Is CRO Different for SaaS? (Interview with Growth Expert Frederic Linfjärd)

Nathan Collier
Nathan Collier
April 5th, 2022
Estimated read time: 32 minutes, 49 seconds

Is conversion rate optimization for SaaS businesses different than traditional A/B testing for ecommerce? 

In traditional eCommerce, CRO is all about getting people to click the “buy” button. But for subscription-based companies, that’s just the beginning.

We sat down with growth expert (and current Director of Growth at Planday) Frederic Linfjärd to learn more. 

Listen to the podcast or watch the video (below) for a ton of insights about CRO strategies that provide real revenue growth for SaaS companies. But if you don’t have time, we’ve included a few of our favorite takeaways, as well.

Full Recording

Note: The FastSpring platform includes top-of-class checkout and subscription management features, automatic localization. Plus, using a merchant of record model, we take care of fraud prevention, global billing compliance, VAT and sales tax management, and a lot more. To learn more, sign up for a free account or request a demo.

1. For SaaS, A/B Testing Isn’t Always the Right Approach

“I usually say that sometimes the best A/B test is not to run an A/B test, because it just takes a lot of time …. And the worst thing that can happen is that you end up with an inconclusive result, which means that you haven’t even learned anything from it. So nowadays, it’s more about building a process and a methodology where you consistently find the right ideas and create experiments. You prioritize them based on where you think the highest business impact is, then you run the test, and do it all again, and you try to do that as fast as possible.”

For Fred, CRO strategies don’t evolve around to A/B testing. Instead, he recommends looking at your top customers: those who are closing faster and/or have the highest LTV, and try to figure out what differentiates them. Form some hypotheses around this, and test changes to your user experience on your website, in your trial or sales process, and so on to convert more potential customers that share those qualities.

Bonus tip: Build out segmentations around LTV to make sure that anything you try is based on your existing customers that are bringing in the most revenue.

2. Don’t Stop Measuring After Trial Conversions

“I’ve seen many people stop [measuring and testing] after they convert someone from a trial or after they pay. They stop there and then you focus on traffic traffic traffic — surface metrics like converting to a trial — and then they don’t really see: are they churning you know, after one month or are they actually staying? I’ve seen people miss that in companies because you can make the same amount of revenue instead of increasing the trial conversions if you retain them for a longer period of time. It would even itself out.”

The classic conversion optimization goal for subscription companies is getting customers to switch from monthly to annual subscriptions. But, Fred warns, the tactict that works well for one company may no work for yours. 

“You need to know that there are no best practices that work. It’s going to be completely unique for your business. So you need to have that process to find that and find out as fast as possible.”

Bonus tip: Marketing and customer success teams can collaborate on a testing and data-collecting strategy that increases customer retention and increases a customer’s LTV. 

Note: FastSpring offers in-depth subscription and revenue reports with real-time data around subscription revenue, churn, campaign performance, and more. If you want to learn more, sign up for a free account or request a demo.

3. For B2B, Messaging Matters More Than Design

“If you’re a B2B SaaS company, it’s not even about the button. It’s about the messaging. The one thing that I say if you’re a B2B SaaS and you have a longer types of sales cycle, and you have a trial, you need to be testing copy. You need to be testing messaging. That is 90% of the tests that I would run.”

Fred encourages companies to test messaging all the way through the customer journey. Once again, create a system to test out different hypotheses as quickly as possible. 

One suggestion is to try out different ways of personalizing the customer experience on the site.

“Try to personalize messaging by various tactics. Personalize your website so you can change the experience based on who is on your website. And there are various techniques that you can do to accomplish that, instead of A/B testing different messages. Try to show different experiences to people based on who they are even before they convert.”

Another topic he dives into is localizing the messaging.

“For instance, when I was at Capture One, I would use Upwork for freelancers. So Capture One is  photo editing software, so I would want to find basically a photographer or a copywriter that has a passion about photography in that country. If I would translate it over to Spanish, I would find maybe a journalist student that loves taking pictures in Spain, and I would want that person to write my copy and content, or translate and localize it.”

Bonus Tip: Encourage your content marketing team to listen to sales calls and/or QBRs with customers and build a list of specific terminology that your customers and prospects are using. PLG-based? Dig into support forums or set up calls with customers to ask questions.

4. Adding More Payment Types and Localized Checkout Are Important Tests To Run

Offering people the ability to pay in their local currency and with their preferred payment methods can improve conversion rates. And Fred recommends testing as many currencies and payment methods as possible.

“If you’re in subscription and ecomm, and you’re selling globally, that’s where you want to start if you want a quick win. With Capture One, when I started, where we had kind of a home-built [ecommerce] solution, you could pay with American Express, MasterCard, and Visa in either Danish Kroner, or Euro, or dollars: X-VAT. 

“That is a very attractive situation for a guy like me, because I know that if I would, for instance, put in a solution like FastSpring where I will all of a sudden go from three currencies to 25 or something and local payment methods, that is like a very attractive test to do.”

Note: FastSpring helps thousands of SaaS and software companies increase revenue throughout the customer lifecycle — not just during checkout. Learn more about subscription management with FastSpring.

For more automation marketing strategies, check out the follow-up conversation with Fred about how he reduced churn by 50% at one SaaS company.

Also check out:

Transcript

EJ Brown  00:04

What do many SaaS companies miss when it comes to conversion rate optimisation? Here’s what Fred Linfärd, Director of Growth Marketing at Planday, has to say.

Fred Linfjärd  00:13

What I’ve seen is that many people stop after they convert off a trial or after they pay and they kind of stop there. And then just focus on traffic, traffic, traffic. Surface metric, like converting to a trial and then they don’t really see are well are they churning? You know, after one month.

EJ Brown  00:29

Today, we’re talking about CRO tactics specific to subscription-based software companies. I’m EJ Brown, Senior Content Strategist at FastSpring, we help SaaS and software companies scale around the world. And you’re listening to the growth stage podcast, where we share stories from global SaaS leaders that you can use to inspire new growth strategies in your own business.

Nathan Collier  00:55

Hey, Hi, I’m Nathan. I’m the Director of Content at FastSpring. I’m here with Fred. Fred, would you please introduce yourself?

Fred Linfjärd  01:01

Sure, my name is Fred or I go by Fred. But I have a very Swedish name. It’s Frederic Linfjärd. But yeah, Fred will do.

Nathan Collier  01:11

Fred, thanks for taking a couple of minutes with me today. I’m located in the US, where are you located in the world?

Fred Linfjärd  01:16

 So I live in the south of Sweden, Malmö. But I’m based and work in Copenhagen since eight years back. Currently, I’m the Director of Growth Marketing for company called Planday, a SaaS platform for Workforce Management. That’s what I do in my daytime. And on my evening times, I spend that with advising companies such as FastSpring and others on growth and different types of marketing tactics.

Nathan Collier  01:42

Can you give me just like a quick background, sort of like, what are you world class in? Like, what’s your background and your experience?

Fred Linfjärd  01:47

Yeah, so for the last, I’d say since 2010 … So basically, I started not in this field at all, it’s quite a funny story. I was a musician, right. So going around playing with bands, and I was to be able to survive on that. I was doing a lot of affiliate marketing, you know, building blogs, sites, ecomm sites, rank it on Google, selling other people’s products to sort of get a passive income to go out and play, right? And as you get older, and your music industry is hard to live on, so I sort of moved into this field naturally, because I’ve tried so many different types of things.

Nathan Collier  02:26

So what range was that? Like, what date range?

Fred Linfjärd  02:30

I would say, from the early 2000s, even before starting with web, starting with SEO, right? Going into testing back then, when it was, I don’t think anyone even called it CRO. I mean, basically is testing different things, tactics to get an edge. And then around 2010/11, sort of went into more professionally, graduating, and started working for different types of businesses.

Nathan Collier  03:01

I was gonna guess, sometime, like 2005 to 2010, that was really there when affiliate marketing was all the rage back in those days, so I remember those days, too.

Fred Linfjärd  03:12

Yeah, that was when you could put a lot of text on your website, and, you know, have the font in the same color as the background. Put the lot of keywords in there.

Nathan Collier  03:21

Yep, that was a long time ago. And yet not that long ago. So I think what’s interesting about that is you’ve sort of taken us to sort of the beginning of really like conversion rate optimization as a field, really sort of was born out of that sort of A/B testing. Like, it started right around then right? 2008/2009, really moving into that period of time when websites started to get more sophisticated, especially like SaaS and software, kind of it has its origins in that time. And even right there this whole time, right?

Fred Linfjärd  03:55

Yeah, I mean, definitely, I mean, I think back then it was all about testing a blue button or a red button. All these types of things. And it’s changed a lot now. I mean, it’s definitely harder and harder. You know, some of the practitioners in the fields, they’re almost science, because it’s just actually very, very hard to master that skill, really, and it’s more and more becoming a process, you know, optimizing your process more than the tactic of it.

Nathan Collier  04:25

Well, let’s get into it, then. Because this is really what I was hoping we would start to talk about and why in the conversations we had leading up to this conversation, we started to talk about, like, what is conversion rate optimization for a subscription product? Is it just optimizing the buy button? It’s not anymore, is it? And if it’s not just that, what else is it?

Fred Linfjärd  04:46

I mean, it’s a really good question, right? Because I think many might have a misconception that it’s just the, you know, you go out and you run a ton of tests randomly, which is usually the worst thing you can do. I usually say that sometimes the best A/B test is not to run an A/B test, because it just takes a lot of time, it could be quite complex. And the worst thing that can happen is that you end up with an inconclusive result, which means that you haven’t even learned anything from it. So nowadays, it’s more about building sort of a process and a methodology, where you consistently find the right ideas, create experiments, right? You prioritize it based on where you think the most highest business impact is, then you run the test, and then you do it all again, and you try to do that as fast as possible. That’s what it’s about.

Nathan Collier  05:38

Give me a couple of examples of that iterative process and how that has worked in your career.

Fred Linfjärd  05:45

It’s kinda always work itself like that. For me, like, even when I was in affiliate marketing, that I remember, I always worked on the process. So instead of, you know, how many creating a WordPress site for a niche that I find, I tried to figure out how fast can I create a WordPress site when I have that niche, so I can create maybe 10 of these sites over a weekend, instead of just doing one? Thereby making sure that I’m spreading the risk that I will hit one of them right. So yeah, I would say that would be the way when I look back at it. And for example, it really depends on what type of business you’re in, right? So if you’re in ecom, and maybe subscription ecommerce, where you have like a lot of low value orders, but it’s a high quantity, yeah, then you might want to try to figure out, you know, how can I get people more to buy? So the checkout optimization. Where can I find a big dense, localization, etc. Whereas if it’s more B2B sales, it’s really more about messaging, positioning, testing up, if that makes sense.

Nathan Collier  06:51

Let me ask this, question. For somebody with a SaaS, or a subscription software company, if you came into that company, and you’re gonna advise that company, and let’s say that they were not a huge price point, but also not a low price point kind of in the middle. And same with volume, meaning like, it’s kind of it’s not like enterprise sales, but it’s also not like $5 per transaction sales? Where would you start in trying to help them optimize that flow of converting people from when they first start on the side all the way to them when they become like a high value paid customer? What types of things would you look at to start with? Where would you start to experiment?

Fred Linfjärd  07:34

Well, you kind of have to go back a little bit before the experiment and kind of looking at the data and us trying to find those patterns on like, what type of customers are closing faster and yields a longer lifetime value. Trying to find that pattern between those, then formulate sort of a hypothesis and idea on how you can get more of those or how you can make it easier for those type of people to convert and thereby then start testing different things. You kind of have different types of levers to pull right you know, you can pull the converting into trial metric, but you can also pull the you know, acquisition metric right, so increase the traffic and then also during after a trial, you know, get them from trial to customer. So, it really depends on where I see the highest potential that I can do as fast as possible and try to get those first.

Nathan Collier  08:36

You mentioned three things there. So traffic is one lever, convert to trial’s another lever, trial to paid is another one and then churn being the last one. Of those four like is there one of those that you find is like a consistently under used like lever like an area where people don’t spend enough time?

Fred Linfjärd  08:57

Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely what I’ve seen is that many people stops after they convert off a trial or after they pay, kind of stop there and then you focus on traffic traffic traffic, you know surface metric like converting to a trial and then they don’t really see are well are they churning you know, after one month, or are they actually staying? I’ve seen people miss that in companies because you can make you know the same amount of revenue instead of increasing the trial conversions, you just retain them for you know, a longer period of time. It would kind of evens itself out.

Nathan Collier  09:37

I think this is what we were getting at when we were talking before we clicked record was that there’s more to it than just getting people to click that first button on the homepage, right? Like how CRO and conversion rate optimisation for subscription products. It’s just different than what CRO has been considered for a long time, especially just in the sort of ecommerce world. Is that accurate?

Fred Linfjärd  09:59

Yeah, Definitely it’s by far different from the traditional B2C ecommerce store where you, you buy a t shirt or you buy something because there’s such a high quantity there, right? Where you can actually really focus in on maybe checkout conversions, you know, playing with different things like free shipping, etc, where, you know, one small little nudge annually will actually be a quite a big yield. Whereas subscriptions, it’s more about that recurring revenue. You know, it’s not about that one, the first revenue you get, in fact, in many times, a tactic that you can use a subscription is to actually give them the first month for free. So it’s much more about, you know, the continuous recurring revenue and keeping that and making that as long as possible with various tactics.

Nathan Collier  10:47

What are their tactics? So, if I just asked you like, what else should I be trying, in addition to sort of one month free? Like, how else could I get more of that recurring revenue?

Fred Linfjärd  10:58

Well, I mean, I think even subscription, you have the classic ones that have been tried, techniques that you see everyone is doing, like, you have the classic one where you show your pricing plans where, you know, if they choose, you know, an annual plan to get 20% discount. Obviously, that will give you more upfront revenue, and you keep them for one year, right. But then I think also, what you should be doing is, you know, once you, like, if you understand how people buy products, and say that, you know, I’m researching this product, I want to try it out, maybe I’ve tried a trial, but I didn’t want to try it. So sign up for a monthly subscription, right? Your main goal should be to get them from that monthly subscription to an annual, like, that would be one focus that you want to start with, and you need to kind of really, really dig in on those monthly subscribers, I understand them understand what you need to provide them with, in order for them to actually upgrade to a yearly, right. So that that is a focus area. And you know, in terms of taxes, what you can do, yeah, you can do many different things, you need to kind of look into, like, what’s the ha moment that is going to make this person like, Yes, I’m definitely going to use this product doesn’t make sense that I pay monthly, I am just going to upgrade, right. And those are smaller levers that you have to pay. And it’s it’s hard to name like a few because it’s really different from each business, right? So you kind of need to be, you need to know that there’s no best practices that work, it’s going to be completely unique for your business. So you need to have that process again, process to find that and find out as fast as possible.

Nathan Collier  12:39

Let me ask you a different way to see what you say like what’s the tactic that you have seen work in a specific context, to get people to make that switch from that early subscriber to an annual plan.

Fred Linfjärd  12:50

So there’s one thing I would say if you deal with … if you know that a lot of people, they actually you can see a pattern that they’re using it a lot the product, but they’re still on a monthly subscription, you can kind of use you want to look into. Okay, so they’re using it, but they’re not actively thinking of going into a one-year subscription, because it just takes from their card. But if these people you know, need to put in, like an expense report, a monthly expense report to their finance department, that’s something that you can play around with. And you know, hey, we’ve seen you, you know, do this monthly charge. Must really, you know, be painful to do these expense reports, why don’t you know, we’ll give you 20% discount, and we’ll take you up to the annual plan. And you’ll get this, this and this as well. And actively sending that out, email offer or something like that.

Nathan Collier  13:56

I like that. That one would work on me for a few things that we pay for. Right, good. So how else would talk to me more about like the difference between what traditionally has been thought of as conversion rate optimisation and how that is different for like SaaS companies or a subscription software product?

Fred Linfjärd  14:18

Well, I think traditionally CRO, or A/B testing, is that it’s just been this. No process or anything like where you try all these different things like small, pointless things like Blue Button or green button and all these different things that doesn’t really make a big dent, especially if you’re a B2B SaaS company. It’s not even about the button. It’s about the messaging. The one thing that I say if you’re a B2B SaaS and you have a longer types of sales cycle, you have a trial, you need to be testing, copy, you need to be testing messaging, that is 90% of the tests that I would run is basically fine, you know, working with the different functions from product marketing to product, you know, digging up insights from your customer support cases, or reviews on trials and trying to like, find really good messaging and unique selling points and test those up.

Nathan Collier  15:23

So tell me more about that. How? Am I doing that an email, am I doing that on the webpage? Am I doing that, on the first page, people see behind the trial sign up, like, Where can I experiment with things?

Fred Linfjärd  15:34

Here’s what I think it’s important to understand. You need to look at everything from the first touch, whether that would be an ad or a blog post, coming in from SEO, to the part where they move down to that kind of buyers journey. Okay, I’m getting attracted to content, I’m coming back. Now I want to find the features, I want to know what benefits and how that solves my problem. And then in the end, you kinda like being able to, it makes sense for them to start a trial. So you kind of need to look at it across that funnel. And you want to kind of I would say, move away from, you know, let’s get them to download a white paper and give us their email address. That stuff is starting to go away.

Nathan Collier  16:25

Why do you think that doesn’t work out?

Fred Linfjärd  16:28

Oh, someone destroyed it for us. I mean, there’s just so many people that just ask for email addresses. And then what they gave you was complete crap. No value in terms of content. So it’s kind of ruined it everyone.

Nathan Collier  16:42

Content people wrecked it. As a content person that I will own that.

Fred Linfjärd  16:49

But to me, it’s just important to also emphasize there’s a difference between content people and people who create content, if that makes sense. And I think that’s the best way because, you know, the one thing I say, when you create a growth team, you need a kick ass content person, copywriter or something that that understands that I’m going to work on a piece of content, get actually the company, your own organization, I’m going to work on a piece of content, it’s gonna take a month, it’s going to provide a heap of value. And I’m going to give that away for free. That’s gonna be hard sell in most organizations, to you know, sea levels, etc. They’re gonna come with come at you and ask for, oh, you gotta gate them, you know, so we get their email address. And that’s stuff that you have to fight fight against. Maybe it’s off topic now. But yeah,

Nathan Collier  17:42

For sure. That’s, that’s a … No, I think, to bring it back. What are what are some? Like? What are some examples of things that you’ve done where you were just kind of working with messaging? And you saw, like a really big impact?

Fred Linfjärd  17:58

That’s a good question. I don’t have a specific example. Now, I think, in terms of what work because it’s more about doing a lot of these tests, and continue doing it, double down on tests, until you kind of find what resonates right? And then you kind of have to understand also, that all these parts — your channels, your you know, your model, product, the market — they’re moving parts, they’re not static, which means that once you saturate the channel, when you go in a channel to get your traffic in, and you’re using messaging, that channel can be saturated, which means that the messaging might not work anymore, because the people that you’re talking to, you know, are not getting that message anymore, that channel, which means that you need to figure out a new type of messaging, you know, it’s everything kind of evolves, it’s just about not standing still in the end. And trying different things. I would say one thing that I that one can try to do is also try to personalize that by various tactics, personalize your website, so you can kind of change the experience based on who is on your website. And there’s various techniques that you can do to accomplish that, instead of a b testing different messages is that you kind of is trying to show different experience to people based on who they are even before they convert.

Nathan Collier  19:32

What types of things can you do like? I think that there is so much in that space. That is maybe not even well known yet because it’s a lot of it is pretty do some of some of it’s been around for a while, but what can I do to change what people see on my website, based on who they are, where they’re from, or what I know about them.

Fred Linfjärd  19:53

So it depends really about the business but some businesses have different verticals. You might have a company … I’ve experienced this where we want to reach small customers, right? That’s what we want to do. But we also want to sell to mid-market and enterprise. Which doing those three things is a recipe for failure, right? But that’s not always the reality that you can you say like, Hey, no, we should only focus on one. So what you can do is, alright, we have a website, well, let’s try to figure out how we can spot the mid market customers. Yeah, so there’s actually technology that you can use on your website to map who’s there to actually what company and industry they’re on. And then also change the website. So if it’s mid market company in there, I’m not going to show the Free Trial button, I might show up, view a demo or book a demo, where else the rest of them, the theory would be that there’ll be smaller I might want to use send them into a free trial. So like, differentiating them on the website, in a good way by using like website personalization. They’ll take you some part in some ways.

Nathan Collier  21:11

I’ve seen that done in a couple of ways not not even through technology. Like sometimes I’ve seen like, you just. you land on the page, and it’ll ask you, like, Are you this? Are you a small customer are you in, like, depending on what I click, it takes me to a different experience. So some of that can work. So but you were talking about doing it in an automated way, like where there’s technology driving it by now? What tools are there that I could sign up for?

Fred Linfjärd  21:38

Yeah, there’s there’s definitely different tools that can do that, that go under the category in 10 tools, you would have tools like Albacross, Leadfeeder, Lead Forensics, those kinds of things where there’s basically a big database. And you so you map the IP, the IP address, right to that database, and it gives you back sort of a company name, but you can’t really, you can only be doing that, because you know, obviously with COVID, and etc, more people are home, right? So you might not be able to map but you know, people are, might be using VPN stuff. So So you kinda have to test that to see if it works for some companies might work really good for others, they might not get any traction on that technique because, you know, their target audience or is covered by their don’t exist in any database. Right, right. It’s a test approach, kind of to try it out.

Nathan Collier  22:38

What about like, localizing stuff? Can I localize? I know it can. But I want to see what you have, like, what experiences you’ve had with that, like, because depending on where people are, I can change what people see on the website and in different areas of the website. Has that work for you?

Fred Linfjärd  22:55

Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of the same thing where where you want to, you know, the messaging in the country? Let’s say you have, you’re targeting different markets, right, or industries in different markets, you know, it’s him, you know, that messaging is going to be different. That’s why it’s, you know, so important that you have a native content writer, or even a subject matter expert, in that field helping you. For instance, when our Capture One, I would use Upwork for freelancers, right. So Capture One, it’s a photo editing software, right? So I would want to find, basically a photographer, or a copywriter or a copywriter that has a passion about photography in that country. So if I would translate it over to Spanish, I would find, like, maybe a journalist student that loves taking pictures in Spain, and I would want that person to write my copy and content, or translate and localize it.

Nathan Collier  23:57

I love that dynamic. How do you do that? So that you know who you’re sending that information to? is, does that change what people see on the website? Is it what they get through email, depending on their location? How are you targeting people in that without those different messages?

Fred Linfjärd  24:12

I think maybe for this reason, it’s just, if you have a Spanish version of your website, right, you would want to do that. For Capture One, and that sense is our whole website was about photography and photo editing, right? Whereas in Planday where I am now, there’s multiple types of personas in play for different industries in different countries. You know, you can have a coffee shop owner, you know, that has five employees, but you can also have a Starbucks where there’s 5000 users, so there’s so many different layers, and then it becomes trickier and harder, right? And that’s where you need to prioritize, really based on Okay, where do I see the most value that I should focus my experimentation efforts at a certain time. Right?

Nathan Collier  25:05

And that would be you did that by potential revenue, I assume?

Fred Linfjärd  25:09

Yeah, exactly. You know, all these different parameters, you know how hard it would be to reach them? How long are the sales cycles? How hard would it be to close them? So yeah, there’s so many parameters in place. Tricky, right?

Nathan Collier  25:23

Can I localize like currency, stuff like that in within the checkout process?

Fred Linfjärd  25:29

Yeah, definitely, I would say that. That is, I mean, if you’re in subscription, and ecomm, and you’re selling globally, that’s kind of where you want to start if you want a quick win. With Capture One, I think, you know, from when I started, where we had kind of a home-built solution we offered, you could pay with American Express, MasterCard, and Visa in either Danish Kroner, or Euro, or dollars: X-VAT. That is a very attractive situation for a guy like me, because I know that if I would, for instance, put in a solution like FastSpring, where I will all of a sudden goes from three currencies to 25 or something and local payment methods, that is like a very attractive test to do. Because that’s really, you know, especially when you do sort of the that type of subscription business where you have many transactions that are of lower value, I think we’ve charged 2.99 USD at that time, it becomes kind of more important there, again, that they need to understand that it’s safe and secure. I can pay with my card, I can use my local payment method, you know, if it’s so forth for Germany, or if it’s Alipay or whatnot, right? That is actually something where you can really, really gain a lot of good return on your investment. So I mean, that would be like a basic thing, I would do it immediately.

Nathan Collier  27:03

Just to clarify, you’re saying if if a SaaS or subscription business wants a quick win, to increase the overall effectiveness of their of their funnel, one area to look at is is localizing currency,

Fred Linfjärd  27:15

Localizing currency and offering local payment methods. And then also a localized checkout. If you are a company, that you have a product, you have traffic, from different countries, like you know, all these things, that it’s almost a no brainer, you don’t need to do an A/B test or anything, you just need to go and implement pretty much.

Nathan Collier  27:37

So Fred, tell me, you know, as we as we wind this down, like, what’s a big failure story that you had, from your career? Something you try that you thought was gonna be great. And you just you looked at it? And you’re like, wow, like, that didn’t work at all?

Fred Linfjärd  27:53

I would say, so many, right? I would say that maybe I know, I get my intuition might give me that I might get 50%, 60% right. I mean, there’s, there’s so many times in my career where I’ve been running tests where, you know, I think like, this is beautiful, it’s great UX, clear understanding, and I put it to test and then the ugly, the ugly form or page, whatever converts higher, right? It kind of makes you a little bit humble. You kind of have to check your ego at the door, like whatever you think might work, it probably won’t. That’s why you have these, test it and see what your how your customer thinking it’s like, right now, at planned, I have people that wants to log in signing up for a trial, for some reason. Why?

Nathan Collier  28:48

Every business has that and it doesn’t make any sense. I love it. So let’s speak to the SaaS, the SaaS owner out there, the SaaS, the person who owns the website at a SaaS or software company with a subscription product. Give me one or two things that like you really want that person to know about conversion rate in the full funnel, like converting people across the whole experience like what’s what are a couple things that they really, really like, they should take away from this interview?

Fred Linfjärd  29:22

A couple of things that I think when it comes to SaaS, between is that what I said before, that you’re messaging, like the copy of your messaging, getting that right and tirelessly trying to find out how your customers work and working on that messaging, obviously connecting with your product and making sure that they will they succeed in their product. But I think that one is very people don’t spend as much as much time on that they should on the messaging and positioning and all that type of thinks right? Because a lot of these categories, they get more crowded. So you really need to stand out. And you also need to make sure that you continuously also work on the product to kind of find your type of niche and where you want to play. And then also really building working on your content, you know, also testing that part.

Nathan Collier  30:24

Well, Fred, we have one more conversation we’re gonna have so it we will do a whole nother episode about Sure. Because you have a story to tell there. We held that one. Yeah, there’s an episode. So if you’re listening to this, and you want to hear more from Fred about churn, it’ll be in the next in the next episode. But Fred, we will put your LinkedIn in the links wherever this video is below beside the notes, so people can connect with you. Is there anything else that people should know? Connecting with you on LinkedIn is a good place to send them right?

Fred Linfjärd  30:57

Yeah, definitely on LinkedIn. please connect with me. I love to engage and talk with, you know, like minded spirits and trading insights, such as so please do.

Nathan Collier  31:08

Thanks for coming on today. Fred.

Fred Linfjärd  31:10

Thank you so much, Nathan.

Nathan Collier

Nathan Collier

Nathan Collier is the Director of Content and Community at FastSpring.

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