Tag: SaaS solutions

How To Evolve Your Saas Business In Upcoming Year

Posted on by Jay

The changing environment and the growing digitization have become the primary disruptive factors in the market. And with that, it is challenging task for companies to make their SaaS offerings stand out from the others.

This is not just about in this year. The SaaS model has evolved over the past 12 years.

The rise of cloud-based software has helped to redefine the enterprise workplace, unleashing truly mobile and collaborative workforce and new customer-facing interactions.

 

 “Most of all, I discovered that in order to succeed with a product you must truly get to know your customers and build something for them.”

– Marc Benioff

It’s also democratized IT management and stimulated a shift in technology adoption that’s transformed the way companies buy and consume products and services.

Moving beyond, the SaaS global market looks to continue with fast-paced growth.

According to Gartner, public cloud services alone are set to increase by 17% around the world to $266.4 billion in 2020.

Never miss an update from us. Join 10,000+ marketers and leaders.

Meanwhile, the integration of AI with SaaS platforms looks set to propel an additional market expansion, as more and more enterprises seize the opportunities on offer to cost-effectively automate internal operations, boost productivity, and speed up delivery of personalized services.

SaaS Growth Statistics - Statista
Image Source: Statista

This could sound good to the entrepreneurs who are considering to enter the As-A-Service (AAS), as well as the existing vendors preparing to update and evolve their SaaS offering

Standing Out In A Crowded Marketplace

More than two-thirds of companies operating in the SaaS space today were formed in this last decade. And the number of new entrants also continues to increase.

With a growing number of organizations looking to benefit from the reduced costs, scalability, and convenience offered by SaaS, it’s no surprise that new market entrants are keen to capitalize on the burgeoning opportunities.

Building a strong customer relationship can be leveraged for standing out from the crowd. It will identify value-added transactions and unroll service offerings in line with changing business requirements.

This is especially relevant where private equity firms are acquiring multiple MSPs, rolling them up together, and then reducing pricing to capture market share.

This puts pricing pressure on independent MSPs, and suddenly it becomes a race to the bottom.

What’s needed is a laser-like focusing on differentiating with the best customer experience.

Actively communicate your feature changes and improvements through regular updates that ensure customers recognize you’re responsive to their evolving needs.

Staying close to customers through regular account reviews will also generate opportunities to deliver strategic consultancy and impart in-depth knowledge that improves their operations.

Finally, utilize BI and analytics to reinvent your pricing models. Tailoring pricing to individual customers will further demonstrate the truly collaborative nature of your relationship and discourage any temptation to consider switching providers.

Deliver Seamless Customer Experiences

“Every step of your customer’s journey, from first sales interaction to on-boarding and ongoing support, needs to be easy and seamless to navigate”.

Because

“if you’re not delivering a holistic service that is responsive, accurate, and timely, no customer will commit to a long term relationship”.

User Experience

An effective on-boarding process that is manageable, intuitive, and interactive should include actional walk-throughs of key features and functionality.

You will also need to provide a help center and additional resources, plus a checklist for users to work through.
Utilizing the professional service automation (PSA) and RMM (remote monitoring and management) tools will help ensure you’re able to gain complete visibility and control of your customers’ environments and can institute process improvements to serve them better.

From automating routine tasks to enabling accurate billing, the effective management of support issues, and keeping track of SLA performance, customer satisfaction depends upon your ability to deliver more than just promises.

Scalable Service For All Industries

Ensure your product can be easily integrated with the customer’s platform. It will make it easier for users to augment their internal processes with your services and products.

In recent years there’s been a growing trend towards SaaS companies moving away from delivering a broad range of business functions and focusing instead on the delivery of vertical-specific software solutions built for clear industry niches.

Focused on the concept of customer success, these solutions often incorporate industry-specific data governance capabilities and tailored features that can be easily adapted to the demands of the user base.

Providing opportunities to create new ecosystems, featuring partner organizations, moving into the delivery of vertical SaaS platforms opens the door to co-marketing opportunities and the incorporation of new technology features through the utilization of APIs.

Refresh Your Approach To Marketing

Delivering content that meets the needs of prospective and existing customers is the key to retaining your market position and becoming a recognized industry leader.

From content marketing that showcases your expertise and builds brand awareness to adopting good digital marketing tactics designed to boost audiences in a wider range of geographies, aligning your marketing activities and messages to specific buyer personas will yield positive outcomes for your business.

By keeping your finger on the pulse of the current challenges customers in your target market are facing, you will be able to refine your offering and educate current and potential customers on how your solutions solve their problem.

To build ‘stickiness’, initiate portals that enable customers to share successes and best practice with peers, gain access to subject matter experts, and acquire new knowledge.

Indeed, building a user-group community is once again becoming central to initiating stronger customer bonds and more informed relationship strategies that generate value-add for everyone involved.

You’re probably already familiar with the often-stated stat that acquiring a new customer is up to seven times more expensive than retaining an existing one. But there’s one instance where that isn’t true: customer referrals.

By creating a simple, rewarding referral program, you can turn your best customers into your most vocal and passionate fans.

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

LEARN MORE

In doing so, you not only increase the return on investment from every customer, but you can grow your client base without increasing your marketing spend.

And since everyone involved gets something out of it, referrals can increase customer satisfaction, too.

Warping Words:

Today’s customers want to have personal relationships with the companies they do business with.

To thrive and survive in an increasingly competitive landscape, SaaS businesses must strive to cultivate strong, collaborative, and strategic relationships that are personalized to every client.

That means delivering clearer communications, one-to-one check-ins, and better, more timely, insights.

Ultimately, unifying personalized solutions with technological innovations and consistent service delivery that demonstrates you’re paying attention will be the key to maintaining your position in a market that’s characterized by constant disruption.

Want to evolve your SaaS product? Let’s discuss.

How To Achieve SaaS Growth Through Customer Acquisition Techniques

Posted on by Jay

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.”

Defining Acquisition

(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.”

Verify Your Product & Its Market Fit

(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.

Develop Customer Personas

(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.

Identify The Most-Targeted Traffic Sources
(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.

Have an awesome SaaS idea, but not sure about the techniques and developing the strategies? Let’s Discuss!

How To Overcome From B2B SaaS Marketing Challenges

Posted on by Jay

B2B SaaS marketing is always tougher than customer marketing. And we are not saying that marketing to consumers is easy, but it is more traditional.

Anyone who works in the B2B segment knows that the industry creates its own sets of constant challenges. However, in the B2C industry, the marketing takes place with the customer, the sales cycle is smaller whereas in the B2B SaaS marketing, the sales cycle is quite prolonged. Mostly if you target smaller groups with higher priced products.

The list of challenges for SaaS marketing is much longer and pretty complicated. You need to understand not only about your product and services but also about your customer industries. It is important to create a good rapport and empathy with your customers, without these two factors your business can surely fail.

Whether you’re racing to market with a brand new offering, gaining a foothold and trying to scale, or firmly established and trying to improve performance, there’s no shortage of challenges SaaS businesses inevitably face.

Never miss an update from us. Join 10,000+ marketers and leaders.

Still, not selling a physical product already possesses its own challenge and this is not familiar to many people as well. Not to mention, SaaS marketing can be very demanding, where not only growth but also it is more required for a successful business.

What Is SaaS Marketing:

Let’s start with the theory of SaaS first. SaaS or Software as a Service provides users the ability to connect and use the cloud-based application via the internet.

Basically, users or business customers hire this kind of application for their business.

On the other hand, you can hire this kind of application for your business, so your user can get connected over the internet.

And SaaS marketing is simply the process to market this kind of application.

If your company offers software as a service to other businesses, there are several targeted marketing strategies you can use to achieve the highest conversion rates possible.

If you are a SaaS vendor, you must adopt the latest marketing strategies to archive more customers and high conversions.

So how do you get started with SaaS marketing?

Still, before getting started the SaaS Marketing process you may face several challenges.

Challenges Of SaaS Marketing:

SaaS is a logical product. And the mindset of its customers is always different than other targeted customers.

The decision of purchasing a SaaS product would be more logical than emotional, pricing and compatibility like factor must take some part as well.

And the purchasing decision does not lie on a single person.

So, having these facts the challenges become more complicated when it comes to SaaS marketing.

Logically, marketers may have dealt with many physical products but in SaaS is not having any physical presence.

Other Major Challenges In SaaS Marketing:

Demand and SaaS offerings are always changing. The constant update and release of new features can make your marketing strategies chaotic before your previous strategy would make any significant impact.

  • Customers are not aware of the use of your SaaS product. So, your marketing strategy and content needs to detail educational
  • You need to bring together the SaaS B2B customers and your sales cycle.
  • Standing Out from the Crowd
  • Build a loyal customer Database
  • Targeting your audience
  • Dealing with constant changes

SaaS Marketing Strategy:

Statista data shows – “the total size of the SaaS market has increased to $116 billion in 2019 from $105 billion in just one year. And it is expected to cross $135 billion in 2020.”

So, as a SaaS vendor, you must take a deep dive into marketing.

Before jumping into SaaS marketing, you need to learn about the customer journey first. And can prepare your marketing strategy by following the respected journey stages.

The customer journey may consist of the following stages:

  • Awareness
  • Consideration
  • Decision
  • Retention
  • Advocacy
SaaS Customer JourneyImage Source: Singlegrain[.]com

Actually, there are countless marketing strategies available to produce maximum results. With a mixed knowledge, I have listed some (would be) impactful SaaS marketing results.

  • Define Your Goals

The countless effort without the right directions is totally meaningless. To define a clear and achievable goal is the first step to do for successful SaaS marketing.

    • The goals must be specific and tractable by assigning KPIs and key metrics.
    • Figure your overall business
    • Figure how marketing and sales team can align to achieve the goals

The goal must be realistic. The bigger goal is always hard to achieve. So break down the bigger goals to smaller with realistic milestones.

  • Inbound Marketing

The inbound marketing methodology has four phases;

    • Backup your step
    • Evaluate how to create an inbound strategy
    • Define your buyers’ personas
    • Illustrating key traits of the buyers

And the very next step is to create content for them and address their issues and help them by solving those problems.

  • Content Marketing

Content marketing is an important strategy for any business including SaaS marketing as well. You may look at some of the biggest players of the SaaS market; strong content marketing is their key factor.

The content marketing methodology has encompassed two things:

    • Letting your audience know the use of your product
    • Establish your position at the related industry

You can extend your approach to social media platforms to provide the same information as well.

Existence, trust, and credibility are an important part of assets in the SaaS niche. And you can prove your existence by spreading the voluble information through content marketing.

  • Communicate Value Differentiators Of Their Product 

With the rise in the internet, the size of the market has enlarged. Many new and unique SaaS products were emerging daily, with at least ten competitors, who are launching similar products. This gives the customers a variety of options to choose, while purchasing any kind of products or services.

Therefore you need to demonstrate your product and marketise how your product is different from your customers.

You can handle this sales challenge by showing how your product is different and unique. The key is by doing some research on your customer’s industry and addressing their pain points of the future upgrades will be pretty much helpful for you. You need to communicate and concise about your product and how it will help the customers in solving their major issue.

  • Giving Users Free Trial

To encourage new customers and let them experience the actual benefits of your SaaS products, a free giving period is the best tactic to focus on.

And alternatively, it can be used for the lead generation as well!

This doesn’t mean you should go blindly without any strategy here;

“Optimizing the conversion rate within the free-trial period should be the focus of any SaaS marketer, and this will also mean one other thing: your product must be good.”

Through the free trial period, you would have the chance to showcase your customer service excellence.

Standing Out From The Crowd:

The shift from On-premises software to a cloud based SaaS took some additional time to get recognised in the market. B2b customers are pretty much apprehensive about their data security, location and many other things.

 Things might have taken some turn, however the last few years have noticed a significant development among various SaaS solutions.

However, the global cloud revenue is predicted to reach $ 474 billion by 2022, the ongoing pandemic has increased the demand for digital services and made the cloud a centerpiece for many new digital experiences.

  • User Engagement

And the last not the least Customer engagement is a goal that must stretch across teams and metrics.

It can be performed at a high level, as the knowledge and tap points of a customer for your product, company, or brand.

It is the relationship between your company and your customers and is closely related to customer loyalty and retention.

The better user experience can make a bold relationship between your SaaS product and customers and closely related to the customer success stories and retention.

Many biggest SaaS companies follow the strategy of building a loyal database for their customers. Under the SaaS subscription model, the costs are recovered along with time when the customers continue to renew the subscription.

New customer acquisition has become the top priority for many SaaS business.

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

LEARN MORE

Customer retention becomes a key point in increasing profit for SaaS business. According to Salesforce desk, with 5% increase in the customer retention will drive profits up-to 125%

SaaS Product(Source: Unboundb2b)

The customer experience can be broken down into different stages and can be developed, and implemented separately. Like;

    • Short Signup process
    • Send the users through an onboarding sequence
    • In-App Chat Feature
    • Offer Free Training or Free Demo
    • Develop and link tutorial Videos to engage
    • Get Feedback for improvement

Warping Words

SaaS marketing is different from other product marketing. If you follow the right path and strategies then you can easily gain success for your SaaS product in a short period.

 For every business, becoming successful starts with attracting the right customers. It might take some longer for the SaaS company to grow, but it is achievable by following the right SaaS marketing strategy.

The strategy discussed above will work effectively in successfully growing your SaaS business.

And must make it a point to find regular feedback from your loyal customers and instantly try to improve the customer service.

Also, throughout the marketing methodology focus on retaining the customers as this can be a game-changer in your overall profits.

Thinking of building a SaaS product, let Andolasoft help you. Our Dedicated developers will build excellent SaaS products for your business, by following all the security major and latest features to grow your business.

Happy SaaS marketing!

Planning to launch your own SaaS product? Let’s discuss!

7 Advanced Tips For Never Losing SAAS Customers

Posted on by Harmit Chawla

The Health of any SAAS organization is straightforwardly attached to its churn rate – the level of clients who cancel a service or product after a specific timeframe.

At the point when your software isn’t giving enough value, clients take their business somewhere else. It’s as basic as that.

It’s all-around terrible to lose clients. To lose clients is to lose money. In SaaS, we call it to churn rate

The number of subscribers of a service is defined as the Churn rate which suspends their subscription of that service in a given time span.”

A large portion of the pablum you read on the topic will let you know “have an incredible product!” or “magnificent client service.”

I’m in support of extraordinary products and executioner client support, but on the other hand, I’m expecting that you have the basics down. It’s the ideal opportunity for advanced tips to get better SAAS solutions.

Never miss an update from us. Join 10,000+ marketers and leaders.

What you’re going to peruse are propelled tips. You will find key techniques for avoiding the benefit of killing the falloff of loyal clients.

Advanced Tips For Never Losing SAAS Customers

  • Be Proactive About Canceled Or Expired Credit Cards.

Commitment is a wide field. There are many methods for tracking commitment, estimating commitment, and requesting commitment.

I need to take you from the immense field of commitment to the tight field of avoiding cancellation by means of credit card expiration. If your SAAS solutions utilize repeating charging on Master-cards, at that point this is a profoundly huge point.

For one thing, this is what you have to think about credit cards.

    • Most credit cards expire at regular intervals.
    • This implies, all things considered, 3% of your card memberships will expire in a given month or 36% of your card memberships will terminate over the span of a year.

With these sorts of numbers, you will confront expire Mastercards all the time.

Expiration information is a piece of each card information, so you have this data to use as you wish. Tell clients that their card will expire before it really occurs.

Send an email or give them a phone call several weeks or months before the expiration date, advising them that the card will expire. Some dunning management services can play out these functions for your benefit.

  • Improve The Features That Truly Matter.

 As your SAAS solutions, you’ll see that a few features are more essential to your clients than others. When that gets obvious, ensure you’re improving the quality and intensity of those specific features.

If you can make the best element of your SAAS stunningly better, at that point you’ll keep your clients from consistently expecting to cancel.

For business, visionaries calls these features “sticky.” One indication of a sticky feature is one that implants itself in the day by day work process of the client.

Not exclusively does the client become exceptionally connected with (recall point one!), however, they additionally become dependent upon that element, along these lines bringing down churn.

  • Give Discounts, Upgrades, Or Random Prizes.

One approach to build energy with your service is to have a feeling of implicit shock or anticipation. Amazing clients is a demonstrated method to expand satisfaction.

In controlled tests, scientists found that when servers gave clients a little gift, (for example, a mint), tipping was all things considered 23% higher for clients who were astounded by the signal.

Pick something that is important to your product, however, make it significant. Here are a couple of options.

    • Free features
    • Additional storage
    • One free month free
    • A percentage discount for a year

Amazing and pleasing clients is a strong business system. As a Salesforce manage puts it, “SAAS organizations must enjoyment their clients for quite a while to keep them returning.”

  • Be Absolutely Transparent.

The average client sees a bit of software that costs a ton, however, doesn’t appear to require a mess of overhead with respect to the provider.

Of course, there’s some marketing and development cost, however, where is all the client’s well-deserved cash going? The suspicious client raises an eyebrow, as well, over any conceivable security breaches and opaque agreement language.

  • Upgrade The Client Experience.

It’s a mistake to believe that your SAAS clients are in it just for the software. They’re in it for the experience, as well. To convince yourself of this point, think about the amount of your SAAS is the service part.

This incorporates the interface the software, its speed features, functionality, cost, buy process, reestablishment process, correspondence, client care, and everything else that has anything to do with the whole SaaS.

A negative experience can rapidly crash a client, though a positive encounter will hold that client.

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

LEARN MORE

By giving an incredible spotlight on the experience you can hold clients who are wavering on the edge.

  • Continuously Be Selling.

If you haven’t understood it at this point, as a SAAS organization, you should consistently be selling. VentureBeat puts the issue obtusely.

SAAS organizations are actually continually selling since they need to prevent the client from hitting the cancel button every month. It implies a few things:

    • Make unmatched client support. Your client assistance is as a lot of a piece of your SAAS as the software itself.
    • Give fast sending and quick configuration. Most SAAS deals cycles are truly short, which is actually what the supplier and the client need.
    • Be versatile. At the point when your client’s business develops, develop with them.
    • Make upgrades simpler. One of the clearest approaches to consistently be selling is to consistently be upselling.

  • Request Engagement.

Saving your SAAS clients is no basic assignment. A list of “hacks” or “tricks” on the subject won’t cut it. That is the reason I’m beginning with a profoundly propelled strategy based on the point of commitment.

In SaaS, commitment happens when a client uses and gains an incentive from the SaaS. Apptegic characterizes “client commitment” as the nexus of a client’s time and consideration and your product.

If a client is effectively utilizing your product, they are probably not going to cancel their service. If then again, the client doesn’t utilize your product at that point they’re going to pull the fitting.