There has been a tremendous increase in SaaS companies for the past few years – specifically last year. It is challenging to secure new clients and make your SaaS venture stand out from the crowd with such a busy market. Even if your SaaS venture is at its peak performance, you can never be satisfied with the expected revenues growth.
In today’s SaaS market, companies are currently increasing their spending on marketing techniques and adopting new strategies. Attempting traditional methods such as pitching SaaS programs as a B2B solution will undoubtedly fail. Traditional marketing methods from another decade are now useless.
You will need new and fresh strategies to survive the level of innovation in today’s SaaS world. Well, here are the latest five proven SaaS marketing strategies for 2022.
1. Offering free trials is key
You should always offer your customers a free trial. Allowing a potential customer to test your product for a few days comes at a bit of cost. However, free trials are dependent on the kind of product you offer. If you can, aim at giving your potential customers a test of your software.
In SaaS, there are no shipping or return transport costs you will incur. Hence, using this method to acquire new customers is less risky. It offers you a great chance to showcase your product and customer support service and lead to sales without any effort if customers love your product.
To increase your conversion rates, you should always ask for billing details. Any potential customer will give such details without a second thought. You even go an extra mile and price your free trial at $1 to boost your conversion rates even further,
After the trial is over, reach out to your subscribers. Gather insights about what they liked and disliked about your platform. The feedback will be invaluable to your sales and product teams.
2. Leverage the power of a CRM
A CRM or a Customer Relationship Management Software is a technology that handles all your client interactions to optimize the customer experience.
A small business CRM such as Zendesk can provide a daily workflow boost and cut down on human errors. You can send personalized messages to improve customer engagement rate and reduce costs by automating tedious tasks.
3. Take your SEO seriously
Optimizing your website’s SEO will help you obtain the relevant audience from high-value keywords on search engines. Start by evaluating whether your website has adopted a top-notch SEO strategy. Make sure you have the fastest-loading website around, packed with a lot of valuable and SEO-optimized content.
Do not rely on the SaaS site for your traffic. Create a subfolder blog. Post helpful SEO-optimized tutorials that are related to your area of specialization. Make sure you have a call to action conclusion for every article.
Focus on getting backlinks and mentions on top websites. Backlinks directly give your brand a boost. Also, when linking out to other websites, only choose high-quality and well-known sites. Do not forget to adopt an excellent internal linking structure to reduce bounce rates and increase your page optimization. To simplify the process of internal linking, find out who is better: Link Whisper or Internal Link Juicer, both of which offer efficient solutions for enhancing your website’s internal linking structure.
You should, however, note that search engine optimization will only get you leads and not actual customers. It is your job to convince such leads into buying your product after they have landed on your webpage.
You can also take the help of a professional SEO agency to boost your organic traffic growth for more leads and conversions.
4. Keep sign-ups easy and pricing straight
Signing up should be as quick as possible. If you are offering free trials, it should be even more straightforward. Too many complicated steps will ruin the process. Some consumers will be fed up in the middle of the procedure and leave it incomplete.
To avoid such, you should have a maximum of three sign-up steps. If you have more than that, revise your sign-up procedure. Check what you can eliminate or merge. For instance, you can remove email verification and make it mandatory in the dashboard after the account has been successfully created.
Eliminate any irrelevant information you are gathering during sign-ups too. You could make them optional for the consumer to fill up in their dashboard after opening the account.
Talking about pricing, you should always look at the method you have adopted from a client’s point of view. Do not design the pricing page from your point of view for the following reasons:
- You might end up capturing features that cost you a lot of money to design. These features might not make sense to potential customers. You should only include things that benefit them.
- You might adopt a suboptimal ROI.
When you design the pricing page from a customer’s view, you will end up talking about the benefits of your product, its proposition value, and many other essential things. The chances are that you will get more conversions than you would typically do.
5. Offer a few choices
Life is full of choices. Every day you must make countless complicated decisions. In his book, The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz suggests that providing customers with many choices increases stress, anxiety, and remorse. To avoid such, cut down your choices.
Do not make your consumers sweat and even research harder to narrow down to one choice. With many decisions to make, the odds are that they will take time before making the purchase. The time taken could be anywhere from several days to weeks. Some might even give up after not narrowing it down to their ideal plan or package.
So, focus on making it easy for potential clients to buy your services. Keep it to just two variations if possible. You can always sell additional features to them as add-ons in the future once they have already subscribed.
6. Create crazy offers
One way of increasing your sales is by offering more extended plans for less. For instance, you could give a 2-year subscription for the price of one year. You can also offer a 1-year plan for the price of 19 months or so. Customers will upgrade to more extended plans after their free trials to reduce the cost of paying monthly.
You can also incorporate a reward or affiliate program to boost your sales. Customers will do anything, including going to extra lengths to get a one-month free service for introducing a friend. Approach your long-term clients who love your platform for affiliate marketing. They are the best people to spread the word and encourage new customers for a bit of compensation. Affiliate marketing will bring you leads to your SaaS platform, whether you use commissions, subscription discounts, or free add-on features.
Conclusion
If adopted well, the above top 5 SaaS marketing strategies will lead to more high-quality leads and an increased conversion rate. However, keep in mind that the market is constantly changing for industries such as SaaS that have a high churn percentage. So, ensure your team stays in the loop with new marketing strategies now and then to reduce churn.