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…
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:
WARNING: In 2013, relying heavily on SEO to drive traffic to your website is a recipe for failure!
Okay, that might be a bit harsh… maybe SEO isn’t dead, but things have changed and you need to look beyond SEO to drive traffic to your website.
If you put all your eggs in Google’s basket by focusing only on SEO to generate traffic for your SaaS app, you could end up with much less traffic – especially quality, qualified, relevant traffic – than you’d like, which means less trial signups, less customers, and less revenue!
But don’t worry… there are plenty of other ways to drive traffic to your website besides SEO and I’ve put a list together just for you…
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.
Learn to avoid the pitfalls of publishing your Pricing while in Beta in this video presentation
Are you in Beta and getting ready to move to production? Did you already publish your prices on your website?
Or are you thinking about running an extended Beta testing period for your new app?
Well, you only get ONE chance to exit Beta… don’t screw it up!
Luckily – now that you have this information – you won’t screw it up!
You need to develop a robust SaaS marketing plan – but sometimes you just need to do some quick tactical things to get the ball rolling. First, see the first part of this series SaaS Marketing Plan: 100 Places to Promote your App (Part 1)… and then read this post.
