I looked at over 100 SaaS lead gen forms (probably a good bit more) these past few weeks and 90%+ weren’t optimized for lead conversions.
As CEO or CRO, obviously focusing on how to increase close rates and net retention is paramount, nothing earth shattering here, but website conversion gets less attention.
Why? It’s because we tend to focus on and look at things that are the easiest to track.
Losing a customer or prospect happens right under your nose, losing a potential customer due to a poorly optimized website happens in silence.
PS: 2.5%+ is the website to lead conversion rate you’re looking to achieve. (average across B2B SaaS is right at 2%)
Before I get into the changes to make, let’s look at the math at what just a .5% conversion rate shift can do to a SaaS company with 10k monthly visitors:
Let’s say you get 10k visitors a month and your conversion rate is 2%.
Moving to 2.5%, that’s 50 extra leads a month.
Let’s say you convert 6% of MQLs
That’s 3 new deals a month!
@ $35k ACV
You just added over $100K to your MRR!
So how to do it:
Here are the most common issues I found:
- Excessive forms to fill out (one had 9 fields + 4 dropdowns + open text field) most were 7-8
Listen, congrats on clearly identifying your ICP and creating amazing segmentation. But don’t make the potential lead have to go through 10+ forms to fit your complex internal process to make sure they are being routed to the right rep.
This is the #1 cause of abandonment and these are potential customers down the drain.
- Not mobile friendly. Roughly 50% of your website traffic comes from mobile devices these days. Many sites I’ve noticed are not optimized at all for mobile.
Grab your phone and bring up your website. Go through the site as you would a potential prospect and go through the lead generation process. From there, you can figure out how to make the necessary changes to better optimize the experience for your prospects.
- Page load times are slow.
According to Portent, conversion rates drop an average of 4.5% with each additional second of load time between 0-5 seconds. If you’re page loads times are over 5 seconds, your buring leads. I get that animations are fun, but if it’s causing 10 second load times it’s just not worth it.
- Lead forms are below the fold.
I was surprised how many lead forms I had to navigate around to find. These were either below the fold or I had to actually click on different pages to view. Place your form in an easily accessible area, popups and chatbots can help as well.
Instead, here’s what I’d do to optimize your site and convert more visitors and generate more leads:
I highly recommend having no more than 3…4 max form fields on your lead form.
Will you get the same data you were getting before? No, but my guess is that you’re finding that because of the excessive forms to fill out, oftentimes the data was inaccurate to begin with. Also, I guarantee by removing fields you’ll start seeing more website traffic convert.
I also always recommend a segmented path. So based on the fields selected, or data from a firmographic tool, have different paths for your buyers;
- For those qualified, give them the opportunity to chat immediately or book time on an AEs calendar. (majority buy from the first vendor they speak with)
- For the semi-qualified, or maybes, send to book time with SDR to qualify.
A great combo, thanks to VP Marketing at Winmo, Marilyn Mead Brutoco, would be Tourial to increase conversions, Clearbit for appending the firmographic data and Chili Piper for routing and for providing prospects with an opportunity to immediately chat with or book time with an AE.
Chilipiper’s data points says that 78% of buyers select the platform that they speak to first. “We’ll get back to you within 24 hours” is not acceptable. You need to put processes in place to reach out to the prospect ASAP. Ideally, you need to give the buyer the ability to chat now or schedule a call at their convenience.
