How I increased my SAAS sales 390%!

Discussions
#1

Sorry could not resist the click bait headline but sales have gone up that much. Mind you I was starting from a very low base so any increase would be dramatic.

I have a simple web app at https://wordtohtml.net/ we get a tonne of users to our free service but practically zero signups for our Pro product. Based on feedback from the group Advice on getting free users to pay for a PRO option of a product I made the following changes.

I merged the free and Pro versions into one. Now Pro features are visible but when a user clicks on them, they get a popup explaining that it is a Pro feature.

I also made the process of signing up for a Pro account a lot simpler. Before the user had to wait for an activation email etc

With these changes, we have had more sales in one month than the previous five months put together. The main lessons are:

Don’t hide your features make them as upfront as you can. Very few users where clicking on the Pro features page, you need to show users all the features.

Make the signup process as simple as possible. We only ask for email and password. Users can also sign up with their Facebook or Google account.

Make the payment process super simple. The user clicks the buy button, and we trigger the stripe payment window. It is a 50/50 split between users paying with Stripe and Paypal so make sure to offer both.

My next idea is to have Business plans. At the moment it is just $25 a year for the service, but I am thinking of having two plans Personal for $24 and Business for $72. Both plans are identical in features; I am basing it on the MS Office model where they sell a home version of Office cheaper than the business license. Is this sneaky? Should I offer some extra features in the Business plan? How do you handle business and personal accounts?

If you have a moment, I would appreciate it if you have a click to https://wordtohtml.net/ and let me know if you have any other suggestions.

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#2

When I saw the topic title, I was already on my way to delete the topic as spam! :slight_smile:

Nice work with the improved sales.

An incredibly simple way to differentiate between Personal plans and Business plans is to offer “Priority Support” for the business plan. That’s it. Priority support means you answer support emails for business plans before you answer them for personal plans.

It doesn’t seem like a lot of extra value to you - I’m guessing you probably answer all support emails quickly anyway. But can be enough for some users to think “ah yes, business, that’s me. Oh look, I get priority support! Here’s my credit card.”

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#3

Ohhh good idea. We actually use live chat as well, so that might work.

Is it weird only offering yearly plans? When we started I wanted to keep things simple with a small basic price. But I wonder should I offer monthly plans. Maybe double the price for monthly plans but save 50% if you go yearly?

#4

Wait, your pricing is per year? Consider doing a little experiment, and for the next four weeks, see how things go if you charge new users $25/month instead of $25/year. If it goes badly, switch back to $25/year.

If you try this, I suspect you’ll see a massive increase in revenue.

#5

Yeah i am in a really weird position. This basic site was created to drive traffic to our main product https://convert.wordcleaner.com/Home/Pricing here I have all the usual SAAS pricing.

But what I found was the free site really took off and we get a ton of SEO traffic. That is why we added a Pro option to get some revenue. Our main product has a lot more features but it seems users like this simple tool. It is like have a restaurant but finding customers prefer to eat from your food truck parked outside.

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#6

How much work (hours) was it to implement FB and Google signup?
Can you “see” if the browser has the FB/Google signup “cookie” to know whether you should suggest it to them?

I’ve considered the above signup but our users tend to be > 60 and not FB users, but maybe 30% are gmail users.

-Clay

#7

BTW, if you have followup emails,
I’d stick with $25/month for a while and TEST some other price points.

$25/month might be too high, but perhaps $12/month is not. (And $$140/year is a WHOLE lot better than $25/yr)

-Clay

#8

GREAT idea. Not sure if it would help THAt might in our market, but good thing to put on the “things to test” list.

#9

Hi clay we use the yii framework for the site and it comes with some add-in social network support.

Depending on how you coded the site there should be some reusable login code you can use.

Quite a lot of users use the social login options so it is definitely worth doing.

Facebook is extremely popular with the over 60’s so it might actually suit your users more than you think.