If you spend anytime using SaaS apps these days, you’re familiar with CTAs, and making sure that your potential customers can easily find the button to sign up for your app. But what about people who give you money every month for your service? Why do they have to hunt for the link to our sign in pages so often? Normally we highlight the Sign Up button, and make the Sign In button more muted (or not even a button at all). We do this because a customer is sufficiently motivated to look for the link to sign in to the app that they are paying us for.
We know who our customers are. They’ve logged into our app before. If they show up at our home page, they’re most likely going to sign in. So wouldn’t it be more user friendly to make the Sign In button more prominent than the other buttons? That’s what we’ve been doing at Stunning for awhile now, and customers have actually written to me to say that they appreciate it.
This is how our home page looks if you are a customer:
This is how it looks if you aren’t:
The way that we accomplish this is simple: Once a customer logs in, we set a cookie that takes awhile to expire, and then we check for it the next time they arrive at the home page. If the cookie exists, we change our styling to make the Sign In button easier to find.
The best example of welcoming a customer back that I’ve seen so far is Basecamp. I was recently added to a Basecamp team. I signed in a few days ago. When I went back to basecamp.com, I was greeted with this full screen overlay:
It’s so good, right? As a customer, you feel appreciated and special. They changed the entire home page just for you.
Consider removing this one point of friction from your customers’ day. They might not notice consciously at first, but they’ll definitely benefit. And one day they’ll realize that your homepage is just a little easier to use, and they’ll start wondering why other websites don’t do the same thing.