SaaS Market is booming now and SaaS Product has become the medium to reach users of your target market to generate revenue.
If you are working for a Software as a Service (SaaS) product, then there are chances that you’ve heard about “SaaS products sell themselves”.
However, this idea acts as a form of disservice to the hard work of SaaS sales and for the marketing teams.
Also, developing a Sales team and creating a foolproof sales strategy for the team to follow are one of the most important things that any SaaS company will do to ensure the growth and success.
(Source: solutelabs.com)
You have done some research and finally built it, which can be customizable according to the user’s requirement with an objective to generate online sales. Having a SaaS application is not the end to generate revenue; you need to market it well.
But before proceeding, let’s have a look at
What Is SaaS?
There are days, when old on-premises systems ask for much valuable storage space on the server, with the development of SaaS based systems, much advancement in the technology field was observed.
SaaS technology introduced the concepts of securing, remotely hosting, and managing the software.
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SaaS Technology plays an important part in everything that we do in our day today life, from how we listen to music to how we communicate.
In such a way, Software as A Service plays an important role in the growing subscription economy, delivering the software directly to the computer in a way that other subscription services are delivered with physical goods to your doorsteps.
It is expected, the Global SaaS market will reach $400 billion by 2025. In a scenario the Indian SaaS companies will fulfil 19% of the global SaaS demand.
So now, you might think or you may ask your marketing experts, “How to generate online sales or how can you increase your sales through SaaS product?”
Techniques like, content marketing, email marketing, SEO, link building and viral marketing can helps you to market your product and do so.
Here in this article I would like to share the major tips to increase the sales of your SaaS product, but before that let’s have a quick look at the experts’ advice,
Larry Kim – Founder of Word Stream
I’m really excited about Facebook and Twitter Ads because:
- People spend a ridiculous amount of time on social media.
- It’s cheaper to advertise on social media than on search.
- I can promote my best content and generate trials for my product.
Ben Sardella – Co-founder & CRO at Datanyze
A way to drive new leads and conversions is to deliver value during the visitors’ initial experience. This can come in many forms, but one of the most common is a freemium approach. At Datanyze, we have several freemium tactics:
- Free premium content – we invest a lot of time and effort delivering know-how from the best people in the space.
- Market-share data – we have valuable data that we give to researchers.
- Free browser-plugin – this puts the power of Datanyze into the hands of our typical users for free. It’s not a free trial, but yet a free tool that gives us a bottom up approach to infiltrating a potential customer.
Tom Gorski – Founder at SaaSGenius
In the SaaS industry, users come to making decisions by following specific patterns. Let me explain. It all starts with the Awareness stage, an initial point in which a customer comes in contact with your app. Although he or she wasn’t specifically looking for you, they may have come in contact with your product.
The process then moves to Consideration stage in which a user begins to consider whether to actually purchase a specific solution and then, researches what would be the best alternative.
This is the stage during which they will research your company, your app’s features but also seek out and read reviews and other social proof. Lastly, they purchase the selected solution. Therefore, it’s important that you get reviews from your users, because they will affect the purchase decision on your potential customers.
(Source: blog.omniconvert.com)
Tips To Increase Sales Of SaaS Product
1. Reduce Churn Rates:
One of the crucial metrics that you need to track as a SaaS company is churn rate. It expresses the percentage of customers that decided to leave your product during a specific period.
Churned Customers / Total Customers
With reduced Churn Rate Shows that the products are really valuable and that the lifetime value is more high. While discussing sales performance, you should not take the churn lightly and measure it according to the time that suits best.
Churn has become a major challenge that is faced by SaaS companies, and you need to address it, you have to benchmark the best rate of your business and implement the important tactics to attain it.
2. Allow Users To Use Free Trial Period:
Free trail is the standard way of selling SaaS Products. After launching, keep your sign up free and provide free trial period without keeping any restriction on the functionalities. People are spending more dollars latter after using the product as trial. But make sure to keep your trial period short, say 15 to 30 days.
Remember; never force your visitors to sign up free with credit card details. Remove credit card info from the sign up form. The chances of losing signup and conversion are high because visitors are not interested to share card info at the initial stage. Let’s have a look the comparison stata,
3. Focus More on Design And User Engagement:
Professional, simple looking and soothing colored UIs are preferable by visitors, otherwise visitors don’t find the site to the interesting and they leave. Ultimately, they abandon the cart.
So, give a simple look to your product and adopt three click rules. Three click rules are basically making things easier for visitors to reach right place with three clicks. Use more relevant and high resolution images for easy understanding and clear visibility.
Create some killer and catchy headings; Use different attention grabbing personal CTAs.
Make your product fully responsive, because more than 60% of online users are using Smartphone. Use multilingual feature, to be familiar with different regions target audience which you are focusing.
Make your page loading faster in terms of few second to have good visitor engagement and thereby increase in revenue.
Sites with 3 seconds loading time get 22% fewer page views, 22% lower conversions and a 50% higher bounce rate than sites with 1 second load times.
And sites with 5 or more seconds of loading time are worse. They get 35% less page views, 35% less conversions and 105% higher bounce rate.
Further research even shows that reducing page load time from 8 to 2 seconds can boost conversions by 74%. So always try to minimize the loading time as much as you can.
(Source: blog.omniconvert.com)
4. Get Connected With Emails:
Email is the most powerful gun to hit your target audiences in direct marketing. This also helps in generating high sales compared to organic search. So make an email list of your potential users/customers and send triggered emails to encourage subscription. Try to maximize your contact list and go for smart and personalized sales calls and do timely follow ups.
5. Adopt SEO And SMO:
Search engine optimization (SEO) plays a vital role in bringing visitors and prospective leads through keywords. So after the completion of design and development of the product, make that search engine friendly with suitable keywords and on page SEO. Your site needs to appear in organic search with your keywords.
Social Media Optimization (SMO) is the real viral marketing to reach millions of users on the web. Give some time in social engagement in top social media sites and participate in groups, forums and discussion to create a branding of your product. Paid social media advertising is expensive but also can boost sales.
6. A/B Testing Your Key Pages:
A/B testing is the conversion oriented analysis for rapid growth of your sales in your product’s existing traffic. You need to do regular testing of your major pages/ high traffic pages in Google Analytics to check your existing and new users’ activity. Go for setting funnels and try to find out the leak points of your page to modify accordingly.
It’s always easy to gather a huge amount of traffic through paid promotions and marketing but these are too expensive. Go for regular testing and analysis of pages to maximize your sales
7. Content Marketing:
Content marketing is the art of creating online content like blog, video, Infographic, eBooks, social postings and share them for user/reader awareness.
“Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
Quality content always educates your reader, reach more users, aware them about your product and create a brand name.
(Source: illuminationconsulting.com)
Blog, video and tutorial contents help in maximizing your sales. Through content marketing you can reach product influencers and earn their trust.
8. User Customer Testimonial And Online Reviews:
People may think negative or wonder when you talk about your products, but get convinced when they see testimonials. Testimonials are the feedback from the real users and this helps winning the trust of your potential customer.
“People influence people. Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising.”
– Mark Zuckerberg
You need to be very very careful on choosing the right one, because it should match your demographic, the occupation and the position of user and industry as well.
According to brightlocal consumer review in the year 2017, 97% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses and 85% of consumers trust online reviews as personal recommendations.
So, don’t forget to include testimonial and reviews on your product page.
9. Effective Communication And Excellent Customer Support Are Top Priorities
Communication is the key factor to represent your thoughts with others. Use the right words at the right time while you talk to the prospects to keep them engaged before any financial discussion. Be open in discussion with confidence and handle the queries thrown by your prospect and never forget to suggest the correct one.
Customer service is the lifeline of your online business. According to helpscout.net, 78% of consumers fail to purchase because of poor service. This is very bad, despite having a good product.
Most of the SaaS Companies focus towards the revenue from new prospects, rather than focusing on their existing users. But the truth is only 5-25% revenue can be generated from new and more than 80% revenue comes from renewals and up-sales.
So you need to give priorities to your customer support like free upgrade, product onsite training, quick response of queries and sharing support documents through which users can understand the details quickly.
10. Use Secured Hosting:
As all web hosting’s are developed equally and hosting vulnerabilities will create chances of getting your WordPress websites being hacked easily.
I’ve worked with the team at Andolasoft on multiple websites. They are professional, responsive, & easy to work with. I’ve had great experiences & would recommend their services to anyone.
Ruthie Miller, Sr. Mktg. Specialist
Salesforce, Houston, Texas
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When choosing the web hosting provider, you don’t go for the cheapest one that you find. Go for research and make sure to use a well established company with a good tracking record for strong security measures.
Related Blog : 6 Basic & Easy Tips For Never Losing Your SaaS Customers
Conclusion:
These are the most necessary tips to improve the sales of your SaaS product. Besides these you need to do regular optimization, analysis of your product and also analyse your competitor’s activities with keeping in mind your target users.
As a SaaS product development company, Andolasoft has two award winning products like Orangescrum– Project Management application and Wakeupsales– a CRM tool, why don’t try these now?
However, if you want to develop your SaaS tools you can contact us, at Andolasoft our expert developers will help you in developing your SaaS based product.
Are you interested to discuss more about your SaaS Product? Consult now
