inbound marketing

Acquiring new customers is never easy or cheap; keeping them is even harder. Customer Retention Cost (CRC) is the key metric to watch for 55% of SaaS companies – and with good reason. It's five times more costly to acquire new customers than it is to retain them.  For SaaS startups, in particular, losing customers due to a lack of engagement is a sure-fire way to sink a business. 

The recent global crisis has left us in uncharted – certainly turbulent – waters in our personal and business lives. This difficult time is driving us all to review how we operate as businesses and communities. Here in the UK, at the time of writing, we’re at the early stages of dramatic changes that we’ve had to make and it’s unclear what is to come and for how long it’s going to be before we return to some form of normality. Therefore, it would be easy to have a knee-jerk reaction, batten down the hatches and cut all your spend, but that would be entirely the wrong thing to do.

SaaS user cancellations can stack up faster than your sales team can get new leads through the door, and when the scales tip too far in the wrong direction, your software business may struggle to recover. That's because the pressure to showcase exponential growth is considerably higher when compared with other industries. If a software company is only experiencing a 20% annual growth (which is a reasonable figure for other types of businesses), the likelihood of it ceasing to exist in a few years is 92%. Yikes!

All businesses start out as great ideas. You come up with a piece of software that fills a gap in the market. You have confidence that your ingenious offering is going to wow customers. So you spend your budget on advertising, promotion, and lead generation tactics to create awareness. As soon as everyone knows who you are and what you do, they'll be lining up to buy – right? The enthusiasm is high, and the expectations even more so. According to Gartner, SaaS revenue is set to reach $278 billion by 2021– hugely encouraging figures for anyone trying to stake a claim to a slice of that pie. But what happens when your profit margins don't line up?

For SaaS companies, and indeed traditional software companies, part of the sales process is giving prospects access to the software for free. This offers them a chance to get hands on with the solution, really see if it fits the way they work and can deliver the end results they are looking for. In this article we are going to look at the best tactics you can deploy to ensure a healthy conversion rate of free to paid users.

Hang on. Wait a minute. Don't get excited just yet. A marketing strategy isn't something you can just dive into and get right in a single day. 

As a SaaS marketer, no matter what you are promoting, you should always start with a well thought out marketing strategy. Whenever we begin an engagement with a new client, we always start off with a kickstart strategy meeting and putting a proper plan of action in place.

You have been working tirelessly on your SaaS marketing strategy, from creating your buyer personas to creating a full-funnel campaign, but how can you make sure all your time and effort has been worth it and will continue to yield results for your business in the future? 

If you're selling software as a service (SaaS) then I'm pretty sure your business growth relies on leads. It's also likely that your sales process involves some degree of consultation, whether that's via your sales teams or a high quality content asset that educates your target market as to how your software solves their challenges and pain points. Not sure where to start? Take a look at these four lead generation channels and discover how they can start filling your sales pipeline. What is lead generation? For your business to thrive, you need to be creating a constant stream of potential customers. Lead generation is the effort your business makes to attract new interest to your products or services, and move high-intent individuals along the sales funnel.