* ABS corp, a B2B SaaS firm acquired as many customers as it wanted. Yet, success remained elusive. Why? It is because as they kept acquiring new customers, they overlooked the existing ones! As a result, customers churned and the firm couldn’t do anything about it. You don’t want to be in such a tricky situation, do you? If not, start focusing on customer retention. Plan the best SaaS Retention strategies that ensure customers stay with you for long.
The moral of the above story is- If you have a high customer churn rate, no matter how many new clients you get, your business and revenue will suffer. You may eventually cycle through your whole prospective client base, jeopardizing your company’s survival.
Customer retention is critical to your company’s long-term success. SaaS retention strategies that work help you turn hard-won consumers into long-term customers, and long-term customers into powerful advocates!
10 Best SaaS Retention strategies for your business!
Invest in an efficient and successful customer Onboarding.
Customer onboarding establishes the foundation for a positive customer experience and, hopefully, long-term retention. Since this is such a crucial step in your client’s journey, there are definitely customer onboarding guidelines to follow.
Throughout the onboarding process, your customers should feel supported and guided. Be proactive to see how your customers are using your product. Try to solve the most important use case for which the customer has brought your product. Do not teach all features in one go.
They should be able to contact you if they have any problems or need assistance understanding your product, and you should allow them to submit feedback both during and after onboarding. The more streamlined your onboarding process is, the faster and easier it will be for your customers to get started using your product.
Incentivize Customer Retention
Different departments of your firm track different metrics. For example- Each month, sales teams prefer to keep track of how much revenue they generated. Marketers track qualifying leads, which don’t necessarily turn into sales. Meanwhile, product teams are busy keeping track of how many features and story points they’ve delivered.
Now this situation represents misaligned goals. You need to incentivize customer retention by designing overarching metrics. Going by the above example, you can:
- Limit the number of prospects each salesperson is responsible for. This prevents salespeople from rushing through leads.
- Focus on lead quality above quantity for marketing teams. Try measuring sales-qualified leads (SQLs) as a success indicator instead of the number of marketing qualified leads (MQLs).
- For product teams, ensure that product managers have direct and unrestricted access to customers. Product upgrades will be haphazard without direct feedback, and will ultimately fail to retain customers.
- Customer Success teams should collaborate with cross-functional teams to understand
Improve Customer Engagement by sending personalized tips
To engage users further, you may set up automated emails that are sent when they do a specified action. If a user finishes developing a sales page, for example, you can send them an email that says, “Congratulations on creating your first page.” Here’s how to make the most of your sales pages,” and point them to a blog or educational video.
You can also use this page to engage them further. This type of assistance adds value to the customers’ efforts and encourages them to stay.
Define your KPIs and metrics clearly
Sometimes churn is unavoidable, but the more you monitor patterns and trends, the higher the chances of stopping it. You need to define your KPIs and metrics clearly to know what you want to measure. Tracking your SaaS retention metrics must be top of mind if you want to succeed at the churn and retention game. The KPIs that you should track differ at different stages of a customer journey.
Crafting SaaS retention strategies accordingly will go a long way in retaining key customers.
Onboarding
The KPIs that you will use to measure success are:
- Early Time To Value (TTV) – To know the time taken by your client to get value from the product after subscribing to it.
- Milestones completed- To keep track of customers’ progress throughout the onboarding process.
- Customer Engagement – How well the users have understood and used your product features
- Number of Users onboarded- To know if all the users have utilized the product or not.
Check out Designing a Customer Onboarding Framework for B2B SaaS.
Adoption
This is the point at which your customers have a firm grasp of your product and have begun to explore its features. At this stage, it’s critical to track how clients interact with the platform and which features they use the most.
Here, the KPIs will change. The following are the analytics or the metrics to be used at the adoption stage:
- Daily Active Users (DAUs),
- Monthly Active Users (MAUs),
- Product Adoption rate
- Key product milestones achieved,
- License utilization
Retention/Renewal
You don’t have to predict who will renew using CustomerSuccessBox. Instead, you’ll have all the information you need to keep clients by combining real-time account health with CRM data and customer billing. It notifies you if it detects anything that could indicate a future churn risk, allowing you to jump directly into where you’re required while still having time to rescue the account.
The analytics that you should use here is as follows:
- GRR and NRR
- Retention rate
- Repeat Customer Rate
- Customer Retention Cost (CRC)
- Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
The more information you have about when and how customers churn, the easier it will be to detect at-risk accounts and implement a client retention strategy to assist mitigate the risk. You can also look for patterns by breaking down your churn data into different customer segments. This could aid in identifying the reasons for churn and, in turn, preventing it in the future.
Send reminders and progress reports regularly
Your product may not be at the top of your customers’ minds all of the time. But their pain points and goals are. Sending notifications reminds users of the key problems they were trying to solve, and it connects your product to something that is intrinsically meaningful to them.
Educate your customers
Without contacting a member of your team, your customers will prefer to get the answers on their own. In that scenario, creating resources that customers may obtain on their own time when they’re working on a problem on their own, is a fantastic idea.
This might be in the form of a discussion board or a community built through customer newsletters and seminars. Customers will feel more supported if they can go to a place where they can get opinions from others who have used your product and are familiar with your company. They’re now a part of something bigger, which makes them want to return.
Provide an excellent customer experience
Customer Success, Customer Service, and Customer Support are all critical. They may all work together to improve the overall customer experience. It all boils down to consistency: you must continuously meet your clients’ expectations for your product. You must do everything possible to avoid unpleasant shocks.
Customer support must provide a pleasant experience to users. It talks about your approach to resolving their difficulties. So, practice pleasing users when resolving these difficulties. Always go above and above in your efforts. Consider any difficulty a consumer has as a stumbling block on the way to the ideal customer experience. You not only remove the bump, but you also reward the users for their troubles. Eventually, this may turn out to be one of the best SaaS retention strategies that you have.
Offer discounts on upsells to loyal customers
Discounts and add-ons are a great way to thank your long-term clients. Furthermore, the more add-ons a customer selects, the more likely they are to utilize your product, making it a win-win scenario for you and the customer.
What makes a consumer loyal? Customers who-
- Use the most features,
- Generate the most recommendations,
- Participate in the most helpful forums, or are all of the above.
Allow loyal customers to trial product add-ons complimentary for a limited time after you’ve determined who qualifies. You can also give them discounts if they reach a certain milestone.
Listen to customers- via a solid Feedback Loop
Listening to your consumers is the best approach to improve their experience and encourage them to stay with you. Develop a customer feedback loop. It is a communication system in which you may ask your clients for feedback, collect and evaluate it, and make it apparent to them that you’re considering their ideas.
In instances where you want to give people a sense of power, ask for input. So you might include a reference on your pricing page or in your monthly newsletter, for example. Make sure it’s pleasing to the eye and enticing for users to provide feedback.
Customer interviews, written reviews, questionnaires, and even monitoring online review sites are all examples of this type of feedback.
Analyze your CHURN!
Yes, you read that right. Not every customer will stay, but even those that go can teach us something. Follow up with those who do depart to see if you can figure out why they left. Instead of using this as a chance to try to reclaim them, see it as a useful learning experience.
A customer may opt to discontinue using your product for a variety of reasons. It’s likely that their priorities have shifted, and your solution no longer aligns with their current initiatives. Or they were having trouble learning your product and didn’t have the time to devote to it. Once you’ve drilled down to the root of the problem, you need to keep track of it and work on a solution.
Final thoughts on SaaS Retention Strategies
Every customer that signs up to use your product is unique, and some customer retention methods may be effective for some but not for others. You can persuade customers to stay loyal for the long run by taking a strategic approach to retention.
Of course, none of this means that you must overlook acquisition. A steady influx of new consumers is essential for any organization. However, your subscription business won’t survive long unless you have a solid plan in place to keep those consumers.
Invest in developing a long-term strategy for keeping your current clients, and you’ll see your efforts pay off for years to come.
P.S. – The main image has been taken from pexels.com
