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. 

To keep evolving your SaaS product, you need a steady cash flow. It's imperative to set up a pricing strategy that appeals to the needs of your buyer personas and keeps them loyal to your brand. The wrong pricing model could quickly damage your reputation and discourage customers from growing with your software.

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!

Have you ever tried to fill a bucket full of holes with water? It’s pretty tough, right?! The water you pour in the top, just pours out the bottom. You keep working hard to get the water level up, but those holes are just too damned big. At this rate you’re never going to fill that bucket to the top. There are only two options left, you can either: Become Chuck Norris and watch the bucket fill itself. You can now, after all, empty a swimming pool of water with a fork in the rain - surely a leaky bucket is no problem! Plug some of those holes and slow down the rate at which the water is being lost from said bucket.

Misalignment between sales and marketing only happens in traditional, dinosaur-esque type business, right? Software and tech companies are far to evolved and well equipped to have friction between these two departments, no? The truth is, outdated business practices and poor communication between these two critical teams can creep into even the most forward-thinking companies. SaaS enterprises can fall victim to this precisely because the nature of the industry is to upgrade and improve continuously. Digital media and advertising will also frequently present business with new promotional opportunities and strategies to pursue. This makes the propensity for each department to veer off in its own – sometimes misguided – direction very high.

2020 is shaping up to be a great year for SaaS companies. As more businesses and individuals move to cloud-based technologies, the demand for efficient, engaging and value-adding software is rising. The challenge is setting yourself apart from the competition entering the market daily. The fast production cycle for software products and the necessity for continuous improvement creates a hostile environment for companies who may not have the financial backing to compete at scale. This is where your ability to delight customers can act as a USP. Happy customers will help you to use positive interactions to prevent churn, increase retention and attract new fans to your brand.

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.