The market for SaaS or ‘service as a software’ has grown massively over the years. As digital platforms and services improve, people and businesses are now turning to more digitized versions of services for all their needs.
Why is SaaS Sales Funnel Important?
Recent business studies show that the SaaS industry grows by 18% every year. But there are now many options for SaaS solutions. With that, it can be tough to stand out as a SaaS provider or business.
But, some proven strategies can get you more customers if you plan to start a SaaS business or ramp up your existing service.
Given that 87% of marketers use email marketing tactics to disseminate their content to their customers, one of the strategies you should have is an email marketing funnel system.
SaaS Sales Funnel Stages & Main Metrics
Marketing funnels are excellent because they automate a lead generation and nurturing process. It creates an efficient way of converting cold leads to avid customers.
Moreover, it continues to nurture those customers by building a continuous relationship with them over email by regularly sending them reminders, updates, promos, and offers. Having a marketing funnel system gives a SaaS company a chance to market to a warm audience repeatedly.
So how do you create a good marketing funnel system? The first step is to understand what stages a marketing funnel must cover. There are generally three stages that each funnel must include:
- Building awareness,
- Creating brand engagement,
- Converting leads to customers.
Let’s look at each one in detail.
Also read: What is Lead Nurturing? Examples & Strategies
Build Awareness
People’s first impressions about your product, service, and brand matter. It may not be the most important factor, but building that awareness has the potential to positively or negatively affect your marketing funnel system.
So you need to make as many people aware of your brand or service as possible. As you build awareness, you must communicate your service and digital products.
Building awareness basically means introducing your brand, product, and service to a broad target market. The most effective strategies for building awareness are the ones that target the behavior of a set of personas that will best benefit from your service.
For example, if you’re an accounting service provider, you’ll want to target accountants and bookkeepers first. You can also build awareness amongst accounting students as they’ll eventually start using your services.
Finally, positioning and placing your brand in the mind of the customers as one of the options they can choose is highly effective.
Create Brand Engagement
The next step is to engage people. Engagement is simply building that long-term relationship with an audience by giving them a reason to continue conversing with you.
Why should they keep opening your emails instead of sending you to their spam or junk folder?
Everything – from your lead magnet, sales page, and even a welcome message – should give people a reason to engage with you for the long term. Effective brand engagement creates and increases brand loyalty amongst your old and new leads.
You can do this by making sure your marketing funnel system highlights something valuable to them repeatedly. Examples are promo vouchers and tips.
Convert Leads to Customers
When your target market already has a good level of awareness about your brand and has already been engaged, you now have the chance to convert leads to customers. In turning leads into customers, the conversion rate you should shoot for is 3.1% – 5%, according to most marketing experts’ golden rule.
There are many lead generation strategies, but you have to know which ones would work for your target market so they would have a positive experience with your brand. Good customer experience is the key to making that conversion happen.
You can communicate that by sharing positive feedback from customers or giving a free trial to your service. Remember that in converting leads to customers, a clear call to action is also a must. Don’t share too many calls to action. The lesser actions a lead must take to buy or subscribe to your service, the better.
How to Build a SaaS Marketing Funnel
So now that we’ve discussed the steps to a marketing funnel, here are some tips when creating a SaaS marketing funnel.
Choose a Marketing Funnel Builder
Choosing the right marketing funnel builder is essential to your email marketing strategy. Some of the best sales funnel-building examples that you can find online include:
- Sender
Powerful multi-purpose marketing channel integrates both Email and SMS marketing capabilities and automation that effectively fuses different channels. Take Sender for a test drive with a Free-forever plan, and you’ll be nicely surprised.
- Activecampaign
- Clickfunnels
- Kajabi
- Everwebinar
- Mailchimp
- Sendfox
An effective marking funnel builder allows you to grow your list of leads with as little manual intervention as possible. So, look at what features you need most in a funnel and choose the one that works well with you and is appropriate to your budget.
Create a “Carrot” aka SaaS Sales Pipeline
One of the steps of an effective SaaS sales pipeline stage is creating a “carrot” or a lead magnet. An effective carrot has value, is free, and can instantly be received via email or direct download. Some great carrot ideas include:
- A free webinar
- An ebook
- A whitepaper report
- Templates
- Business checklists
Studying the behavior of your target market would give you ideas of what kind of lead magnet they’d be willing to exchange their email for.
Be careful of coming off as a piece of clickbait. Potential customers are quickly turned off when your headline is not consistent with your content or what you are offering them. A valuable “carrot” must also be true to your brand.
Build a Strong Lead Capture Page
If you look for the best sales funnel examples online, you will see that these pages have a strong lead capture page. A strong lead capture page clearly says what the page is about and a clear call to action to its potential customers.
Creating and optimizing a landing page for top conversion is very important. Poorly constructed landing pages waste traffic because they can’t convert site traffic into subscribers or customers.
Ensure that your copies are engaging. Use images to drive your key points and turn your headers into attention grabbers using power phrases and words.
Develop a Marketing Funnel Sequence
A marketing funnel sequence is a series of emails that engage your leads once they are already part of your list. You have to be careful not to make a complicated funnel sequence. If it’s complicated for you, it’s more complicated for your customers.
An effective SaaS sales email funnel allows you to build an ongoing conversation with your leads. Constantly check your email performance by checking the open and click rates. Make adjustments to your email copies as needed to get better results.
Strategically Input Your Upsells
Throughout your email sequence, you can start inputting yours upsells. Do it in a way that’s strategic and casual. Don’t come off as “salesy” too early on. You can mention your service often, but don’t oversell it.
An effective SaaS marketing funnel doesn’t feel like a sales pitch. Instead, it should always feel like a conversation that mentions a product from time to time just so that people know that they have the option of buying if they want to.
Keep Testing and Improving
The market evolves all the time. For example, people’s buying behavior usually changes faster than their purchasing power. So, a specific marketing funnel system may work for a season but must be improved afterward.
This is why it’s crucial to have effective business process management software to keep track of their systems and adjustments. This step allows you to better look at your marketing funnel to improve it for your future campaigns.
Outclass in Marketing Funnels for SaaS
Building a B2B Saas marketing funnel is straightforward. But it requires time, effort, and much tweaking. But with suitable systems and strategies in place, you’ll be sure to create one that will generate recurring revenue for a SaaS business.
Also read:
- User Onboarding for Ecommerce, SaaS Apps: Major practices
- Building Winning Lead Generation Funnel
- What is an Advertising Campaign: Definition, Types & Examples
- What is B2B Sales? Process, KPIs, Nurturing
- 7 SaaS Email Marketing Strategies for 2023
