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How to increase SaaS website conversion rates using customer insights
Learn how to use customer insights to prioritize CRO efforts, craft impactful messaging, and improve your B2B SaaS website conversion rates.
Articles
December 30, 2024
11 min read
How to align your website with the B2B SaaS user journey
A website is one of the most critical touchpoints in the B2B SaaS customer journey. It’s where prospects come to validate your solution, understand its unique value, and decide if they should convert. Your website can only achieve this if it seamlessly addresses user pain points, speaks to their motivations, and communicates differentiated value.
But many websites miss the mark. And the biggest conversion-killer is misaligned messaging. If your headlines, calls to action, and content fail to align with what your audience wants, then your SaaS website becomes a giant missed opportunity.
That’s why it’s so important to know what your audience wants before you reorganize your feature list or sit down to pen (what you think is) the greatest headline. You can’t wing it. You can’t make a best guess. You can’t decide by committee. You need to talk to your customers.
This article will teach you how to replace guesswork with more impactful website messaging — the kind of messaging that actually drives conversions — by capturing and incorporating Voice of the Customer (VoC). You’ll learn how to:
- Distinguish between the SaaS user journey vs. customer journey
- Map Voice of the Customer to the SaaS user journey
- Implement Voice of the Customer data on your website
And, ultimately, you’ll see why listening to your customers and building a customer-centric website will drive the meaningful bump in traffic, conversions, and revenue you’ve always wanted.
1. Differentiate SaaS user journey vs. customer journey
Before you can build or optimize a SaaS website, you need to understand the difference between a user journey and a customer journey. While they intersect with each other, they address distinct aspects of your audience’s experience — both on and off your website.
What is the SaaS user journey?
The user journey focuses on user experience in a specific context, such as how they engage with your platform, mobile app, or website. Optimizing the user journey means guiding visitors from one point to the next via frictionless flows that keep them engaged.
To optimize the SaaS user journey on your website, you need to ask questions like:
- How did they arrive at the site?
- What page did they land on?
- What is their buyer persona or intent?
- What’s the ultimate goal of this interaction?
A good website user journey provides clear direction about what the users are expected to do next and considers the broader customer journey and the user’s awareness level.
What is the SaaS customer journey?
The customer journey looks beyond your website, encompassing every touchpoint — from third-party reviews and competitor websites to peer recommendations and social media interactions. When thinking about this broader journey, ask questions like:
- What problems are they trying to solve?
- What keywords or phrases are they using to search for solutions?
- What competitors or alternatives are they considering?
To meet users where they are, SaaS companies must position themselves as trusted problem solvers. This requires a keen understanding of your customers — what they want, why they want it, and what channels they use — and the competitive landscape they’ll navigate to find you.
Note that while this article focuses on using Voice of the Customer to streamline the on-site user journey, VoC data can help you analyze and optimize the overall customer journey as well.
Why you should think about journeys in terms of personas
You already know that there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all SaaS user journey. There are multiple buyers in the B2B buying committee and you probably have a laundry list of personas you’re targeting (CIOs, CTOs, VP of Sales, etc.).
But when it comes to messaging, it’s often more helpful to group personas by their motivators, challenges, and decision drivers rather than their department or role — especially if those details are rooted in real customer data. Fortunately, it’s easy to collect this data and synthesize it so that you can extract meaningful messaging. All you need is a systemized approach.
For example, say you want a quick window into the start-to-finish user experience on your website. You can achieve this with a simple five-question survey mapped to different awareness levels. Questions might include:
- “What brought you to our website?”
- → Seeks to understand audience motivators.
- “What concerns do you have about choosing a product like ours?”
- → Seeks to understand what customers are considering ahead of a purchase.
- “What would make you confident to choose our product?”
- → Seeks to understand trust signals that drive a purchase decision.
- “What would make you stick with a solution like ours?”
- → Seeks to understand what you need to drive retention.
- “If you could change one thing about our website, what would it be?”
- → Seeks to understand the #1 point of friction on your website.
Once you’ve conducted enough survey data*, you can begin looking for commonalities and mapping specific needs and pains to the SaaS user’s journey. For example, asking these five questions might net responses like…
| Interview Question | Persona A | Persona B | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Awareness | "What brought you to our website?" | "I’m looking for a solution that fits within my team’s budget." | "I’m tired of [pain] and it looks like your product is one of the best ways to solve it." |
| Consideration | "What concerns do you have about choosing a product like ours?" | "I’m worried about hidden fees or whether it’ll really save us money in the long run." | "I’m concerned about whether your product keeps up with new trends and technology updates." |
| Decision | "What would make you confident to choose our product?" | "Seeing pricing details upfront and understanding the ROI over time." | "Hearing about cutting-edge features or seeing proof of how your product innovates." |
| Retention | "What would make you stick with a solution like ours?" | "Regular updates to ensure we’re getting value for our money and staying efficient." | "New feature rollouts and being part of a company that’s leading the field." |
| Feedback Loop | "If you could change one thing about our website, what would it be?" | "Make the pricing comparison tool easier to find and more transparent." | "Offer more details on how to use advanced features to achieve my goals." |
With responses like these, you can draw tangible conclusions about Persona A and Persona B. You can begin to label each cohort based on their pains and priorities:
- Persona A is a Budget-Conscious Buyer. They prioritize affordability, transparency, and proven ROI. They’re always looking to squeeze extra value out of every dollar.
- Persona B is an Innovation-Seeker. They’re looking for advanced features, regular updates, and cutting-edge tech. They’ll stay loyal to whatever’s ahead of the curve.
Now you can begin mapping specific needs and pains to your website’s SaaS user journey and identifying gaps in your messaging or opportunities to improve it to appeal to specific users.
*Note: A survey like this would typically need 200–300 responses to ensure some measure of accuracy, though this number will vary depending on niche and audience. Whatever data collection method you choose, ensure that you have an adequate sample size and unbiased data collection methods to ensure statistical significance. Small sample sizes are great for understanding specific user experiences but they’re not a reliable indicator that your overall messaging needs to change.
2. How to map Voice of the Customer data to the user’s journey
Before creating messaging for your website, you need to understand where most of your users fall on the awareness spectrum. Are they unaware of their problem, only starting to explore solutions, or already familiar with your product? This will determine how much education, persuasion, or validation your site needs to provide.
Momoko Price, owner of Kantan Analytics, has a strategy for this that can easily be applied to B2B, B2C, non-profits, and everything in between. After she mines customer insights from surveys and interviews, she classifies them according to the MECLab Conversion Heuristic Formula for the top Motivation, Value, and Anxiety messages.
Having a spreadsheet stuffed with customer insights makes it easy to spot repeated themes and create an objective messaging hierarchy. Plus, if you know the awareness level of most of your users, you’ll know exactly which messages to prioritize.
Let’s explore how messaging shifts across the stages of the buyer journey based on user awareness levels, using the example of a project management tool:
Awareness Stage: Introducing the Problem
If your audience is largely unaware of their pain points or the solutions available, your job is to educate them about the problem and help them recognize its impact.
What to Analyze:
- Survey responses that indicate pain like “Team missing deadlines”
Tailored Messaging:
Focus on identifying the problem and agitating its consequences. For instance, create blog posts or videos like “5 Signs Your Team Is Struggling Without the Right Tools” or “The True Cost of Missed Deadlines.” Use customer language to describe the pain and start planting the seed that a solution exists.
Consideration Stage: Highlighting Benefits
When users are looking for solutions but haven’t necessarily heard of you, you need to make sure they stop to consider your product. Your role is to build a persuasive use case.
What to Analyze:
- VoC data about why customers chose you over competitors or vice versa
Tailored Messaging:
Focus on differentiating your product while showing its ability to solve their problem. For example, craft feature breakdowns that address specific challenges, like “How Our Tool Keeps Remote Teams Aligned in Real Time.” Address concerns identified in user feedback, such as ease of implementation or compatibility with existing tools.
Decision Stage: Piling On Proof
At this stage, users know your product exists but need validation before making a purchase. They’re asking, “Why should I trust you?”
What to Analyze:
- Customer objections, fears, and hesitations
Tailored Messaging:
Highlight proof points and trust-building elements. For example, use testimonials, case studies, and industry certifications to answer common doubts. A headline like “Trusted by 500+ Teams to Deliver Projects On Time” can seal the deal for a high-awareness audience.
Retention Stage: Deepening Loyalty
Once users become customers, their focus shifts to how well your product supports their ongoing needs. This is where you convert one-time buyers into advocates.
What to Analyze:
- Post-purchase surveys that highlight areas of satisfaction or friction.
Tailored Messaging:
Provide resources that show customers how to improve their results. If Voice of the Customer data reveals that advanced features are underutilized, create guides or emails like “3 Hidden Features to Take Your Workflow to the Next Level.” Celebrate customer wins, and invite them to share their stories as testimonials or case studies.
3. How to implement Voice of the Customer data on your website
Once you’ve gathered and mapped your Voice of the Customer data to the SaaS user journey, figuring out what to act on first can feel overwhelming, especially if you’re operating with a massive product suite that solves a lot of problems for a lot of different users.
Best practice is to prioritize the needs of your most prominent user segment — but ONLY if that segment aligns with your growth goals. After all, if the goal is to acquire innovation-hungry buyers with healthy budgets, you don’t want to emphasize messaging that will attract more Budget-Conscious Buyers.
Once you’ve identified the most important user group, you can begin refining your website from the top down by:
Optimize navigation
Your site’s navigation should reflect the natural pathways users prefer, making it easy to find essential information and take meaningful action. Useful steps:
- Streamline the menu: Prioritize Feature and Solution pages that speak to the most important goals your target personas want to achieve.
- Improve informational hierarchy: Create pages that address your persona’s motivation for landing on a page, the value they’ll realize with your product, overcome any doubts or anxieties they have, and then end with a compelling call to action.
- Simplify the action path: Reduce the number of clicks required to complete high-priority tasks, such as signing up for a trial or requesting a demo.
Perfect above-the-fold content
The top of your pages is prime real estate. Scroll depth analysis often reveals that the majority of users won’t make it past the first ⅓ of your page. Your first few lines had better knock their socks off. Voice of the Customer data can help you:
- Craft engaging headlines: Mine VoC data for common phrases used by your customers.
- Discover trust signals: Super compelling quotes and broad statements like “Loved by 10,000+ Teams” can all compel best-fit leads to action.
- Keep CTAs clear and compelling: Ensure your buttons lead to a result users actually care about and don’t keep them guessing about what happens after they click.
Showcase relevant and strategic proof
Which testimonials, reviews, or success stories should you highlight? Using Voice of the Customer data, you’ll be able to:
- Select relevant testimonials: Use quotes that emphasize user values. For example, you’ll turn Budget-Conscious Buyer heads by showasing testimonial like “We cut our team’s overhead by 25% using [product]!”
- Include recognizable logos: Feature logos of well-known brands or certifications to build trust.
- Place proof near decision points: Add testimonials, case studies, or star ratings close to CTAs, such as on pricing pages or sign-up forms.
Highlight impactful benefit statements
Your messaging should address the specific goals, challenges, and decision drivers identified through VoC data. Use this new data to strategically:
- Appeal to specific goals and pain points: Say goodbye to generic headlines like “The best tool for workflow automation.” When you know why customers think your tool is the best, you can say it outright — “the most user-friendly workflow automation platform” or “the workflow automation platform that helps CMOs 10x content marketing”. Identify the #1 reason users choose you and make that your primary headline.
- Get specific: Specificity adds weight to your claims. For example, instead of “Improves team collaboration,” say “Reduce team email by 60% with seamless integrations.”
- Refine CTAs: Tailor your calls to action to user intent and make sure the next step is appropriate for their awareness level (i.e., a user who’s just discovered your product for the first time probably isn’t ready to “Buy Now” but might want to “Learn More.”)
Refine feature lists
When your product does almost everything, it’s easy to lose sight of which features users value most. You can improve the SaaS user journey by using Voice of the Customer data to:
- Rank features by priority: Use VoC data to identify the most valued features for each persona and make sure the most talked-about features show up first in menus and page text.
- Reframe features in terms of benefits: Instead of listing features, emphasize what they help users achieve.
- Use comparison tables: If VoC data shows users are comparing you to specific competitors, create side-by-side feature comparisons to highlight your strengths.
Does your website leverage VoC data?
By capturing customer insights and applying them across the entire user journey, you can craft messaging that resonates deeply at every stage, from attracting first-time visitors to nurturing loyal advocates.
Whether it’s refining a low-converting demo page, clarifying CTAs, or tailoring onboarding resources, VoC data helps B2B SaaS companies move beyond guesswork to deliver meaningful, measurable improvements.
