Improve your signup page conversions

What is a good conversion rate?

Answer is - it depends! The typical signup page rate across SaaS companies is in the range of 2-5%, however depending on your business, your own landing page rate may be significantly different.

For example if you have a high customer lifetime value (LTV) in a relatively niche sector a 3% conversion rate might be totally acceptable, and your company could be wildly profitable.

So why do people not signup? Low conversion on your signup page is usually caused by a combination of issues:

1. Your signup form is too long - Having additional form fields i.e. company name, position/title and/or phone number have been shown to decrease conversion rates, so where possible keep the number of fields to an absolute minimum.
2. Lack of social logins - By using a social login you can access most of the information you'd normally ask prospects for (name, email, etc.) automatically. With the added bonus that the prospect doesn't need to create a password for your service. This removes multiple points of friction in your signup flow and thus improves your conversion rate.
3. Not demonstrating value - Giving prospects that ability to trial your product can be challenging from a technical perspective, so businesses often use "request a demo" buttons as the next stage of the funnel. Unfortunately this isn't a great solution as a potential user might not want to invest 30 minutes of their time in a meeting just to see your product in a screenshare.

This blog post will focus on point 3, as prospects have become increasingly less comfortable speaking to vendors. Most prospects are now looking for buyer-led purchasing processes, even for more complex products. This is obviously a complex issue that might require a lot of product development time to solve, or not be possible for your product. We have some suggestions for how you can demonstrate value in a buyer-led environment without complicated technical changes.

How to demonstrate value

One way to demonstrate value to a potential prospect is to embed a snapshot of your product in your signup form, including a screenshot has been shown to improve conversion rates by 73%.

Adding a video can increase conversion rates by up to 85% because demonstrating your product in action builds confidence in the prospect that your product not only exists, but does what your marketing says it does.

The absolute best way to show off your product to prospects is with an interactive product demo, which lets the prospect get a feel for your product in a guided sandbox. These take less time to create than a video demo and are much more engaging.

Think about the viewer

On your signup page, you only get an extremely short period of time to get the attention of your potential lead so any product demonstration is going to need to be short and to the point, you should ask yourself the following questions.

• What is the easiest to demonstrate value proposition?
• Is there a common "wow" moment while using the product that you would like them to see?
• Is there a way to highlight a specific piece of interactivity in the product?
• How can I make this even shorter, without making the demo too short that it is confusing?

Record a simple demo

Using the HowdyGo chrome extension, this is a super simple process.

1. Install the extension in your browser
2. Pin the extension to your toolbar
3. Click "Start Recording" and walk-through your SaaS product's "Wow-moment"
4. Click the "Stop Recording" button.

Edit your recording

Once you have finished recording and the upload is completed the editor view will open in your browser automatically.

The editor page for HowdyGo is super easy to use and should only take a couple of minutes to have your recording ready to publish, you just need to fill in the details of each of the annotations that appear on-screen.

Make sure to edit the final call to action, this is a really effective way to push your most engaged prospects to the next stage of the funnel. They will be pre-qualified and high-quality so you can confidently close these opportunities.

Publish and embed into your signup page

Use the Publish button in the editor and you'll get a ready-to-share link.

Most of our users like to either link directly to the share page, or embed their demo directly into a landing page.

In the HowdyGo editor page click the "Publish" button to get your share page.

You can also embed your demos using an iFrame, like so: <iframe src="https://app.howdygo.com/embed/xx" title="My Demo"></iframe>

Record the results

One of the most important parts behind the scenes of any landing page is to ensure you are seeing the desired uplift in conversion rate, so tools that work quite nicely for this include:

• Posthog
• hotjar
• Google Analytics

Use one of these tools to track your conversions and see if the changes you are implementing are improving your conversion rates.

Analyze, optimize and iterate

By looking at analytics you can work out how you can continue to iterate on your sign up flow, some potential ideas to explore include:

Do prospects not complete the demo?

If people are not completing the demo you should look at reducing the number of steps in your demo flow. Over time you can develop a collection of demos to try out, showing off different USPs of your product and using different copy to improve click-through.

Using multiple demos you can effectively A/B test the features that resonate the best with your prospects.

Is the signup form not getting completed?

Maybe your potential prospects are filling in the first field on the signup form and then just leave the page? If this is the case you should run an experiment where you reduce the number of fields in the form to see if it improves the form completion rate. Also look at implementing a social sign-in process.

Are prospects completing the demo but not using the CTA?

This may be evidence of an issue with your product demo, the product itself, or the prospects you are targeting in your marketing and lead-generation. Prepare a new collection of ICPs and test those customer profiles in your marketing.

Make sure you are linking the demos you deliver to the ICPs. If for example, you have a patient CRM for health providers, the demo you deliver for a Physiotherapist might be completely different to the one you deliver to a General Practitioner.

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