An established SaaS company can achieve growth in many ways. They could retain more customers, increase prices, or reduce churn rate either.
But as a startup, you just only have one option: “to acquire more customers“.
However, the problem is that you might not have a clear path of how to do it, right?
That is exactly what I have explained with some proven strategies.
Through this post, we will show you the top 5 customer acquisition strategies that will boost your SaaS growth.
Intrigued? Then let’s do it.
Defining Acquisition:
Before making a deep dive into the techniques, let’s make something clear;
“Customer acquisition has nothing to do with generating new users.“
But the acquisition is a process of bringing new visitors to your application and helping them to sign up.
Without new signups, you’d have no one to try to convert into a user, and retaining them as a paying customer.
However, customer acquisition is the most important part of the SaaS growth process.
“To ensure that customers go through the funnel stages (to Revenue), you have to make sure that there are enough customers at the top of the funnel. Without those customers, there will be no customers at the end.”
(Source – incisive-edge.com)
The above graph described this point quite well. TO generate the average conversion rates at each stage, you need to acquire a large number of incoming visitors to paying users.
Now, let’s take a look at some customer acquisition strategies or techniques to grow your SaaS business.
Verify Your Product & Its Market Fit:
Like other vendors, you also like to start acquiring the targeted users as early as possible, even if you don’t have a product ready.
And it is always crucial to acquire the first user for your application.
Acquiring the first users helps you validate your idea, and learn if you’re targeting the right customer pain point.
When you have a validated idea and achieved your product & its market fit, then you can switch you focus it to grow your SaaS application.
It refers to a situation of being “in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”
(Source – incisive-edge.com)
Pivoting a value proposition is relatively straightforward, and speaking in technical terms as well.
So, before you launch any strategy to attract new customers, ensure that you have validated your idea.
Develop Customer Personas:
It helps you design your products & campaigns that your target audience connects with. Preparing a customer persona also gives you detailed insights into your target audience, their behavior, their needs, etc.
But without buyer personas, it’s hard to know who your potential users are, and how you could reach them online.
Or figure out the best ways to attract them, at that.
For example, how can you create lead magnets that will attract new users to your list, without knowing their pain points relating to your product first?
Or discover channels that drive the most targeted traffic?
You see, buyer personas make it easy to attract the right type of web visitors. And that, in turn, makes customer acquisition a much simpler task.
(Source – incisive-edge.com)
Identify The Most-Targeted Traffic Sources:
We admit this strategy requires experimentation to get it right. But the benefits of going through the process are immense.
Because you see:
Not every traffic channel will deliver visitors who can convert.
In fact, often, channels you might consider a certainty flop.
A couple of years ago, Dan Norris did an experiment to assess his traffic sources. And as it turns out, sources he banked on, like Adwords or email brought hardly any results.
However, strategies like guest posting, being active on forums, social media, and Twitter auto follower strategy, delivered actual conversions.
(Source – incisive-edge.com)
Now, your best visitors might come from different channels. Perhaps SEO would work for you or maybe advertising your SaaS product on Facebook would drive the most signups.
It’s hard to tell without testing.
And so, to ensure that first, you get new customers, and secondly, acquire them at a relatively low cost, you have to identify your best channels.
Create Different Customer Acquisition Funnels:
Most of the time the website visitors do make the sign up on the homepage.
But many others will not even see it.
And yet, they could become users too.
For the most part, however, SaaS founders focus on a simple acquisition funnel that looks more or less like this (via Google Analytics):
They calculate that visitors on the website will notice the Sign-Up call to action, act through it, signing up for the free or version.
And then, through the onboarding and retention strategy, convert into paying customers.
And many do. However, a large group of your visitors may not yet be ready to create an account and start using your product.
As Elizabeth Yin points out in this article: (http://www.launchbit.com/blog/what-customer-acquisition-funnel-should-you-use-as-a-saas-company/)
“these days, the Saas market is becoming inundated with new Saas products. Nearly every Saas company has either a free trial or a free package, so free software no longer a unique factor that distinguishes your product from the competition. Professionals are no longer jumping at the opportunity to try every new free Saas tool that is on the market.”
And so, to acquire them, you’ll need to find another way to convince them to sign up.
For example, you could first target them with your lead generation strategies, then nurture them, and finally, entice to sign up at the time when they’re ready to do so.
Invest In Building Audience:
Nothing beats having an audience.
Just take a look at SaaS companies like Orangescrum, Wakeupsales CRM. They enjoy engaged audiences.
And although many of these people aren’t their customers (and maybe will never even sign up for a trial), they actively help them promote the app.
How? By sharing their content, for example, telling others about it, commenting on their blog posts, attending and promoting their webinars, and other events… The list goes on.
So, building a targeted audience for your SaaS application as early as possible.
But when building your audience, go beyond from just posting blogs on your blogging portal:
- Repost your content on other channels, like Medium or Linkedin. Many successful SaaS companies utilize this strategy to simultaneously initiate conversations with many audiences without having to produce original content for all of them.
- Repurpose your content into lead magnets and content upgrades and build a lead generation engine to fuel your secondary funnel (the one we talked about in the previous point).
- Target social media channels that you’d discount in B2B, like Pinterest, for example. You can hear Dustin Stout from Warfare Plugins sharing his experiences with less common social networks for B2B (and how they’ve become his top traffic sources) here.
Warping Words:
Last, not the least, be sure to always put your customer’s requirements first before applying the customer acquisition techniques. By focusing on the customer’s benefits and presenting the solutions to their queries would lead to more retention.
Keeping this in mind, and finding the best way to guide the visitors through the acquisition process with helpful involvement that comes at the right time and adds value to their experience. This will lead to much more success in the long term.
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