Two tools offer the same features, yet one is much more popular than the other — how many times have you seen this happen? How many high-quality software or amazing product ideas have you heard of that didn’t survive their first year?
Offering a good product isn’t enough. To actually stand out, you need to go the extra mile in tailoring your processes to what your users need. You’ll do that by exploring the subconscious parts of their minds.
So, in this article, we’re presenting some of the ways SaaS companies can tap into consumers’ subconscious and increase sales and customer retention by:
- Creating an intuitive design,
- Focusing on effective sales tactics based on psychological research, and
- Optimizing onboarding to be as user-friendly as possible.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- To successfully attract and retain users, SaaS companies have to tailor products to their subconscious needs as well.
- The most successful sales tactics are based on psychological research that goes beyond the conscious mind.
- Sometimes, a tweak in color or design can be the key to keeping a customer.
Tapping into the subconscious of how people make decisions
Offering a quality product isn’t enough to attract and retain customers. A huge reason for this lies in the fact that 95% of our buying decisions are made on the subconscious level. Therefore, no matter how much time we put into researching deliberate consumer choices, we can’t overlook the subconscious aspect.
As Peter Lewis, Chief Marketing Officer at Strategic Pete, explains, “in SaaS, choices become so overexposed.” Understanding how users’ brains process the information and where their attention goes “means everything between conversion and bounce”.
A product that stands out comes with the onboarding process and design that reflects how users process information and what catches their attention.
Furthermore, the most effective sales techniques are based on psychological tactics that tap into:
- Users’ awareness that they need a specific product, and
- The subconscious way their brains work — by limiting the offer duration or providing customer testimonials.
Both of these techniques have the purpose of speeding up decision-making.
Create a more intuitive design by understanding user attention
The way you design your software can be the key to making your product stand out.
As Filip Mujkic, Brand Design Director at CAKE.com, explains, design has two key components for SaaS companies: design related to marketing efforts and product design.
Mujkic describes the first component: “The main job of design is to get people to sign up and try the product. Here, branding plays a key role: choosing the colors that subconsciously evoke positive associations, getting the typography right, and presenting the product in an attractive, cohesive package.”
The Chief Marketing Officer at HEAVY Equipment Appraisal, Tracie Crites, agrees with the first component Mujkic pointed out. She highlights how important it is for SaaS companies to “develop interfaces that activate positive emotional response along with cognitive ease [the ability to process information with minimal brain activity] while ensuring their applications appear effortless to use.”
When it comes to the design of the product itself, Mujkic notes that “making the product as easy as possible to onboard and navigate increases user retention while wrapping good UX in an attractive interface is important to make the product stand out, a sort of confirmation of the promise made by the product’s branding beforehand.”
Perfecting both of these aspects is crucial, as the Founder of VoidSEO, Firdaus Sateem, explains:
“Businesses that comprehend subconscious choices tend to build interfaces that better serve user needs. Customers face fewer obstacles during their purchasing path because of this reduction, leading to better conversion rates.”
Choose effective sales tactics based on psychology
Taking time to come up with sales tactics that bring the best results is crucial for SaaS companies with subscription-based models. That’s because, as Biljana Gogic, Customer Success Manager at CAKE.com, explains, “in SaaS, clients lease the license and have a short-term commitment — they already know the end date to their subscription, and they keep having that negotiation power since they remain in the renewal cycle.”
So, SaaS companies have to constantly improve their processes and find effective sales techniques to ensure their users continue their subscriptions. One of them is scarcity. Lewis explained how scarcity creates emotional pressure for users:
“When people think they have all the time in the world to decide, they procrastinate. But when they come across a limited-time offer, a countdown, or proof that others are already signing up, their brain fears missing out — a phenomenon popularly called FOMO.”
Further reading
FOMO is a phenomenon that also happens in hybrid work arrangements. Read more about it here:
Another tactic companies apply is social proof. Lewis notes that people seek validation before making a decision, which is why “SaaS brands that include dynamic social proof, such as ‘Sarah from Denver just signed up’ or ‘5,000 marketers use this tool every day,’ increase their conversions.” He tested this out on a SaaS client:
“With a SaaS client, we introduced real-time customer activity on a pricing page. We saw a 17% lift in sign-ups because this product suddenly felt like the obvious choice.”
Lastly, a crucial point in sales tactics for SaaS companies is converting free customers to paid ones. As a tech entrepreneur and co-founder of Movade, Salome Mikadze, notes, freemium models are designed to bring conversion by applying psychological tactics:
“The “free trial” model taps into loss aversion — once a user experiences value, the pain of losing it drives conversion.”
Further reading
If you’re promoting your SaaS product using a product-led growth strategy, here’s what you can expect in 2025:
Optimize onboarding based on users’ needs
As Gogic notes, the process of adopting software could be challenging for new customers. If the onboarding isn’t user-friendly, they can have a difficult time understanding the software, resulting in frustration and even service cancellation. To avoid this, Gogic says that CAKE.com offers free onboarding and applies the “begin with the end in mind” approach:
“Through the tailored onboarding process, we make sure that our customers use our products in the right way. We strive to understand the end goals and root needs of our clients, we dissect their problems, comprehend their workflows and business specifics, and we create a tailored onboarding plan that ensures the right configuration and proper adoption and product usage.”
Further reading
Service cancellation can also happen due to subscription fatigue. Learn how SaaS companies can prevent it here:
To better understand what users need, Gogic’s team takes on a proactive approach based on data analysis:
“Through careful assessment and creation of best practices, we help clients understand and execute the right configuration decisions, organize the knowledge transfer sessions, and make sure that all [customers] will know how to use the app. That way, we help [them] feel confident using our product so they can integrate it seamlessly into their daily workflows.”
The way onboarding is designed is important as well. For instance, a marketer and CEO of Hire Developers Biz, Evgen Kushnirchuk, explains how a minor change with users in mind streamlines onboarding processes:
“For one SaaS client, we reworked their onboarding flow to include friendly animations and short, encouraging prompts. That one change boosted their user activation rate, as it made people feel welcome and curious instead of overwhelmed.”
Lewis highlights another successful method of designing good onboarding: progressive disclosure. Progressive disclosure prevents people from becoming overwhelmed with “too much information upfront” by separating key info into different onboarding steps.
Further reading
Preventing information overload is also important for remote communication in general. Learn how to avoid it in this blog post:
Attract and retain more customers by optimizing design, sales, and onboarding
In times when research and information are so readily available, offering a good product won’t be enough. SaaS companies have to work hard to ensure they’re standing out with both their product and their service.
Thankfully, attracting and retaining customers can be achieved by focusing more on how your design, sales, and onboarding affect the subconscious parts of your users’ brains. As Gogic notes, each aspect of your business, from start to finish, is equally important:
“In recurring revenue business, every single activity is a pre-sales activity, since companies continuously need to prove that they bring enough value to the customers.”
And, if you’re wondering whether high-quality, intuitive tools can help your business, here’s how the right software helps your company thrive.