Your SaaS product lives and dies by the digital assets that sell it. Today we are talking about 6 components of a highly effective SaaS homepage.
Yes, functionality, reputation, customer service, and social proof all play an important role. But if you don’t properly highlight these things on your site’s homepage, you’re going to have difficulty growing a customer base.
From generating a healthy first impression and building trust to communicating value propositions and offering compelling calls to action, your homepage serves a very wide range of functions. And each of them is as important as the other when it comes to nurturing and converting visitors into customers.
In this article, we’re taking a look at six things that every SaaS homepage can’t be without.
5 Tips For High-Converting SaaS Website Design
Evocative Visuals
Literal messaging alone doesn’t sell anything. Humans need to invest emotions into a potential purchase – especially one that involves a subscription.
Visuals – photographs, art, animations, and videos – help web designers trigger feelings with site visitors. These feelings aren’t what convinces a lead to become a customer, but it helps build a stronger connection between them and the brand.
To do this effectively, your brand needs to establish a consistent voice that resonates with its target audience. The key here is in understanding who you’re selling to and what their emotional needs are.
What feelings do they want a new product to make them feel? Security? Confidence? Motivation?
What feelings do they want your product to take away? Frustration? Worry? Inadequacy?
If answering these questions wasn’t part of the process when developing your brand’s buyer personas, I highly recommend revisiting it.
Brief your designers on these feelings. Ensure they’re populating your website with visuals that hit as many of these emotional notes as possible.
Xero’s header image does a great job of evoking a sense of busyness and the fear of not “getting to everything.” Their product is smartly positioned as an antidote to this emotion.
A Meaningful Value Proposition
One of the first messages that should hit the eyes and minds of your site visitors is the reason they should become customers.
At this point, it’s really important that we make a distinction between a value proposition and a feature list.
The things your product does – features and functions – aren’t the reasons people should pay you money every month.
To borrow a quote from Joe MacMillan, a feature is “the thing that gets us to the thing.”
What your SaaS product allows its users to do isn’t the reason they subscribe. Your customers are customers because features give them real-world benefits.
These benefits are your value propositions. The reward that a person or business gets for using your product is the value that your homepage should be selling.
Ask yourself this question when writing your value proposition: “What is the real-world, measurable benefit that a customer enjoys by using my product?”
AMZ Pathfinder hits all the right notes by using terms like “scale” and “profitable” in their homepage header. Both of these words make it crystal clear for site visitors what they can expect after becoming a customer.
An Accessible Feature Summary
Finding out what your SaaS product does is one of the main reasons potential customers visit your website. Don’t make them click around to find this critical information. Let them find a description of your product’s core features within seconds of landing on your homepage. Look at Hi5’s homepage and see how they’ve listed their main features for Team managers as well as Team members.
When discussing your product’s features, it’s incredibly important that you Stick to the important stuff. There’s no need to do a deep feature-dive on your homepage.
Visitors want a friendly high-level view of your core functions, not a knowledge base. Take the lead from Workplace and stick to four things the software allows your customers to do.
It’s also important that you avoid getting too technical. Discuss features in language that everyone will understand. Don’t use industry jargon or terminology that only you and your customers understand.
Remember that many of the people who land on your homepage have no concept of your product and the context it operates in. Spores does an amazing job at keeping its feature summaries highly accessible.
Credible Social Proof
One of your homepage’s most important objectives is to remove conversion obstacles. Oftentimes, prospective customers are hesitant to commit to a subscription because they doubt your brand’s credibility.
Are you going to deliver what you promise? Do you have decent support channels in place? How steep is your product’s learning curve?
These concerns are often even more pronounced in the B2B space, where the fallout from committing to a substandard service can be huge.
Providing credible social proof is the most effective way of addressing these concerns. Let’s take a look at some SaaS homepages that nail this tactic.
- Bench shines a spotlight on their earned media, listing four high-profile media outlets that gave them positive coverage under the heading “Featured in.”
- Goco leverages its exceptional reputation score on G2 to create social proof. The company’s homepage dedicates a sizable portion of real estate to highlight the six awards it won from the industry-leading review site.
- Dialog opts to show the logos of their impressive list of customers. Seeing globally recognizable brands like Samsung, Ubisoft, and Sephora on your homepage goes a long way to remove any doubt a lead may have about your reputation.
Easy Ways To Get In Touch
Certain leads need a high-touch sales option. Not everyone will be comfortable with a sales process that’s entirely digital.
A visitor may have a question about a specific product feature. They may want to know more about a specific claim that your sales copy makes.
Sometimes, a lead just wants the reassurance that there are actual human beings running the company they’re considering doing business with.
To that end, don’t hesitate to advertise the fact that prospective customers can get in touch with someone willing and able to answer their questions.
- Piwik includes a very prominent “Request a Demo” CTA on their homepage. This is an incredibly effective way of imbuing your homepage with a human element.
- Both Rydoo and Pleo make use of Intercom, an industry-leading, CRM-integrated chat service that makes it super easy for site visitors to interact with your support or sales staff.
- Baremetrics goes old-school and proudly displays their telephone number in a floating header element.
Compelling Calls To Action
If all of the elements on your homepage do their jobs, many of your visitors will be ready to take immediate action even before delving deeper into your site’s content.
Immediate action is even more likely if your homepage’s CTA buttons make a compelling case for being clicked.
Here are some CTA design best practices, along with a few examples.
- Use Appropriate Action Words. Calls to action are effective when they tell your lead what’s going to happen when they click. Even more so when you use short, impactful phrases in the label.
- Place CTAs Next To Compelling Messages. FreshBooks offers us a fantastic example of where to place CTAs on a homepage. In total, there are five conversion-focused buttons on the page, each aligned with a unique and compelling brand message.
- Offer A Non-Subscription CTA. Not all of your homepage calls to action should result in a traditional conversion. The primary CTA on the Flamingo homepage is for getting early access without a credit card. This takes a ton of pressure off a lead that doesn’t feel ready to commit to paying yet.
Some Final Thoughts
It’s vital that you take a holistic approach to the tactics we’ve talked about here. The effectiveness of a SaaS product’s homepage doesn’t hinge on a single element.
At the risk of sounding overly poetic, the components of a homepage need to harmonize. There needs to be a balance in how ideas, messages, calls to action, and emotive triggers are distributed through the page’s real estate.
Remember that too much focus on one element detracts from the effectiveness of another. Avoid this at all costs.
Don’t worry about “overthinking” the homepage’s design process. It’s not an easy thing to do, and rushing through it just so that you can get it live is counterproductive.
Involve a professional designer, get the input of people you trust, look at what your competitors are doing, and keep reading content like this for inspiration and guidance.
Good luck with these 6 components of a highly effective SaaS homepage.
