You’re probably frustrated with your website or platform’s marketing performance and want to know what should you be converting at, compared to SaaS industry benchmarks.

For SaaS teams, comparing signup rates to purchase rates (or other conversion goals) can be misleading.  There are so many nuances to consider.  Luckily, I’ve been able to work with a variety of software companies and have identified similar trends across all of them.  

Keep reading because I’m about to share some insider data.  We’ll explore industry benchmarks on signup rates, purchase rates, and other important SaaS metrics.  

I’ll also explain the nuances and reasoning behind the metrics from a conversion rate optimization (CRO) perspective.

Average SaaS Conversion Rate Benchmarks

What are the SaaS conversion rate benchmarks for sign ups and subscription plan purchases?

Benchmarks: The average conversion rate for SaaS demo forms fall between 2-10%, while the average signup rate for self-service SaaS companies typically land between 10-30% and   2-15% for monthly subscription plan purchases.

Although benchmarks are a good point of reference, when discussing CRO, it’s important to understand what factors are actually affecting your conversion rates.

What is CRO and Why Does it Matter for SaaS?

Conversion Rate Optimization goes beyond user experience (UX) and copywriting.

While UX matters, it rarely explains poor signup-to-purchase rates. Even with a clunky interface,  products that solve a painful problem can overcome any initial UX friction that would cause poor conversion rates.

True CRO is a data-driven approach that combines data analysis with intuition.  The best SaaS CRO companies will identify every bottleneck that is affecting your conversion rates, including:

• Product positioning and messaging

• User intent signals

• User behavior

That’s we offer a full-service at CompleteCRO, that includes multiple services related to conversion rate optimization. You get everything needed to improve conversion rates, from A/B testing to tracking & analytics setup.

Comparing Typical SaaS Conversion Rates

Your conversion rates will differ depending on if you are a self-serve software platform, or a traditional enterprise SaaS.

Understanding the nuances between self-service and traditional SaaS will give you a point of reference that you can use to guide your conversion strategy.  

Average Signup Conversion Rate in B2C SaaS

For example, self-serve SaaS platforms will usually have a much higher signup rate than software companies that use a sales team to onboard new users.

The funnel chart below is cold traffic from a Meta ads campaign, that one of our B2C SaaS clients was running.

he chart shows that even though it took 3 steps before the user was asked to create an account, it had little affect on the account sign up rate.  

However, when we redirected them to the pricing page, we had a huge drop in conversions with most user’s leaving the website.

Takeaway:  So although self-serve products have higher signup rates, it’s much harder to convert users to a paid plan.

Understanding B2B SaaS Demo Form Conversion Rates

Enterprise SaaS on the other hand is much harder to get user’s to book a demo.  

Because most traditional SaaS companies require a sales team to onboard users, or enterprise clients, they are optimizing their call-to-action (CTA) for appointments and product demos.

This is a challenge because nobody wants to book an appointment in todays world.  In all fairness though, it’s hard to get anybody to book an appointment, regardless of industry.

This chart shows just how poorly demo forms can perform, even when targeting high intent keywords with Google Search Ads.

The good news is that when someone does book a demo, they are far more likely to turn into a paying customer.  

This chart shows high engagement on feature & pricing pages, when compared to the initial landing pages.  This means that after booking a demo, users will start exploring the product features and pricing.

Takeaway:  For Enterprise SaaS, the funnel is much shorter. Prospects can move from interest (booked demo) to the purchase consideration in just a few steps.

CRO Strategies for Increasing Self-Service SaaS Conversion Rates

Improve Your UX to Boost Signup Rates

A/B testing CTAs, signup form optimization, and leveraging social logins can all help improve your over all signup rate.

Making even the smallest improvement to your user experience (UX) can have a big boost in conversions. You just need a a solid CRO tool to get started, which I recommend to you.

Below is a good example of how our A/B testing CTAs lead to big improvements for one of our clients.  We tested the CTA button in the header to see if more user’s would signup for the waitlist if it was easier to navigate to.

• Control: CTA button linked to the homepage

• Variant: CTA button linked to an page anchor, where the waitlist form itself was.

The result was a big increase in lead form signups.

No matter what type of software you offer, you can start improving your signup rate & conversion rate today by A/B testing CTA buttons.

A/B Test Your SaaS Pricing Page to Prevent Checkout Abandonment

One of the biggest issues for self-serve SaaS platforms is poor subscription checkout rates, alongside high cart abandonments.

For SaaS teams, it’s hard to understand why users will choose a subscription plan, begin checking out, only to leave before completing the purchase.

This is why A/B testing is so important.  For example, one of my client’s made large changes to their SaaS pricing page (without first running an A/B test) and asked us to monitor performance over a 2 week period.  

And hereThe chart below reveals some interesting insights.

While the new pricing page layout was still effective in getting users to begin checkout, there was still a high cart abandonment rate.

It wasn’t until months later that we discovered the reason for the high abandonment rate.  

It was because subscription plans were set to annual by default, but the plan said “$5 per month”.  This created sticker shock and confusion for new users.

Takeaway: A/B test individual elements, instead of large changes all at once.

The best A/B testing software is hands-down varify.io, which is what our team has been using for over a year now.

 Follow this framework when attempting to improve your conversion rate:

1. Identify the problem and the specific metrics (ex: begin checkout →  purchase ratio)

2. Make a list of the elements that have the greatest impact on your problem metrics.

3. Run A/B tests for each element on your list.

4. Make permeant changes to your platform or website based on the test results.

So instead of making drastic changes, take your time to prioritize smaller A/B tests. That way, you’re saving time and money because:

• The results are more measurable

• You save developer resources

• You can learn more about your customers

• It’s a faster way to boost conversion rates

And if you need help with checkout configuration check out these compliance solution companies on DesignRush.

Build trust to increase SaaS subscription signup rates and convert blog traffic

Between September 1st and June 30th, we measured the performance of cold blog traffic for one of our CRO clients.

A 22% CTR for any call to action can be considered good, especially when it’s mostly cold traffic from a blog post that they found in the Google search results.

I credit this largely with our messaging strategy.  We did a great job at matching search intent with our CTAs and positioning our product as a painkiller to our reader’s problem.

Despite the high CTR, However, less than half of those clicks signed up.  The issue was obvious, the form looked awful:

• The design didn’t match the website.

• The logo was an outdated version

• Their we’re required form fields that we’re easy to miss

Takeway:  Make sure that your website and platform designs match.  You can imagine how a beautiful website, with a poorly designed signup form, can lead to uncertainty and lack of trust.

Combating Low Conversion Rates in Enterprise SaaS

Despite the lower conversion rates for traditional B2B, generating qualified leads can make up for the lack of lead volume.

Increasing Lead Quality by Matching User Intent

Unlike self-service or B2C software products, you’re probably focusing more on outbound traffic like:

• Cold email outreach

• Digital ad platforms

• Networking referrals

Plenty of companies will sell you on things like programmatic display marketing or Reddit ads, but most SaaS companies can overcome junk leads by focusing on UX, copywriting, and user intent.

Ensuring that you are aligning the messages of emails, or social media ads, with the content on your landing page will help you reduce conversion loss.  

We wrote a SaaS landing page conversion rate case study that shows the power of matching user intent when running ad campaigns.

Keep in mind that when it comes to Enterprise SaaS, there is no one-size-fits-all benchmark for lead quality scoring.  So don’t be afraid to make content decisions based on your intuition and what you know about your ideal customer.

What Is a Good SaaS Conversion Rate for SaaS to Aim for?

No matter what your current conversion rate is, you can always improve it.

Here are 4 areas for improving both signups and conversion rates, that we’ve seen overlooked by SaaS teams:

• Understanding user behaviour through data analysis

• Alignment of product messaging with user needs is

• Smart A/B Testing

• Analytic & Tracking enrichment.

At CompleteCRO, we help clients just like you utilize techniques ranging from A/B testing to detailed analytics setups.