User interface (UI) and UX design are critical components in any industry, especially for SaaS brands. The SaaS market is highly competitive. This is why it’s crucial to take your time doing UI and UX research to make sure your product and marketing efforts are more thorough and check all the right boxes. If you are too focused on creating and marketing the best product, you can easily lose sight of what really matters — your customers.
Below, we’ll review the top 10 SaaS marketing mistakes and tips for how to overcome them.
1. Biased marketing and UI design
In the early stages of designing a new product, it’s easy to get swept up in the excitement of creating something new. Unfortunately, this is when UI can start having bias that prioritizes the brand’s or designer’s preference over the customer’s.
Just because you think something looks good or works well doesn’t mean the customer will feel the same. So in the early stages, it’s important to conduct thorough research. That way, you ensure your product and marketing efforts are directed toward the right audience.
This can be done by gathering data on your target customer, creating user personas, identifying customer pain points, and conducting user testing.
2. Ambiguous messaging
Though your UX designers and marketers might be hip to technical SaaS lingo, your customers likely are not. So your UI and marketing need to be clear and informative yet relatable and understandable. If your messaging and design are too vague or contain too much technical jargon, it can throw your customers off. This will cause them to quickly lose interest.
3. Lack of customer-focused UI features
Your product’s primary features are what you want to market to the consumer to convince them to buy. Thus, those features need to show how they specifically benefit the customer.
What your designers think is a cool feature might not actually be useful for the customer. So try to see things from the customer’s perspective when adding certain features and elements. Furthermore, it’s highly beneficial to focus on a universal design that is inclusive of all customers, no matter their limitations or abilities.
4. Lack of personal experiences
A key element in UI and UX design is the personal, human touch. If your product or message is too technical and impersonal, you will fail to connect with your intended audience.
If you want to be successful, you need high conversion rates, and if you want to convert more leads into customers, you have to appeal to them by providing more relatable and personal content and experiences. This can be done by utilizing social media, optimizing the user experience on your website, providing product tours, and following up with prospective customers.
5. Poor mobile UI
Even though primary business tasks and functions occur on larger computers, people still rely heavily on their mobile devices for those times when they can’t be glued to their desks. Thus, it is crucial for SaaS brands to have a robust mobile app that is user-friendly and responsive.
This could mean providing a complimentary app that works with the primary computer software, a stand-alone app that allows the user to accomplish all tasks using the software on their mobile device, or a feature-restricted app that is a pared-down version of the web software.
6. Not offering a free trial
Many SaaS companies will forgo offering a free trial as they fear it will cost them money, but the truth is actually the opposite. Not offering a “try before you buy” option will result in more customers looking elsewhere for what they need.
No one wants to spend hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars on a product only to find it doesn’t suit their needs. So you are actually more likely to convert prospects into customers if you offer them a taste of your product first without forcing them to commit. Some of the most successful IT and SaaS marketing strategies include a free trial option.
7. Forgettable UX design and marketing
Customers today have very short attention spans — 15 seconds, to be exact — so if you don’t grab their interest right away, you may lose them as potential customers forever. This is why good UX design is essential. If the user experience does not cater to the user and excites them from the start, they will seek what they need from some other company.
8. Prioritizing new customers
Many SaaS companies will do just enough to convert new customers, but once they’ve got them, the customer service and experience drop off. Unfortunately, this is a sure way to tarnish your brand reputation and lose potentially loyal customers.
So while establishing new customer relationships is key, you also need to spend time building those relationships by continuing to deliver quality experiences and features over time. A good way to do this is by listening to existing customer feedback and making changes and adjustments as needed to better suit their needs.
9. No blog content
SEO is crucial when launching a new product as it helps drive traffic to your website, which ultimately increases sales. And one of the best ways to utilize SEO is with blog and web content. The more optimized content you provide, the more your search engine rankings will improve, which will drive more traffic to your website and increase brand awareness.
10. Too many choices for the customer
The customer journey is the main element in UI and UX design. And this journey is essentially a series of choices or options that a customer has that will ultimately lead them to make a purchase decision.
So if there are too many choices or too many elements that exist in the customer journey, it can overwhelm and distract them from their main goal and cause the customer to churn. Thus, every point in the customer journey from start to finish needs to be clear, relevant, and useful to better guide them to make the right choices.
Wrapping up
When it comes to designing and marketing a SaaS product, always prioritize the customer. Your UI and UX should be entirely driven by who your target audience is and what they need. When you lose sight of your customer, you lose sight of what matters. Then, you can easily make any number of mistakes that can put your company at risk. However, as long as you always work with the customer’s best interest in mind, you should see better results and have no trouble growing your company.
