Customer Acquisition and Churn Reduction Consulting
So, should you require a Credit Card to get started in your SaaS Free Trial?
TL:DR – By asking for a Credit Card up front, you will get fewer prospects into your Free Trial with no guarantee of converting more paying customers.
Now, if you’d like to know why that is, read on…
What if I said there was something you were doing right now that was actively reducing your SaaS customer success?
What if that thing you’re doing was standing in the way of driving higher levels of engagement and was reducing the amount of expansion revenue you’re generating while potentially increasing churn?
What if I said there’s a very good chance you’re doing it right now and don’t even know it?
What if I said that it’s easy to fix if you just keep reading?
SaaS Customer Success starts by orchestrating “Quick Wins” for your customers, helping them bypass their natural tendency to seek out reasons not to use your service!
I was in Silicon Valley recently and I found myself talking about this idea of “Quick Wins” several times within the context of SaaS Customer Success and I wanted to share this idea with you, too.
In my last post I shared some actual ways to reduce your SaaS Churn Rate, including attracting the right customer and managing expectations.
In this post, I’m going to go deeper, and share some awesome methods for improving customer retention by leveraging the power of the SaaS business model, specifically the ability of the provider to monitor for and drive Customer Engagement.
For many SaaS and Cloud providers, email will be the main fuel for your Engagement Engine that you use to drive potential customers through your Free Trial to conversion or to drive new customers to become deeply invested in your service.
SaaS customer onboarding starts with the welcome email, so when I saw this great post over on the Vero blog called 5 Conversion Optimization Experts Weigh In On An Email Remarketing Campaign I was excited to see people talking about this important – and often overlooked – element.
In the post, 5 copywriters – arguably the best in the business – analyze and offer suggestions to the welcome email of HipChat.
I agree with just about everything the panel of experts said, but I think they missed a couple of points.
Welcome to 2013… it’s now time to figure out why your SaaS company even exists and what your market positioning is!
If you’re a SaaS or Cloud provider in the Email Marketing, CRM, Project Management, File Sharing, Collaboration, Marketing Automation, Analytics,… or frankly most horizontal product categories… it’s time to do some deep soul searching, market analysis, and customer development to figure out why you exist and what your market positioning is.
When creating your SaaS marketing plan, you must understand that your business model of choice is a fully-integrated architecture where all aspects of the business – product, support, revenue model, and marketing – are tightly-coupled.
Deviation from that model and understanding will affect growth, and most deviation occurs as a rift between marketing and product.
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” – Peter Drucker
What Drucker says is even more powerful when you consider your product to be part of your SaaS marketing plan.
And in SaaS, your marketing / promotion / customer acquisition methods must extend into the product in order to get the product to “sell itself.”
WARNING: This is advanced stuff… it at least requires that you have the right mindset to really increase your Free Trial conversion rate… so see this Resource Guide first. You’ve been warned!
Most discussions about SaaS Metrics are some retelling of Bessemer Venture Partners’ Top 10 Rules of Cloud Computing and SaaS.”
The metrics that BVP talks about – CMRR, CAC, etc. are absolutely the core metrics to monitor at the high-level, I’m just not sure how many more posts we need telling us that.
What is often lacking – because the authors don’t actually know or they don’t want to share their secrets – in posts about SaaS metrics, is what you’re supposed to do with the metric once you have it… how can those things actually help you increase your free trial conversion rate?
SaaS providers should use email to drive Engagement, Conversion, and Retention, but to achieve those goals, some rules should be followed.
Regardless of the type of email – Transactional or Marketing – your email has to:
Before you watch this video, you should watch the 25-minute Beta Testing & Pricing: A Hazardous Combination video for better context.
In 2011 I pulled together this ~35 minute presentation for a group of SaaS entrepreneurs – literally overnight – where I explore the marketing sites of around 25 SaaS & Web App startups in Beta.
