understand what they will receive for their money.

Doing this also eliminates confusion and ensures that they see the value in upgrading to higher tiers if needed,

Tip: If it’s possible, add a Q&A feature that answers some questions your visitors might have.

Use the AIDA model

So far, we’ve already been covering this. But briefly, this model is one of the best-known practices in the content marketing world.

A.I.D.A. is an acronym for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. It implies

Grab your visitor's attention with a compelling headline or eye-catching visuals.
Maintain their interest with engaging content like a short video.
Create desire by showcasing testimonials, case studies, or unique features that solve a user’s problem.
Direct users to take action with a clear and strong call to action.

Step #4: Finish by A/B testing and analytics

Finally, if you want to tell whether your content or landing page (as a whole) is effective or not, this is where A/B testing comes in.

During this test, you can use tools like Optimizely, Google Optimize, or Unbounce to create and compare different versions of your landing page.

Track key metrics such as conversion rate, bounce rate, and user engagement to analyze performance.
Use analytics to understand user behavior and refine your strategies for better results.

Who is doing it right when it comes to high-converting SaaS landing pages? And who is getting it wrong?

That’s it!

Conclusion

An effective SaaS landing page easily guides prospective customers to act a certain way on a page. During this journey, the page must answer questions or address customers’ concerns, pain points, or issues. Incorporating elements like a clear value proposition, tidy visuals, core features & benefits, social proof, consistent CTAs, etc., on your SaaS landing page streamlines this process. It also helps maximize your conversions.

Since it can be easy to make blunders with your landing pages (on your own), using a landing page builder can help. Brizy provides a clear, concise way to build and design a highly converting landing page. It provides all the templates and effective SaaS landing page elements to start with.

Get Brizy today to design landing pages for your SaaS business and convert as many customers as possible.

Article by Bogdan

Co-founder & Head of Design, Bogdan has a passion for everything that works great and looks awesome. Guilty for most of the UI and UX around this place, you can say "Hi" to him at bogdan at brizy dot io