How to A/B Test Your SaaS CTA’s for Optimal Conversion Rates

You’ve created the perfect landing page and have reached a product-market fit with your company’s main product. But now, it’s time to find more potential customers, increase revenue, and scale your business. 

For that, you will need to optimize your SaaS CTA or call-to-action buttons so that you reach out to more visitors, increase revenue, and improve your conversion rates. And the best way to do that is through a data-driven process that can be implemented and proven through A/B testing of your CTA. 

This article will cover the elements that will help you A/B test your SaaS CTA’s for optimal conversion rates.

What Is a CTA?

A call to action or a CTA is a medium through which the marketer leads his audience, visitors, and customers to the next step of the buyer’s journey. CTA’s come in different forms— they can link to a direct sales page, move the person from the visitor to the subscriber phase, or enhance the revenue from the buying cycle by prompting users to upsell.  

A call to action should be placed immediately after the marketing message when the effects of the message are the strongest. That’s why you will see CTA buttons at the end of the articles, sales and landing pages, where it makes the most sense for them to be. 

And to be beneficial, a CTA needs to: 

• Capture attention. A CTA needs to be visible and easy to click on. We will talk a lot more about design, placing, coloring, and language later on. 

• Deliver on the promise. A CTA needs to be aligned with the marketing message or otherwise make sense for the reader to click on it. If you spent all of your time talking about one thing in your marketing message, then the CTA needs to follow-through on that message and lead the person further in the sales funnel. 
• Increase your revenue/subscriber number. And the last benefit of the CTA is its effectivneess. It needs to lead your visitors, consumers, and customers further into the cycle because that’s how you will increase your revenue and/or subscriber number. 

Even though this sounds simple enough (and it is), it’s not easy to do. A CTA should be informative, yet concise, eye-catching, yet subtle and this also applies to your Saas CTA’s.

So let’s how do CTAs differ when it comes to SaaS. 

How Do CTAs Differ for SaaS?

When it comes to SaaS, your customer’s first visit to your website and their first interaction with it is crucial. On it, your customers need to grasp how complicated/simple your product is and if they can understand it in mere seconds. 

When it comes to CTAs for SaaS, they should focus on getting the visitor to either schedule a demo session with one of your agents or start a free (7, 14, 30 days) trial. Since there’s some time needed to set up everything for your SaaS, having a demo session to go over all of it or a trial period is a good way for your customer to get to know their options. 

Considering your SaaS needs to be integrated with the company’s other tools, do a team-wide installation, and go over the data security points, it will take some time so a direct “buy now” CTA that would work for a B2C company wouldn’t work for a SaaS company. 

When it comes to your SaaS business, you should find a way to integrate CTAs into your SaaS content. You can do three things when it comes to your CTAs for your content: 

• Internal links. You can place CTAs inside of your SaaS content by linking from your body text to another article, ebook, or whitepaper so that your visitors can get more information about the topic of their interest.

• Consider a whitepaper. When your visitors still aren’t ready for a demo session or a free trial, you might use a whitepaper or an ebook at the end of your SaaS content for them to consider. This will provide them with more detailed information on your product and how it would work for them specifically. This can usually lead your visitors to schedule a demo session or start a free trial.

• Read more for awareness. If it’s a visitor that’s interacting with your content for the first time, it might be better to provide them with a CTA that would lead to another informational content before a demo session. That way, they will get to know the benefits of your product in a more organic way and become ready to start a trial. 

What Is A/B Testing? 

A/B testing is also known as split testing. It’s a process where you show two, three, or more versions of a single variable to different visitors of your website, sales page, or landing page. You do this to determine which version is the best one (which one provides the best results out of all of them). 

A in the A/B testing stands for the original or the control testing variable and while B is the variation (it’s still called A/B testing even if you have multiple variables). 

Since the data-driven approach to decision-making is essential for SaaS businesses, you eliminate all the guesswork out of your CTA optimization since you rely on data. And not any kind of data, but the best kind of data— your direct visitor, consumer, and customer data. 

Once you created your variation, it’s time to test them out. One audience will get the original while the other audience will get the variation(s). And you will see how the winner is by comparing data—  which variation provided the best possible outcomes for your business. 

How Can A/B Testing Help My SaaS CTAs Convert? 

When you A/B test your CTA, you can drastically improve the effectiveness of your call to action buttons. 

All types of businesses have problems that A/B testing can solve. For SaaS businesses, it’s about finding SQLs instead of MQLs and A/B testing can help you with this. You will find out where your customers drop from the sales funnel, why they do that, and what can you do to fix it. 

The following five reasons are why A/B testing will help your SaaS CTAs convert: 

• Solve visitor pain points. Your visitors come to your SaaS website to solve a specific problem they have. And your CTAs should entice them to click on them because they promise to solve their pain points. By A/B testing, you will look at the data and find the CTAs that speak to your visitors’ problems in the most optimal way. 

• Get better ROI from existing traffic. When you optimize your CTAs on the website, you will make better use of the visitors that are coming to your company’s website. So to get a better ROI from the traffic, you should A/B test your CTAs. If you have 20,000 monthly visitors on your website and you increase your click-through rate by just 1%, you will have 200 more visitors that have clicked on your CTA and may become new customers. 

• Reduce bounce rate. The new Google Analytics no longer measures bounce rate (the new metric is called average engagement time), but the term bounce rate still remains in the marketing circles. When you test out your CTAs’, you reduce the number of people who leave your website because they don’t understand something about it. 

• Make low-risk modifications. The beauty of A/B testing is that you can still keep the current optimization rate numbers while you make modifications. So you can keep testing until you find a better alternative and you should do that with your CTAs. A complete rehaul of your website or a landing page might lower your current conversion numbers so an A/B test is always a safer solution.

• Achieve statistically significant improvements. When it comes to A/B testing, you will take a look at the data and determine which variation is the best. And this adds up— when you make multiple changes through A/B testing, it can add up to significant improvements in your business such as increased revenue for your business. 

Helpful A/B Testing Tools

We’ve established the many benefits of using A/B testing to optimize your conversion rates. You don’t have to manually establish an A/B test because there are tools that can help you with that. 

So we will cover a couple of those, go over their pros and cons, and see their pricing models. 

Google Optimize

Google Optimize is an online-split testing tool. You simply plug this tool into your website and then you can facilitate three types of testing: 

• A/B testing
• Multivariate testing
• Redirecting testing

Google Optimize has two key elements to it: Editor and Reporting. In Editor, you write up your variations for A/B testing, while you go to Reporting to see the data for those tests.

Advantages

Google Optimize has many advantages: 

• Plenty of integrations. Since this tool is Google’s tool, it can easily be integrated with many other Google tools such as Google Analytics, Tag Manager, or AdWords. 

• Easy setup. Google Optimize is quite user-friendly and it’s easy to set up the A/B testing campaigns in it.

Limitations

Google Optimize also has some disadvantages: 

• It doesn’t have built-in analytics. With Google Optimize, you always need to integrate it with Google Analytics if you want to get reports from your A/B testing campaigns. 

• It doesn’t have the capability to test complicated features. If you’re a bigger company, then this might be a problem for you. 

Price

Google Optimize utilizes the freemium pricing model. With the free model, you can run up to three simultaneous tests. 

If you want access to all of its features, you can upgrade to Optimize 360, but it’s an expensive tool. It costs around $150,000/year and it’s more geared toward companies that have more than 1 million visitors a month on their platforms. 

Optimizely

Optimizely is a platform that is aimed at enterprise-level customers almost exclusively. Companies that choose Optimizely do that because they need to run multiple web experimentations and they approach testing with the utmost seriousness. 

Advantages

Optimizely has many advantages: 

• Optimizely isn’t only used for websites, but also for testing mobile apps, messaging platforms, and more. 
• Their platform is highly customizable so you can use it for plethora of options such as various group segmentation, multiple A/B testings at the same time, etc. 

Limitations

Optimizely has some limitations: 

• It’s a robust tool with many options so the user interface isn’t so user-friendly at times (it’s easy to get lost in all the options)
• Depending on the scenario that you set in the console, it can have a really slow loading time. 

Price

Optimizely is quite a pricy tool. They don’t have a free version and they don’t offer a trial for their tool. You can choose between three plans: 

• Standard
• Business
• Enterprise

The price starts from $50,000/year.

VWO

VWO is an optimization platform where you can use A/B testing tools to improve your business metrics. It’s one connected platform where you can test ideas, discover insights and improve engagement all across your customer’s journey.

With VWO, you can receive actionable insights because the platform enables you to use heatmaps, on-page surveys, funnels, and recordings. 

Advantages

VWO has some advantages: 

• It’s one of the easiest A/B testing tools that you can use. You can create tests with ease, without any technical assistance with their Editor. 
• VWO has a user-friendly interface and it’s quite easy to get to know your way around the platform

Limitations

VWO has some limitations:

• It can be difficult to modify and implement advanced A/B testing campaigns
• VWO is still lacking in integrations with some other tools.

Price

When it comes to pricing, VWO has a base rate of $199 per month per feature. These change depending on the additional features your SaaS business needs from VWO. 

A/B Testing Ideas for SaaS CTAs

There are many places on your website, sales, and landing pages where you perform A/B testing for your SaaS CTAs. And we will start with CTA’s styling— design, coloring, and language.  

A/B Test CTA’s Styling

Style can make quite a big difference when it comes to optimizing your CTAs. We will cover tactics that will help you optimize your CTAs when it comes to design, coloring, and language. 

Design

One thing you can do is to overlap images and page elements. With this, your users will scroll further down because they will see a part of the next elements and they will be curious to find out what the entire element or image is. 

This way, you will encourage visitors to read ahead, go down your page, and in the end, click on your CTA.

Coloring

When it comes to coloring, you can use Von Restorff’s Effect. This effect states that people remember shapes that differ from other similar objects around them. 

What you can do with this effect is group a series of text and have a coloring scheme around them that contrasts the other elements on the page. With that, you can “point” to your visitors where they need to give their attention on the website. 

Language

When it comes to language, you can frame highly vague and intangible concepts with phrases and metaphors so that your users make them tangible in their minds. 

For example, you could say that you protect your consumer’s data with privacy and that their information is safe with you. Or you can describe it by saying that their data is “Being stored in an online version of Fort Knox.” 

A/B Test CTA’s UVP Language

One more thing you can do is to insert your unique value propositions (UVP) in your CTA’s and A/B test them. 

With your UVP, you offer your customers something that’s unique just for your organization that no other company can match. It’s what makes you stand out in the market. 

So when A/B testing your CTA’s, try to insert your UVP in it. An example would be “Click Here To Get SQLs instead of MQLs”.

A/B Test CTA’s Location

It’s always better to display the CTA button instead of having it be a link. The button will garner much more attention from you. But you will also have to insert the button in multiple locations on your sales or landing page. 

Sometimes, visitors might miss the button altogether so you should have it in the top, middle, and bottom of the page. It will have an effect on your visitors by mere exposure effect.

Conclusion

We’ve covered the most important aspects of A/B testing your call to action so that you can optimize your conversion rates. 

And of course, we will end the article with a CTA of our own. If you’re still unsure if your CTAs are on target, book an intro call with us to learn how Directive can help you boost SQLs, not just MQLs.