SaaS startups are popping up everywhere. It’s a great business model with high growth rates and easy scaling. But it would be best if you still marketed your business well.
You want to engage your audience effectively and reduce churn. Here are five tips to help you market your subscription business better.
Donate a lot, but not all
Subscription marketing’s top tactic is to give something away (such as an introductory trial).
Why?
Your product will work if it is good. You want people to be so enamored with your product or tool that they cannot imagine their lives without it.
Do not be overly generous. Don’t be too great. Don’t give away the whole for free, whether your trial has a limit on usage or restricted features.
Follow-up during and after the trial period. Email is simple; chatbots may be better, but in the B2B sector, phone calls are more effective. Customer segmentation is critical to creating an onboarding process targeting at-risk users during the trial period.
You can use social and PPC ads to direct your audience to the landing page of your free trial. If you want to position yourself as a new alternative, you can bid on your competitors’ brand names. The landing page must be highly focused on conversions to maximize signups. A/B-testing can help you design more effective pages.
Adobe, a big brand, can afford to make all of its software available for download.
Can you create something similar with a free trial or a resource center for free? Make the most out of “free,” as it is a popular search term for users and a conversion driver.
Users’ data is collected for additional features
SaaS marketing must be data-driven to drive users through the sales cycle and short funnel as quickly as possible. Data allows you to identify your next-generation super users to allocate marketing, support, and service budgets accordingly.
The lines between marketing and customer service are blurred in SaaS marketing. Early support chats, interactions, and insights should be mined carefully for data and insights that can be fed into marketing and the customer lifecycle.
For subscription-based businesses, multichannel customer service is a must. They often require comprehensive knowledge centers that help users to assist themselves.
Your data should not be used solely to trigger emails or retargeting campaigns. Data is a valuable asset for a SaaS marketer or product manager. You should use it to improve and create new features.
Spotify and Netflix both make great use of the data of their users. Both services use platform data to generate playlists and recommendations that have become legendary features of their respective services.
Create a user community
As a subscription marketer, you must create a community. You can turn an empty platform into a vibrant community by getting your users to work together.
Here are three things you can do to create a new community.
Create an email list. Like, properly. Use tools to maximize every website visitor’s interaction.
You can create a lot of content, such as guides, that gives away valuable information. To drive organic traffic, you want to give useful things away.
You can offer a course or a podcast to help your subscribers get the most out of their subscription service or tool. You will see a massive increase in your customers and users if you provide them with the right tools.
Zendesk offers various customer service resources, including blogs, reports, and charts.
An engaging content library helps build credibility and engagement for a brand over time. Marketing is about the long term, while ad campaigns focus more on the short term.
Your brand’s core message should be centered on solving users’ pain points, not promoting yourself. Customer-centric marketing is not about self-centered marketing.
Tip for outreach: Don’t start by discussing your product or platform while acting as a brand ambassador and negotiating press and PR placements. Instead, focus on your industry’s community and provide helpful advice to solve business problems. You will have half the battle won if you can show editors and journalists you are knowledgeable about their audience.
You can learn from the best
You can find some great SaaS resources on the web. You should follow the top names in marketing and learn from their strategies and tactics. Set realistic goals by reading industry reports and analyzing statistics.
Look to the big SaaS firms for advice and tips on best practices. HubSpot is great at giving back to its community by providing helpful content. It also has an aggressive sales pipeline. HubSpot doesn’t hesitate to reach out to people interested in its CRM via LinkedIn Inmail or phone calls (especially those on the agency side).
On the other hand, Shopify is an online storebuilder that has seen impressive growth in the last few years. What is the secret behind its success? The secret to its success? Spotify has been able to stand out by focusing on these critical areas.
You can analyze their strengths and weaknesses to steal a few customers from them.
Investigate churn
Churn can be bad for subscription businesses but is also completely normal. Your churn rate will rise as your marketing strategy takes off and more people become aware of your tool or trial period.
However, if your baseline churn rates are increasing rapidly, you should carefully examine the situation and take action. A high churn rate will not lead to a stable user base or platform.