How digital signatures drive growth and reduces churn for SaaS

SaaS adoption has exploded. Consider this: the SaaS market was valued at $134.44 billion in 2018 and is expected to grow to $220.21 billion by 2022. As McKinsey research explains, the “next normal” established during the pandemic has accelerated SaaS adoption.  And with SaaS solutions among the easiest to adopt and roll out, it’s no wonder.

So, with opportunities galore, the focus of SaaS companies has shifted towards how to capture a bigger slice of the SaaS-market pie than the competition. Because any change a SaaS business can implement fast might give it the edge over the competition.

While it might not be the first thing that comes to mind, eSignature technology is one SaaS growth hack that’s fast, easy-to-implement, and can make a real impact with marginal effort.

Here’s how eSignature tools are leading SaaS businesses to greater acquisition, more productivity, reduced churn, and, ultimately, more revenue.

Improve sales conversions

You can’t grow without new customers. That makes the process a customer goes through to sign up to your product very important. Because if the process is too long or hard, they’ll quit — it’s as simple as that.

Think about how annoying the contract-signing process can be for a customer. Being sent from your website to a third-party eSignature provider or tool to sign a contract isn’t ideal, they have to make an account, swap windows, puzzle over a new user interface — and all the while they’re wondering why it doesn’t look like your brand.

It’s even worse if you’re on mobile, where switching windows and tabs is an absolute nightmare.

And let’s not even go into the traditional pen and paper method!

There are so many steps in the process where a potential customer might get distracted or frustrated. Wouldn’t it be easier if prospects could just sign documents right there on your website?

And APIs are designed to d just that. In the words of Armando Torrealba Echiburú, Product Design Director at Xero,

“APIs help deliver a natural, seamless to customers because all the transaction of data is happening in the background in a seamless way.“

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eSignature APIs are a sure-fire way to improve that process by removing the friction associated with signing paper or electronic documents.

Features like embedded signing place the entire signing experience within your website or product. Users are completely locked into your experience with no third-party tools or new tabs to frustrate or distract them.

What’s more, sophisticated eSignture API tools even offer features like white-labeling, so not only do they keep users in your controlled sign-up experience, but the only brand your users see is yours.

And when you build a single-branded signing experience directly into your product’s workflow, sign-ups increase significantly — we’ve seen it help close deals up to 17% faster.

Reduced churn

More than just converting new customers to your product, you need to keep them.

And when 70% of customers say they abandon a purchase because of bad user experience, it’s clear that if the experience is bad, customers won’t hesitate to find a new provider.

And Xero’s Product Design Director, Armando Torrealba Echiburú puts churn down to one simple thing:

“In my experience, the main cause of churn is when customers don’t feel listened to. Customers see your company working on things that are not what they need. When you listen to your customers and plan your strategy and roadmap about their problems, they won't leave you."

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So any way you can make even incremental improvements to your customers’ experience that show customers you’re listening is a leap towards faster SaaS growth, lower churn, and more revenue.

With eSignature API features we mentioned above that improve your customer acquisition like embedded signing, you can remove the tedious and long-winded document-signing processes for users of your digital product — making their experience fast and intuitive.

Scale your teams’ productivity

There’s a nuanced difference between growth and scale that’s worth knowing.

While SaaS growth is a fairly straightforward equation — add more resources (capital, people) to increase revenue — scale focuses on increasing revenue without a significant investment in resources. That is, scale is focused on getting more out of what you already have.

So whenever there’s a possibility to scale a business function, rather than just grow it — whether that’s through new software, integration, or processes — it’s an opportunity SaaS businesses should jump at.

And eSignature tools are just that: an enabler of scale. Why? Because they help your teams do more with their time without adding (much) more.

eSignature API features like templating for example, help your teams send out personalized documents, via an API, with the click of a button.

Say your team currently sends out a load of NDAs every day. Rather than formatting and customizing an NDA every time there’s a new request, your team only needs to format it once, save it as a template, then send out a fresh version via an API with a single click for every new request.

This reduces the time your teams spend on non-growth activities like admin and frees them up to focus on more meaningful tasks.

Find out what else eSignatures can do for SaaS businesses

Whether you’re building a B2B SaaS sales strategy or a SaaS start-up sales strategy, the differentiator between big success and just getting by comes down to the little things that make your customers’ and teams’ lives better — things like an unobtrusive buying process, an intuitive user experience, and the removal of time-sucking admin.

Despite the big wow-factor tools out there, it’s the ones that people don’t notice that have the biggest impact on how effectively a SaaS business grows. And one of these growth- and scale-enabling tools are eSignature APIs, which sit behind the process and do the heavy lifting.

Find out how eSignature APIs are helping SaaS businesses reach new revenue heights in our latest eBook Everything you need to know about eSignature APIs for SaaS.