When it comes to marketing, marketers have to strive hard and use different approaches and strategies to sell their services. With SaaS marketing, it is similarly tough to get clients, especially when you have no clue where to start. But that doesn’t matter because we have prepared the best practices to help boost businesses regardless of the toughness. First, however, before accelerating your growth with some of these strategies, we must dig deep and understand the roots of SaaS marketing and its primary associations. So let’s get the ball rolling.

Understanding SaaS marketing 

Any marketing process or procedure followed to generate extra demand and adopt SaaS products and services will always serve as SaaS marketing. Therefore, as a SaaS marketer, it is essential to understand what procedures and strategies to follow to make SaaS marketing efficient. Furthermore, the efficiency of SaaS marketing dramatically relies on adopting the best practices associated with it. Better approaches to SaaS marketing should thus entail incorporating specific tactics that focus on clear SaaS marketing objectives.

It is also crucial to understand the specificity of marketing SaaS products. It is pretty different from the rest as the process involves trying to sell intangible products – that’s why it might sound a bit difficult. Implementation of intangible marketing products mainly occurs through selling the SaaS services via subscriptions.

With a deep understanding of SaaS marketing, you can now be sure what you want to practice next – marketing your SaaS product. As initially stated, selling these products isn’t any more straightforward than other marketing forms. It thus needs some strategies and best practices to achieve the final goal. The rules section themselves into different divisions, which include customer acquisition best procedures, customer retention best practices, and free-trial activation best practices, among other crucial methods.

However, before narrowing down to the specific practices in each section, let’s grasp what each section involves as a SaaS marketing practices to boost your business.

Customer acquisition is all about acquiring customers for your SaaS product or service. Even though convincing first-time customers can be demanding, some best practices, such as embracing product-led, understanding your user persona, and frictionless signup processes, will make everything seamless. Remember, customer acquisition is one of the significant stages of SaaS marketing and thus requires excellent prioritization.

Once you’ve acquired more customers, you will need to focus more on adoption and ensure practices that enable the success of customers. These services include rewarding customers for hitting milestone targets, celebrating SaaS business successes with customers, and using micro-videos to engage the customer.

Once you have a wide range of customers for your SaaS products and services, you will always need to retain them and not lose them. Remember, you can quickly lose customers, especially when you provide poor services. It is thus essential to focus on customer retention practices such as the launch of new in-app features, implementation of self-service support, and building a community of customers, among others.

SaaS Marketing Best Practices

Customer acquisition best practices 

• Embracing product-led 

The first thing you should use to acquire customers is the product you want to sell them. Therefore, this practice entails using the SaaS product you wish to trade to drive customer acquisition. It is thus essential to show the greatness of your product to ensure increased trial signups.

With this strategy, the customers can easily understand more about the product offered, and the next time they need the product, they will head straight into acquiring the product offer. The most renowned SaaS product marketing strategists believe that enabling visual displays of the best parts of the product will generate a lot of customer interest. Once the customers are interested in the products they see, they might consider them immediately. If you have instantly acquired a customer for the product you are selling, it’s always a good practice to entice them with a bundle as soon as possible so they can see the product in operation.

• Ensure clear positioning 

With positioning in marketing, the context lies in how the product or service you want to sell fits in your potential customer’s mind. To ensure the best and most precise positioning, you must clearly outline the product you wish to provide and define its users. It would help if you also defined some potential product users’ expectations.

It is essential to implement proper positioning since it fully aims at attracting the rightful potential customers. With great attraction through proper positioning, you should expect you will increase the acquisition rate among customers. Clarity of whatever your product is helps the potential customer to understand it properly and thus reduces doubts of future disappointments. Additionally, consider partnering with a specialized SaaS SEO agency to optimize your positioning and further amplify your online visibility.

• Understand your customer persona 

One of the most excellent practices that will keep you up the scale in SaaS marketing is the proper understanding of whom your product will serve, including verifying essential details such as checking phone numbers for accurate user identification. With a proper understanding of the user persona, it is definite that you can describe your product efficiently to fit what the potential user wants. While you highlight a description of the product to the right people, it is essential that you also include some of the benefits that directly fit the potential user. You should also understand how customers want to communicate with your brand to define whether you should send text message from computer for promotion or a simple email. Doing so will help you generate more attraction, driving motivation into the potential SaaS customer.

• The use of trial signups through the content drive  

Actionable content is one of the significant features that will keep you up the scale in SaaS marketing. You can always use enticing content to drive the users into trial signup. This approach will also help you save a lot, mainly because everyone focuses on reducing customer acquisition costs. Using content to entice users into the use of trial signups is one of the cost-reduction strategies that focus on giving customers a key reason to share your SaaS product a try. Hiring a fractional CMO can be beneficial in crafting and implementing such content strategies effectively.

• A seamless and smooth signup process

If your signup process is full of friction and a bother to the user, it is always possible that you might be a potential client. Therefore, you must ensure a smooth signup process, which is the first thing your new customer should encounter after developing an interest in the product you are providing. Therefore, ensure the design of the signup process follows strategies that ensure smoothness in sign-up. Once customers find difficulties signing up, they might give up and consider other options.

Even though friction-based signup isn’t advisable, you can still consider it in some cases. The goodness with the process is that once the new customer successfully signs up, there is an excellent possibility of them being long-term clients. However, frictionless approaches to signing up will always give you a high signup rate.

Strategies that will help users activate their accounts and buy the SaaS product include:

• The use of welcome screens with a section for long-time customers.
• Gamifying the onboarding experience.
• The use of checklists.
• The use of personalized primary onboarding.

Customer adoption best practices 

The following are some practices that will help you in growing SaaS business & encourage customers’ adoption and their success aligned.

• Ensure to include primary onboarding

While primary onboarding is one of the critical things to consider, it is essential that you also embrace the usage of secondary onboarding. With secondary onboarding, you need to ensure that your users understand and get more insight into your product through secondary-feature discoveries.

One of the common mistakes among SaaS businesses is the forgetfulness of customers after they activate their accounts. So always ensure that customers get continued value from the SaaS product.

• Gamification

Gamification is one of the crucial strategies that will set your SaaS marketing on another level. By incorporating gamification software, you can leverage the power of rewards and competition to enhance the customer experience. While everyone loves rewards, you can be sure that rewarding your customers will always generate an excellent customer experience. Thus, to drive more engagement, always ensure that you make the experience with your SaaS product more competitive with increased conversions through rewards for achieving certain milestones.

• Sharing success celebrations with customers

After some time, your products and marketing will always attain success and thus must share the success and celebrate with customers. Continuous success celebrations with customers will continuously develop a positive relationship with customers. Such approaches to marketing will always make your customers love the product and even forge excellent brand loyalty.

• Use of micro videos to increase engagement with customers

Among the selling points of your SaaS products is the use of engaging micro-videos. The videos are short for educating, entertaining, and engaging customers on the product they can consider. The shortness of the videos is because most people have a short concentration span, thus ensuring they are short but captivating.

• Customer retention best practices 

Once acquisition and adoption are okay, it’s time to retain the customers so that you don’t lose any. Some crucial strategies to keeping customers maintained with your services include the launch of new features, feedback gathering while fixing the possible loops, self-service support implementation, and creating a community of customers.

Conclusion

SaaS marketing can seem challenging at the start. However, the above practices make the entire process easier and seamless. You only need to focus on the three crucial areas – customer acquisition, adoption, and retention.

To know more about about SaaS marketing best practices, connect with us!

Also read: SaaS Product Design Principles