Do you want to boost your SaaS sales?

There are lots of tried-and-true strategies that can help you bring in more traffic, capture more leads, and convert more of those leads into customers.

Whether you’re starting from scratch with a brand new product or trying to turn around faltering sales of a well-established offering, here are eight highly effective strategies you can use.

1. Offering a Free Trial

SaaS customers will expect to be able to “try before they buy.” If you don’t offer a free trial, you’re going to miss out on a huge number of potential customers – it’s as simple as that. Even if you have a limited free version of your software, you might want to consider offering a free trial of the premium version: users who get used to the premium features will find it tougher to downgrade and lose out on them.

It’s up to you whether you require a credit card for the free trial. You’ll get more sign-ups if you don’t (and remove any administrative headaches of people emailing for a refund because they intended to cancel and forgot). However, you’ll also likely find that you have a lower conversion rate.

2. Prioritizing Content Marketing

With dozens of other potential solutions, what makes customers buy from you? Often, it won’t be about your amazing product features or even your generous money-back policy – instead, it’ll be about whether those customers feel they like and trust your company.

One huge way to build your brand and connect with potential customers is through content marketing. That means producing blog posts, videos, and/or social media posts that engage with your target audience.

These shouldn’t simply showcase your product features; instead, you want to think more broadly about the type of content that your ideal customers would find useful – promoting your software where appropriate. If your company develops time tracking software, for example, your blog should cover topics like how to plan your days using time blocking to increase your productivity and how to get motivated to work when you don’t feel like it.

3. Engaging in Search Engine Optimization

Content marketing is a great way to boost your search engine optimization (SEO). Whatever type of SaaS software you sell, you want customers to be able to quickly find you through a Google search … instead of ending up with one of your competitors. SEO is important for all content on your site, including videos and webinars.

Effective SEO involves both on-page and off-page optimization. On-page SEO means making sure you’re thoughtfully using titles, subheadings, keywords, internal links, and so on. All of this is entirely under your control. Off-page SEO is primarily about link building, which you might do through guest posting, interviews with other websites, giving away free accounts to potential reviewers, and more.

4. Encouraging Referral Marketing

Word of mouth has long been considered one of the best forms of marketing … and that certainly hasn’t changed in the SaaS age. The more referrals you can get from happy customers, the better.

To encourage referrals, you could reach out directly to some of your most loyal customers. You might also want to look at incentivizing referrals, perhaps with affiliate commission, with reward points, or with a “discount for you and discount for your friend” scheme.

5. Creating Video Demonstrations of Product Features

You might have screenshots galore in your documentation … but are you really showing off exactly what your software can do? Short video demos are a great way to get potential users excited about features – and they can also be very useful for encouraging users to upgrade to a higher-priced plan.

If you’re worried that slick video demos might be out of reach for your tiny SaaS startup, check out Vimeo Record. It’s a free screen and webcam recorder that lets you quickly and easily record videos to share.

6. Hosting Webinars to Teach Your Audience Something Useful

Webinars are a fantastic way to quickly turn a casually interested lead into an instant buyer. On a webinar, you have the time to build a great connection: you can deliver useful information, answer questions in real-time, and craft a powerful call to action that gets people to buy.

Whether you’re running your first-ever webinar or you’ve been creating webinars for years, make sure you have a strong webinar script and that you allow lots of opportunities for interaction. Your content could focus on showcasing features in your product or giving other useful tips that tie closely into your product offering.

7.  Using Retargeting Ads

Not sure what retargeting ads are or why they’re valuable for your SaaS marketing strategy?  You’ve come across retargeting ads plenty of times online, even if you didn’t realize it at the time. Ever checked out a website only to find their ads popping up all over your social media – or on completely unrelated websites? That’s retargeting in action.

Retargeting is a highly effective form of advertising, with retargeting campaigns performing (on average) almost 10x better than regular campaigns. If someone looks at your product sales page but leaves without making a purchase – perhaps because they were interrupted, didn’t have their credit card on hand, or wanted some more time to think it over – then retargeting is the perfect way to gently remind them to continue checking out your software.

8. Offering Time-Limited Special Deals

Often, users need a little nudge into buying. Time-limited deals are a great way to encourage people off the fence. You’ll almost certainly want to do this for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, at a minimum. Depending on your SaaS product, there might be other times of the year when it makes sense to run deals – for instance, if your product is about health and fitness, you’ll want to have a big sale in the lead-up to January 1st.

As well as running sales at specific times of the year, some highly effective SaaS companies have a time-limited “special deal” on offer for every single customer – uniquely timed to their visit. For instance, visitors would see a timer at the top that starts as soon as they arrive on the site, offering 35% or more off … but only if you buy within the next few hours.

Whatever your SaaS product, you can boost sales using these strategies. Pick one idea to work on over the next few weeks, and track your progress to assess what works best.