SaaS startups continue to struggle with low product adoption rates shortly after launching. They have high signup rates but these customers eventually wane away and cancel their subscriptions when they are done with their initial goal of signing up.
For most SaaS companies, strategic marketing can help them increase their numbers. However, the moment where a customer discovers how this product could help them achieve their goals doesn’t always arrives. This is also known as the “aha” moment. This is why it is important to take a close look at your company. Doing so will help you discover the stages that are important along the customer’s life, and use these stages to introduce “aha” features that reel customers in.
Having said that, we had a look at some strategies to accelerate product adoption for SaaS startups below:
1. Use In-Product Tips, Guides and Walkthroughs
The first time a customer signs up to your company they will have a very specific goal. For SaaS companies, the chances are high that the customer will achieve that specific goal within a day or two of signing up. It is also possible that after the customer achieves said goal, they won’t log into your service again.
Additionally, the users who have continued to use your platform will probably get bored after some time and only log in whenever they want to achieve a particular goal every once in a while.
To save your startup from both of these possibilities, you need to develop a comprehensive onboarding strategy. You can do this by using in-app tips and walkthroughs to acquaint your new users with what the service has to offer aside from the feature for which they signed up.
Most SaaS businesses have several helpful features. It is important to ensure that through in-app guides and walkthroughs, your customers understand all the features your software has to offer. They will get more engaged with the service as they learn what they can do with it aside from their initial signup goal.
2. Use Segmented Email Marketing
Email marketing is still a very effective way of reaching out to clients. Using proper email segmentation will help you divide your customers into various sets of groups.
Using this groups you can set up email campaigns to provide guidance or just keep your customers updated. As you communicate with them, they get engaged and even more psyched up to keep using the platform.
After the user has completed the signup process, they need to be on-boarded, nurtured, and taken through a series of emails that can help them discover your product’s hidden gems. By taking them through these initial steps, you can greatly increase engagement, increase your conversions at each stage of the campaign, and help them adopt your product.
At Pressfarm, we introduce upsells and calls to action along the way to different segments of our customers. We have greatly increased our adoption by sending the right emails to the right segment of users at any stage in time.
The bottom-line is, do not just send mass emails to your customers expecting they will automatically get engaged. Instead, identify the segments you need to differentiate your customers and send relevant emails to these segments.
3. Use Blog Posts to Educate
The best place to continuously pitch and market your product is on your company blog. Take advantage of the readership you have to keep training your customers on how to achieve their goals using your product.
You can write articles about your company’s offerings as part of documentation and occasionally refer your customers to them. However, we prefer to use articles not as a marketing tactic but as an opportunity to help customers achieve their goals around a topic they are interested in.
Your content marketing should always be educational. Provide useful guides and information. Tell the customers what to do, as well as how and where to do it. In other words, you should think about your blog as a comprehensive guide for helping your customers to solve the problems they face in your area of specialty.
A clever way to teach people about your product is occasionally writing about the strategies that customers can use to achieve a certain end goal, then lightly mentioning how your product helps them achieve one of the strategies as a tip in the article.
In order to develop an effective content marketing strategy, you must first understand the topics around your startup’s niche, write useful content about them and test the response from users. Once you’ve done that for a while, you can learn from the data, make the necessary changes, and grow. A sound content strategy has helped the software-as-a-service market and companies like Buffer, Kissmetrics, and Hubspot to grow their daily users.
How to reach your target market through guest blogging
Guest blogging involves partnering with other thought leaders in your industry to publish blog posts on their sites. By doing this, you can not only reach a wider audience but also widen your professional network. If you can publish quality blog posts with links to your website. Then you will boost your web traffic as people follow the links back to you.
An agency like Pressfarm can also help you create quality content as well as develop a media outreach strategy to push this content to the right media outlets. With a professional press release, some engaging feature stories and a creative media kit from Pressfarm, your brand can make a splash in the media. Beyond creating quality content to help you make a memorable impression with your brand. Pressfarm can also help you develop a media outreach strategy to push this content out to the right journalists. By building curated media lists, the experts at Pressfarm can help you connect with journalists in your niche. Furthermore, as a client, you get access to to a comprehensive database containing over 75,000 journalists across industries. With Pressfarm’s services, you can finally generate the publicity your brand deserves.
4. Test Website & In-App Placement
It is crucial to make use of the stages along your customers’ usage when you can prompt them with CTAs. An announcement, an action-based tip, and element proposals that move them to the next stage of the service.
Some SaaS companies do not provide any sort of engagement to their users when they are logged on. However, if you investigate a little you will find that from platforms like Facebook, Gmail, Airbnb, Dropbox, and Slack attempt to re-engage users and increase product adoption through website and in-app cues. These keep the customers engaged.
In order to implement this effectively, you can identify important spots in your service. Where you think customers will benefit from a tip, CTA, or an announcement. Add those prompts to guide your customers into the next level of your service.
5. Try Using Prompts In Team Email Signatures
Your customers can benefit a lot from subtle and unobtrusive email prompts like having your team place an announcement or CTA in their signatures. As they send out emails, these prompts help onboard customers and increase product adoption. They also attract new customers and increase signups.
6. Utilize Ad Retargeting To Stay Top-of-Mind
Repetition has seen some companies grow dramatically. This marketing strategy is proven to work and it is very simple as well. Simply show your ad to people who have shown interest in you in the past. Keep repeating this like a psychological trick and eventually you will convert.
For instance, let’s say you recently had an ad leading customers to your landing page. Some of the prospective leads that showed interest but did not execute. The call-to-action on the landing page is a great opportunity to market another product or additional features. You can set your ad to show to these leads again. That is the whole concept of ad retargeting.
The more they see your ad, the higher their chances of eventually signing up.
Utilise ad retargeting so that you can stay top of mind with your customers. Propose upsells, CTAs, product features and upgrades. Alternatively, you can prompt them to try a training session that will ultimately lead to higher product adoption rates.
7. Host Webinars & Live Demos To Train & Upsell Users
Webinars and live demos cannot be underestimated. They have become popular over the years for one main reason: they provide video content in an interactive and unique manner.
Through webinars, an actual person interacts with customers to teach them about the product. As well as its features, and how to quickly achieve what they want. The viewers get to learn about features they’re not already using, participate in the conversation and ask questions.
Two most important benefits of webinars and live demos are:
a). You get customers visually engaged. It changes your product demonstrations from telling to showing.
b). It becomes easier to upsell customers on various points or additional products and increase your conversion rates.
8. Use a Startup PR Roadmap
A PR roadmap is a PR calendar that helps you stay in touch with what news to send to the press. As well as when, where, and how to go about it. Startups which want to keep their users informed on the latest product changes and features can implement a year-round roadmap to help them stay in the news all year long.
This helps with new user acquisition as well as helping your current users know that there are more features on your platform which they can use to achieve their bottomline. When your users are seeing your product features highlighted in the news. They begin to ask themselves how they can utilize these aspects to stay ahead of their competition in business. To know how to develop your startup’s PR roadmap, check out this guide. That we did a while back: Best Tips for Creating a Startup PR Road Map (Free Template Included)
In conclusion, the issue of product adoption is a very pressing concern among Saas startups. While for some platforms it can be very straightforward, for others it might appear impossible to boost your daily user numbers. High signup rates with a lower number of daily users is an issue that continues to plague even the most accomplished startups in the market. Using the strategies above, you can turn things around for your SaaS service and accelerate your product adoption.