When you see companies like Salesforce that introduced the concept of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to the world, to something like Slack that even Microsoft couldn’t beat with its own enterprise collaboration platform, you might want to take notes if you want to understand what they’re doing right.
In this article, we’re going to learn about these amazing approaches that helped these companies get where they are today.
SaaS Business Growth Strategies
Many industries heavily rely on sales or digital marketing teams to make their product sell, but before anything else, it’s of utmost importance to put out an exceptional product. Manufacturers inherently understand this, and use integrated MRP software to get a complete view of their business.”
Following are the steps to help you understand how you can grow your SaaS business the right way:
#1 – Know Your Churn Rate
Consumers will stop doing business with you at some point if they don’t find utility in your product, find it pricey, or find a better solution for their business. Whatever the reason may be, your users churn every now and then.
The rate at which that’s happening is something you might want to closely monitor because that tells a lot about your business. As a rule of thumb, just remember that anything below 2% is actually pretty good in the SaaS industry.
Churn rate alone can’t be useful. You have to look at the engagement your business draws. For example, if you have an eCommerce business, how does the engagement rate look? How much are people interacting with it on a daily or a monthly basis? Or are they not using it frequently?
Of course, engagement depends on the kind of service you’re selling. Hence, you have to calculate the duration of the average use of your product and figure out around what time should you be aiming for your customers to return to your service.
Generally, your product should satisfy at least 40% of your consumers to a point that they’re totally dependent on it. If that’s not happening, then consider striving for a product/market fit, so that you establish a strong demand for your product.
#2 – Understand Your Audience
Ideally, this should be done before even developing your product, but now that you already have customers, what you may want to do is pick out your best customers and try to figure out how to fulfill their needs better. This will start becoming the foundation of your business and you’ll be able to serve your future customers better.
Here’s what you can do:-
- Find out the churn rate of your audience based on the subscription plans you’re offering them.
- Segregate your consumer data based on their company size, industry, and business model.
- Use this as a model to figure out what demographic do your best customers belong to.
Now that you have this data, you have their pain points and what would actually help them. Having this will help you every step of the way from when consulting them to designing email marketing campaigns for them.
#3 – Have a Sales Maximization Plan
As soon as you’ve calculated your churn rate and now you understand your audience as well, you have to design a plan that will help you maximize your sales by:-
Increasing your consumers’ repeat purchases
According to Harvard Business School, increasing customer retention rates by 5% can increase your profits by 25-95%. Sending email marketing campaigns with exciting offers is one of the ways to do the trick. Creating email-subscriber-exclusive offers or VIP offers for premium users.
Another way is to create follow-ups after the customer makes a purchase. Using apps like Apollo and Mailchimp will help you automate the follow-up process.
Increasing their average order size
There are 2 ways that you can increase the average order size – Either you raise the prices of the existing packages, or you redesign the current packaging model that includes higher pricing packages.
For example, Buffer, a company that helps you manage multiple social media accounts with the help of their online tool, only had free and $10/month subscriptions, and they now have $15, $65, and $99 monthly plans where they’ve added new features for new plans.
Increasing the number of consumers in total
As you’re scaling up, the biggest investment is in having a blog, especially if you want to grow your SaaS business because the quality of your blogs will speak about your capabilities. In other words, you’re being judged by other professionals.
A blog brings a lot of relevant traffic to your website, a significant percentage of whom will sign up as a subscriber and/or check out your services. It’s so effective that corporations employ PPC advertisements in blogs instead of hard-selling landing pages. Speaking of blogs…
#4 – Build a Quality Content Marketing Team
The best bet to grow your SaaS business is to have an exceptional content marketing team. It’s not easy to find content writers who have a profound understanding of your services, let alone the skills to articulate them in a manner that impresses your audience.
Here’s why you need a content team:-
Improving Your Search Visibility
When you have a team that constantly produces quality content, you end up having more pages on your website, and more reasons for your visitors to stick around. However, it’s not just the people that visit your website pages.
The search engine crawlers visit every page of your website and when they find out that you have internal and external links on your website, it improves your chances of ranking on search engines organically. Having an SEO checklist here will make your life so much easier.
Tip: Among many other things, make sure that you have site security measures in place to reduce the bounce rate of your SaaS website. At times, Google blacklists websites that it considers suspicious and removes them from indexing & SERPs. You can learn about website whitelisting or use free blacklist checking tools.
More Traffic (Means More Conversions)
Your content marketing team will not only have a content writer and a graphic designer but a content strategist who plans out what social media platforms, groups, and forums are relevant to your services and posts different pieces of your website content there.
What that does is reach people who are interested in your services and your piece of content becomes a reason for them to visit your website. Several companies are utilizing social media marketing tools to make the process even more efficient.
Brand Reputation
Whether you realize it or not, but your social media is your one ticket to building a reputation for your business. Let’s take a look at the social media of Hubspot for instance:-
Their Facebook posts have 75 comments, Instagram posts have over 2,500 likes, LinkedIn has more than 200 likes too. What’s worth looking into, is their average engagement with every social media post that they put out.
If you want to build a brand and make it big, it’s only social media that can make it happen in this day and age. As you grow, you’re going to need amazing quality graphic designs, videos, and blogs, for which you need just an amazing content marketing team.
Over to You!
By doing everything that’s stated above, you’re bound to grow your SaaS business. The only thing you will need to do as you grow more is to dial down on hard selling. This is something that you only understand when you’re already getting enough clients.
If companies operating at a large scale like Hubspot were conducting a webinar, they would be offering a demo instead of trying to sell the program.
Forget Webinars, offer free value to get them deeper into the sales funnel. For instance, by offering them value through a free ebook, you’re making them comfortable enough to take their time to make a decision, thereby creating a possibility of a sale happening at some point.
