Customer Success-driven Growth
Lincoln Murphy's Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Thought Leadership
I got an email the other day asking about Freemium Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) and whether or not to include the cost of supporting and marketing to free users in the cost of acquiring paying customers.
Here’s my quick answer and some other resources for you to check out.
Attention SaaS Providers: If you use email in any way to communicate with your users, customers, and prospects, you should care about GMail’s recent additions: Tabbed Inbox and Categories.
As a SaaS provider, you leverage email for marketing with things like your newsletters and your Free Trial follow-up sequence. But you also send transactional messages like activity reports, password reset notices, and dunning messages.
So yeah, even in 2013, email a major communications channel between you and your customers, users, and prospects.
And since GMail has roughly 450,000,000 users with 5,000,000 Google Apps for Business users, chances are – especially if you sell to the SMB market, startups, entrepreneurs, freelancers, oh, and governments and schools – a non-trivial portion of your audience is probably using GMail.
If you’ve seen your open and click-through rates go down recently, it could very well be due to these changes. If you haven’t experience that, consider that you might as Google rolls out Tabbed Inbox and Categories to their Business users.
So, again, if you use email for anything, since a large portion of your audience is likely using GMail… you should absolutely care about these recent changes, what they mean for the future, and how to work around and with them.
When it comes to SaaS marketing, we know that Random Effort Yields Random Results… but it gets worse.
The problem I see too often – and the catalyst for this epic post – isn’t Random Marketing, but what I call Lazy Marketing.
And lazy marketing is perhaps a more insidious form of marketing, if for no other reason than the fact that it looks like its working.
It’s not until you take a step back and examine what’s really going on – the actual results – that you see it is not only not working…
… but it’s killing your business.
It’s time to stop being lazy and get deliberate with your marketing.
Okay, this is it… finally, my definitive answer on measuring SaaS churn!
I’ve heard it all before… things like “Lincoln, you talk about churn a lot, but you don’t ever say anything!”
First, that’s just hurtful.
Second, all of these “how do I measure the success of a SaaS business?” questions depend on so many different factors, it’s super-hard to generalize.
Wait… let me re-phrase that.
It’s super-easy to generalize; it’s just hard if you care about sending the wrong message.
And I don’t want to send the wrong message, so I’ve laid it out as simply as I can.
Never is it more clear that random effort yields random results than when you look at the “marketing” of far too many SaaS companies…. maybe even yours.
Take a look at a SaaS company that’s stagnating or failing to reach their goals, and you almost always find this random hodgepodge of tactics that they “tried” at one time or another.
After I published “Rise of the Growth Copyists” where I said that really successful SaaS growth hacking is creative and that most just copy others, the guys over at GrowthHacker.tv reached out to me and wanted to setup an interview with me.
Definitely check it out… a good time was had by all…. but before you do, read the rest of this post!
During the 75-minute video interview, we deep-dive on such questions as:
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