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Tag: đŸ’» SaaS

  • 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
    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
    SaaS customer onboarding

    Relevant read:

    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
    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
    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
    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!

  • 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
    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
    Example provided by Buffer

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

    Lumosity welcome email
    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
    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
    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
    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.

  • 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
    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
    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

    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
    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
    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
    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
    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
    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.

  • Top 5 Free Strategies to Promote Your SaaS – Nick Greene-apollodigital

    Out of ideas on how to reach more customers?

    With new marketing strategies popping up every day, you have to keep up with the competition and get some traction on your site.

    In this article, we will cover the best marketing strategies for your SaaS which you can start implementing right now.

    Content that’s featured on respectable media not only looks great on your website but also brings you site traffic, new customers, and revenue.

    Here’s a simple step-by-step guide on how to get featured on popular media:

    Step 1: Create a list of all your competitors.

    Step 2: Google all their names and find out all media websites they have been featured in.  To make your life easier, you can narrow down the search by looking up the “News” tab.

    Step 3: Once you’ve made a list of all competitors, list out all the articles they’ve been featured in. Specifically, you want to note:

    • Name of the media, e.g.. Business Insider
    • Name of the article, e.g. Socialyte founder explains her process for choosing the right person for the job
    • Name of the journalist, e.g. Don Draper
    • What the article is about, e.g. Your competitor has a special way of hiring people.
    • Journalist contact details. Sometimes the writer will list his/her contact details on the site. If he hasn’t though, there are a bunch of email extraction tools you can use, like Hunter.io or ClearBit Connect.

    Step 4: Create a press-kit.

    A press-kit is a file that contains all the information a journalist needs to know about your SaaS, like what your company does, its founders, some background information, previous press releases, and your contact information.

    You can create a Google Drive folder with all the information and send the journalist a link. Alternatively, you can put everything in a ZIP file.

    Here’s what you should include in your press-kit:

    • Info on your company. How long have you been around? Are you VC-funded or bootstrapped?
    • Info on your founding team. Who’s on the team? What other entrepreneurial experience does the team have?
    • Product screenshots. What does the product look like? The journalist, in most cases, will want to use ready screenshots for their feature (and not have to make them themselves).
    • Company Logo.
    • Contact Information.

    Step 5: Send personalized emails to all the journalists that wrote about your competitors.

    The key here is personalized.

    You don’t want to just randomly email them and beg for a feature.

    For example, if the journalist wrote about employment in the influencer marketing SaaS industry, they might be interested in how your company recruits and finds the best people.

    Because all of the articles are about something different, you need to create separate, personalized emails for each journalist. Make the email short, to the point, and relevant to the article they wrote. It might seem like a long shot, but trust us, it works. You’ll hear back from at least some of them.

    Strategy #2 – Create Quality Content

    With authority content, you tick off two goals with one bullet:

    • You want to reach an audience that is looking for solutions to a problem you can solve.
    • You want to establish your SaaS as an expert in the industry it operates in.

    The path to creating authority content has two main phases:

    1. Content creation
    2. Content promotion

    We’ll discuss both steps in detail below.

    Phase 1: Content Creation

    Let’s say your SaaS is an influencer marketing agency that connects different brands with influencers. Your goal is to reach both brands and influencers and then ultimately offer them your services.

    So, what’s the type of authority content you should be creating?

    In your case, you could create a comprehensive guide to influencer marketing.

    First, through a Google search, check what others have written about the topic.

    Note down what each of these guys do right and what they do wrong.

    The key here is to improve on what everyone’s done, and create the best, most comprehensive no fluff content out there.

    Phase 2: Content Promotion

    Now, you have a great piece of content. However, it is worthless if people don’t know it exists. You want to make sure people read it and talk about it.

    Here is how to get the buzz going around your article:

    • Share the link on social media.
    • Reach out to relevant connections and ask them to share your content.
    • Share your content in relevant subreddits. Appropriate subs are /r/marketing, /r/startups, /r/ content_marketing. Be careful to not outright dump your content though. Reddit users don’t like self-promotion. That might even result in a ban. Post the link as a comment whenever someone asks a relevant question that your content answers.
    • Run ads on Facebook, Twitter, and Quora.
    • Submit your article on Quuu Promote.
    • Reach out to people who wrote articles on a similar topic or linked a similar article.

    Strategy #3 – Promote Your Product with Partner Companies

    This strategy is straightforward: you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

    If there is a company out there whose product is complementary to yours, you might want to hit them up for a cross-promotion. For it to be a win-win situation, though, make sure you are at the same level in popularity and amount of users. And it goes without saying that competitors are off-limits.

    Here are three great ways to do cross-promotion:

    1. Product Feature Posts. You create an article featuring your partner’s product, and they feature your product in their article.
    2. Run Facebook Ads. Both you and your competitor can run ads targeting each other’s audiences.
    3. E-mail Users. Don’t want to go through the trouble of creating custom audiences? E-mail your users instead. Inform your audience about how the competitor’s product is complementary to yours (& why it’s the best).

    Strategy #4 – Create Viral Infographics

    Infographics are everywhere for a reason:

    People absolutely love them. They contain a large amount of information that is compiled and visually appealing.

    And the best part? Media companies love infographics. If you get one featured on different media, you can get a ton of traffic, brand awareness, and backlinks.

    For example, Noodle, an online platform aimed at teaching new skills to professionals, created an infographic to show how the need for data scientists is growing. The infographic then incentivized people to visit their website to learn more about how to get these in-demand skills.

    News outlets picked it up (probably by following Strategy #1) and the rest is history.

    Strategy #5 – Create SEO Content

    Want your content to rank on Google?

    Here’s how:

    Step 1: Decide on the keyword.

    SEO content is complicated.

    The articles you write for your blog should be dictated by keyword research (as opposed to what you think is good content).

    You have to search what people are looking for online and then create content based around that. You can do this by using free keyword research tools like Google Planner or Wordtracker.

    Let’s say you still operate an influencer marketing business. By running ‘influencer marketing’ in Wordtracker, you can get a good idea about what people are searching for.

    Decide on a relevant keyword that (1) describes a problem your SaaS is solving, and (2) people are searching for. In this case, ‘influencer marketing platform’ is searched by 1,752 people per month. You might want to write quality content on that.

    Step 2: Gather information about your keyword.

    Look up your keyword and take a look at what has already been written about it by the top rankers.

    So, you want to go through the top 5 ranked articles for ‘influencer marketing guide” and look for the information they all have in common.

    Make note of whatever is relevant. It will also give you an idea of what your article is supposed to look like.

    Step 3: Create an outline

    Borrow the most relevant information from the top sites and create an outline for how your article will look like.

    If your keyword is “influencer marketing platforms”, your outline should look something like this:

    • Describe what influencer marketing platforms are
    • Explain why influencer marketing platforms are important for growing brands
    • Create a ranked list of influencer marketing platforms
    • Name and functionality of the platform
    • A screenshot of the platform’s webpage
    • How the platform works
    • Why the platform is beneficial for its customers
    • Conclusion

    Step 4: Write the article & optimize for SEO

    By using the outline and all the borrowed information from competitors, you can now FINALLY write a killer article. You can do this yourself or by outsourcing it to a content writer.

    After your article is said and done, you can optimize it for SEO by following the guidelines of YoastSEO or RankMath.

    Conclusion

    Getting new users is good.

    Getting new users with spending any money on marketing is even better!

    We hope you found this guide useful and found some new ideas on how to market your SaaS business!

    Also Read:

  • 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
    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
    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
    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
    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
    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.

  • 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:

    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
    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
    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
    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
    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.

    Most Important Social Media Platforms for B2B Marketers (2017)
    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
    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:

    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.

  • How to Design Drip Email Campaign?

    An email drip campaign is a series of messages that are sent, or “dripped,” in a predefined order at a predefined interval.  Drip campaigns are commonly used to communicate to new subscribers or someone who made a purchase but didn’t join your email list yet, but you can use them at any time.
    Email drip campaigns are intimidating. They’re complicated, requiring you to create a bunch of content, write a bunch of emails, and then stitch it all together somehow.

    Drip Email Campaign
    Drip Email Campaign

    Now that we know what is drip email campaign, how do you actually map out a successful automated drip campaign? Turns out, it’s not as hard as it seems.

    Know more about drip email campaigns: Drip Email Campaign
    Also read: How to Track Customer Acquisition in SaaS?

    How to Set Up a Drip Campaign?

    Here are eight steps to keep in mind to create your first drip campaign — plus examples of how to target your audience, write your emails, tweak for best results and so on.

    Set up your objectives.

    You need to define your objectives to achieve your expected results. These objectives must be SMART, which is an abbreviation for the words — specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. Let’s break them down below:

    SMART objectives
    SMART objectives
    1. Specific: Be clear about what you want. Do you want to promote your products? Or, do you want to educate consumers with actionable advice? It’s time to plan and decide.
    2. Measurable: Create success metrics for your drip campaign. What is the click-through rate you want to achieve? How will you measure your conversions? By introducing target numbers in your objective, you can clearly define the level of success you want.
    3. Attainable: Are these objectives achievable for everyone in the team?
    4. Realistic: Nothing is impossible, but you have to be a bit realistic when it comes to your time and your resources. Are your objectives attainable based on the number of your subscribers, and the amount of time in your hands? Is the amount of work required for the campaign reasonable based on the number of marketers and designers in your team? While it’s great to be ambitious, you also need to be a bit realistic about your objectives.
    5. Timely: Set a time frame and schedule to make sure that your drip campaigns will stay on track.

    Your objectives should be based on your end goals. Do you feel that your leads only try the free trial and none of them end up buying a subscription? Try an email sequence that contains product tutorials to highlights its value and show users how they can benefit from it.
    Don’t forget to create SMART objectives. A lot of people set big goals only to fall short, because they don’t have a concrete plan to achieve what they want. So, it’s important to clearly define your goals from the start.

    Identify Your Target Audience

    Drip campaigns are all about breaking your subscriber list into subsections, and targeting information to niches of customers. So, the most important piece here is determining which triggers and groups you’re going to use for your drip campaign strategy. But how do you segment your customers? Here are some ways you can get started.

    Segmentation of audience
    Segmentation of audience
    1. Demographics
      Demographics contain basic information like age, gender, location and job. It’s pretty obvious, but failure to use this data may lead to disastrous emails. For instance, let’s say you’re in the business of selling shoes. Without segmenting your emails based on genders, you may send emails promoting high heels to males. This is a disaster and a complete turn-off to customers. No one wants to receive a message that’s obviously not meant for them.
      The good news is that by segmenting customers based on demographics, you never have to face this dilemma. In addition, you also send messages that are tailored to the needs of each customer.
    2. Actions
      You can also segment customers based on their behavior such as purchase, visit frequency, length of subscription and content. With the use of triggers, marketers can send emails based on products bought or the content users interacted with.
      For example:
    • A user subscribes to your company newsletter, and you send them a welcome email via your drip campaign
    • A user makes a purchase, and you automatically send them a receipt with shipping information (plus a few up-sells)
    • A user downloads the trial version of your app, and you send them a series of six instructional emails over the course of the trial, which offer helpful tips on making the most of your app.

    Visualize your end goal

    Step back and think about what action you want qualified leads to take. Ultimately, we want to get on the phone with these top-tier leads to not only try to make a sale, but to also explore possible partnerships and discuss their current challenges. Your action might be a purchase, a download, or a demo; regardless, make sure the desired action is clear.
    By the time users reach the end of the drip campaign, they should have a clear picture of their unique problems, how you can help them solve them, and how exactly you can work together. Ideally, when our customers are ready to buy, they have a good understanding of content marketing and its long-term commitment. Eliminate as many surprises beforehand by working backward from your end goal.

    Determine Frequency of Your Drip Campaign

    Next, think about the frequency of your emails. Let’s say, your drip campaigns is about a course on a specific skill. You can space these emails out for two to three days each — rather than 7 or 14 days apart. This way, your viewers will easily recall what the email is about. The rules of how often you should send an email isn’t set in stone. So, if you’re in doubt, test your results or ask your customers.
    Let’s say, you have an educational drip campaign about your product tutorials. Try to find out your open rates if you send tutorials every two days, five days and so on. Are customers more likely to open your email, if the previous one is still fresh from their minds? Check your analytics to find out.

    Determine Your Email Sequence

    Next, it’s time to determine your email sequence. The sequence of your email campaign should be in sync with your objectives. What do you want your users to achieve by the end of the drip campaign? Will these emails help them achieve it?
    The emails you send should serve as a customer’s path to achieving your objective. As for how many emails you’ll send, you can go with as low as five emails and a maximum of ten emails, but there’s really no limit. Just don’t go overboard! Simply send enough emails to get your message across.

    Create Irresistible Subject Lines

    How do you write an email that gets read? It all begins with an irresistible subject line. Here are some tips:

    • Keep It Short
    • Add a Personal Touch
    • Be witty
    • Use a Call-to-Action

    Select your content and create the campaigns.

    Now that you know whom you’re targeting, you need to generate a message that’s helpful and grabs their attention. What do you want the user to do? Or, what do you want the user to learn? When it comes to selecting content, it all goes back to where your lead’s focus currently resides and how close he/she is to making a decision. For those who aren’t purchase-ready, include blog posts and other content covering a variety of questions and concerns. These readers aren’t ready to jump on a call about budgeting, targeting, and possible solutions — they’re just testing the water, and it might be too cold.
    Based on your answer, write copy that’s clear, actionable, and attractive. Maintain the voice that you’ve built for you brand, but make sure that your message is clear. To move qualified leads closer to a buying decision, focus on content that digs deep. Think whitepapers, case studies, and demos that clearly highlight your understanding of their problems — and how you can be the solution.

    Here are some phrases you can use to create an actionable email:

    • Shop now, Share, Get social, Spread the word

    Combine this with phrases related with time to create a sense of urgency:

    • Only [number] days left, today only, Limited-time, offer ends at [time], Sale ends at [time]

    Automate your emails.

    Once you’ve decided on a strategy, start sending. To do this, you can either implement your own custom drip software or buy an off-the-shelf product that’ll have you up and running in minutes. Once your content is ready, it’s time to let your marketing automation solution take care of the heavy lifting. The content you’ve selected — blog posts, external articles, whitepapers, case studies, etc. — that covers the basics should be delivered at a routine pace.

    Drip Email Tools
    Drip Email Tools

    For those leads at the bottom of the funnel, we utilize content to address questions and objections that might slow down a potential sale. These emails are best delivered via triggers, like link clicks, open rates, or lead qualification. As leads approach the decision-making part of the process, they’ll need answers quicker; match that pace, or you’ll lose their interest.
    Ultimately, developing a drip campaign isn’t a plug-and-play method to maximize sales. Rather, it’s a powerful tool to create prepared customers. Put in the work, and your drip campaign will result in a flood of new business.

    Evaluate and Adjust

    Just because your drip campaign is automated doesn’t mean you can let it run unsupervised. You spent a bunch of time researching user segments, and it’s important to readjust those segments and your strategy based on the results.

    Evaluate, adjust and repeat
    Evaluate, adjust and repeat

    If you aren’t getting as many clickthroughs as you want, try rewriting your calls to action; if you aren’t meeting your conversion rate goals with your sale-closing email, try more educational communications before asking any user to pull the trigger.
    Evaluate, adjust, repeat.

    Conclusion

    Drip email campaigns are of great help when it comes to getting users and popularizing your idea/product. Though, different strategies may work for different companies and products, we have given some basic steps that anyone can follow to create a successful drip campaign. Just follow the steps and tweak the details according to your needs. If you have some other tips, please let us know in the comments section.

  • What is Drip Email Campaign?

    Whether you’ve been using email marketing automation for years, or have just started to dip your toes in, you’ve probably come across the concept of “drip campaigns”. Email drip campaigns are intimidating. They’re complicated, requiring you to create a bunch of content, write a bunch of emails, and then stitch it all together somehow.

    What is an Email Drip Campaign?

    An email drip campaign is a series of messages that are sent, or “dripped,” in a predefined order at a predefined interval. So, for example, if someone joins your email list, they receive Email #1 upon signup, Email #2 three days later, Email #3 five days after they join, and so on.

    Must read: How to validate your SaaS idea before building an MVP?
    Relevant read: How to Track Customer Acquisition in SaaS?

    The primary goal of an email drip marketing campaign is to attract the right subscribers. And send subscribers highly relevant emails that encourage them to commit to your call to action. Even though these are automated emails, they can be personalized with your contacts’ name, company info, customer behavior, and more.
    Automated email drip campaigns have been proven to perform better toward reaching your business objectives, for example:

    1. To effectively nurture your leads,
    2. Communicate regularly with your customers,
    3. Increase sales or
    4. Re-engage lost customers in a scalable way.

    Drip campaigns are commonly used to communicate to new subscribers or someone who made a purchase but didn’t join your email list yet, but you can use them at any time.

    What makes a drip campaign successful?

    To create an effective email drip campaign, first, you need to pinpoint your pain:

    • Do you need more checkouts?
    • Drive back to your website your one-off website visitors?
    • Do you need to increase engagement among your existing subscribers?
    • Or onboard users smoothly so that they set up their accounts and start using your service?

    All of these can be automated via the right drip campaign!
    The secret to creating the perfect drip is to revisit it along the way; feed your insights and results into your existing drips and customize them accordingly.

    Relevant read: Essential Tips for Marketing Your Business to Boost Profitability
    Important read: Challenges Faced by SaaS startups

    Common Types of Drip Campaigns

    A drip email campaign is a primary nurturing/communication channel with your prospects and customers. Let’s look into how most common drip email campaigns are structured.

    Welcoming

    You did a great job at marketing your product, and you’ve gotten a lot of users to subscribe to your newsletters or sign-up to learn more about it. But how do you turn these new users into actual customers? How do you get them to try your product? Why should they be interested on what you have to offer?
    That’s where welcome emails shine — they introduce users to your products and highlight what you have to offer.

    Welcome campaign
    Welcome campaign

    Since the goal of a welcome email campaign is to deliver the first unit of value (aka the ‘Aha’ moment), you can stop this series of emails at any time when user becomes an ‘active user’. At this point, prospects understand your product value proposition and the next step is to teach them how to get maximum value from your product

    GETU's Welcome Email
    GETU’s Welcome Email

    GE Learning Technology (GETU)’s welcome email begins with a clear introduction of its business and benefits outlined in bold, followed by a video that provides a more in-depth explanation of its services.

    User Onboarding

    If welcome drip campaigns introduce your customers to your business, then onboarding campaigns are here to make them stay. They’re useful to software companies who encourage users to try their free trial first.

    User Onboarding
    User Onboarding

    For example, if a user submits a registration form to create an account on LinkedIn, he/she will receive a welcome email. If the user never comes back, he/she will receive a series of welcome emails to encourage them to come back. On the other hand, if a prospect has registered to LinkedIn and started using it but hasn’t completed their profile details, then LinkedIn’s user onboarding emails will be sent. These explain why and how providing more profile information can enrich a user’s LinkedIn experience.

    box's user onboarding email
    box’s user onboarding email

    Cloud storage app Box employs drip campaigns to teach people how to use their product.

    Also read: Bootstrapping SaaS Startups
    Relevant read: Email writing for Engagement stage

    Nurturing Leads

    Some users need a little push, or nurturing — engaging promotions until they’re ready to buy your product. As a result, most businesses nurture their leads by offering emails with links to relevant content such as newsletters and webinars.

    Nurturing Leads
    Nurturing Leads

    Prospects don’t always come through your free trial gate. Downloading a marketing asset, such as a whitepaper, industry research, case study or signing up to a webinar is another way to start a communication process with a prospect.

    Zapier's email
    Zapier’s email

    Zapier sends new users a nurturing drip email to help them brainstorm automation ideas.

    Product Engagement

    Product engagement campaigns are essential to a SaaS company with a freemium business model. Companies that use freemium models need to ensure that customers who aren’t paying for the product right now are engaged and increasingly use the product.

    Product Engagement
    Product Engagement

    The math here is pretty simple: the more often someone engages with your site, the more likely they are to convert into a paying customer. Engagement emails are a type of drip campaign that invite the recipient to return to your site and look around, triggered either by some on-site activity or a general lack of activity.
    Social sites are a great example of how to use activity-based triggers. If someone on Twitter mentions you in a tweet, Twitter can send you an alert-style email, encouraging you to visit Twitter and respond.
    But it doesn’t have to be just happy feelings; guilt can work as well. If you don’t log an activity in fitness app RunKeeper for a while, they’ll send an automated “We miss you!” email. It’s a subtle way to remind you that you should work out, combined with a touch of nostalgia for the app they hope you’ll use while exercising.

    RunKeeper's email
    RunKeeper’s email

    RunKeeper sends users who have not logged a workout in a while a re-engagement drip email.

    Promotional Drip Campaigns

    Promotional emails are used to upsell, promote and inform customers about limited-time promotions, special offers, new products and discounts.
    “You might also like” isn’t just for Netflix bingeing—recommendation engines are a cornerstone of nearly every giant online retailer. The more a company knows about you and your buying habits, the better they can predict what you will and won’t like. With that info, they can send you targeted drip emails that contain products or coupons specific to your purchasing tendencies.

    Jaybird's Promotional Email
    Jaybird’s Promotional Email

    Jaybird’s email which introduces its wireless headphones is one good example.

    Relevant read: How to Set Pricing for Your SaaS Product?
      8 Ways to Toggle SaaS Customer Retention

    Confirmations

    You’ve closed the sale, or better yet, convinced a user to stick with your product for another year with a renewed subscription. But your drip email work isn’t done. You can also use a drip campaign to confirm your user’s purchase renewal—just set up a “thank you” auto-responder that goes out right after they hit the “purchase” button. In that confirmation drip, you could include some links to your product’s newest features to re-engage them with your brand.

    Confirmation email
    Confirmation email

    Fairfield uses drip campaigns to confirm user reservations, and show off some of the hotel amenities.

    It should be a no-brainer to send your users an email receipt after they make a purchase, but you can also leverage that communication with related products and upsells. And with confirmations for things like plane tickets and hotel rooms, send a quick email a day before the event to put any important confirmation codes at the top of the user’s inbox. Then, perhaps, that same drip can send another email a few days later, asking them to review your product or service and offer a coupon for future purchases.

    Conclusion

    In this article, we have seen what is drip email campaign and learnt about different types of drip email campaigns. If used correctly, drip email campaign strategy can be of great value to the marketing and growth of your company. With drip email campaigns, you will be able to get the right subscribers, nurture your leads, increase sales and/or re-engage lost customers.
    So, apply the suitable drip email campaign strategy right now, and get started. Let us know your views in the comment section.

    Also read: How to Design Drip Email Campaign?

  • How to Improve Landing Page Conversion?

    Landing Page is an opportunity for the company to tell the most important thing about their products and services within a few seconds, and for a potential client – to make sure that it has hit “bulls eye”. Besides, it is a powerful tool for converting traffic and generating leads. The complexity of the task increases many times if you make a website that works as a web service that offers an access to software through the Internet (Software as a Service).

    Software Conversion Rates
    Software conversion rates

    Research shows that the average conversion rate for SaaS industry sits around 7%. If your website converts at 7% or higher, you’re doing great. However, if your SaaS website is converting at a rate less than 7%, you need to improve it. To create a high-performing landing page, you need to understand your target audience and design the right sections to communicate your value in a compelling way.
    In this post, we’ll go over 10 landing page sections that help web pages generate more leads.

    Also read: 8 Ways to Toggle SaaS Customer Retention
    Must read: How to track customer acquisition in SaaS?

    Define your goal

    Before you can promote your brand or product to new visitors, you need to define your business goals. Are you looking to generate brand awareness, boost sales for enterprise customers, build an email list from lead generation techniques, or educate your audience in some way?
    Each type of goal falls into one of 3 objectives:

    • Awareness
    • Engagement
    • Conversion

    You should determine what outcome you’re looking for before you start designing your page. Because the goal you set will help you determine what type of page you need to build.

    Identify your target audience

    Before you start creating your landing page, you need to understand who your target audience is. Every audience has different characteristics and will need a different approach in order to increase conversion rates. You ultimately need to have “high relevance,” which means you are successfully positioning your page to a specific customer persona. That is: speaking to their pain points, needs, and viewpoints.

    Important elements your landing page needs

    The hero

    According to reports, people often leave web pages within 10-20 seconds of visiting. However, if you can clearly communicate your value proposition, and connect to the reader, you’ll likely convert them from “first impression” to “scrolling the page” to learn more.
    The hero section is one most important sections of your site. It’s where you’ll have the opportunity to grab your visitor’s attention and tell them precisely 4 things:

    1. What you do
    2. Why you’re different
    3. What the key benefits are
    4. How to get started

    This is also where the visitor will most likely complete a conversion — or not. This depends on the visitor’s goal and how well your call-to-action responds. That might include informing them of specific results they could find by entering a search or updates they’ll receive after entering their email. Without having a way for visitors to complete a conversion, you’ll miss the opportunity to make effective optimizations to your page.

    Airbnb hero section
    Airbnb hero section

    Airbnb has a simple hero section on their homepage which gives the visitor a clear understanding of what their core value proposition is and how to get started with the service.

    Relevant read: Kapture CRM
    Must read: Challenges Faced by SaaS startups

    Offer decides everything

    The first thing that strikes the visitor of a landing page is a heading. It should be made in a beautiful large font, while its content marketing is crucial for SaaS companies. The essence of the title is an offer or a unique trade proposal.
    How do you differ from your competitors? What will be valuable to your client? The answer to these questions also gives the offer. Clear, concise, convincing. According to the results of numerous studies, it takes 5 sec for Internet users to decide whether to stay on the page or to leave.
    Ideally, the visitor’s reaction should be like: “I finally found it!” The minimum task is to scroll the page to an end.
    Here are examples of value propositions from the practice of several SaaS companies:

    Salesforce home page
    Salesforce home page
    Autopilot home page
    Autopilot home page

    A bad example: “We will acquire customers via Google Adwords.” The proposal is specific, with a hint of benefit (we’ll bring customers), but it’s painfully standard. No uniqueness.
    A better variant: “Setting up Google Adwords with a conversion rate of 4%. Or we return the money.” The value of this offer is the guarantee of a specific result (4% conversion rate) with the condition of a refund. Perhaps, for a given niche, a more accurate offer cannot be invented.

    Also read: How to Set Pricing for Your SaaS Product?
    Important read: How to validate your SaaS idea before building an MVP?

    The signup form

    Without leads, you don’t have a business. After you’ve built some initial trust with the visitor, it’s time to ask them to take action and sign up. In the early stages of the customer journey, you might decide to collect information about your visitors to enter them into a process known as “qualification”. This is where you’ll explore specific attributes about the lead to see if they are actually a good fit for your business.
    To boost your sign-up conversion rate, you’ll want to offer some form of incentive to the visitor. What sort of value can you give away for free? A lot of marketers will create “lead magnets” with CTA buttons that are positioned to incentivize visitors to sign up for things like a free trial, eBook, checklist, or case study.

    Webflow
    Webflow signup section

    Webflow has a simple signup section on their landing pages that speaks directly to the price-conscious visitor who wants to test the product before they buy.

    Speak about the client, not about yourself

    Put yourself in client’s shoes. What would they like to receive using your product?
    Landings with high conversion are not focused only on the characteristics of the company or product, but also on the benefits of the client. Many pages use blocks such as About Us, Our Advantages, Why Choose Us, How We Work.
    In approximately this way:

    Speak about the client
    Speak about the client

    It is often enough to change the title “Why choose us” to “What you get”, “How to help you”. The feeling is completely different. Remember that the buyers, in the long run, do not care about your achievements. They want to satisfy their need.

    Develop segmented email drip campaigns

    The reality is that 40-60% of your users will sign up for your SaaS product, use it once and never come back. Or they will buy a subscription, but you might struggle with cash flow over the next several years. It cost so much to acquire a customer, but you receive only a small amount of revenue on a monthly basis.
    WP Engine sent letters to their customers to get them to upgrade to the yearly plan. This was phenomenally successful for them and improved their signups.

    One of the emails WordPress sent to their subscribers to up sell them the yearly plan
    One of the emails WordPress sent to their subscribers to up sell them the yearly plan

    They send a series of highly targeted, plain-text emails to their customers asking them to upgrade. The intent of your email drip campaign is to move your customers up the marketing funnel.
    To collect data, you can send an email to subscribers asking for more information. Or, when you get new users to sign up through the landing page, ask them to pick an option that tells you more about them (for example, whether they have used a product like yours before, or the size of their company).

    Know more about startups, read: List of Top Mutual Fund Startups
    Relevant read: Email writing for Engagement stage

    Use only real reviews

    One of the best ways to tell a story on your landing page is to provide testimonials from real people who have benefited from your product. Share their unique situation, the problem they faced, and how they overcame it with your solution. The goal here is to inspire your visitors with stories of your past customers. These are real people, sharing real experiences, which your visitors should be able to relate to.

    A good example of client’s review.
    A good example of client’s review.

    Google AdSense provides a simple photo of a customer and includes a link to a video to learn more. This is a great way to cross-promote your YouTube channel or other social media by telling the same story through a different medium.

    Google Adsense
    Google AdSense

    Work on CTA

    A major part of your landing page that drives conversions is a Call-to-Action (CTA). A CTA makes visitors click. It persuades them to take action. It tells them what they’re supposed to do (next). Make CTA prominent so visitors can easily find it and take action. Make it clutter-free.
    Here are few CTA best practices that will help you improve conversion rate:

    • Move it above-the-fold. It can increase conversion rate by 20%.
    • Make sure your landing page has one CTA. Don’t confuse visitors with multiple CTAs.
    • Make it benefit-driven.
    • Keep it short and clean.
    Bad CTA vs Good CTA
    Bad CTA vs Good CTA

    Here is an example on how making CTA button prominent increased conversion rate by 357%.

    Relevant read: The Pros and Cons Of Becoming a Freelancer
    Two minute read: All You Need to Know About BankBazaar

    The pricing section

    One of the biggest objections that new leads will have as they near the closing stage of the buying cycle is price. If you are in the SaaS or eCommerce industry, you’ll save yourself a lot of time by handling those objections up-front.
    Including a clear, transparent pricing section can help break down the specs for those visitors who are ready to buy. Even if they still have a few lingering questions, you should be able to get a conversion — if you detail exactly what they’re paying for.
    Drift includes a clear two-tier pricing section which shows exactly what features you get on each tier. You can see the monthly prices for each tier and make a decision about whether you need more or fewer features.

    Drift pricing section
    Drift pricing section

    Typeform adds an additional option for leads to set the billing interval before they commit to a price. For example, if you wanted to pay for a monthly Pro+ plan on an annual contract with 1 or more users, you’d pay 59 Euro per month.

    Typeform
    Typeform pricing section

    Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

    Even with all the descriptions, demos, visual storytelling, and social proof, people will still have questions and objections to buying. They might have a unique problem they’re not sure you can solve. They might just want to learn more about the product in action. The FAQ section provides a straightforward way to handle these objections directly. Think of this section as a poll. Over time, the questions that continue to come in become the perfect candidates for the FAQ.
    Lyft shows a set of common questions about their self-driving project. You can click into each question to read the answer. This helps handle common objections about Lyft’s self-driving car project and makes it easy to see every question clearly.

    Lyft's FAQ Section
    Lyft’s FAQ Section

    As an often-overlooked section, the footer can be a great place to instill a sense of security and trust in your visitors. One important aspect of your landing page to always include is a Privacy Policy and a Terms and Conditions page. If you’re an international company, you can also include a language select menu to translate the site.
    “Make no mistake,” executives will scroll to the bottom of your start-up’s page to look at your Privacy Policy and evaluate the legal implications before they decide to sign up. This is a subtle optimization which can help you boost your credibility and professionalism.
    Slack has a well-optimized footer section including all the links a visitor might need. This section helps visitors build additional trust and feel in control of the page.

    Slack footer
    Slack footer 

    Conclusion

    • Focus on getting people to convert from the free trial to paid users, as much as you focus on getting website visitors into your trial
    • Show, don’t tell. Use images, screenshots, charts, videos and other visuals to reinforce your copy and show visitors how your software solve their problems.
    • Continuously sell the outcome and the benefits that come with using your software instead of focusing on the features.

    I hope these 10 tips will help you increase SaaS conversion rate. While implementing these tactics will help, you’ll have to test and tweak to get better. There is no end to improvement. There is always room to get better.
    Let’s grow your SaaS company. Which one of the trick worked best for you? Please tell us in the comments section.

  • Email writing for Engagement stage

    For all the advances in technology we’ve witnessed over the last two decades, the business world still runs on email.
    You don’t even need to cherry pick the statistics. Email wins across virtually every metric:

    1. Email marketing drives more conversions than any other marketing channel, including search and social. – Monetate
    2. Email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter. – McKinsey
    3. Email subscribers are 3 times more likely to share your content via social media than visitors from other sources. – QuickSprout
    4. 72% people prefer to receive promotional content through email, compared to 17% who prefer social media. – MarketingSherpa
    5. 4.24% of visitors from email marketing buy something as compared to 2.49% of visitors from search engines and 0.59% from social media. – Monetate

    Also read: Must-Read Startup Books For Students
    Relevant read: How to Track Customer Acquisition in SaaS?

    But like with anything worth doing, effective email marketing requires some persistence and attention to detail. You need to know when and what to send and you have to take advantage of every opportunity. It can be especially tough to choose the most important action for new users to take. Often though, there’s one step that’s absolutely necessary for people to ever realize any success in a product or service.
    Now, we will look at some of the emails from which you can learn.

    So, Let’s get started!

    Filepicker.io activation email

    Filepicker, a file management service for apps, has an activation email that starts right after their welcome and encourages new users to upload their first file. That’s the first behavioral conversion goal.

    Filepicker.io email example
    Filepicker.io email example

    As Bethany Stachenfeld who manages online sales and marketing at the company explained: “If users haven’t uploaded a file, then there’s no way that they’re actually using Filepicker.” Once people upload a file, they receive the next email campaign explaining more advanced features.
    The progression of emails is important. Director of Customer Success Joseph Palumbo adds, “The goal of these emails is to have people experience how simple it is to integrate our product and have that first experience set the bar for using the rest of our framework.”

    Also read: Netmeds: India’s Online Pharmacy
    Important read: Challenges Faced by SaaS startups

    SaneBox onboarding email

    SaneBox, an email management tool that works in every inbox, triggers an activation email if you haven’t used a key feature. The subject line — “The most important feature you’re not using – SaneBlackHole” — adds urgency and FOMO to get the most out of the app.

    Sanebox onboarding email
    Sanebox onboarding email

    Giving a heads up to new users that they can now unsubscribe from any email without leaving the inbox — while making sure to target only those people who haven’t used the feature yet — helps activation without annoying people who have already taken this step.

    Also read: Top 10 Youngest Entrepreneurs of India
    Relevant read: How to validate your SaaS idea before building an MVP?

    Dropbox

    Dropbox, a file hosting service, is another SaaS company that has a great email marketing strategy. They have so called “friendly reminder” emails that are simple, cute and personalized. First of all, they have a cute charming header cartoon that quickly draws the reader’s attention. Secondly, for more personalization, they greet recipient by their first name. Finally, the body of the text is straight to the point: it asks the recipient to download the software and reminds about the main benefits they might get.

    Dropbox email example
    Dropbox email example

    Their primary CTA is also used straight to the point: they just ask the reader to “Download Dropbox here”. Though the usual rule of thumb is to make CTAs brighter and more eye-catching, in this case the CTA makes the transition from reading the email to downloading the software more fluid.

    Also read: SimplyGuest – Find the Best Housing Solutions

    Conclusion

    What you can learn: The three main things you need to include in your email are:

    • What: the purpose of the email
    • Why: the benefits of the software
    • How: the way users can get the software

    The success of email marketing is ultimately in the follow up.
    In this article, I’ve tried to cover scenarios in the engagement stage your business will likely face but in an evolving marketplace, there will always be new opportunities for follow up.

    Please comment below your ideas to follow up in the engagement stage.