When it comes to SaaS Customer Retention, I get questions like this frequently:
Hi Lincoln, I’d like to hear your perspective on minimizing churn, especially in an industry with steadily declining prices, Adding more value with a better customer experience and more product functionality to mitigate price erosion and churn helps. Better segmentation. What else?
Churn happens for many reasons, but especially when people think your product doesn’t do something they need it to do (especially if they thought it would), if it doesn’t do that thing as easy as it should, or if the experience is incongruent with the price paid.
SaaS Customer Retention: The Seeds of Churn Are Planted Early
Clearly these are just a few of the reasons for Churn… but in many ways, these are the basis for the things you might be more likely to hear or see, like Customer Service problems or post-sale price sensitivity.
So, up-front price sensitivity often results from directly comparing your product to a cheap competitor’s product… when 12 different products seem to be identical, price becomes the main differentiator and the lowest price “wins.” (Does anyone really win the race to the bottom?)
What is really interesting to me is that Increasing Retention (or Reducing Churn) and Converting Prospects into paying customers share many of the same requirements.
It starts with attracting the right crowd and managing expectations properly early in the process.
Improve SaaS Customer Retention by Adding Value Before the Sign-Up
It is easy to say “add value” so you can charge more, but what does that mean?
Where I’ve seen success in “adding value” is in what I call pre-sale or pre-signup Indoctrination.
How you position your product, the sales copy you use, the imagery and social proof, and even what you do to engage with your prospects before they sign-up (webinars, whitepapers, etc.) will all help in that Indoctrination process.
And it will help better prepare your prospects and customers for the post-signup experience, allowing them to become more Engaged – faster – thus leading to a deeper level of Investment and, of course Conversion.
So the goal of pre-sales lead nurturing / Indoctrination is to get them engaged, then get them invested in the product.
Customer Retention / Prospect Conversion are the same in that respect…
Get them and keep them engaged, then get and keep them invested in the product.
And never stop doing that.
You can also leverage some of my ideas and tactics from this other post on Churn Reduction / Customer Retention.
SaaS Customer Retention is a Process
So yes, a great User Experience, managing expectations, Engagement, Investment (time, energy, resources, etc.) are all part of the conversion – and the retention – process.
But the secret to both is having a plan for conversion and revenue expansion.
When someone enters your Free Trial or becomes a lead in any other way, you need to have a specific conversion path that they get on as soon as they sign-up (or hopefully before they sign-up).
Now everything you do should lead them down that path, never letting them fend for themselves or virtually wander around.
Well, the same thing should happen after they become a customer, too… you want to up-sell, move them to a more expensive version or incorporate add-ons into their current plan, etc.
To keep converting customers, expanding revenue, and growing Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) requires a clearly defined path and you should guide your customers down that path in everything you do.
And, of course, if you’re constantly moving them down that path, then you know you’re engaging them and they aren’t a churn threat.
Let’s Optimize your Free Trial Conversion Rate
There is only one of me, so I can only help a limited number of SaaS providers at any one time. But if you’re serious about finally turning your SaaS Free Trial into a customer-acquisition machine, email me with the details of your situation and I’ll get back to you to setup a meeting.
– Lincoln
About Lincoln Murphy
