Tag: b2b

How to Convert Blog Traffic to Leads?
Are you struggling to increase free trial signups? You’re not alone. Of course, if you have a SaaS product, you’ll eventually want to increase your conversion rates to get paying customers, but the process of getting a sustainable user base starts by getting more people to take free trials and check out demos. If you don’t, your business won’t last very long, because you won’t make the revenue you need to keep it going.
Blogs are a popular, effective, and affordable way to bring people to your digital domain. That’s the good news. But the bad news is that traffic generation is only half the battle. Page views, likes, tweets, and comments are nice, but none of them are the ultimate goal. You need to convert that traffic into leads.

Obviously, growing an audience isn’t enough. Content marketing is about delivering value while paving the way for the sale. It’s very rare that a first-time visitor of your blog will immediately buy your product. Thus, instead of hoping that visitors will somehow rediscover your blog later, you want to take actionable steps towards building a communication channel – so you don’t lose them.
Here are several ways you can capture leads to build a relationship with your audience and ultimately convert them into new customers.

The Reader to Revenue Strategy

Here’s a super simple framework for understanding how you’re converting readers into customers. You convert readers to customers in just 2 ways:
1. Through direct links to sales pages
2. By capturing reader emails and emailing them.
That’s it. Once you put your conversion strategy into that simple framework, you can move on to measuring how both funnels are doing and then increasing the conversion rate.

Also read:
Methods to convert your blog traffic to leads

Offer an Irresistible Incentive

One of the main challenges with converting blog traffic is driving visitors to your main website. When you think of it, that’s not why they came to the blog for in the first place. And chances are they aren’t that much interested in your product or service. But you can motivate them to be by presenting an irresistible incentive.

An incentive is something that can motivate a person to take action. It works for a simple reason – it helps making the decision easier. In online marketing an incentive is typically an appealing element such as discount, bonus, special offer or promise constructed to stimulate a desired action. Whatever incentive you choose though, for it to work you need to communicate it to visitors. And there are 4 main ways to do that:
- Display a Static Ad
- Use A Scrolling Ad
- Display a Notification Bar
- Play on Visitors’ Curiosity with a Navigation Link
Improve your pitch

You’ve heard of an elevator pitch, right? It’s how you concisely pitch a prospect in less time than it takes to ride an elevator cab to the destination floor.

Elevator pitch

Elevator pitches work in digital marketing, too. In fact, they’re often more effective than long, drawn-out pitches. You just need to know what works for your audience.

Let’s say, for instance, that you’re selling shoes. Most people know what shoes are, so you don’t need to explain how they work or what they’re for. You just need to bottom-line why they’re the best shoes for your audience. If you search for Nike running shoes on Amazon and click on one of the models, you get very scant product copy:

Nike running shoes

That’s eight bullet points. Why? Because it’s all the prospective customer needs to know. How can you tell what pitch will work best with your audience? Test different pitches. Try long- and short-form pitches. Adjust the wording. Switch up your headlines and calls to action (CTAs).

Newsletter signup

You’ve put in the work to get people to your website; make sure you capture as much of it as possible. Walk them through the next step of becoming your customers. A newsletter signup is a great way to do this. There are a few methods you can use to motivate them to sign up for your newsletter. One way is a pop-up that opens on the screen when users have scrolled down to a specific piece of the content. Some great tools to set this up are JustUno or Popup Domination, either of which will open up a pop-up to attract visitors to subscribe to your newsletter, just like the one below:

Newsletters

Another technique is to have an email newsletter sign-up option on the right-hand side of the blog. This is always visible while being a bit less “obnoxious” to visitors who are reading the blog post. Some great tools for this are Get Drip or Hubspot, which allow you to create side opt-in forms, like the one below:

Subscribe popup

The cool thing about this pop-up is that it makes it easy for visitors to become subscribers because it gives them multiple options, depending on their preferred contact method.

Relevant read:
Collect Immediate Feedback

The best way to find out what’s working to increase free trial signups is to ask your visitors. Collecting feedback will help you tweak your marketing strategy and messaging to increased effectiveness. Options for collecting visitor feedback include using a customer survey and interacting with visitors via live chat, as in this example from Missinglettr.

Feedback system

Popping up a survey just before people leave can help you find out why some people are ignoring your free trial. Then you’ll be able to adjust your marketing to get their interest next time around. Or you could email free trial signups immediately after they’ve signed up to ask what they’re hoping to get from the free trial. Again, that’s valuable information for future marketing.

Call to Action

Your blog posts need a call-to-action. Every one of them. You need to get your visitors to do something: sign up, download, click, read something else, subscribe, install, contact you, and so on. Giving prospects a clear action to take is the key to converting passive blog traffic into real, active, and engaged customers. This is arguably the most important persuasive skill you need as a marketer.

A high-quality blog post without a compelling CTA is a lead lost. They’re already on your site. They’re already interested and engaged with you and your brand. So, give them more. A strong CTA is action oriented, benefit-to-them driven, visual, persuasive, and ideally creates a sense of urgency.

Example of CTA – Dropbox

I recommend including a clear call to action in every blog article you publish. Too many blog articles, even on the best blogs, don’t result in any action after a visitor reads them. Including social share buttons at the bottom of a blog article will help visitors easily share your article, further expanding the reach of the article. Having a contact us button with an action-oriented color, like orange, can make it easier for people to get in touch with you if they have comments or questions about what they just read.

Lead magnets

Lead magnet is anything that your potential customers will find valuable. You’re going to offer it for free in return for their email and consequently a chance to develop a relationship with them. A classic lead magnet example is an eBook.

Lead magnet

There are however many other content types you could use to collect visitors’ emails:
- Free tools – Hubspot’s Marketing Grader is a good example. The tool allows you to grade the marketing effectiveness of your site, in exchange for an email of course.
- Templates / Checklists – Whitespark offers a Review Handout Generator allowing users to print instructions on how to leave a Google review for their business.
- Discounts – Many Ecommerce and B2C websites offer discounts for the first purchase if you sign up for their mailing list.
- Email Courses – Create an educational resource your visitors need and offer it for a sign up. For example, Enchanting Marketing offers a free, 16-part writing course.
Must read:
Show off case studies, testimonials, and social proof

Collect reviews from your customers, ask clients to create testimonial videos, and mention any high-profile clients you have (with their permission, of course). If a well-known person in your industry has tried your product and loved it, mention that fact on your homepage, landing pages, and elsewhere on your website.

Social proof, case studies, and testimonials are all excellent ways to convince your website visitors to convert. You want them to know they aren’t betting on something new and untested. You want to infuse them with confidence.

Conclusion

Generating blog traffic is only half the game. It’s knowing how to convert blog traffic that differentiates winning marketers from the rest of the crowd. Apply the actionable strategies we’ve discussed, and you’ll start seeing how your blog can be an effective tool to win you the sales you seek.
February 18, 2020
Ideas to Boost Customer Retention
Customer churn is the SaaS kryptonite. It is what scares SaaS founders the most, and they are always innovating ways to beat it. Customer Retention is one of the most crucial and cost-effective SaaS retention strategies.

Customer Retention = (Number of Customers at End of Time Period – Number of Customers Acquired During Time Period) X 100 / No. of Customers at Start of Time Period)
For example: Imagine you start the year with 10 customers, gain 5 new customers in the first quarter, and have 1 customer churn.
Customer Retention = ((14-5)/10)) x 100 = 90%

If you’re not doing customer retention right, it can result in a loss as you acquire more customers. The SaaS model gets you profitability over time, and if your users churn before completing enough payment cycles to break even on the acquisition costs, all your growth strategies will be ineffective. Customer retention, in this sense, means getting your customer to stay and engage with your product long enough till it becomes a habit/ part of their daily lives. As they become long-term users, it will give you more opportunities to upsell, increasing their LTV (lifetime value).

Also read:
Now, we will discuss some ideas with which we can boost customer retention:

Personalized marketing with email

The first area to search for low-hanging fruit is in the emails you write. Most email programs come with the ability to record personal data alongside email addresses, so you can quickly personalize based on the needs of your subscribers. To use this simple strategy, send an introductory email with a compelling subject line asking subscribers to self-select their interest. Are they using your software for a small business, for personal use, or something in-between?

Personalized email marketing

A subscriber’s interests aren’t the only way you can segment. Turn also to the life cycle of your SaaS product. For example, recent signups might be more interested in learning about your biggest features, while power users will find details, advanced tips, and hidden shortcuts more valuable. Thankfully, this information is easy to gather from within your app analytics. Understand where users are in the customer journey and appeal to those stages.

Time discounts and offers to free trial progress

The most powerful feature that distinguishes SaaS companies from other products and services is the ability to provide a free trial. This is the perfect time to optimize your emails and take advantage of the buying mechanisms at play—urgency, a sense of trust, and the excitement of starting with your product. This is also a good time to offer a discount or other promotions related to the soon-to-expire trial offer. A great example is Zapier’s email reminder, which you can see below, lifted straight from the inbox:

Zapier’s email reminder

The email is customized to each user, reminding him or her how many tasks have been automated and providing a custom recommendation for which upgrade to choose based on usage. In short, it’s the perfect email to convert a free trial user to a happy paying customer.

Relevant read:
Reward your most profitable (VIP) customers

Information gathered in the CRM software can tell you which of your accounts are your most profitable. These are the customers you really don’t want to let go of, your key accounts. For this purpose, let’s call them the VIPs. Knowing who brings you most revenue allows you to allocate your time and resources efficiently, as well as increase your chances of cross- or up-selling.

Example: Let’s say you have a number of incentives to give away. Use them to reward your VIPs to further increase their loyalty. The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes

Pareto principle

It’s easy: just create a list of your VIP customers in your CRM software. Now, you can start to follow up and let them know about the rewards and incentives in order to make them feel special, so they continue to be your most profitable customers, which, if you consider the 80/20 rule, this investment is bound to pay off!

Customer Referrals

If you’re not already tracking customer referrals, you need to start. Your best customers are also your best salespeople. When they are happy, they will provide testimonials, leave reviews, and most importantly, refer their friends, family, and co-workers to your brand. Having a lot of customer referrals indicates that customer satisfaction is very high. Affiliate or refer-a-friend incentive programs are very powerful tools that marketers have been using forever.

Not only do they reward customers for providing you with new business, but they provide you with several valuable insights. In addition to detailed tracking of your customer referrals, affiliate programs provide you with insight into why people recommend your brand. Referral programs might not be ideal for all types of businesses, but all businesses should be tracking customer referrals to determine if it ever could present a word-of-mouth marketing opportunity.

Use automation to re-engage customers

Automation is allowing some of your routines to be handled automatically by a software. The most popular is “marketing automation.” Monitoring and keeping your customers abreast manually are time consuming. Because there are so many processes to be repeated daily, in order to keep your brand fresh in the customer’s mind.

Marketing automation

The idea here is to use automation to re-engage your customers. Sure, you’ll see a boost in conversion rate as you engage customers manually, however, you can communicate stronger and faster through automation. Through automation, you can manage your customer contacts, drip feed education emails, schedule promotional emails, text messages, and event notifications.

Know more about:
Improve customer support.

Excellent customer support makes a difference to your business’s success. Using chatbots for minor inquiries can help reduce the time taken to meet such concerns. Information like tracking updates, delivery details, reservations, and more don’t need human intervention. Chatbots save time when users need information that can be extracted from a database.

Customer support vs Chatbot

Your live customer support staff can focus on critical issues, giving attention to problems that matter. You’ll offer faster support, saving time and resources. A chatbot strategy can improve your customer support and influence a customer’s decision to stay with your business. This leads to greater loyalty and improved retention rates. Successful businesses are the ones that recognize that customers form the backbone of their business. Support your customers with retention strategies, and they’ll support you.

Leverage customer feedback surveys

Surveys are powerful tools for building customer engagement. Surveys may look boring, but people like it. According to Fluid Survey University, “The Average Response Rate for email surveys is 24.8%.” Hearing from customers directly to know how they feel about your products and services is a great way to cement the bond that already exist. In essence, it can help you develop engaging custom content for customer retention. When customers are given the chance to express themselves, they reveal their minds and feelings about your brand.

In their complaints, be sensitive enough to catch the pain points. Get to know the areas they’re not satisfied about and why. Adjusting in those areas will turn things around. Remember that through feedback, you can re-engage a customer that’s about giving up on your brand. No matter how you look at it, automation can help your business in so many ways. Most striking is the fact that it can help you engage and retain your customers.

Conclusion

The goal of inbound marketing is to build a mutually beneficial relationship between brands and customers. This opens the door for special offers that extend far beyond a coupon. Keeping your customers happy is more than continuing to receive their money, it also helps you improve your company to make them even happier – and in turn, they’re happy to spend more money. By the way, which of these customer retention strategies have you implemented, and how did it work for you?
February 10, 2020
How to Launch your SaaS Business?
Launching a SaaS business takes a lot of hard work and determination. Many entrepreneurs feel that it is about getting the product out the door. Unless you’re an experienced entrepreneur, this approach can be quite disappointing. You launch your SaaS product and hope to get a few signups every day. Days turn into weeks, and you don’t find anyone coming. Why? Because your product is only part of the puzzle. There are quite a few things to sort out before you take your product to market.

Here are 9 things to take care of before you launch a SaaS business.

Validate business idea early

You don’t want to end up spending thousands of dollars to realize it’s just you and your best friend using the app you’ve built. Reach out to relevant communities on social media, forums, put together a survey and ask as many people as you can. Make sure there are people who not only need your product, but are also ready to pay money for it.

Chanty business idea validation survey

Also read:
Learn about your target market

Getting to know your buyer persona is extremely important while running a business. Never stop learning about your target audience as their needs evolve and so should your product. When you are just starting out, put a survey with several questions to find out the biggest pain point. Apart from doing a survey, make sure you communicate with your potential clients directly. The more you talk to your customers, the better (and faster) market fit you’ll get.

Have customer onboarding

No matter how simple your SaaS product, you need to have an automated process to onboard new users to your app. This will make it easier for people to use your product and quickly turn them into paying customers. At the minimum, it should allow users to sign up and sign in, display a welcome screen and give a quick product tour of your top 3 features that help them get started. Don’t walk them through all the features as it will only confuse them. You can use free plugins like Intro.js to provide a step-by-step guide to your application. Also, have automated lifecycle emails (after signup, after activation, end of trial).

For example, Slack has an awesome new user onboarding which uses a combination of tooltips, animations, static screens, and in-app examples.

SaaS customer onboarding

Relevant read:
- How to Manage Remote Teams?
- Video Marketing for SaaS
Get the tool kit ready

There are certain software tools your team will need to operate. For example:
- CRM to track your tasks
- GitLab for coding, testing and deployment collaboration
- Confluence for company wiki and meeting notes
- G Suite for a corporate email, storage and documents collaboration
- MailChimp, Mailgun and Amazon SES to send out emails to our customers
- Team communication tool like Slack
- InVision app for prototyping
- Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, SEMrush, SimilarWeb for keyword, traffic and backlinks research
- Google Analytics, Hotjar, Yandex Metrica for site analytics, heatmaps and more
- Buzzsumo for content research
- Canva, Hootsuite, TweetDeck, Manageflitter, Hashtagify to manage and design social media accounts
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator to outreach potential clients in LinkedIn
Wow, I didn’t realize there were so many. You’ll probably have the kit of your own, however, this list should at least help you receive an approximate idea of what you’ll need. These are just examples of software that do the task, there are plenty of good alternatives for each one of them. So, choose accordingly.

Don’t charge your customers initially

When you launch a SaaS startup, it might be tempting to charge your customers. After all, paying customers are the best way to validate your product. Here’s why it’s not a good idea. If you need to charge your customers, you need to add a payment gateway such as Stripe or 2Checkout to your website, which will cost you integration time. You also need to apply for a bank account and run around for additional procedures such as incorporation. The whole process can take months and delay your launch unnecessarily.

Instead, release your SaaS product as a beta version, and mention that it will be free during the beta period (3-4 months). This will give you enough time to validate your idea, as well as set up the payment module.

Must read:
Don’t forget the social media

While social media is not the primary traffic source, it’s still important to keep your customers updated. Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook serve this purpose pretty well. Even if you don’t plan any social media activity yet, it’s still a good idea to reserve your brand name at all the major social platforms.

Social Media

Start a blog

Content marketing is a big thing. If you choose to attract organic traffic with your articles, I advise you to write in-depth articles that bring value. This task can be given to freelance writers but sometimes their articles don’t reflect the personal experience, the passion for what you are doing, their words are not filled with excitement. Don’t expect instant results. Running a blog is a lot of time and effort. In fact, according to HubSpot, B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads than the ones that don’t.

Start a blog

Plan A Media Stunt

Motivate those who already signed up to share your startup with their friends. You can offer an early access to those who invite a number of friends (usually 3-5) by providing a unique url to share. You can also move them up in a waiting queue of beta testers or offer other rewards your audience would be interested in.

Earning press coverage requires being the subject of a news story. Avoid stunts that will ring as desperate or cynical and focus instead of events or actions closely related to your brand’s mission. Put the focus on the most newsworthy element of the SaaS itself and how it is relevant to conversations about current events

Set up Analytics

As you’ve seen, there are quite a few things you need to do, to get your SaaS product off the ground. However, they’ll be fruitless if you’re unable to measure, analyze and improve their performance. Luckily, Google provides two amazing free tools that will make your life easier.

The first one is the Google Analytics (GA), that helps you analyze website traffic and understand user behavior. Add a piece of code to your website and GA will do the rest. It provides tons of informative reports out-of-the-box that help you understand the most visited pages, how much time people spend on your site, their location, device, browser and a lot more. You can even set up goals and events to track clicks. This will help you understand how users interact with your product and which features they use the most.

The second one is the Google Tag Manager (GTM), designed to simplify both developers’ and marketers’ lives. Once you add the GTM code to your site, marketers can add or delete any further piece of marketing code such as Hotjar Analytics, or the Facebook Pixel on their own, without distracting developers.

Once you start tracking the right metrics, you’ll know what to improve and see if your activities are moving the needle. It also allows you to set growth objectives and review your progress regularly. Here’s a sample Google Analytics dashboard that shows you detailed information about your website visitors

Google analytics dashboard

Conclusion

Starting a SaaS business is a formidable task, but if you implement it carefully, you will surely be able to launch a SaaS product that gains traction quickly. We hope the experience we’ve shared helps you during your SaaS product pre-launch. If you have any questions, feel free to reach us in the comments below. We’ll be happy to help. Meanwhile, good luck pre-launching your product!
February 9, 2020
Email Writing for Awareness Stage
With customer retention in general, there are a few key ingredients you need for success:
- A deep understanding of your customer
- The ability to provide exceptional customer support
- Loyalty rewards
Now, these three ingredients aren’t the only thing you’ll need—after all—you still need a product that stands out from the rest. So how can you actually get your product to stand out from the rest?
Interestingly enough, you can use email to not only tackle all three areas mentioned above, but to also get your product to stand out through continued interaction with customers.

Even in a heavily crowded market or industry, the companies that reach out consistently are the ones who give their customers top-of-mind awareness of the brand. Retention emails an easy way to remind customers that you exist and provide value to them. They can make all the difference to get your product to stand out from the competition and ultimately close more business.

How email helps

Before I get into how to use emails for customer retention, let me explain why email works so well in the first place.
1. It helps you improve communication with your customers
2. It’s a cost-effective way to stay in touch
3. It’s easy to use and can be set up to run on autopilot
Now, we will see how to write emails for the first stage of SaaS cycle i.e. Awareness.

Also read:
Activation or welcome email

Welcome emails have some of the highest engagement stats of any sequence. It’s the perfect opportunity for you to set the tone of your relationship and establish your brand in a favorable light. First impressions count for a lot! When it comes to customer retention, it’s essential that you start the relationship off on the right foot. This really sets the tone for your new partnership.

One of the best ways to do just that is by using a Welcome or Activation email. With this, you’re introducing your customer to your brand and giving them that warm welcome they’d receive if they were in person. Plus, you can (and should) also use this important message as a chance to guide your new customer into taking their next step—using your product!

Example provided by Buffer

This next example also captures the warm and friendly tone you want with these emails:

Lumosity welcome email

Again, we’re greeted with an eye-catching image and a big welcome message. You also see a message that sounds just as if the person was right in front of us thanks to the phrase “We’re glad you’re with us.” On top of that, you’ll notice that Lumosity also makes use of social proof: “You’ve just joined a global community of 85 million.”

Farmers Insurance, for example, launched its 15 Seconds of Smart campaign: short, 15-second videos educating their audience on insurance opportunities – while being wildly entertaining. These snackable bits of content were delightful, shareable, and educational all at once.

Farmers Insurance

Creating a conversational and warm welcome email is a must; but you should also consider adding in the very next step you’d like your customers to take. This helps them engage with your brand right away and gives them more guidance on what to do from there. First impressions count. A lot. Therefore, if a subscriber signs up to something, whether it is to receive future blog posts or a series of email tips, it makes sense to thank them and welcome them.

By doing nothing, you make it difficult to create a strong impression. Whether you use auto-responders or send the emails manually, welcoming new subscribers to your company email list is a great way to build a strong relationship from the beginning. In the email, make sure you introduce yourself and company. You can also provide helpful links to content such as most popular blog posts or white papers, or links to your social media profiles. When to send: Each time you get a new subscriber.

Relevant read:
Activation follow up email

Lumosity follows up their welcome email with another one that explains a little bit more about the product.

Lumosity follow up email

This time, you see things like:
1. How the app works?
2. What areas of the brain will be challenged?
3. How many games you can play?
4. And how you can monitor your score
With this email, they’re helping new customers dive right into everything they have to offer. But they’re doing so in easy-to-digest bite-sized chunks. You’ll notice this in the way they’ve used different colors for each section and only a short 2-3 sentence description. What’s nice about breaking up this email into two parts is that you never overwhelm your new customer. Instead, you offer them just enough info to get them started.Consider breaking up your welcome and next steps emails into two different ones. By doing this, you can keep everything simple without overwhelming your new customers. Example provided by SumAll.

SumAll

When SumAll acquired Flutter, a tool that helps businesses grow their Twitter following, one of the first things they did was inform their subscriber list. In doing so, they were able to create new interest in their product offering. So, for prospects that were not sure whether SumAll was the right fit for their business, announcing this kind of news is likely to have a more positive impact.

You can implement it whenever you have news to share, such as winning an award, changes to product offering or new pricing options, for example, announce this news to your subscriber list. You can either include all of the company news within the email or itself, or link the email to a landing page. When to send: Each time you have news to share.

Must read:
Conclusion

The role of email as a measurable, cost-effective marketing channel is clear. Backed up by both professional opinion and industry statistics, email has an important value for businesses in creating sales, leads and revenue, and retaining customers. So, learn how to engage with customers during awareness stage and apply it to your business. This will help you to grow your business and get loyal customers. What do you think about the article? Please let us know in the comments section.
February 6, 2020
Top Analytics Tools for SaaS
Analytics tools for SaaS business are important because if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. The truth is, SaaS businesses handle complex data and most analytics tools for SaaS are not easy to use. You need efficient analytics tools for SaaS that will break down this data into understandable metrics. Analyzing this data manually will lead to errors, inaccurate ROIs and a total waste of time. It is vital to keep track of the analytics on a daily basis when running a SaaS. The analytics necessary to ensure the success of a SaaS are not easy to compute and are almost impossible without the help of a calculating tool that can give you the numbers in just a matter of seconds.

Many of these SaaS analytics tools will integrate easily with the programs that you are already using to take payments. Thanks to the ever-evolving internet, existing on the web for a brand can be quite volatile, and immediate access analytics will ensure those smart decisions while optimizing for conversion. When it comes to SaaS analytics tools, you have hundreds of options to choose from. There’s a tool for everything: tracking marketing spending, measuring app engagement, heatmaps and more. Unless your full-time job is to research the best tools for your business, this can be a daunting task.

The goal here isn’t to choose the perfect tool (which doesn’t exist) but to choose something that is good enough and starts giving you actionable insights.

What are the best SaaS metrics to track?
1. Monthly Recurring Revenue. In a SaaS business, all of the investment is up front. Before customers can purchase the product, the product gets built, and the majority of the budget is spent on customer acquisition. The monthly recurring revenue is the amount of revenue added (or lost) that is expected to be received each month.
2. Churn. The value of lost customers each month. When your churn is in the double digits, there is something totally wrong with your product. Stop worrying about your growth and get back to the product and fix the problem. Reach customers directly, see what their problems are, and work to build a product that can be truly loved.
3. Cost Per Acquisition. To figure this out, you will need to add up all of your marketing and sales expenses for the month. Divide this by the total number of customers acquired in that period. CPA is the average amount spent for each acquisition. It does lack detail, but it’s a quick way to get a snapshot of the business.
4. Average Revenue Per Customer. The average revenue received from each customer. Once the churn is regulated, the key to increasing revenue is up-sells and cross-sells. Up-sells move the consumer to a more expensive version of the product, while a cross-sell will be an extra feature sold with the product, like a product that complements yours.
5. Lifetime Value.To get the lifetime value, first, combine the average revenue per customer with the churn rate—this is a prediction of the revenue received in total. Then there are a handful of ways to proceed, but the simple version takes your average subscription length multiplied by the average monthly revenue per customer.
How to:
SaaS Analytics Tools

Profitwell

Profitwell

You will be able to see the context of your growth and types of revenue will impact your growth over time. To track your growth, you have the tools needed to set goals and track progress at a glance. Daily growth can be checked through an email or on the web application. With ProfitWell, you can track revenue retention, delinquent churn, and MRR churn while the cohort reports will aid in visualization of keeping your clients and revenue.

Learn how your annual subscriptions, fees, and refunds are affecting your overall cash flow. You will see monthly and annual breakdowns of subscriptions in a simple snapshot. Get a good idea of customer activity when you receive a list containing customers. This list will sort the customers by their most recent billing receipt so that the outreach you give will be timely and relevant—things like marketing campaigns and feedback requests. With this web application, you will also gain access to some of the most knowledgeable SaaS experts around.

Baremetrics

Baremetrics

Looking for an easy-to-use analytics tool for Saas? Baremetrics it is. It is a specially designed analytics tool for SaaS businesses. Baremetrics provides subscription metrics such as Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and Churns rate. The software is a one-click, zero-setup analytics tool for SaaS and one-stop shopping for your Saas analytics needs.

It has integrations with 2 payment gateways and 2 recurring billing software and ability to view 20 subscription metrics in one dashboard. It also provides forecast data on cash flow, monthly recurring revenue, and customers. It helps in sending daily, weekly and monthly email reports and notifications and offers credit card dunning to prevent failed payments.

Baremetrics pricing is based on your monthly recurring revenue (MRR). For instance, if you have $200,000 as your monthly recurring revenue, you will pay $250/month.

Google Analytics for Web Attribution

Google Analytics is a great option for companies who are just starting to measure the attribution of their campaigns. GA is relatively easy to set up and will let you even start exploring multi-touch attribution modelling. GA is a great fit for those companies who drive mostly web traffic and have under 1M monthly visits.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics 360 is the enterprise version of Google Analytics. You get access to more advanced reports including a more powerful funnel and attribution report. If you’re spending significant money through Google Ads and Youtube, GA 360 will integrate nicely with these sources and give you better insights into your campaigns. Like GA, this is suited for companies who are driving primarily web traffic and can easily justify the annual expense.

Also read:
MainMetrics

When you sign up, you will connect your Braintree account to begin monitoring all of your most important metrics immediately. You will have the tools needed to gain real-time insights into the success of your SaaS, and learn about how the business is doing currently and how the success of the business evolved over time. While tracking this progress, you will be able to compare various time periods so that you can see how the strategies that you have implemented are affecting the success.

MainMetrics

One great thing about using MainMetrics is that there is no need to have any knowledge of coding—the accounts connect in one click, and you will not have to transfer any data manually. There are a few plans offered at different price points that all depend on the needs of the user, so when the needs of the user change you will be able to switch the plan that you are using when needed. Use the program risk-free for 30 days, and if you are not satisfied, MainMetrics will give you a refund within those 30 days.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is another suitable analytics tool for SaaS you can use for your business. It interprets user behavior to produce understandable information and make informed decisions. It helps SaaS business to understand users’ behavior by tracking engagement and interaction in real time. With Mixpanel, you can dig deeper into the analytics to get your questions answered.

Mixpanel

Some of the pros of mixpanel are- it improves conversion rate by knowing when customers drop off, guide users by visualizing how they explore your product and website, send targeted messages to users who are likely to convert, notifies you when there is an unexpected change in metrics and shows you what leads to a particular goal such as purchase, upsell, and retention.

Mixpanel analytic tool for SaaS has three plans. The free plan (5m data points per month), the basic plan (10m data points per year) costs $999 per year and the enterprise – custom price.

Relevant read:
Insight

Using Insight, you will be able to track what is going on with your data at all times, share the status and progress with your team, and make confident decisions driven by the accurate data provided. You will easily keep track of all of the most important metrics while having a clear picture of all of the deadlines that you have in place. Additionally, you will be able to see how much your team is getting done in a given amount of time, enabling you to work on increasing productivity.

Insight

As a whole, you will be able to identify whether or not your process is efficient—you will be able to pinpoint where there are any blocks in your development process. Stakeholders will be able to see live reports in just a matter of seconds, so those invested in how the brand is performing will be able to see the most accurate snapshot of the numbers. Similarly, clients will be able to view custom reports from your brand, allowing you to show them that you are a professional.

FullStory

FullStory is another all-in-one tool that will allow you to easily capture heatmaps and visitor recordings. You can’t run surveys through this tool but it will collect quite a bit of information about user interactions.

FullStory

Putler

Putler is a revolutionary analytics tool for SaaS. It is created for businesses in the SaaS, E-commerce, and professional services niches. It provides insights on relevant SaaS metrics such as customer metrics, visits, and product metrics. Some of these metrics are Monthly recurring revenue (MRR), Average Revenue per User (ARPU), popular products and best customers.

Putler

It details reports on products, customers, sales, and visitors, and improves customer profiles to help you know your customers in-depth. With Putler, you can easily export your mailing list and receive weekly email reports, organize stores, visitor analytics and payment gateways to create a single source of information.

Putler have three basic plans – the scale (10,000 paid orders / month) – $249/month, Growth plan – (3,000 paid orders / month) – $76/month and the starter plan – $29/month.

Relevant read:
Conclusion

Tracking SaaS analytics doesn’t have to be a pain. Even if you have no idea where you should start, select a program from the list above and get connected. Your metrics will be displayed on demand and give you the insight to help your brand’s success, right up to that very minute. Why is this so important? Thanks to globalization, it takes just a few moments for a brand to go viral and become the center of attention for either good or bad reason. Because of dynamics like this, it is vital for brands to be able to see exactly where they stand regarding their sales and profits, or losses in real time. So, choose a tool and see how it works for you. Also, if you know some other tool, please let us know in the comments section.
February 5, 2020
Different Stages of SaaS User
You probably use a variety of different SaaS products every day. That’s because software as a service (SaaS) market is growing quickly, and spreading rapidly. But on the other side of the coin, if you’re a business leader or a customer success manager (CSM) at a SaaS company, you need to understand the different behaviors and strategies for earning new SaaS customers or else you’ll be one of many SaaS companies that don’t grow fast enough.

You don’t buy a SaaS product once and forget it. There’s no true autopilot or end of the journey, just a SaaS customer life cycle that continues to grow and evolve, generating the recurring revenue that you need to survive. It’s a cycle that seems very straightforward but proper execution requires a lot of smart timing and knowledge. In essence, you’re finding a customer, getting them to sign up for your SaaS offer, and then trying to keep them. In practice, there are a variety of considerations during and between each step that can lead to success or frustrated customers who leave.

SaaS growth funnel

The SaaS customer life cycle can be broken down into three stages – the acquisition, engagement, and retention of your customers. SaaS products are different than others because it’s not enough to get a customer to buy once, you need them to engage with your product repeatedly to see value so that they’ll keep buying from you every month, or every year.

How to:
Acquisition Stages

During the acquisition stages of the customer life cycle, customers are looking for a solution to a problem they’re experiencing. Education is vital at this point: you need to help your customers understand their problem, and help them understand how your SaaS tool will help them solve it.

Traditionally, companies aren’t great at this – they have a tendency to sell too hard, too soon, and put-off prospective customers with an overly enthusiastic sales pitch when they’re in ‘research mode’, rather than ‘buying mode’.

Awareness

The start of the customer life cycle, whether you’re a SaaS provider or any other company, is when your customer first becomes aware of an issue they have. Through marketing, referrals, demonstrations, and other tactics, you also make them aware that your solution solves their problem. Think of this as the educational stage. You’re just trying to inform someone about your offering, and that can mean providing a lot of context.

Awareness stage

If you’re struggling on where to start with awareness, there’s one content trick that works with successfully with companies from start-ups to some of the largest cloud security companies in the U.S.: turn each question in your FAQ into an individual post, graphic, video, or other element. Answer the questions people have and demonstrate your capabilities, and they’ll be aware of you and what you do.

Consideration

By now, your customers will have a decent understanding of their problem, and will have identified several potential SaaS solutions that they’re considering.

Qualification

Building on awareness is the qualification of leads and customers. In this stage of the SaaS customer life cycle, you’re taking a potential customer and determining if they’re a good fit for your business. At the same time, the customer is looking through your materials or perhaps trying a demo to see if they think you’re a good fit. Your customers will narrow down their options to just a few solutions. They might start free trials, request a demo, or start a conversation with your sales team.

Qualification stage

If you’re in a new software category or have a very different take on functionality and workflows, make your support information and teams available to help. Treating the qualification stage as the start of your on-boarding will help your team deliver quality service that can boost conversions.

Also read:
Engagement Stages

The engagement stages are key to the success of your SaaS company. It’s where your customers make their leap of faith, and start paying for your service. According to Intercom, 40-60% of users use a SaaS product once, and then never return.
You then need to provide real, tangible value to the user as quickly as possible, to convince them that it’s worth their investment. Getting that first session right is essential for keeping your customers coming back for more.

Engagement Stages

Evaluation

Your customers are now in the final stages of their decision-making. They’ll be asking your sales team very usage-specific, or company-specific questions about the capabilities of your solution, to assess whether or not your solution will meet their needs and solve their problem.

Purchase

This is it – the magic moment when they part with their credit card details and officially become paying customers. Your customer has made it to the first major milestone, congrats!
Carve out purchase decisions as their own step when you’re mapping your customer journey. This helps you test and validate the process as well as see why customers do or don’t buy from you. Closing the deal is also an appropriate time to evaluate your marketing and other efforts so far, plus perform audits on documentation and payment methods.

When the interested party becomes a paying customer, thank them. Introduce your team again and remind the customer of your dedicated support and services. Be helpful and ask for your first round of feedback so that you can make the qualification and purchase steps easier for potential customers to complete.

Activation

Now they’ve paid for your service, your customers are starting to use it. They’ll work through any on boarding processes you have, and (hopefully) start to get value from using your solution. After the purchase decision is made, the SaaS life cycle shifts. You’re dealing directly with fewer managers and C-Suite leaders. Your focus becomes the daily user. This is the person who needs training and support to figure out how to use your software.

The benefit to thinking about this stage as a shift in your target customer is that you and your teams will focus on making a good “first impression” with daily users. Actively listening to their needs and being responsive during the onboarding and training process can keep them happy. In many cases, SaaS contracts can be cancelled at any time. Competitors are also waiting to grab frustrated users from you. This is your first big customer filter and you want to get on the good side of users to keep their whole organization happy.

Relevant read:
Retention Stages

In these later stages of the customer life cycle, your focus should be on customer success: providing continuing value to your customers, and providing excellent support and information to help your customers maximize the value they get from your service, to reduce or prevent churn.

It’s cheaper to retain existing customers than it is to acquire new ones, but many companies often overlook investing in customer success, focusing instead on lead generation and customer acquisition to fuel their business growth.

Expansion

The next phase in the SaaS customer journey is when the customer and their teams become regular users of your service. You become part of their daily operations and need to treat this with the respect that it deserves. They may decide they need additional features or functionality available from higher-price packages, expanding from the initial package or service they signed up for.

For demonstrating that respect, your mission is here to give your customers the tools, information, and support they need to properly implement change management. By understanding customer workflows and how your product disrupts them, you can determine the best way to position your SaaS capabilities. Ask your customers what they hope to achieve with regular use and provide tips and guides for how to accomplish this.

Renewal

After you’ve become part of the customer’s new daily routine, you need to ensure that you’ve made the routine better. The months or year after first landing an onboarding is a big-time milestone and decision for many. Your customers’ initial contracted use period has come to an end, and they decide to continue paying for, and using, your service. Your customer is looking at their budget for the next quarter or year and questioning if you’re worth it. You’re doing the same and seeing if you need to change your pricing structure or what features to provide to keep people happy.

The purchase decision often relies on hopes for improved efficiencies and bottom-line gains: how will this help our business. The renewal decision, however, is focused on if those gains were achieved and how the customer felt about it. You have to not only be a benefit but feel like one. To put this in perspective, think about a time before you had one of your go-to SaaS tools, like a CRM. In your pre-CRM days, you did all that customer management in spreadsheets and hand-written to-do lists and called or emailed when you remembered and had the time. Some people just fell through the cracks, even if they were good leads and customers.

Adopting a CRM automated a lot of this and even gave you tools to weed out the less lucrative clients so you could focus on the big wins that made your business successful. You fell in love with the tech and what it could do, and now you had a name for the software: CRM. If the company was a pain to work with, the system crashed often, or its helpdesk never answered a question right, you’d probably not renew. Even if it made your marketing and sales better, you’d take this knowledge that “a CRM is helpful to me” and use it to find a different provider. The boom in SaaS means there are more providers and competition each quarter, making customer service a key differentiator when it comes to the renewal phase.

Referral

Your customers are delighted with your service, and are so impressed with the value you deliver, that they’re recommending your service to colleagues, or others in their network. When the customer does renew, rejoice! And then, ask them to tell you why they chose to renew. Your customer is loyal and satisfied and you’re likely to get some messaging you can use in your marketing to make a pitch to similar companies.

For those satisfied customers, you should follow-up. Thank them for being a customer and ask if they would refer to you to colleagues, partners, or other businesses they know. If you want to sweeten the deal, create a referral program that allows them to save a little or earn some freebies when they make referrals that work for you. In some rare cases, you’ll have a customer who loves your product. They want to tell the world about it, and you should help them do just that. These advocates or evangelists can bring new companies and plenty of revenue to your door. Because they like you already, the rewards you provide don’t need to be huge, they just need to be useful.

Adobe has always had a very loyal customer base and they really capitalize on this advocacy piece with their Ambassador Program. People who sign up get training and webinars and other tools, while being asked to make commitments to advocate for Adobe and evangelize its products at their office and in their community. You don’t need to immediately launch into this step, but it is a smart thing to think about for down the road.

Adobe campus ambassador program

Must read:
Conclusion

In customer life cycles—as in life—the best approach is to take it one day (and one phase) at a time. Plus, while it might be tough to take a data-driven approach to life—that is, of course, unless you track all of your daily activities as data points—customer life cycles are ripe for data collection and analysis. So, let the data science be your guide. Implement systems and software to measure and track customer success, and watch your base of engaged, loyal customers grow.
January 31, 2020
Best Ways to Advertise SaaS
The SaaS market is booming right now, and competition is getting heavy. Spending on SaaS reached $8 billion in 2015. The growth and competition aren’t going to slow down, with spending expected to reach as high as $55 billion by 2026. It’s going to take some unconventional marketing strategies and clever growth hacking to stand out as the competition increases.

Here are some tactics that will give your SaaS an edge over the growing competition.

Marketing Plan

You need to have your marketing plans right to attract the right customers and stay in the competition. To do so, you can take help of apps to advertise about your company. But, you should follow some strategies to create an app:
- You have to get your marketing right or massive distribution of your message won’t help and could actually hurt by attracting the wrong audience.
- You need a good call to action (CTA), and the ability to capitalize on that CTA on the back-end
- Where possible, get to know the people behind the directories and see if there are ways to make your app stand-out from the noise.
- This is not a replacement for a marketing strategy of any kind.
Also read:
- How to Track Customer Acquisition in SaaS?
- Challenges Faced by SaaS startups
But, while this isn’t a complete marketing strategy, why not make sure you’re in every horizontal App directory and recommendation engine as well as going after more specific promotional opportunities within your market.

Sites where you can list your App

Once you’ve done all of that, then you need to go figure out where the real money is, and that is where people aren’t just looking for “Apps” in a horizontal directory somewhere, but where they’re looking for immediate solutions to their very real and specific business problems! Below are some basic listing sites, and some places you might not have thought about. Or, if you have a LinkedIn or CrunchBase profile, consider whether it is used to its fullest.

Basic listing sites

Setup a “local” listing for your physical location or mailing address even if you’re a ‘virtual’ company; more data in the search engines can’t be a bad thing!

Relevant read: How to validate your SaaS idea before building an MVP?
Must read: Email writing for Engagement stage

Highlight your Product on B2B Software Review Platforms

B2B products can offer you three content types that will help their readers assess your product: an in-house review, user-generated reviews, and paid listing. Although the first two types are usually beyond your reach, you can control the third type.

A paid listing highlights your software or gives it a priority in a specific category listing and in-site search results. Furthermore, many reviews platforms include valuable add-ons in their marketing packages. For instance, Finances Online has a marketing package that includes an in-site article about your product, a press release campaign and a verified quality certificate awarded to your product. They also provide very efficient lead generation campaigns for SaaS vendors.

Finances online

Software review platforms are becoming a major lead channel for SaaS marketers as prospects use review sites as their first base to product discovery. What other users say on review sites influences prospects’ opinions, and by the time your sales team get in touch with these prospects, they already have an opinion about your software.
Likewise, B2B software review sites are becoming a necessity in software purchase. A company’s buying unit–an ad hoc team composed of the CMO, executives, managers and end-users–can easily get bogged down by a deluge of options and information on hundreds of solutions. Review sites are resolving this dilemma. They help companies focus on the key aspects to compare and shortlist at once the top choices.

Things can move fast because the buying unit has clear visibility on product options, essential features, pricing terms and call-to-actions. That’s why you need to have a solid presence in these review sites, which is ground zero for product research.

Know about: How to Set Pricing for Your SaaS Product?
Relevant read: How to Improve Landing Page Conversion?

Use an Ad Network Company

An ad network company works like a conventional ad agency. It identifies ad placements and sells these digital locations to advertisers. There are two main types of these: either your ad shows in search results or it shows in content on a website. For both types you can set a target based on keywords, location, IP address, and demographics. Your target is then matched with search results or a website’s content. You can select text ads, rich media, or a mixture of both.
There are two popular ad models: pay-per-click (PPC) and cost-per-mile (CPM). Ad networks also use a bid process, where advertisers set a price per click (PPC) or per thousand views (CPM). The ad which bids higher is selected first for display.

When targeting your ad, you should have a clear picture of your audience. Utilize keywords that these prospects use while searching for content or a product. Do not limit yourself to a niche when ad targeting. For example, an accounting software product can also be promoted in other business aspects such as online business, small business, project management, marketing, etc.

Best display ad networks

The top ad networks for B2B and SaaS are likely to be preferred by publishers and they can leverage your reach and content scope. Some of the best display ad networks for publishers includes: Google AdSense, Clicksor, Adblade, Conversant, BuySellAds, and Media.net. You can also explore other ad networks and compare the main factors outlined above.

Sponsored Social Media for B2B Marketing

Most Important Social Media Platforms for B2B Marketers (2017)

Source: 2017 Social Media Marketing Industry Report

Facebook advertising takes your business beyond your followers. Moreover, you get to qualify your audience down to details. The social network has demographic-specific options, such as, based on the user’s listed job; employees of specific companies; and a life event like a new job. Most B2B marketers use Facebook for brand awareness, lead nurturing and reach out to the personal accounts of the client’s decision-makers. Interestingly, since most Facebook users have their email address for user account, you mailing list is likely to be a treasure of Facebook accounts and the social network permits you to leverage this bonus. Go to Custom Audiences then Campaigns and select Custom List. Your mailing list, which should be in CSV, can now be uploaded and included in your Facebook ad campaign.

On the other hand, LinkedIn is always an excellent channel for B2B promotions, where users are mostly professionals and where your software ad can be more focused. You can target ads by professional titles, positions, and company; thus, niching your target down to the core users of your B2B software. Moreover, people on LinkedIn are more conducive to B2B relationships, where they network to further their career. As a SaaS vendor or marketer, you can be seen as an important connector or expert in your software category.

Important read: Bootstrapping SaaS Startups

Use Paid Content Distribution Networks

These networks promote content instead of ads, and therefore they are ideal for marketing articles, case studies and webinar topics. They focus on engaging prospects with topics of interest rather than with product pitches. In fact, the “ads” look like they are part of the publisher’s content, usually as a bottom filler with subheadings like, “You Might Also Like” or “Stories Across the Web”. Paid content can complement your ad network placements as these content networks create a top-of-funnel traffic that can provide conversion at a much later date.

Taboola, Outbrain, and nRelate are three popular paid content distribution networks utilized by high-ranking publishers such as USA Today, ESPN, CNN, The Huffington Post, and Time. These networks use different algorithms to match your content ads with the publishers’ content to engage readers’ interest.

Show how it Works

When you really want to grab attention, it pays to put your platform to work and show them how it’s done. That’s what Promoter.io did when it launched its service. As a way to tap into current events, the site developed a tool that used its technology (Net Promoter Score measurement) in an unconventional way – predicting the presidential election.

With just a few months under its belt, Promoter.io has been featured in a number of publications with more than 12,000 votes driven by its platform as leads roll in daily. Showcasing the features and benefits of a system is a great way to connect your audience with your value proposition.

Examples of Promoter.io and SumoMe

Engage with Reddit

Marketing on Reddit has the potential to generate a lot of traffic. The community is segmented into hyper-focused subreddits that put your target audience in one place. Unfortunately, Reddit has some pretty strong guidelines about self-promotion.

SumoMe understood the need to provide value in the Reddit community. It created high-value long-form content within the subreddit, rather than Spam content links. It then sent information and links via private message to Redditors who requested more information. According to Wilson Hung of App Sumo, the efforts generated a lot of up votes and discussion with up to 1,000 unique visits per Reddit post.

Create urgency through exclusivity

Creating an exclusive gated or invite-only platform is a great way to generate buzz, because people tend to want what they can’t have. Targeting a younger audience, specifically college students, Tinder mobilizes local reps on college campuses across the U.S. to host exclusive parties for people between the ages of 18-24, which make up about 68% of its audience base. The company has been using this same tactic to grow since it first launched. If you wanted in, you had to download the Tinder app on your smartphone.

Facebook deployed this same kind of exclusivity as far back as 2004 when an edu email address was required in order to target and attract a very specific demographic – college students. That exclusivity lasted more than two years before Facebook finally opened the platform to the public.

You may also like:
- Drip Email Campaign
- How to Design Drip Email Campaign?
Press Release Sites

For standard press releases you have a slew of paid and free PR distribution services, each one with its pros and cons. Free press release sites often do not let you post images or videos, greatly diminishing the impact of your announcement. The advantage of course is there’s no cost involved. On the other hand, paid PR can include a service that distributes your content or tweets it to a press group, but for a cost.

Although press releases are written to announce something, they’re mostly used for SEO, either to gain an extra backlink to your website or get a search boost by riding on the press release site’s PageRank. Likewise, even as your competitors focus on social media and content marketing, that leaves your brand alone in the PR site space, which is a significant advantage worth your attention. Free press releases are also often included in premium marketing packages on B2B review sites.

Make it All About the customer

With so many companies focused on growth hacking, gaming the search engines, leveraging optimization, and pushing the best services, you have to wonder when people are going to start caring about the customer. If your goal is to grow your customer base, then you should stop focusing on tricks to get their attention. Be direct. Ask them, quite literally, what they want from you.

Help Scout gets it, as it developed a help desk platform designed to create a delightful customer experience. Yes, it’s a SaaS product, but it’s customer-focused. The site has built and marketed its platform in a way that helps companies provide a human touch.

Conclusion

Paid channels can be the difference to your organic campaign especially when readers today are being overwhelmed by re-purposed content churned out by companies. When planning your SaaS ad campaign, make sure to cover a wide ground by including the basic but essential paid streams we’ve talked about.

Let us know in the comments section about the different advertising strategies that you applied to bring your SaaS in limelight.
January 26, 2020