We came forth and prepared a list of 18 cherry-picked tools to optimize your SaaS funnel – with these you’ll get necessary traffic, leads, and in the end conversions.
The SaaS funnel management is a long-term process that needs a vast range of tools in order to achieve efficient lead generation and high conversion rates. The entry Triple-A process of Acquisition, Activation and Absorption needs separate solutions that require a lot of effort to find.
The market is changing all the time and fresh startups with interesting apps are popping up like mushrooms after rain – it’s difficult to keep track of them.
However, why one should?
Because new services more often than not offer unique options, designed in order to stand out from the worn-out crowd. We want to introduce you to them – hear it out, as some of the positions are really worth attention.
Triple-A dictionary
The funnel – we care only about the first 3 stages.
The Triple-A stages are crucial steps when you want to optimize SaaS funnel. Even though they are not the only ones, they are the primary elements that every marketer and analyst needs to focus on first when optimizing the SaaS funnel – and so do we.
Acquisition is about bringing traffic to your website and service through various means. We focus on the most popular forms of SEO and Content Marketing, as we find they are the most saturated areas and offer a multitude of options.
Activation is primarily about converting the acquired traffic into users/buyers – This includes web analytics, landing page optimization, voice of customer solutions and such. Expectedly the most difficult part of the SaaS funnel.
Absorption means retaining the customer or in other words “absorbing” them by your service. This part covers live chats, CRM, customer referrals, CX, e-mail automation and more.
Acquisition
MinuteMailer – if you are searching for a collaboration between e-mail and social, this is your choice. E-mail is just one, direct social network and that is why MinuteMailer delivers on both fronts. It’s perfect for scheduling your social content and e-mail newsletters.
It’s mobile friendly, easy to edit, has an unlimited image storage, can import your contact in a breeze and allows you to segment your users. It also tracks data such as clicks and opens, and has a free plan. Great choice for budget savvy businesses.
Snip.ly– a simple solution in sharing links – add a CTA of your choice to any link you share, so you can promote your agenda even when using other’s content.
Remember to match your message and business to your content, so when you share it people interested in the shared link will also be interested in what you have to offer in your CTA. Very intuitive and useful tool to optimize your SaaS funnel.
HelloBar – as a lead-in to the next part and a grey area between both, HelloBar is best used for your landing pages. It is a free bar at the top of the page that features your own message and the CTA. It can also display social buttons, so you can increase the number of shares with it. Hello Bar collects and exports subscriber data to your email lists in services such as Aweber, Campaign Monitor and MailChimp. Finally, it allows you to A/B test your messages. A very simple tool, but offers a variety of options to benefit from the effectiveness of a clever CTA bar.
Activation
Convert – Convert is a WYSIWYG landing page optimization A/B tool that is an amazing asset in every CRO specialist’s arsenal. It uses easy HTML and an editor that in real time displays the changes you’ve introduced – it also contains convenient stylesheet editing for any dynamic content you want to introduce. Installing Convert is pretty easy as you need to use a snippet of JavaScript in your website header. Convert - or another A/B testing tool - is an absolute must have in your SaaS funnel optimization stack.
Lander – Another rising star in the landing page optimization family – With Lander you can create an amazing landing page on your own with the help of their gorgeous templates or from a scratch if you wish to.
They also focus on the mobile traffic and offer a mobile version of their creator so you can focus on the segment of users coming from mobile environments.
VWO Landing Page Analyzer– before A/B testing and launching your page make sure it is fully optimized. The Analyzer is a free tool coming from VWO, which reviews your page based on 21 questions. Although it seem that it bases it’s analysis solely on your responses, it serves as a great checklist to see whether you haven’t committed any basic optimization mistakes before starting testing – it makes no sense to start testing and then hit your forehead with a sudden epiphany “oh dear, I made my page too cluttered, so obvious”.
After the answers you get an overview of your website with useful tips that can help you in optimizing your page. It’s free, fast and makes some good points, so why not run it.
XStockVideo.com – Video landing pages have become the norm because of their high effectiveness rate. More often than not we find ourselves struggling with preparing an efficient video that would both attract attention and be aesthetically pleasing. You can try using a guide to creating a video, but you can guarantee it will be of high quality. Because of that we suggest using XStockVideo as it is an amazing alternative to stock photo sites, which provides you with thousands of HD short free videos to choose from.
If you are planning to A/B test but lack ideas, use a video. Since XStockVideo is free, you can check without any costs whether the concept of a video landing page will work on your website.
Insights: Google Analytics – this sounding like a movie sequel service is actually a very handy booster for Google Analytics. Instead of sifting through tons of data coming from GA (and we know that sometimes can be problematic), Insights instantly points out the fixable errors in your stats, so you can improve the provided areas and reduce bounces, exits and such.
It’s a report that shows you which areas are strong and which require attention – perfect for anyone who believes that Google Analytics overview is not actionable enough for them.
Bloom – Bloom is a wonderful WordPress plugin that will do its best to convert your website’s visitors into registered users. It’s a highly customizable pop-up with lots of templates and options to bring together your website’s design and pop-ups.
It integrates with the most popular e-mail marketing systems available, and readily obtains information about your e-mail lists for your convenience. A good and precisely targeted pop-up coming from Bloom will boost your conversion rates.
Absorption
SatisMeter – with SatisMeter you can gather customer feedback on the basis of the simple Net Promoter System. It allows you to place a bar with only two questions to answer in a scale of 1 to 10: “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend” and “What could we do to improve?” This allows you to gather feedback from both your devoted worshipers and disgruntled malcontents, segmented in a convenient dashboard.
You can also push the data you’ve gathered to other web analytics to analyze it further, the survey is completely customizable, and you can match the language of a question to the language of a user partaking in the survey.
Add SatisMeter to your e-mails as a signature (another awesome feature) to gauge the effectiveness of your e-mails and your brand’s reach-out.
Chatra – if you are looking for a friendly way of interacting with your customers and visitors, Chatra is for you. It’s as familiar as Facebook chat, and offers few nifty features:
Live type – you can see the messages of your customers being typed before they are sent.
Conversation history – all messages are being kept in history, even those that weren’t sent.
Group chats – your support agents can join particular chats and create a problem-solving force right in the single video.
Track the message being written and react shortly after it is sent to you – this will make you look very professional, as you prepared yourself beforehand.
Tend.io – Tend is a very useful tool to keep track of your current user base. In comparison to Google Analytics, Tend also provides you with information what is the order of actions of a given user, who they are, what do they do, how they found you and such – basically, a very in-depth guide to your users and visitors.
Tend does not tend to overwhelm you with data, as it only focuses on these statistics that are a result of your marketing efforts. Thanks to that you can quickly measure the effectiveness of what you do and how it influences your users.
LeadFuze – A sales prospecting automatization tool that stands out from the crowd thanks to one feature called “Done-for-you” – if you do not consider yourself an expert at generating leads, you can use LeadFuze aid and they will do it at you.
All you need is to get onboarded, and they will outreach your prospects, identify leads, prepare e-mail campaigns and provide you with hot leads at your disposal. A great solution for any growing business that cares about their SaaS funnel performance.
MixMax – a very useful suite for your Gmail inbox used for tracking e-mails, scheduling meetings and emails, and for using effective message templates. You have control over the information who opened your email and when, so you can follow up at opportune times.
The list of other features is also extensive: you can preview links, include polls, surveys, and gifs in your emails, and you can undo your sent messages – useful when you hit that enter too fast.
Cursive – it’s a powerful referral campaign manager that is integrated with Stripe (a suite of APIs for ecommerce). It allows you to create easy referral campaigns that you can track (who and to whom), and you can create individual landing pages per every customer.
Finally, an extensive analytics dashboard gives you total control over your referral traffic and growth.
Startup Threads – if you want to promote your brand and get people to like you, send them a free t-shirt with your logo. After all, people adore freebies, and it’s a walking advertisement. You can ship t-shirts wherever you like, either to a freshly paying customer or to a lead that went cold. The dashboard allows you to track your shirts and aids you in the distribution process.
That’s not all
This would conclude the list – is that everything? Only for now, as we are planning to scour the web for your convenience in order to find other tools that ware as cool as these. Prepare to hear more from us in our posts, and get ready to optimize SaaS funnel immensely with the help of Userpeek.
Torsten is CEO and founder of Userpeek. He is an old stager in the online business with 20 years of experience as an online marketer, conversion rate optimizer and UX strategist.
