How to Increase SaaS Demo Requests & Free Trials

One of the most direct ways to increase SaaS demo requests and free trials is to eliminate the friction in the process. To that end, understand why your prospective buyers hesitate to request a demo or to sign up for a free trial, and then remove such obstacles.

Many potential buyers do not want a high-pressure sales pitch. Assure them that the demo will be value-filled and customized to their needs, with no pressure for them to make a purchase.

Some potential buyers worry about the time commitment involved in a demo or a free trial. With a demo, clarify what they should expect and don’t take up more time than necessary. With a free trial, provide them with step-by-step suggestions to get the most out of the trial in an efficient manner.

Some potential buyers do not want an endless stream of emails. Make sure every email adds value and explains new ways to make further use of the software.

Before we get into the specific methods for increasing SaaS demo requests and free trials, make sure that your tracking and measurement systems are reliably in place.

If you’re using GA4 for web analytics, for example, conduct an audit of the configuration. In our experience, 9 times out of 10, GA4 is configured incorrectly and we need to go in and restructure the tracking. Often, data retention is not set correctly, custom events are not configured, conversion tracking has major gaps, there’s no infrastructure for data warehousing, etc.

You should also set up behavioral intelligence tracking (as explained in more detail below). This enables you to uncover insights for updating your web pages, improving the user experience, and increasing conversions.

You should also set up performance dashboards for greater business intelligence. This makes it easy for cross-functional teams to understand site, conversion, and business performance and to quickly pick up on spikes or quick drops in KPIs.

Many companies don’t even know who is on their website. They may know how many site visitors they have in a day, week, or month. But they have no idea which companies are there. Yet, if you think about it, the way to ensure you’re attracting the right people to your site is to monitor the actual companies and organizations on your site. Otherwise, your website data analysis could be inherently flawed.

That’s where website visitor detection comes in.

If the person is already in your CRM, then they should be revealed in your marketing automation or website visitor detection software application.

For all of those visitors outside of your CRM, website visitor detection software such as Lead Forensics, Leadfeeder, and ZoomInfo will reveal the companies visiting your website. And certain applications such as RB2B reveal the actual individuals visiting your site.

If you want to increase demos and free trials of your SaaS solutions, one of the first steps is to ensure your website is attracting the right companies. And then you can see if visitors from these companies are demonstrating the right behaviors while on your site.

If your site is attracting too many visitors that are not your ICP, overhaul your pages to more directly align with the way your ICP thinks and is searching for answers.

You may think that you know your ideal customer profile (ICP), but based on our experiences with many B2B SaaS companies through the years, you’re likely missing opportunities to uncover key audience insights, and in turn, hurting your demo request and trial sign-up rates.

Identify Their Pain Points

What frustrates your ICP the most? Can you name their top five pain points? What pain points can you solve for them more effectively than the competition?

If you are serious about increasing your conversion rates, understand their pain points and address them clearly in your website and content. Go beyond your product features, and hone in on the specific pain points that you eliminate.

Listen to Sales Call Recordings and Fill Website Gaps

Sales call recordings such as via Gong, Chorus, Salesloft, etc. are invaluable in helping you to go deeper in understanding your audience. When Stratabeat starts working with a new client, one of the first requests is to gain access to sales call recordings. In certain cases, we’ve listened to 20 hours of sales calls. There’s a world of insight to be gained by hearing from your prospects first hand as to what they are looking for, their frustrations, as well as their initial objections to your solutions.

For an ecommerce SaaS, we listened to more than 20 hours of sales call recordings, discovering ways that the audience members were articulating what they were looking for and identifying gaps in the client website. By capitalizing on these insights, demo requests have continued to increase quarter over quarter throughout this past year.

Conduct Customer Interviews

Beyond the obvious insights you glean from interviewing your B2B customers, there are many additional benefits. For example, through interviews you can uncover pain points, points of meaningful differentiation, value in your brand’s interactions with customers, as well as inspiration for new product features.

For a fintech SaaS, we listened to 8 hours of customer interviews, discovering two new core reasons why they were purchasing from our client. We then revisited and overhauled the home page and subsequent pages in the site to reflect this, helping to increase conversions and spur new growth.

Use CRM Win-Loss Data and Fill Website Gaps

Your salespeople are recording the reasons why a prospect buys from you or why they chose a competitor. Or, it might be that they record a number of objections before the lead ghosts them.

All of this is invaluable in understanding what your website and content should be speaking to. When you see why you landed a number of large new accounts, dig into the CRM data to understand the keys to the sales. Then conduct a gap analysis with your website and content – if there are no pages yet covering the underlying reasons for the sales, create a new web page or augment an existing page to ensure you’re highlighting such key capabilities.

Too many SaaS are vague in their positioning, differentiation, and messaging. Sorry, but vagueness doesn’t work.

Is your brand a Ford Fiesta, Toyota Camry, Maserati GranTurismo, or Lamborghini Revuelto? Each of these is a car. It’s the same “product,” but each is sold to a different audience with different buyer motivations at different price points and requires vastly different branding. If you tried to sell an inexpensive car with Lamborghini branding, it simply wouldn’t work. The same is true if you tried to sell a Lamborghini with Ford branding.

Don’t try to be everything to everyone. It doesn’t work.

Yet, as an agency, we see this type of brand dilution all the time. If you want more demo requests and free trials, your site visitors need to know that they are in the right place and that you’re the right solution for them specifically.

Heuristic conversion rate optimization (CRO) enables you to identify usability issues, enhance the user experience, and remove conversion blockers. With heuristic CRO, you optimize your website and landing pages based on recognized usability and conversion optimization principles, all with the aim of increased conversion rates.

As heuristic CRO can be done at any time without the need for extensive A/B or multivariate testing, it’s a relatively fast, “quick win” opportunity.

For example, for a restaurant and hospitality management SaaS, as part of a heuristic CRO effort we noticed that the hero area of solution pages lacked user social proof and CTAs. After adding these elements, there was a significant volume of clicks on these CTAs and demo requests increased quarter after quarter after quarter.

A major B2B SaaS buyer trend is an increase in self-serve buyer behavior. B2B buyers are more and more doing the majority of their research on their own, prior to talking and engaging with prospective sales reps.

Aligning with this trend, another way to increase SaaS free trials and demo requests is to add self-serve, interactive demos to your website. It’s a relatively easy way to capture more ROI from the traffic you’re already generating.

Typically, only 2%-5% of your site visitors are ready to talk with your salespeople at any given time. And only 4%-6% sign up for a free trial. In contrast, data from Navattic has shown that approximately 25%-40% of website visitors will engage with an interactive demo.

But why allow them to leave your site without experiencing your products? Why not give them the option to get a demo right now without any friction? Plus, interactive demos ultimately result in higher-intent and higher-quality sales meetings.

The B2B fintech OakNorth Credit Intelligence experienced a dramatic increase in demo requests (talking to sales) from a Navattic interactive demo, with the interactive demo becoming the number-one-converting site offer. And employee training and knowledge management platform Trainual achieved a +450% increase in free trial signups when they implemented an interactive demo.

Another method for increasing SaaS demos and trials is Jobs to be Done (JTBD) content. This is content that’s aligned to the reasons buyers “hire” your product to accomplish specific goals or outcomes (instead of simply writing content based on product features, for example).

This customer-centric approach is a more direct way of substantively meeting the needs of your audience with messaging that resonates more deeply.

In addition, by analyzing the “jobs” customers are trying to accomplish, you can identify new market opportunities and areas for innovation. This proactive approach enables you to stay ahead of evolving customer demands.

Behavioral intelligence helps you to update your web pages, improve the user experience, and increase conversions.

What is behavioral intelligence? It includes a set of analytics data that uncovers user behaviors on your website, on your landing pages, and in your content. This typically includes heatmapping, click mapping, scroll mapping, and attention mapping for quantitative insights. It also includes user session recordings for qualitative insights.

Behavioral intelligence is critical for increasing site conversions, as you can uncover friction in your site caused by unclear messaging, poor design choices, or any areas causing confusion. You can see precisely how far down the page they scroll, and the specific links and CTAs that they click.

Using behavioral intelligence, we noticed that visitors to an internationalization SaaS client’s services index page were scrolling only 35% down the page. This meant that the majority of visitors to the page were unaware of some of the core components, features, and benefits of our client’s software suite. Based on the insights, we overhauled the top of the services index page to ensure that all key components were listed at the top of the page with links to more detailed information. This change helped to increase engagement, conversions, and SQLs.

If you’re looking for more demos, trials, and SQLs, one of the most effective things you can do is revisit, test, and optimize your CTAs.

Many SaaS companies get CTAs wrong. The typical problems we see include:

• Lack of CTAs, missing out on conversion opportunities
• Using the same CTA over and over and over again, not accommodating others who may be at a different stage of the B2B customer journey
• Lack of CTAs in their content
• Lack of CTA performance analysis
• Lack of CTA testing

For one SaaS client, Stratabeat identified that although the demo request buttons in the site were effective, there were no clicks on the “Contact Us” buttons throughout the site over a two-month period. It was clear that the “Contact Us” buttons were wasted real estate on the page and needed to be replaced to better engage site visitors.

Make sure your landing pages are converting at a high rate. After all, they have one job and only one job to do, and they better as heck be doing it.

The top of each landing page is the most important part of the page. Use a compelling headline and include the reasons why the conversion event is so important to them above the fold. The idea is to offer overwhelming value.

Keep the design clean and uncluttered. Too many companies try to do too much with their landing pages. Instead, stay focused. Have one objective for each landing page, and ensure everything on the page is geared towards that single conversion goal. And make sure the page loads quickly.

With landing pages, effective copywriting is paramount. Address their pain points directly and clearly. Keep the language short and punchy. Avoid lengthy sentences and paragraphs.

Place your form above the fold and keep the form fields to a minimum — don’t ask for more information than you need.

And add trust signals, such as client logos, client testimonials, short case studies, awards, industry recognition, etc.

Test what works and what doesn’t on your landing pages. For example, try adding live chat to see if it helps to achieve additional, incremental conversions, etc.

The path to conversion is typically through a form. With this in mind, form optimization is one of the most direct methods for increasing conversion rates.

The most important aspect of forms is to limit the number of fields to only information that’s absolutely needed. I’ve seen many cases where the company included far too many fields, almost guaranteeing that conversion rates would be low.

On the other hand, if you’re facing a problem of too many unqualified form submissions, adding a few qualifying fields may be highly worthwhile.

There are multiple options for displaying your forms, and you should test the different layouts. You can display a form in a single column. Or, a double column. Or, as a multi-step process. If you have more than 8 fields, consider a two-column approach, as it will shrink the vertical height of the form.

When you have a lot of fields, don’t discount the multi-step approach, as it first presents the user with a very short, easy form before the requests for the information appear. Understanding human behavior, people tend to complete tasks once they get started, so the multi-step approach can help when seeking a lot of information. And if you are using a multi-step form, display a progress indicator, as this tends to increase completions. We’ve seen various examples where conversion rates increased when moving to a multi-step form.

For field labels, you’re best bet is to include the label left-aligned and above the form field. However, if you have only a few fields, use inline field labels for a much cleaner, more modern look.

If you want more form submissions, don’t ask for their phone number. Or, make the phone number field optional.

A data-driven approach to conversion rate optimization is to conduct A/B testing. You can test headings, messaging, value propositions, page design, page layout, offers, CTAs, and more.

With proper A/B testing in place, website and page design decisions can be based on the data instead of random opinions, a blessing to any web designer.

The benefits of continual A/B testing include increased conversion rates, enhanced user experience, and deepened content engagement. Plus, A/B testing can provide valuable insights into user preferences and behaviors, allowing for more effective marketing.

Consider adopting a culture of continuous testing, moving from one element to another in an iterative process to constantly refine your web pages.

Want more demos? Want more free trials? Focus on BOFU (bottom of the funnel) content. Crank out more product feature pages, more comparison pages, more “alternative” pages, more integration pages, more ROI calculators, etc., and watch your conversion rates increase.

BOFU content may not attract as many organic searches or page views as many other pages in your website, but the quality of those eyeballs is extremely high. These are typically qualified prospects.

BOFU content helps you get over the finish line with prospects when they are nearing the end of their customer journey.

It helps you to differentiate your solution. Through product comparisons and detailed feature explanations, BOFU content helps prospects understand why your solution is superior to competitors.

Case studies, customer lists, client testimonials, etc. all help you to build trust and confidence with your prospects.

BOFU content accelerates the decision-making process, helping you to drive more demos, free trials, as well as sales.

In his book, “Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion,” author Robert Cialdini points to social proof as one of the most powerful means of influencing a person’s behavior and actions. Adding social proof to your website and landing pages is a reliable and effective way to increase conversion rates.

On your home page, include client logos, a testimonial, reviews (G2, Software Advice, etc.), and links to case studies to help build trust from the start.

On your landing pages, include both client logos and at least one client testimonial. Include examples of the ROI you generate for clients, as well. It surprises us how many SaaS companies do not include social proof on their landing pages – this is most certainly lowering conversion rates.

Include a Customers section in your website. Include powerful case studies, focusing on the strong results you’ve produced for your clients.

And sprinkle client testimonials throughout your entire site.

Do all of this, and your conversion rates will surely improve.

To increase conversions using video, strategically incorporate explainer videos on your home, product, and solution pages. Other effective uses of video include client testimonials and case studies.

Test using videos in your landing pages to see if they increase form submissions, as well.

You can also use video in support of new campaigns as well as taking an against-the-grain thought leadership stance to cut through the noise and differentiate your brand.

In his book “Mighty Midsized Companies: How Leaders Overcome 7 Silent Growth Killers,” author Robert Sher points out that constant strategy tinkering at the top is one of the most common reasons for growth to stall at midsized companies.

If senior leadership is changing the corporate direction every three or six months, it’s almost impossible to gain traction and unleash growth.

We’ve seen this firsthand with certain SaaS companies through the years. One quarter, the marketing team is focused in one direction, only to completely pivot in every subsequent quarter based on the CEO’s desire to continually chase a new shiny object.

Give your strategies a chance to succeed. Take a stand, have a backbone, go all-in on your strategies to win, and keep pushing. Assuming you’ve chosen a strong strategic direction, consistency, repetition, and persistence are unsung heroes in enabling you to change minds, strengthen brand perception, and unlock growth.

If you’re looking for more SaaS demos and trials, let’s talk.

Stratabeat is a B2B SaaS marketing agency with special expertise in SEO, content, and conversion optimization. We go deeper than other agencies. We’re the only SEO & content agency with the unique combination of neuroscience-based marketing for greater impact; advanced audience insight techniques for more targeted marketing; content-ICP fit verification to ensure you’re successfully attracting the right prospects; an account lead with only 2-4 client accounts (typically 8+ at other agencies) so you get the attention you deserve; and an intense focus on CRO for increased leads & pipeline.