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Tips to get more users per month in the first year of the SaaS business

Tips to get more users per month in the first year of the SaaS business.

SaaS, or “Software as a Service,” is a software licensing and delivery model. It is cloud-based software, licensed via subscription, and hosted centrally.  SaaS products are in use for all kinds of bases and industries.

Here are some of the tips for growth of SaaS business in the first year-

Reach Out to Your Network– Start contacting people from your network: friends, acquaintances, current and former co-workers, and ask them for introductions. Ask them specific questions about your product and market. You may feel that they need your product. But it is better to talk to the market and validate the hypotheses.

Common value proposition– Find a way to get users to see the value in your app in the shortest amount of time. Making the customer understand why he needs your product for providing an awesome experience is important. You may not have enough money. However, you do have one big advantage over more established companies: you have more time. Thus, you can give your subscribers more time than a big company can.

Leverage the ‘freemium’ model– You need potential users to see the value in what you offer. Offer a free trial. Then, after some time email your customers and ask for feedback. Additionally, ask for a phone number and call them to help you build a genuine relationship

Use Twitter for Market Research– Twitter can let you know about online complaints. You could reach out to those users directly, and ask them to chat more about their issues so that you understand how to make your product better. Thus, you can do your market research. It also helps to build a list of potential beta customers.

Use Quora  – It gets answers from people in your target demographic about the product you’re trying to sell. You will get responses for the pain points you are trying to solve. It  helps you to gauge the response by the number of comments and upvotes it receives

Evolve Customer Development Tools– If you know what an ideal customer profile looks like, create a survey that qualifies your prospects. Ask one leading question that defines the prospects. Once they reply you can ask them for details like their name, e-mail, and/or company name and treat them like a lead.

Create compelling content and grow your email list- To grow a new SaaS company, the power of content is well accepted. Content along with an email list and a large database leads to more traffic and more money. It is simple to find the email addresses of your prospects. It is also easy to reach out to a high volume of people relatively quickly Alternately LinkedIn messages can yield a higher conversion rate for your business. Try to add value to your subscribers in the first few e-mails. Then persuade them to buy your product in the last one or two e-mails.

Set the right price for your product– They sometimes ask for less than the customer would’ve been ready to pay. Add new editions of your product, with a nil increase in the price for the current editions. A release with more features can be created later and new customers can be charged more for it. This change has to be communicated immediately.

Make your offering exclusive– Exclusivity is a prominent strategy for growing a SaaS business without feeling a huge amount of pressure. Psychologically, people want to be a part and not be left out. Create a compelling reason for people to sign up; then get them to share your service with their friends

Use Betalist– Sites like Betalist help to rapidly generate a list of early bird signups. If the product is liked by the community, hundreds of qualified signups are guaranteed in a matter of days

Leverage Other People’s Platforms-Find other brands that have an audience similar to what you’re trying to build and bring them over to your platform. The trust so far they’ve built with that audience, can be leveraged by you, as well. Use guest posting for leveraging other people’s audiences to build your own. Many businesses have tried and benefited from this approach.

SEO– Search engine traffic can also lead to many paying customers

Run Paid Advertisements– Paid advertising can be an alternative source for getting new customers.

Leverage Online Communities– Online communities are essentially scalable versions of industry conferences. Interact with like-minded people, offer something of value to them, stay in touch, and potentially get some new paying customers.

Generate Press Coverage– There’s always a clever way to discover press coverage opportunities. Press coverage helps to discover some impressive link-building opportunities. It also increases your search engine rankings. For example, if a well-read newspaper such about your company and links to your website, you will receive a noticeable increase in search traffic over time, apart from new customers at the time of publication.

Conclusion

The strategies differ when the business is in its early stage and when it increases. In the beginning, a lot of effort goes into sending cold e-mails, LinkedIn messages, or crafting paid advertising campaigns. You might be interacting with your subscribers personally, asking questions, and responding to every e-mail. You might visit Quora to source long-tail keywords. You may be writing content around that to generate traffic from search apart from other efforts for business growth. The above tips offer possibilities to grow your business in the first year.

 

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    SaaS

    Best SaaS User Adoption Strategies for 2021

    There are lots of SaaS products for all kinds of business and industries. Every SaaS product is designed for a defined goal. Hence, one has to differentiate and adopt the right one for his requirements.

    Getting a SaaS user to adopt a product is a tough process and companies pamper customers as if they are royals, even for a starter plan. The hallmark of a successful SaaS product is a great user adoption strategy that will help achieve that level of adoption with the users.

    All major companies tend to focus time and effort on product adoption to move their users along the pathway from basic conversion to becoming regular, loyal users to create a base of customers that believe in the value of what the company produces. When the end-users get substantial value from a product instantly, it easily becomes a part of the organizations’ day-to-day activities and also cuts down the negative probability of them switching to a near competition

    Acquiring users is the first step. Real success comes from making sure those users fully adopt the product. For an organization focused on product-led growth (PLG), continuous up-gradation of user adoption tactics is required to help the SaaS business, and product, go from strength to strength. User adoption strategies bind the business, preventing all types of churn and building the in-demand retention KPIs

    The following strategies help to create a user adoption strategy that works and helps in increasing user adoption-

    Convincing top-level executives to buy-in for use- The first step is surely getting top- level client executives on board during the purchase process. Step two, to be minutely focused, is getting these leaders to support their IT department. Parallely, this can be expanded by promoting users across the organization. It is important to support and convince the client IT department to gain the executive buy-ins, not only for purchase but for use too. An executive’s scope of promotion has always been a great indicator of the success of a product. Therefore, many SaaS companies are focusing on redefining their content strategies around supporting the IT department with requisite resources and tools to stay engaged with their user teams.

    Clear, Concise, and Easy Communications-Clear communication makes your client users feel comfortable. The importance of adopting a SaaS user model should be highlighted to them. Aside from this, the process should be made super simpler by breaking it down into sub-points. Also, timely meetings and discussions should be done with the user members about their issues, and challenges, if any. Support the team to take ownership in adoption by asking for feedback on the layout and process. 

    Build Products first for the cloud – Cloud-first products almost always succeed since the products intend to alleviate end-user pain points. This facilitates easy adoption since the products are super easy to use. Additionally, this can be done with or without the help of IT teams as well. If rebuilding the product from scratch is difficult, it is preferable to invest in customer research to deeply understand end-user challenges. Once done, the marketing efforts can be leveraged to be specific about how these challenges are to be addressed.

    Flexible, Accessible Training for all-Schedule training monthly, quarterly, or annually instead of being a ‘one-time thing’ by including even new employees. Regular training will ensure that the new ones are looked after well as well as help the experienced users, also. Key people have to be appointed at each location who ‘run point’ on the onboarding process while online collaboration tools to do training sessions and sharing information are used.

    Review of Sales strategy – It is vital to revisit your sales process to ensure that the right expectations are set up. It is a known fact that low product adoption is usually a key indicator of churn. Ensure and confirm that the businesses’ need and expected value specified by the customer during the buying process is documented.

    Share that with anyone focused on driving success at that account after the sale is complete. Apart from just documenting their need and expected value, it is preferable to define the deployment and customer success plan during the later stages of the sale so that customers and anyone supporting them can start the implementation immediately post-sale.

    Provide Full Support to users –Strive to support the users to get their much-needed requirements from the software. For example, creating meaningful and actionable dashboards for each important user as well as assisting them with technical implementations too. This process may need co-ordination of shop personnel, maintenance, IT staff, or simply troubleshooting when things get stuck up.

    Survey how self-sufficient and technical proficiency the users are and streamline your answers. Try to avoid frustrated users that lack timely support and eventually churn away from you.

    Conclusion & Summary for the Best SaaS adoption strategies 2021-

    By Implementing these six product adoption strategies the level of SaaS user adoption will surely boost up. These tips are expected to enhance the user experience and be a catalyst to promote the product and its features. The target for achievement has to be defined and tools used that support that goal.

    Companies with high user adoption numbers have higher marketing ROI and lower marketing costs. Overall, the gain for the company will be increased revenue in the long run. The whole company should be aligned and motivated towards driving product usage at the client end. This is a crucial aspect of retention because it’s in the best interest of everyone in the company.

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