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Growing a wildly successful software as a service (SaaS) business is a game of numbers.

More new customers than canceling customers? You’ll grow.

If not, you’ll stagnate, and the competition will gobble up market share right in front of you.

At the same time, not every new idea for boosting growth and retention will be feasible with the resources you have.

Your product team is busy working on ideas to build a SaaS product that is 10x better than what’s on the market. Your engineering team is building next generation technology that will give a crucial edge of the competition.

It’s not always strategic to pull them off core functions to work on the latest growth idea.

So, while they are busy working on the product, there’s still room for low-cost, easy-to-implement techniques to improve the growth and retention of your SaaS product today.

Think of these ideas as low hanging fruit you can get started on today to see results in the coming months.

1. Call New Prospects Immediately When They Sign Up

This is an idea that I first heard from Steli Efti. He makes the bold claim that if you’re a B2B SaaS startup you need to be calling all your free trial signups within the first 5 minutes.

You might be thinking whether spending time on the phone is a good use of your team’s time. It’s definitively not scalable once you’re getting hundreds of new trials per day.

The benefit is that as an early stage company, every phone call is an opportunity for customer development. Because the person on the other side just went through your marketing funnel, you’ll get feedback on whether your website is performing well.

It can also act as an “early warning system” for poorly targeted ads. You’ll potentially save a lot of money if you realize that your AdWords are attracting the entirely wrong set of audience based on the conversions you’re having with new signups.

The downside is that you’ll have to add a phone number input to your form, which may reduce your sign up rate slightly. You can make it optional so people can self-select whether they want to hear from you via the phone or not.

In my experience, people are generally happy to hear to from you if you call within minutes of signing up to welcome to the service and let them know if they have any questions you’re happy to talk.

The insights you learn from these calls can be turned directly into hypotheses for experiments to run on your SaaS onboarding funnel. For example, you might find out that many of the signups are using a specific piece of legacy software, so you can adjust the funnel to highlight how easy it is to move over to your product.

2. Offer a Weekly Webinar

Some of the best, “stickiest” SaaS products will be become deeply woven into the fabric of your customers’ lives, saving them countless hours or helping them generate more revenue.

But it’s often hard for people to “see” the improvements your product will bring when they are looking at the empty state of your app after they’ve just signed up.

In Elements of User Onboarding, Samuel Hulick refers to this concept as helping your users envision their improvement.

Webinars are an opportunity to give them a glimpse of how your product will look in action after they’ve been fully onboarded.

Once they’ve seen with their own eyes how easy your product makes it to get a specific job done, they’ll have a reason for why they’re going through the hard process of trying something new and investing in learning your product.

At the same time, webinars can be operationally challenging. Live webinars, in particular, pose problems. You’ll need a soundproof studio with someone to keep an eye on the chat box while another person walks people through the product demo.

And then the problems start: the wifi is patchy, your product doesn’t respond as expected while live on air or your mic suddenly stops working.

It’s tough to stay calm on camera!

Therefore, Intercom took a hybrid approach to product demos. They showed pre-recorded demos interspersed with live Q&A and discussion.

They automated the part that could be automated, such as showing how to do a particular job in their app, while they kept that part that couldn’t be automated: live feedback from a product expert.

Personally, I was skeptical when I first heard of this “hybrid” approach, but I decided to give it a whirl.

For the first version, you can use something like Screenflow or Camtasia to quickly record your screen coupled with a decent mic such as the Samson Meteor Mic to get good audio.

I was worried that webinar attendees would be disappointed that the video wasn’t live. However, those fears turned out to be unfounded. In fact, because I could concentrate on the questions coming in via chat, I could give better answers to questions and quickly pull up the relevant documentation to send to them right there.

I’d particularly recommend this approach if you want to offer multiple webinars a week for different time zones.

3. Try Out a Win-Back Offer for Expired Trials

When you first launch your product, users may like your MVP product, but not pull the trigger on moving over to you, just yet. However, as you develop your product into a more fully featured solution, those initial prospects might just be ready to move over.

I’ve noticed that several SaaS providers send out “win back” emails to dormant trial accounts after a year, offering them another 30-day trial while highlighting what’s changed in the meantime.

Here’s an example from Front:

The great thing about this tactic is that it’s so easy to implement. You can manually pull a list of these accounts every month to start. If the tactic works well for you, you can move to an automated email.

4. Send a Summary of “What Happened This Week in Your SaaS” via Email

I first heard this idea put into words by Patrick McKenzie, a serial SaaS entrepreneur:

A thing geeks consistently underestimate: "What happened this week in $YOUR_SAAS_ACCOUNT" ; archivable, free earned media channel, etc

— Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) April 5, 2017

Many SaaS products work day in, day out on your behalf. For example, monitoring services such as StatusPage test your services every minute to make sure all services are operating as expected. Other examples include connecting services such as Zapier, which let you link up data from various services.

These services work for you in the background. In best case scenarios, you might not log into these products for months on end.

A monthly “report card” listing what the app did for you each month will clearly demonstrate the value you’re getting from that particular SaaS. In the next financial meetings when ongoing subscriptions are put under a magnifying glass, your customers will be able to defend their monthly subscription to your service to the accountants.

An even better approach is to put a dollar number to the value you provide, as Nickelled does:

Depending on what your application does, you can send out emails highlighting number of issues closed, number of conversions tracked or leads generated. The closer you can get to a metric that managers care deeply about, the better this tactic works.

5. Retarget SaaS Trials with Customer Success Content

Retargeting is a powerful way to reach out to your past visitors to get them to come back to visit your site. In fact, there’s nothing right now that can work as well as retargeting (for your non-identified users).

Often, SaaS companies use retargeting to get past visitors back to their site so they sign up.

But you can also use retargeting in a myriad of ways to drive better retention of users.

For instance, you can target people within your free trial period with an ad for your webinar. Facebook Lead adverts make it so easy to sign up to the webinar with pre-filled fields. Just two touches and you are signed up, even on a mobile device.

Mocked Up Example of a Facebook Lead Generation Ad

Alternatively, you can advertise customer success stories that highlight the type of value that people can expect to get from your product.

Once customers have activated and are paying customers, you can even take retargeting a step further and start targeting customers that look like they might be in danger of churning based on the data you see in Kissmetrics.

You can export a monthly segment of users that are danger of churning and target them with ads on more advanced features they are missing out on or strategies for getting more value from your product.

6. Offer a “Done for You” Data Onboarding Package

Depending on your SaaS, your customers may need to move a lot of data over to your app before they can get started. Particularly if you’re starting out, this roadblock may get in the way of many of your customers using your product.

Offering a “done for them” data onboarding package to new customers can be a way to smooth the path.

In many cases, this data will have to be moved over from one of your competitors. Other times you’ll be faced with a collection of excel sheets, CSV files, or SQL dumps. The result is that you’ll be faced with importing data from a myriad of different software, including custom in-house solutions.

This diversity of data sources makes it difficult to offer an entirely automated import flow that your customers can carry out themselves. Even importing something as “simple” as a CSV file can be fraught with issues, as Patrick McKenzie points out.

Typically, enterprise customers won’t bat an eyelid at paying for this service, whereas an upfront charge can be a barrier for many SMB customers.

Test Out New Ideas On a Regular Basis

Small improvements in your growth rates and churn rates can have a big impact on your bottom line. Each optimization in your funnel results in more customers using your product, more word-of-mouth referrals and higher customer lifetime value. The revenue this generates means you can invest more back into product development and growth, accelerating the growth loop.

Do you have some ideas on how to boost growth and cut churn? Let me know in the comments!

About the Author: Thomas Carney has worked for tech companies in Munich, Paris, and now Berlin. When not on a computer, he’s at CrossFit or trying to brew the perfect coffee with an Aeropress coffee maker. He writes about marketing for SaaS at ThomasCarney.org.

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Like a competitive athlete trains to win by perfecting a balance of the optimum diet, exercise regime and mental focus, a CMO’s task is to develop a winning marketing machine. By coordinating every element to work together, the marketing machine will deliver short-term wins and outperform and outpace tough competitors.

The question is: what workout plan will sweat out inefficiencies, build the strongest muscles, and prepare a team for the highest performance level? The answer is a marketing workout plan that outlines a series of short but high-intensity and compound movements that are radically more effective at eliciting the desired cross-channel fitness result.

Essentially, we need a workout plan for cross-channel marketing as effective as CrossFit is for our bodies. But you can’t just jump right into full-blown CrossFit training—we have to be eased into it. Here I share with you a workout plan that will help you start strengthening your marketing channel muscles across channels.

1. Drill Your Demand Generation

Getting people excited about your company and product is hard work. Most marketers use a variety of materials and also recreate those materials every time they need to speak to an audience.

The first step to getting your cross-channel marketing in shape is taking an audit of what content, visuals and assets you currently have at your disposal. Think about how they can be reworked into new content to drive demand. Next, make sure that you actually sit down and map your content to the buyer journey. You need to ensure that everything you are creating focuses on the buyer’s needs.

2. Shape Up Sales Enablement

Tied to creating product demand is the need for companies to improve the effectiveness of sales enablement. Do this by first understanding the customer journey through all stages of the sales pipeline. Map your current sales resources along the pipeline stages, key verticals, buyer personas and differentiators. Understand the use case scenarios given by the sales team and analyze any bottlenecks preventing quick and efficient access to those materials. And ask your team to think about these questions:

3. Whip Partner Channels Into Shape

• Does the format of your resource match the use case scenarios?
• Are customer cases used during in-person or online customer presentations?
• Are they mailed, emailed or simply referred to during online presentations?

The power of an extended sales team and a partner channel network cannot be underestimated. But companies need to do some things to make sure partners have access to relevant collateral.

Make all relevant resources easily available. Create relevant and engaging content for your channel partner sales team. Interview that team periodically to see what resources they’re using, which are effective and what would be beneficial to create. Make the most of your existing direct marketing and sales collateral. Edit, re-use and re-purpose webinars, eBooks, case studies and other collateral and modify your creative workflow to generate collateral for both direct and channel at the same time.

4. Workout For Website and Ecommerce

Websites and digital platforms are often the primary channels of customer engagement and need to be the core area of focus for marketing teams. But how?

Increase conversion for targeted industries by creating personalized landing pages based on the company’s industry, size and location. Implement a website personalization platform, such as DemandBase, to deliver personalized content to segmented visitors. Use consistent and attractive visuals throughout the website that support your copy to create an eye-catching web experience. Use dynamic content to further customize each visitor’s experience. Coordinate marketing and eCommerce operations for a cohesive omni-channel customer experience.

5. Condition Content Marketing

In a time when content marketing is a key driver of engagement, businesses are feeling overwhelmed by the amount of content they’re expected to build, distribute and track, all within tight timelines.

To streamline content production, content marketers need to get smart in their approach to stand out from the competition. This means investing in content strategy, aligning it with business goals, and setting up processes and platforms for effective content creation, re-use and distribution. Strategize and create a plan for content that includes measurable goals and aligns with business targets. Make content quality over quantity a priority. Edit, re-use and repurpose content across your entire organization and partner ecosystem. Track content usage and ROI and create a feedback look into the following year’s content planning.

7. Strengthening For Field and Event Marketing

Field marketers are in the trenches, often spending days or weeks away from their head office. Creating a balance between corporate strategy and real-world requirements is an arduous task. Keep a catalogue of approved and high-performing imagery from past events to quickly create campaigns for future events. Take what has worked will and create an “event-in-a-box” campaign. This reduces training and ensures contracted resources can self-serve and use the right assets and messaging without taxing your valuable field marketers.

8. Social Media Shakedown

Social media can be one of the most powerful tools in a marketer’s arsenal. From Twitter and Facebook to Instagram and Pinterest, all employees are online. But to get it right, companies have to put up-to-date collateral in the hands of employees.

Enable all employees, especially internal advocates, with easy access to approved on-brand shareable resources. If you’re managing your social engagement with Hootsuite, consider connecting content source SKD to your Hootsuite account, enabling any user to use pre-approved images, content and resources. Repurpose your content into visually impactful, bite-size, shareable resources. Create fact cards or slides from your best practice and eBook resources that are easy to share on social. Share your company’s involvement with non-profits and the community. Over time, tell the story of your culture or brand.

Equipment For Cross-Channel Marketing Fitness: Digital Asset Management

As you build strength, CrossFit routines will start to incorporate various kinds of exercise equipment: medicine ball, weight bench, pull-up bar. In cross-channel marketing, you also need equipment. One of the most valuable tools at the enterprise level is a digital asset management solution.

Digital asset management provides companies with a secure, central library for its media files, giving employees, partners and clients an effective way to locate, share and download their corporate digital assets, no matter where they are in the world. The future of digital asset management has arrived with integrations into other enterprise MarTech tools, such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Cloud, AutoCAD, Hootsuite, SharePoint and others. These integrations make sure that employees have quick and easy access to the rich media they need right from inside the tools they are already using to build out campaigns and marketing materials.

Poor customer service is unacceptable on any channel, including mobile. Download this brief, Cross Channel Orchestration Fundamentals to discover how you can deliver consistent customer service experiences and enhance customer loyalty.

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When you think of “a conversion”, what goal comes to mind? For most of us, a sale is the ultimate goal, so it’s no surprise that sales and conversions are inextricably linked to each other. But even though a sale might be the end goal, it’s almost never the first thing a new potential customer does when they visit your site.

Yet they’re still converting, even when a sale doesn’t take place. Paying more attention to these types of conversions can not only help you win over more customers in the long run, but also deliver valuable insights that you can glean from your existing data — insights you may never have considered when focusing solely on sales. Let’s take a closer look.

Introducing the Prospect to Your Solution

The first step in any good funnel is to introduce prospects to your solution. Oftentimes brand awareness campaigns like these are done via pay-per-click solutions like Google Adwords or Facebook Ads. In the case of Adwords, you have tight integration with Google Analytics, so you can easily see which ads worked, which ads didn’t, and what kind of actions the user took on your page.

But these platforms really only scratch the surface of the conversion potential that’s happening behind the scenes. To really dig deep and get the gold nuggets of impactful data that makes a real difference in your campaigns, you need a robust analytics solution. Kissmetrics is one such tool that allows you to not only see things that you can also find in Google Analytics (like “How many people clicked this ad” and “how long did they stay on site afterwards?”) but also answer more meaningful, conversion-propelling questions, like “How many new users did we gain as a result of this campaign?” “When did users go from our onboarding email funnel to becoming full-fledged customers?” “Which email encouraged them to do so?”

If you’re truly data driven, you can even have the system crunch the numbers and figure out the average cost to acquire people who downloaded your white paper, for example. Either those leads will pay off, or you’ll find that you need to revisit your free offer to create something of greater value.

These are the kinds of insights you simply don’t get by looking at pure sales-focused conversion data.

Moving the Conversation from Web to Email

Getting the prospect’s email takes the conversation from web to email, and even though it’s a small win, it’s still a type of conversion nonetheless. The visitor is saying, in essence, “I’m interested in what you have to offer, and would like to know more.”

All too often, marketers seize upon this opportunity to blast users with all kinds of information — which can be overwhelming and disconcerting, and lead to them regretting their choice and unsubscribing. This is the time where it pays to look closer at the data in your email automation program. Most platforms will give you simple data such as clickthroughs and open rates – but again, we want to go deeper.

For example, are you tagging users so that you can follow where they go (and how long they stay) after they click an email link? What criteria do you have in place to identify and separate the eager, ready-to-act prospects from the freebie “tire kickers”? And what are you doing to warm up the tire-kickers into becoming ready-to-act prospects?

Fortunately, you can use a tool like Kissmetrics Campaigns to not only automate your email, but provide behavior-based segmentation so that you can know, with far greater precision, who’s taking the actions you want them to take, and who needs a bit more hand-holding?

Behavior-based marketing is more than just a buzzword, and it goes well beyond the traditional $Firstname “personalization” that many email marketing platforms offer. Want to segment emails based on whether or not a user opened or clicked through a previous email campaign? With Campaigns, you can, leading to a whole new level of one-on-one engagement with your prospects.

Getting Your CRM Software to Do the Heavy Lifting

When customer data goes into the CRM (customer relationship management) program, oftentimes the ball gets dropped. No matter which platform you use, your CRM system and marketing automation system need to work together harmoniously in order to output actionable data that delivers a return on investment — and the real sales numbers you crave.

While Kissmetrics isn’t a CRM platform specifically, it does mesh nicely with existing services that specialize in lead generation and customer tracking, including:

• Salesforce
• Marketo
• CallRail
• Call Tracking Metrics
• Tapstream
• And many more (see the full list here)

Details on how to integrate Kissmetrics with your existing shopping cart, SaaS or CRM can be found at the list link above, and once you follow this simple process a wealth of data will open up to you, effortlessly blending marketing and sales information so that you get detailed snapshots of user behavior from the start of the funnel to the end.

Here, you’ll be able to see which customers took which actions, and who needs a bit more nurturing to take that all-important next step.

Seeing the Big Picture (And the Little Details) – What Makes a Conversion a Conversion?

Focusing solely on sales as conversions can be disheartening at best, since very few people will ultimately make it through your funnel even on the best of days. It can be discouraging to focus on such a small percentage when instead, you should be looking for lots of little wins.

Bounce rate on your lead magnet page is lower as a result of more targeted ads? That’s a win.

FAQ pages have an unusually high time on page? People are getting their questions answered. That’s a win.

Downloads of a new white paper resulting in more high end, enterprise-level customers? That’s a win.

To be sure, right now a lot of the information out there can seem scattered and uncoordinated. Marketers still have a great deal of data sifting and filtering to do. But new advances in both tools and technology are helping not only comb through the data, but deliver meaningful, relevant information which in turn helps entire companies work together as a cohesive unit – and focus on conversions beyond the sale.

Are you focusing solely on sales when tracking conversions? Or are you looking at other types of “little wins” as well? How is this approach working for you? Share your success stories and triumphs with us in the comments below!

About the Author: Sherice Jacob helps business owners improve website design and increase conversion rates through compelling copywriting, user-friendly design and smart analytics analysis. Learn more at iElectrify.com and download your free web copy tune-up and conversion checklist today!

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The world of B2B marketing is changing rapidly. Over the past few years, we’ve seen trends emerge that challenge many of the traditional ways we think about demand generation.

A great illustration of this movement was the latest SiriusDecisions “Demand Unit Waterfall”, released just a few months ago, which essentially redefines the definition of a B2B buyer. Rather than leads or accounts, it focuses on “demand units”, defined as “a buying group that has been organized to address a need the organization is challenged with” — in other words, the group of key influencers with buying power within a given company.

If there’s one common line between this and all the other evolutions in B2B marketing we’ve seen in recent years, it’s the evolution of a more targeted model for demand gen, which increasingly resembles consumer marketing in its emphasis on audience personalization.

This evolution received a huge boost with the adoption of account-based marketing alongside traditional lead-led approaches, and has also been propelled more recently by the explosion in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology in the B2B space, which is empowering marketers to do so much more with their customer data.

Here are 5 ways in particular that B2B marketers can continue to evolve by taking a page from the B2C handbook:

1. Audience-centric marketing

Behind the evolution of demand gen — from fishing for leads, to named accounts, to combining both (“demand units”) — is a recognition of the importance of understanding B2B audiences on a personal level. (In fact, for SiriusDecisions, identifying your Total Addressable Market sits right at the top of the funnel.)

Of course, B2B audiences are made up of leads and accounts — but that’s only part of the story.
Audience-centric marketing is the difference between defining a qualified lead or account by checking-off the standard boxes (“job title”, “industry”, “company size”, etc), to zooming in and getting to grips with more personal information — specifically, those relating to the individual leads’ relationship with their account, like responsibilities and job functions, site-level hierarchies, and capacity and propensity to buy. These are the insights that really separate between a potential customer and an unqualified lead.

This echoes the approach of contemporary B2C marketing. Effective consumer marketers don’t merely spam you with every possible item or experience they can offer; instead, they’re using the right data on you to identify which offerings, if any, would be most relevant. That data can range from your age/social demographic, where you live and work, your previous related purchases, your personal interests and even your attitudes and beliefs — all of this gleaned from a huge range of data sources spanning online cookies, intent data and other third-party structured and unstructured data (more on that later).

2. Greater Personalization

Knowing who their target audiences are enables marketers to consistently serve the right content to the right people. The advantages to both customers and vendors alike are obvious. For the former, it means a far more pleasant, less intrusive or irritating customer experience. Customers who receive relevant content are much more likely to consider buying than those served content — even on potentially useful products or services — which doesn’t speak to them.

Consumer marketers do this as a matter of course. It’s no coincidence, for example, that Amazon manages to consistently serve you with relevant ads. Their eCommerce division combines the enormous masses of data at their disposal with AI, to accurately predict what kinds of offerings will resonate with you.

For B2B marketers, greater personalization means more efficiency and greater ROI. Marketing efforts won’t be wasted on unqualified leads or accounts, and sales will similarly save time by only focusing on genuinely qualified prospects. Tailoring content more personally also means their marketing spend can go a lot further.

For example, personalized emails are can generate a sixfold increase in in transaction rates than generic email campaigns.

3. Omni-channel marketing

On a related note: personalization also opens the potential for B2B marketers to fully utilize all the channels available to them in ways that have until now been impossible.

For example, online ad campaigns are seen as notoriously ineffective in the B2B world. But that’s more a function of the two-dimensional, “traditional” B2B methodology — i.e. just target a specific group of company IP addresses and hope the right people at those accounts will see a relevant ad. Unsurprisingly, you won’t get far by simply throwing content in the general direction of your customers and hoping it lands in front of the right person.

Direct mail poses similar challenges: it’s a particularly high-cost strategy, which is only worth pursuing if you’re confident of a reasonably high response rate.

Switching to an audience-centric model helps to narrow the field significantly. Using the right individual-level data can make targeting far more effective for B2B marketers too, by ensuring the campaigns they’re investing in are reaching the right audiences.

To illustrate: a recent Facebook ad campaign we ran at Leadspace saw a 25% lift in click-through rates when we utilized AI to target a more specific, relevant audience.

4. Speak wants and needs, not product features

Every B2B marketer worth their salt knows that to reach your prospects, you need to address the problems you’re solving rather than the specific features of your product or service, no matter how impressive or sophisticated they are.

And yet, so many B2B marketers are still putting their audiences to sleep by yammering away about their product’s shiniest features. The reason for this is that it’s impossible to talk to your customers’ needs if you don’t know who they are and what their pain points are. Without that vital intelligence, the only alternative is to either talk generically or simply fall back on the product itself and hope some relatively informed prospects will respond.

Ultimately, the people who you want to sign a check will only do so in return for solutions to their own business problems. They aren’t interested in “state of the art,” “best in class,” or “advanced XYZ” — they’re looking for ways to be more effective at their jobs, save time, and avoid pressure from other departments or their managers.

Again, marketers can find that information by getting the right customer data — but it’s also just as important to listen to your customers themselves for important insights and feedback.

5. Turn customers into advocates

The most successful consumer brands know that their interaction with their customers doesn’t end with a sale. B2C marketers work hard to ensure their customers will keep coming back for more, and ideally act as advocates and encourage their friends to buy.

The idea of turning B2B customers into advocates sounds almost bizarre at first — B2B marketers aren’t selling anything fashionable, cool or viral. But so what? B2B customers aren’t looking for fashionable, cool or viral. By taking an audience-centric approach, B2B marketers can understand their customers’ most urgent pain points and then effectively solve them. Isn’t helping your customers sleep well at night knowing they’re doing their job better than ever before enough reason for them to become fans?

Bringing it all together

Many B2B marketers are starting to do at least some of these things already, perhaps without even realizing it. But as demand generation continues to evolve, the most successful marketers will be those who combine them all to provide truly audience-centric marketing campaigns which truly resonate with their target audiences.

With legacy technology, marketers are getting an imperfect view of who their customers are and what they want. Download the Customer Experience Simplified to learn how to manage your customer experience and give them what they want.

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