SaaS companies are in a constant battle with trying to find the best call-to-actions (CTAs) for their website and deciding on one has implications on how your sales funnel looks. Most companies end up including multiple different types of CTAs to capture all the different types of buyers, but this takes away the edge of a clear CTA.
With personalized websites, you can show each customer segment the type of CTA that is likeliest to work best. A side-effect is lower customer acquisition costs (CAC) by guiding the customer to the right sales funnel for them.
Different-sized companies by differently. A customer should be guided to the best sales funnel with personalized call-to-actions.
The purpose of the CTA is to provide a clear recommendation to take certain action whether it is signing up for a freemium or booking a demo with a sales rep. What most businesses want to avoid is large enterprise companies signing up for a freemium and a 2-person startup signing up for a lengthy demo. With those dynamics, your business would never scale unless you're running an outlier company. Read on to understand why optimizing the CAC for different customer segments is important and how to achieve it.
🤫 Ps. The last chapter includes a bonus: simple tips to personalize your CTAs for non-ICP visitors to maximize the value of any visitor coming to your website.
🧐 Self-service funnel: Personalizing CTAs for small businesses and consumers
This is the customer segment with the lowest willingness-to-pay for your product and services. Unless you're a startup yourself, showing a 30-minute demo to all that come through the door is just going to fill up your sales rep's calendar without creating enough revenue to justify the costs.
The best CTAs for these types of customers are ones that lead to a freemium or trial version of your product. In a self-serve sales funnel, you typically let the customer test out your product for free for 3-14 days or forever, and let the customer convert to a paying customer when they've found enough value in your product. It's likely that most of these customers end up churning, which is fine since you didn't spend too many resources to convert them anyway.
Recommended segmentation: companies with less than 10M in revenue or less than 50 employees
🧲 Inbound sales rep funnel: Personalizing CTAs for medium-sized businesses
For medium-sized businesses, scheduling a meeting and going through a demo starts making more sense if you can justify the higher CAC with the higher deal size. In this case, you might have one inbound sales rep who is industry agnostic and takes care of all the incoming demo requests. In 20-30 minutes, the sales rep should be able to understand what problem the customer is looking to solve and how might we best help solve it.
Call-to-actions such as "book a demo", "chat with sales" or "book a product tour" are simple enough to convey what you want the customer to do next.
If your sales rep's calendar is too busy, it can sometimes make sense to show the freemium CTA to some medium-sized customers occasionally before you start hiring a second sales rep.
Recommended segmentation: companies with 10M-100M in revenue or 50-500 employees
🏭 Industry-specific account executive funnel: Personalizing CTAs for enterprises
For your largest customers, you don't want the customers to signup for a freemium where they might get the wrong idea of what your product does or who is it for. Having an industry-specialized account executive take the first meeting can put the customer at ease because it's immediately obvious that your company can solve that industry's specific pain points. That account executive is also the best person to go over your enterprise sales solutions.
By changing the link of the CTA button on your website based on the customer's industry to point directly to the right account executive's calendar (Calendly link or Hubspot meeting link), you move a lot of friction in booking meetings AND you make your internal processes more efficient at the same time because the right sales rep gets to meet the right customers.
"Book a demo" and similar CTAs work here same as for medium-sized companies, but you can also get creative here. For example, if the customer has visited your "ROI Calculator 1000" page you can use that information to change all your CTAs on the homepage to be "Chat with sales about ROI of our product".
Recommended segmentation: companies with 100M+ in revenue or 500+ employees
👑 Bonus: The non-sales funnel - Personalizing CTAs for non-ICP visitors
Not all visitors fit our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) at the end of the day. It's as simple as that. But there are investors, media, and other stakeholders that could be looking at your website for one reason or another. In most cases, companies ignore these visitors and focus their website only on the ICPs and throw away a lot of value at the same time.
Most companies focus their website around customer lead generation leading to a lot of missed potential. Other stakeholders such as investors visit your website too and personalized content capture that value.
Investors and venture capital funds
Every growing company can benefit from having a few investors interested in them. Convert your CTAs to boldly invite the investor to join your Investor Newsletter if they are indeed coming from that market.
CTA such as "Hear our latest investor news", "Be the first to hear about our next round", and "Join our investor newsletter" work wonders here.
Universities
A lot of students are looking at websites in the hopes of finding a summer job or a research fellowship. If you identify visitors from universities and academia visiting your website, highlight your career page in the CTAs.
"Open positions" works as a simple enough CTA but positioning in your top-of-the-fold is important here. Most career pages are buried in the footer of a website.
Others
For the rest of the visitors that you don't know what to do with, invite them to follow you on social media. That's about the only valuable action they can take on your website at the moment. Customers ending up in this category are company visitors from industries that you'll never serve in any way.
"Follow us on Linkedin" types of CTAs don't usually get much real estate on a website, but in this case, you can emphasize it.
