Was reading an article by Joseph Carrabis, CRO and Founder, NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global titled 'Websites: You've Only Got 3 Seconds" and thinking about how it applies to SaaS. In general, people expect to trial a product online. They want a 30-day trial, or a free version they can use until they are blue in the face (or until they hit some upgrade limit). So I think with SaaS, I think the lesson can be applied as follows:
1. A lot of SaaS decisions are made in a Search, Find, Try, Buy decision model.
2. Search is increasingly paid search. Google, Yahoo, MSN. And people search on a VERY specific topic of interest to them. For example: "Create Invoices Online"
3. If that's my search, and I click on your Ad, I'm expecting to end up on a landing page that has a 36-point font that says:
IF YOU WANT TO CREATE INVOICES ONLINE, TRY XYZ-SOFT FREE FOR 30 DAYS.
Note - Think you can't have that many specific landing pages? What's preventing it? Look at something like Hubspot or BT Tradespace for ideas on how you could create a simple landing page for every ad campaign. If it takes 30 minutes per page, you could have 16 in a day.
4. I can read that big header in 3 seconds. Give me a nice picture to look at too. I can look at a picture in an instant.
5. Then give me the option to try it out. I might want more information, but mostly I want to get in and see it myself. Preferably the sign-up process can exist ON the page itself. See www.easy-extranets.com for an example of in page signup. Not necessarily optimized for the header, but the idea is in play.
6. Some data - Landing pages like that can achieve signup rates of 10-17%, versus under 5% for traditional product pages.