Are you a data-driven marketer? Yes? No? No idea? Well, it's a love-hate relationship. While it is easy to proclaim that you are a data-driven marketer and to admit that data is your new master. In reality, data crunching doesn't come naturally to marketers. Traditionally, data crunching was the realm of analysts in companies and marketers were the smart, innovative folks who launched and managed awe-inspiring marketing campaigns.

It was a tough transition for me as a digital marketer to start crunching data. But I must admit, while the transitional journey was painful, once I started seeing the gains, I became a big fan of marketing data. Unlike data scientists, I don't live and breathe data but then I ensure all marketing decisions are based on data and less on hunch.

More than 2/3 of marketers admit that they will start making data-driven decisions within two years. But, how much data-driven are you? The reality about data is that its relationship with marketers and data is of a love-hate one.

The Fear is Real (But Don’t Worry!)

As a marketer, you can’t live with it, and you definitely can’t live without it. While on one hand, data can make you a more successful marketer, on the other hand, it can give you a headache and paralyzes your mind. This is where the love-hate comes from. Not only that, many marketers may be fearful of data. According to this report, 91% of marketers are worried about driving ROI from big data and 70% are concerned about making sense of all this data.

That’s not an encouraging sign. In fact, it says that most marketers still do not trust data the way they need to. It’s true that data comes with its own set of challenges. But if you want to be successful, you have to accept it as a necessary evil. And, once you conquer this fear you can empower yourself like never before. If you want to send the right message to the right audience at the right time, you have to become a data-driven marketer.

The Job Isn’t Easy

If you want to be a data-driven marketer, you have to adopt a new mind-set. You have to realign your goals with the goals of your organization and make the most of the tools at your disposal. Because, it’s time for data, big data. Big data is nothing but storage, accumulation and manipulation of large data sets. Their complexity renders traditional methods of sifting through data useless.

And, there is nothing you can do about it. As technology is evolving, data will keep on exploding. The bigger corporations have developed processes to synthesize this data already. In a couple of years big data will become norm and dominate the entire world. 64% of marketers strongly agree that data is the key to success while 49% think their biggest challenge is incorporating data in their strategies.

New tools have already started emerging. These will help you handle big data much more efficiently. The amount of information packed in these data clusters is simply breath-taking. Imagine if you could know the heart-rate while watching TV. Now, imagine correlating that to create an advertising campaign. Hence, the actual job is to harness this data and using it to your advantage.

Right Thing in the Right Place

As a data-driven marketer you have to put the right tools in the right place to collect the right data. For marketers whose analytics live in silos, it becomes difficult to compare data across channels. For example, your email marketing analytics and social media marketing analytics are in two places. You do not have your data integrated with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system either. You have to improve this and keep everything connected if you want to exploit the power of data.

Data-Driven Goals

A data-driven marketer should have data-driven goals. If you want your business to succeed in this day and age, you and your team need to establish this. You should not limit yourself to tracking and reporting. Push yourself to achieve specific marketing targets. It is the only way you can see your strategies succeed. Use data and manipulate it to succeed. After all, you have all the data you need at your disposal. All you need to do is use it to your advantage.

Measure the Unmeasurable

A true data-driven marketer will always find ways to measure the unmeasurable. It’s unconventional, but you should take it up as a challenge anyway. Take for example, branding. Can you measure it? Probably not. But you can use analytical tools to figure out how to measure it. You can combine different data collected from different channels, and effectively combine it to come up with something unique. There is no joy greater than figuring out a way to analyze the unmeasurable.

Incorporate Data in Content

Don't limit the power of data. 92% companies use databases to store data. But how many actually use that data for good? Use that data to improve your marketing content. You can effectively create better blog posts, ebooks, white pages, etc. In fact, you will be surprised to see how much of an improvement it will bring about. Not only that, this will help you go a long way.

You will be creating high-quality content that will be credible as well as interesting. So, try to correlate as many points as possible. It will help you create relevant content that your leads will like.

It is a Mind-Set: Take Baby Steps towards Data

It's all in your mind. You can become a data-driven marketer if you set your mind to it. As a matter of fact, unconsciously, you are already a data-driven marketer. Take advantage of all the underutilized data lying around you and turn a blind eye towards your fear of data (if you have any!).

One analytics tool which every marketer uses is Google Analytics. Start analyzing the data Google Analytics gives you, go into details, explore it in detail and you will be surprised by what all can be achieved from a free analytics tool like Google Analytics. Next, start looking at the CRM and marketing automation tool dashboards, these powerful dashboards will give you a complete glimpse of your Sales and Marketing processes.

So what are you waiting for? Go out into that digital landscape with your guns blazing!

Predictive analytics has existed for years. But now the time has come for it to shine. Marketers are gravitating towards predictive analytics in order to improve their profits. Many more will follow suit in the near future. As of this year 49% of B2B companies are already using predictive analytics to propel their business forward.

So, what is it? Predictive analytics as the name suggests is a concept deeply rooted in the idea of predicting and identifying future outcomes on the basis of historical data. This data, that has been collected through the years coupled with algorithms and other techniques help marketers assess the future.

Why Should Marketers use Predictive Analytics?

A new age of global consumerism has made its way into the world, consumers are becoming tech-savvy so marketers too need to change their methods. The volume of data is expanding exponentially thanks to abundance of technology. But that means more work for marketers, more data to sift through and analyse. Here’s where predictive analytics comes in.

With computers becoming faster as well as cheaper, and marketing software becoming self-explanatory, it is easier for marketers to analyse the data available to them in order to produce insights.

According to this study, Predictive marketers are 1.8x more likely to exceed the shared goals of their organization than other marketers who don’t.

Big data is the data of the future. From IP log files, forms to purchase activities across the internet, big data is complex and needs further analysis. As a marketer you can leverage this data to your advantage. Predictive analytics is where the future is.

Why Is Predictive Analytics Important?

Predictive analytics has a lot of uses for businesses and other organizations.

1.Foretelling Through Predictability:

With predictive analytics, you can optimize your marketing campaigns. You can foretell your customer’s behaviour. You have the opportunity to upsell and cross-sell more as a result of predictive analytics. You will be able to retain more leads through campaigns thanks to this. Organizations can further improve their operability and functioning through successful forecasting. You can predict the optimum price for your products or how many units you might sell during a certain period. It will enable you to prepare for the future. For example predictive analytics will help you forecast your Black Friday and Cyber Monday You will know how to prepare yourself accordingly.

The best thing about this is that you have a fair idea of what is to come.

2.Frauds and Other Risks

Cyber-security has become a major concern amongst most B2B companies. Predictive analytics can actually help you protect your business against potential cyber criminals.

Monitoring real-time activities can actually help you spot abnormal or suspicious behaviour. You can use analytics to assess credit scores of your customers. A person’s creditworthiness is revealed through their credit score. You can reduce the risk of defaulters with the help of predictive analytics.

How Can You Use Predictive Analytics to Engage Prospects?

# 1: Know Your Customer

To sell more, you need to know more about your customers, leads and prospects. Your marketing database does not show you the bigger picture in terms of data.

Using a predictive analytics platform will allow you to put all customer data from every department to get the complete picture of your client. Using this you can profile your customer.

The key to good marketing is to know your customer. To see the complete picture, you need to know the following things:

• How they got to know of you
• How they behave when they are on your website
• What problems they have
• How you can solve these problems
• How you can retain them for the long run
• How they can communicate about your brand to others

For the long run, you need to develop cross-selling and upselling strategies, and there’s no way better to do this than using predictive analysis. Your first step should be to consolidate all data from multiple channels in one single platform. The reason why you need to consolidate all this information is because a lot of vital data resides in the databases of departments like sales, support, IT etc. You have to make sure that they are COLLECTING data in the first place. Only then can you put this all together.

#2: Build Meaningful Relationships

At this day and age, consumers are looking for interesting brands who are willing to connect with them at an emotional level. For that brands and marketers need to build meaningful relationships with their customers and leads.

While it is true that account retention is not really a marketer’s job, but there is nothing bigger than achieving success. For a marketer it is fairly easy to retain customers by building meaningful relationships. All this while you can use predictive analytics to your advantage.

With predictive analytics you can start building meaningful connections with your leads the moment they enter the sales funnel. You can revolutionize the entire process of lead nurturing with predictive analytics. You can continue this even after these leads have become customers.

Your clients will be able to trust you more and more, to such an extent that they will buy a certain product only from you and not from your competitors.

Not only that, it is easy to predict existing customer behaviour. Hence you will be able to profit more.

#3: Take Advantage of Metrics

As a marketer, retaining customers is more important than acquiring new ones. After all, if you can’t retain your customers, how and why will new ones come to you?

As I have already mentioned, existing customers are much easier to predict. And they are much more likely to refer you to their family, friends and colleagues.

You may use Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) as an effective metric of performance. Set concrete goals with help of predictive analytics. Upselling and cross-selling have never been easier. This will be your opportunity to upsell premium items and cross-sell related products and services to your client pool.

Renew licenses, contracts and subscriptions because that will ensure how many customers you have on board.

Use predictive analytics to identify customers who might not be satisfied with your product or service. Accordingly you can create campaigns to retain them. And that brings us to..

#4: Create Influential Marketing Campaigns

You understand a lead’s journey through the sales funnel. With predictive analytics, you can actually predict their next action/step. It might be a discount coupon or a bundled offer in case of existing customers or qualified leads.

When you incorporate predictive analytics in your marketing automation platform, you can personalize your responses further. Take your marketing automation strategy to the next level with predictive models.

You can create campaigns based on future predictions. Not only will you be able to save time, because you already know what your leads and customers want, you can also bring in more business in the long run.

Predictive analytics will allow you to identify patterns and build models that will explore all your data. You have to collect the right data, if you want to be successful.

Club this with your lead-scoring model and you will be able to find out which leads are better suited for sales-handover.

The Bottom Line

Most marketing teams already have an existing customer database that they can use to their advantage. But very few use them. You need to change your idea about retaining customers.

You need to understand that predictive analytics could be the only thing standing between you and your cold leads, unhappy customers and underrated prospects.

Marketers have already made SEO their top priority. But as a marketer, are you thinking of voice search as part of your SEO strategy? As long as statistics are concerned, Google has disclosed that 20% of their queries come from voice search.

What marketers need to understand is that different people use voice search differently. It is gaining popularity but the way voice search is being conducted is evolving. First of all, in order to strategize properly, we need to dig in deeper.

History of Voice Search

This unique piece of technology dates back to the beginning of the new millennium. Google had just started tinkering with voice recognition and then rolled out an experimental voice search in 2004. Users could call a phone number provided by Google to ask questions and get the results delivered on their browser.

This progressed and after many more modifications led to what is now known as the Google Voice Search. This same technology powered Apple’s Siri till 2013. After that Apple started using Bing as part of its search engine technology to power Siri.

Following that came Cortana from Microsoft who owns Bing. Not only that Bing also provides search engine results powered by Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service.

Voice search exhibits clearly how it is changing the way people find information. The entire reason why a person should opt for voice search is because of the instantaneous answer that one receives.

So, let’s take a look at what people usually search for when it comes to Voice Search.

1. Reminders, Shopping and To-Do Lists
2. Searching for TV Schedules
3. General Information regarding news, travel, recipes etc.
4. Local Information such as business listings including restaurants, shops, weather, etc.

What Does this Mean for Marketers?

Primarily this is an opportunity for local businesses to up their SEO game. Even though it is not possible for marketers to find out what exactly a person searches for. But they can create a broad match modifier which triggers an ad when a certain set of words are used. And, the good part is that the marketers can dictate this. You can further analyze the results and the metrics of paid search campaigns. Then you can narrow down to the queries from mobile devices. You won’t be able to figure out which ones were voice searches but you can analyze the way it was framed.

At this point of time there is no tool or platform to measure these things. Hence, marketers have to rely on their own hacks.

How Can You Prepare Yourself?

We think there are three simple steps that you can take in order to prepare yourself.

1. Rethink How Your Brand Shows up on SearchesYou have to keep in mind that due to variations in pronunciations, when it comes to voice search, the margin of error is vast. Marketers need to anticipate this issue because prospects might not land up on your website because of how they pronounced your organization’s name. You need to research misspellings that can be a result of mispronunciation of your brand’s name or a product. Add them to your keyword optimization strategy but make sure they are relevant to your cause.


2. Natural LanguageThis is another tricky thing that you need to consider as a marketer. When someone types in a search, they use computer language like “Italian Restaurants Nearby”. However when that same search is to take place over Voice Search, it becomes “What are some local Italian restaurants?” As a marketer you have to keep all of this in mind and offer search results that are specific in nature and answer a person’s query easily. You have to optimize your landing pages and add copy to it so that you can account for the natural language searches.


3. ToFu (Top of Funnel) adaptionThe right type of content will help your brand attract loyal customers. How about using voice search as a helping hand for your customers by answering their questions? When it comes to this, you can critically consider another aspect of voice search, long-tail queries. Since voice search tend to contain question words, it is safe to assume that as a marketer you can benefit by using that information to address ToFu queries.

The rate at which voice search continues to rise just shows how fast technology is progressing. More and more users are turning to voice enquiries, so this experience needs to be optimized. Right now marketers do not have access to precise data, but it might be just a matter of time when that becomes accessible.

• Fear of the platform not working.
• Fear of replacing humans or even the marketer himself getting replaced in the future because of this technology.
• These fears instill more hate for the technology so marketers become unable to implement them.

If you run a SaaS business, you know pretty well how much customers mean to your organization. Attracting customers are one thing, but retaining them throughout a certain period of time, preferably for the long term is another ballgame. Customer retention is extremely important for you and your SaaS business. You cannot deny it, because customer retention is the only factor that can make or break your entire business.

Simple enough, if you cannot hold on to your customers, you set to lose money. Not only do you lose money but you also set to lose the goodwill of your customers. Word spreads like wildfire. If your customers do not want to stick to your product, soon there will be more customers who will discontinue using your product and you will lose more customers.

For any SaaS business, churn presents an extreme amount of financial drain both for your growth as well as your profit. Churn is a 100% statistical model that is used to represent the probability of a customer ceasing to use your product at any given point of time.

Now, the calculation for churn resides on a number of factors that vary from and are not limited to, how much a customer values your SaaS product, how much a customer relies on it and how much value is assigned to your competitor’s product. Apart from that you can analyze customer profiles to get deeper information and find out the root cause behind disgruntled customers. In the following infographic, you will be able to see ways through which you can improve your customer retention.

At Esanosys we work with SaaS companies of all sizes and help them reduce churn, CAC and increase LTV. Partner with us today for your SaaS marketing needs. Get in touch with us here.

Marketing has been going through a renaissance where it has been moving from a closed container to a more open style revolving around customer lifecycle. The marketing department model that stands out and can sustain itself day after day is a model structured around the customer’s experience, so that customers can receive a consistent and quality experience all throughout their buy cycle.

Marketing organisations have to exert extreme expertise to allow customers choose their own experience. But to make this a reality, you have to ensure that you have a strategy in place and your budget most importantly can support this.

The debate: Point-to-point engagement or not

If you are a marketer, you know that the sheer number of marketing channels are overwhelming for anybody. The immense pressure that every single digital platform exert on marketers can cripple busy individuals who are struggling to keep up with the staggering number of social media posts and personalized messages for their customers.

According to Content Marketing Institute’s annual B2C Content Marketing: 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends, out of 12 most popular marketing tactics used by marketers, 9 of them are digital approaches, from email newsletters, to website blogs. As is resonated throughout the research, we can clearly understand that the B2B report does not deviate much. It echoes similar results and exposes the fact that webinars, email newsletters, blogs, online presentations and other digital approaches are the most popular and successful.

Unfortunately many companies are still stuck in an ancient marketing phase where every branch of digital marketing is just stacked upon one another instead of seeing marketing through their customer’s perspective.

What is Your Customer Looking for?

If you look at marketing from the point of view of customers, you have to understand that they do not classify themselves according to anything. They expect to open their devices and access the information from any platform that is accessible to them. It can be a Facebook post that talks about a great offer and they want the “buy” button present there so that they can buy it there and then. What you have to have in order to give the customers a great experience is a multi-channel suitable to support all platforms and devices so that the customer experience is not hindered.

But what makes customer experiences haphazard is when a marketing department is silo-ed. Mostly what happens is that the social media team fails to coordinate with website development and your customer ends up bearing the brunt of this miscommunication. They are stuck and often face duplicating messages during their time on your website. Soon, they lose faith because they are not satisfied with everything that is happening.

What you need is a marketing team that devotes itself to customer experience rather than anything else. Your marketing budget will revolve around the customers and what they want so that you can convert as many leads as possible and increase sales. You need a budget to support that and tools that will ensure that customer experience will be top-notch.

Why do you need to Increase Digital Marketing budget?

To get the best out of your marketing team and make it more about the customer than the company, you should consider increasing your digital marketing budget. Offline marketing channels have been taken over by digital and you have to invest more money in that if you don’t want to fall back.

Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey of 2015-2016 reported that digital marketing budgets have almost increased by 10% in 2014-2015 and it will continue increasing every year with so much importance allotted to digital marketing channels. Every marketer admits that online and offline marketing channels are merging and there are a few concrete reasons why:

1. Online Customers: More and more people are taking to social media from the teens to the elderly. It is becoming a place of communication extremely fast. Since you can reach out to such a diverse group of people on digital marketing channels, it is a complete no-brainer that you need to increase your marketing budget so that you can have access to a wider customer base.

2. Faster: Digital marketing is faster than its offline counterpart. Customers now demand instant information and gratification. If they do not get that they will go to your competitors. These demands become extremely easy to fulfil if you invest heavily on digital marketing channels.

3. Tracking: When you spend on digital marketing, it becomes easier and better to track marketing ROI. Marketers can now justify where, how and why they spent part of the marketing budget.

Every company is trying to take their business online at this day and age. Marketing itself is becoming digital and soon there will be nothing called “Digital Marketing”. If your company still hasn’t gone digital, you should be thinking about it because it will dawn a new era for your organization.

How do you decide your marketing budget? Let us know in your comments below!

Need help in planning your company's marketing budget? Send us an email to info@esanosys.com with your marketing goals, timeframe and schedule a free consultation.

Every SaaS business is equally passionate about their product and they are convinced that their product has what their customer needs. Most SaaS products are genuinely good and compel free trial users to subscribe it right away. But for a lot of SaaS companies who are not converting most of their trial sign-ups to paying customers have to figure out why this is happening and try to their improve conversion rate. According to a research conducted by Totango, the best SaaS companies are able to convert 25% of SaaS free trial users sign-up to become paying customers. Also, you have more chance convincing around 70% of your SaaS free trial users to become paying customers after using your products for 3 days if a sales rep gave them a call.

Reasons why People don’t buy after Trial is over

1. You fail to engage users: Failure to engage a customer right after they sign-up for your SaaS free trial is often the cause of people not buying your product later on. You have to design your free trial in such a way so that people stay engaged all through out. Sometimes, SaaS businesses leave their free trial users to fend for themselves while navigating through the product and then wonder why most of their trial users are leaving. When someone is signing up for a trial, engage them. Drop a mail, give them a persuasive call, help them get the most out of your product and then convert them into paying customers. Take a look at the home screen that greets your customer while using your product, make sure that it is attractive and intuitive enough to engage users for a longer period of time. If users don’t like the feel of that, they will most likely leave as well.


2. Complex UI: Admit it, software and technology intimidates a lot of people and if, your SaaS product has a complicated user interface (UI), your users most likely will run off to your competitor’s for a simpler environment. Your SaaS product should be clutter-free and sleek. A few ways that you can make it better:

• Convince your UI designer to create a simple design that will be clutter-free and elegant. You should be aiming at converting more customers rather than showing off your products complexity.
• Guide users how to use your product to the fullest.
• Post demo videos and conduct live webinars for your users to understand how your SaaS product works. They can re-watch it later if they want.

3. Wrong audience: When you have an engaging SaaS product at hand but somehow seem to not convert trial users at all, you should take a look at your audience. Is this the audience that you targeted in the first place? If you are reaching out to the wrong audience, no one will sign up to buy your product or even finish the trial after a few days. Depending on your product’s usability, you should reach out to that audience. If you have a product for a specific industry, you should reach out to that industry rather than reaching out to all industries. You also have to make sure that you get the buyer personas right. Firstly, it will save you a lot of marketing dollars and most importantly save you the trouble of dealing with wrong audience.


4. You're Not Leveraging Your Content: SaaS companies tend to revert to a short buying funnel, trying to send people directly to their free trial from every blog post. What you have to realize is that every reader is not ready for the trial. If you do that then you are losing the opportunity to educate your readers about your product and if that is the best fit for them. Readers will sign up for a free trial with no clue as to why they signed up for the trial and how your product might suit their needs. Your content should align with the different stages of the buying cycle so that visitors and prospective customers understand your product. Forcing everyone to sign up for a free trial would just prove to be detrimental for your business. Provide personalised dynamic content based on the stage the buyer is in the sales funnel.

5. You are not nurturing the users properly: If your strategy is to engage prospects and educating them before leading them on to take up a free trial, you must have a proper drip marketing strategy in place. Email is one of the best ways to reach out to prospects before, during and after the free trial period for communication. When people sign up for a trial, they should get regular nurturing drip emails. Don’t go overboard and bombard users with unnecessary emails, just send them occasional emails that will help them get the most out of your product. Send them tips and tutorials that will guide them through your product easily.


6. Trial period is too short/long: You can choose a short 7-day trial period, that will motivate users to engage with your product, but it might decrease the conversion rate because of the shorter time span. Longer timespan for 30 days is good for SaaS products that have complex in depth features but it also makes the user lose interest if you cannot engage them for long. So depending on the complexity of your product, you should set the trial period. Just because most people opt for a month, you don’t have to opt for a month. If you have a fairly simple product at hand, a week is more than enough. Many SaaS products have found the sweet spot for their SaaS trial at 14 day length. But it is for you to decide by analysing statistics from your previous trials as to how many days will be perfect for your SaaS free trial.

7. No human interaction: It’s perfectly okay to conduct online demos for your product and reach a larger audience. But technology can never replace the human touch. Trial users will be more comfortable if they can speak or communicate with someone who is human(in their language of course). Offer your users free and personalised demos so that they understand how to use the product and they get to hear a human voice at the other end. Offer your trial users online chat to answer all their questions and clear all their doubts. Provide your trial users with phone numbers to call you and email their queries. Keep the lines of communication open and make them as user friendly as possible. If you cannot support them during their buying process, users will tend to be skeptical about support after buying as well, hence they may choose not to buy.


8. Social proof: Offering case studies of clients to your SaaS free trial users will help them understand how your product has helped another customer. If you have a generic SaaS product, you should offer industry specific case studies so that users can understand how it has helped others in their industry to perform better. Offering testimonials from users who can vouch for your product and support go a long way in successfully closing sales.

At Esanosys, we work with SaaS companies of all sizes and help them reduce churn, CAC and increase LTV. Partner with us today for your SaaS marketing needs. See this video here.

Customer retention is extremely important to your SaaS business because it can make or break your business. If you lose customers, you lose money and goodwill. It’s as simple as that. On an average, SaaS businesses see a 8% annual customer churn while the ideal SaaS business should see negative churn. According to the Harvard Business Review, if you can improve customer retention by even 5%, you will be able to improve profits by upto 95%. That’s something, isn’t it?

Now, who doesn’t want to get an edge over competitors and turn their SaaS business into one of those companies with negative churn. Read through the following tips to chalk out a strategy to retain your SaaS customers.

How Churn Effects Bottom Lines of SaaS Companies

For any SaaS business, churn represents a huge financial drain on both growth as well as profit. The churn is a statistical concept so modelling it operationally becomes a fundamental statistical problem at hand. What the SaaS churn represents is the statistical measurement of probability or actuality that a customer will cease using your product anytime. The factors that determine this are:

• Value that a customer sees in your SaaS product
• How much the customer relies on the product
• Value of your competitors’ SaaS products
• Internal issues of your customer’s organization

You will be able to analyze information based on these factors. Also, customer profiles in the CRM or your tool’s dashboard will help you analyze direct product usage data to analyze the first two factors. You can tackle the rest by implementing surveys, sales and support reps and feedback. With the right data and analytics, you can actually find the root cause of churn. Addressing and identifying the churn will improve your bottom lines significantly.

Tips to Boost SaaS Customer Retention and Reduce the Churn

1. Boost Engagement Trying to retain your customers is not an easy task. It takes time, energy and highly efficient techniques to turn your churn into negative. In SaaS, engagement happens when the customer pays attention to your product and your product consumes their time. It happens when your customer tries to figure out and understands the value of your product. Bottom-line, you have to concentrate on boosting engagement because if a customer stops using your product, they will automatically stop paying for it. If your customers are not engaged and not using your product, they will cancel it and you will lose revenue. Totango, who surveyed over a million customers, found that cancellation was preceded by a period of inactivity. So, to prevent churn from customer disuse, you should try to boost engagement so that the customer does not think of stopping at all. You should adjust the features and functions of your product and ask your customers for their feedback. Whatever you do make sure that you have your customer’s time and attention.

2. Be Proactive About Expired or Cancelled Credit Cards Expired credit cards are a major reason of cancellation. The reason being most credit cards expire every three years. On an average, 3% of your card subscriptions expire on a given month and within one year almost 36% of the cards will expire. If your product uses recurring billing, you should be proactive in finding the expiry dates of credit cards under file. Let your customers know that their card is going to expire, long before the expiry happens. Send them an email that will act as a nudge from your part. Often the card gets rejected because it has been cancelled. A huge amount of churn happens due to credit card cancellations. Whatever the issue might be, be proactive and stay on top of it.

3. Invest in Customer Success You should invest in customer success in order to retain customers. Retention is not so much about optimizing your product but it is about understanding your customer’s needs. You should make sure that the product does not frustrate the customer in any way. There should not be bugs or any kind of data loss that might irritate the customer. You should invest in making your product top-notch. In that way you will be able to make sure that your customer is successful while using your product and if they are successful, they will keep using your product.

4. Awesome Customer Service Be sure to provide the best customer service, so that customers can put their faith on your business. Give importance to whatever feedback they might have for your product. When customers come to you and suggest improvements, pay attention to them, because not only will that retain those customers but it will also help you generate more because of the improvements. Make feedback and complaints an important part of your customer retention strategy.

5. Wonderful Onboarding Experience You have to realize that whatever got a customer to become your customer will more or less be the reason for that particular customer to stay your customer for the long term. You should pay attention to your on boarding process to take note of which features of your services are more appealing and attractive to the customer. What motivates your customers to take the buying decision? Make the implementation and training as smooth as possible. Customers get delighted for a variety of reasons. If you can figure that out, then you will be able to keep your customers happy in the long run.

6. Upsell In SaaS, you got to be selling, always. Consider upsell as the process of engaging an existing customer at a deeper level. As you already know that it is about engagement, so if you raise your level of service, they will tend to pay more. But everything should be done in moderation. Upselling helps you deepen relationships with your customer, raises the value that the customer receives and also improves customer LTV or customer’s lifetime value. Upselling is a win-win scenario for both you and your customer.

7. Interact with customers regularly You should get in touch with your customers regularly so that they realize you mean business and you care for them as well. Make it a habit to engage with customers on a regular basis on social media, email or direct communication channels. Take notes about what they have to say about their product and experience using your product. If you do not interact with your customers regularly, customers will tend to forget you and they will just opt for a competitor’s product when they feel like it.

8. Build a community of loyal customers When you treat your customers correctly and listen to what they have to say, it does not take long to put faith in your SaaS product. You will soon have a community of loyal customers who will come forward with feedback regularly as they know you keep improving your product and want to make it even better by listening to what the users have to say. If you’re honest in your dealings, the customers will realize that soon enough and they will want to stay as your customer for a long period of time. Hubspot, a leading inbound marketing SaaS company has literally take this to the next level. Their community org is an online hub for over 150,000 inbound marketers to connect, interact and learn inbound marketing.

9. Invest in a SaaS Customer Retention team: Invest in a SaaS customer retention team because that will only assert the fact that you are serious about customer retention. Not only that, a retention team will be able to dedicate all their resources to engage with clients. They will analyze churn rates, reach out to customers on a regular basis, devise new methods to retain customers and identify risk areas for customer churn. They will be able to pick up signs from the customers that want to quit and try to listen and solve their issues.

10. Add important in-demand features As your SaaS gradually matures, you will realize that some features are more important to your customers than others. Work on improving those features and add important modules that your product does not have but the customers demand. That will be a sign that you truly care for your customers and you are willing to make changes to your product to please them. This not only makes customers feel important but they understand that you are a dedicated business owner.

11. Provide free training resources If you have a complex software, you will have customers who will want to learn more about its power and what they can do with it. You should provide free tutorials, webinars and training to coach your customers on how to squeeze more value out of your product. There is no use creating a brilliant but complicated product that customers will have trouble using. They will just switch to another product which they are more comfortable using. It’s up to you to make that product look easy to operate by giving them an opportunity to understand how it actually works. You will not only be increasing the product’s value in the eyes of the customer but it will also help reduce churn by improving your relationship with the customer.

At Esanosys we work with SaaS companies of all sizes and help them reduce churn, CAC and increase LTV. Partner with us today for your SaaS marketing needs.

SaaS (Software as a Service) startups and ventures have started facing stiff competition due to the immense growth this segment has seen in this decade. According to Compass, SaaS is growing at thrice as fast the speed of software as a whole. In fact, in 2016 the entire market for SaaS applications will reach $33 billion this year from 2013’s $20 billion according to a research by Gartner. This demand for SaaS Enterprise applications has been on a continuous rise and has generated an astounding demand.

As an entrepreneur and marketer myself, I always look for ways to improve SaaS marketing. But the process is not easy and only through thorough implementation of SaaS marketing strategies can you do so. According to IDC, by the year 2018, almost 27.8% of the world’s enterprise application market will be dominated by SaaS, with a spike rate of 16.6% in revenue since 2013.

The Challenge

For SaaS founders and marketers alike, the major bottleneck is demand generation. You are under a lot of pressure to increase sales faster so that you can offset all customer acquisition costs as soon as possible because the funding won’t last forever. You need to chalk out strategies to acquire new customers effectively and also retain them by providing top-notch support. You have developed a fantastic product with a few early customers and adopters but that is not enough to break-even. You want to grow rapidly and establish your grip over the market so that your brand can reign supreme.

Strategies to take care of your SaaS Marketing

Let’s see how SaaS Founders and Marketers can take adversity to their stride when it comes to marketing:

1. Competition: When a potential customer decides to purchase your product, they will survey the market first- that’s a given. By surveying the market, they will take a look at what your competitors have to offer. And you have to ensure that potential customers purchase from you rather than your competitors. Boost your prospects’ confidence in your SaaS product by offering a free comparison between your product and your competitors’. This way, you’ll be able to win them over to your side.

2. Optimized for Conversions: The main goal of your website is and should always be to convert visitors into customers. Whichever part of the website they may land in, optimize your website in a way that there are unique pointers guiding the visitor to different CTAs of the website. Do everything possible to make them sign-up and create a free account on your website. You should have every information available on the website, arranged in a manner that it will be easy to find from every part of the website. Another part of your website which is by far the most important channel to acquire top of the funnel leads is your company blog. Considering the number of conversions that start with the blog or even happen on the blog, it’s one asset you surely would like to optimize for conversions. Setup CTAs in strategic locations, like the end of an article or banners across the blogs to increase your conversions.

3. Content: One of the most essential pillars of your SaaS marketing strategy is your content. Where most companies go wrong is that the write content for their own industry or for the search engines, rather than creating content for their customers. If you want your blog or website to convert, then you have to start writing for your customers. Start with creating a well researched buyer persona to get the content right. You must know what your ideal customer is interested in, so that you can offer the best content to your audience. Remember not all content types work for all your visitors, leads, prospects and customers. Create specific content for top-of-the funnel, middle-of-the-funnel and bottom-of-the-funnel audience with a clear goal to conversions. Please keep in mind that conversions, need not always be trial sign-up or product enquiry, it can something as simple as a newsletter signup.

4. Mailing List: While you’re optimizing your website, you will also have to keep in mind that there are loads of people who are not ready to buy, yet. For these people to convert, you will have to nurture them for a certain period of time before they decide to buy. Focus on your lists and offer your subscribers freebies to gather basic contact information. Depending on their position in the Sales cycle you can segment them into lists and conduct targeted email marketing campaigns. Proper lead nurturing can ensure steady inflow of direct leads when you need them.

5. Social Presence: For B2B companies, maintaining a social presence is extremely important. Not only can you reach out to your audience but you can also use advertorial features on various channels to target your ideal customers. Along with online presence, you should also consider participating in conferences, podcasts and interviews so that you can also establish a physical presence, one that customers can see for real. Remember, you can’t grow without joining the social media party.

6. Personalization & Support: Personalization is the key when it comes to winning over customers. Putting a face behind your organization gives customers a way to relate. Your presence both online and offline grows stronger when your interactions with customers are personal. It develops a sense of trust amidst your leads and people buy products from companies they can trust. Apart from pricing and features, customers also look for support. If you can provide intelligent support to them, they will not only be pleased, but also advertise for you and recommend your product to other people they know.

7. Monitor: You have to be on top of your brand mentions all over the internet. You have to make sure no one has a problem that you cannot fix, or an issue that you haven’t been tended to. For quick resolution of online complaints, you will have to have a prompt support team which makes sure that every customer is attended to and given due importance. You can use tools like Google to monitor activities whenever your brand is mentioned. Along with that you should always monitor your competitors. Keeping track of the competitor’s activities will help you stay on top of your game by being a step ahead of them, all the time.

8. Referral Marketing: Through various forms of referral marketing, you will be able to rapidly grow your SaaS product. Whether it is a one-way referral technique or a two-way or maybe you’re using social referral techniques, it all depends on your requirements. But if you are opting for referral marketing, you should have a solid strategy in place. Referral marketing is all about referring your brand to other people, and sharing the information is the only way it is possible. So make sure that your social media channels, blogs and emails are spreading your message.

As a digital marketer, when you implement an Adwords campaign, do you target anybody and everybody without any thought or do you target a specific audience. The former relies on luck while the latter relies more on logic and research. Relying on luck will not take you anywhere when marketing is concerned.  It is better to conduct your own research and have your goals aligned before launching a campaign. Plus you need to know exactly who your target is, and this is where buyer persona comes in.

What is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional description of your ideal buyer. This persona is built using information from the real world, primarily using information provided by real customers. The buyer persona represents an ideal customer and it tells you how and what prospective buyers think and do. You can anticipate buyer decisions and understand the psyche of your customer by developing a buyer persona or several buyer personas based on different factors. Buyer personas are more than simple descriptions of buyers. Since you are now aware of buyer’s expectations and how their problems are solved by marketers, you can align your marketing strategy accordingly.

Using a buyer persona you will be able to delve so deeper into a customer’s mind that you will be able to build a relationship with your customers that will be your competitors’ envy. The more detailed your persona is, the better will be your results. Not only will it help you increase your revenue in the long run but it will help you focus your time and energy in the right places, eventually leading to attracting the most valuable customers to your organization.

Why are Buyer Personas Important?

Buyer personas are important for marketing and here are a few reasons why:

1. Strategy: Buyer persona helps B2B organizations to strategize better and align their goals accordingly. Buyer personas help marketers to keep up with changing tastes and preferences and how their own goals are changing as well.

2. Common Ground: Developing a buyer persona gives you the scope to understand buyers and develop a common ground for them where you can interact directly. Buyer personas help you to overcome different barriers and focus on the primary goal of helping buyers and fulfilling their needs.

3. Performance: B2B companies who implement buyer personas have outperformed competitors simply because they have knowledge about their customers which their rivals do not possess. If you want to develop a customer oriented company then you have to have customer personas to help realize your dreams.

4. Globalization: Every company dreams of globalization nowadays irrespective of their size and buyer personas help break these barriers when they are entering another country’s market. Even if the company has little knowledge about the people there, creating buyer personas will give you very little room for any error whatsoever.

Buyer personas help you understand what type of content you need to prepare, and states the nature of your marketing campaign as well. Basically buyer personas help you focus and realize the necessities of customer satisfaction. Along with a sense of understanding, your campaigns will bear the mark of relevance and every marketing strategy will be more effective.

How to Create Buyer Personas?

You can create buyer personas by conducting interviews, surveys and thorough research. Your best bet would be to create a pool of customers, prospects and people outside your existing database. A few ways to gather required information would be:

1. Go through your contact database and conduct research to reveal how leads behave on your website and how do they consume your content.

2. Depending upon which persona information is the most important for you, you can ask that field-specific questions in your forms on your website so that you can get maximum information regarding that field.

3. Try to find out what the sales team has to say about your leads. They must have some kind of information that will help you form generalizations depending upon the customers they have served over a period of time.

4. Conduct interviews over phone or in person to know more about a customer’s choices and what do they like or dislike about your product.

In order to find interviewees for your research, you have to reach out to a number of people from varied backgrounds. You can always choose to establish contact with some of your loyal customers who have been already engaged by your company. Ask questions to both customers who were satisfied with your product and those who were unhappy with it. If you only ask questions to any one group then you will not be able to build the perfect buyer persona. It is important that you know what both groups have to say and make it collaborative in nature. Interviewing your own customers actually prove to be easier than outsiders because they are already interested in your company.

But interviewing customers only won’t be enough. Be sure to balance out your process by throwing in a few prospects in the pool. Prospects are usually not well-informed like customers and they help you create the persona in a more realistic fashion because you will be using that persona to nurture leads as well. Along with that if you interview a few referrals or outsiders who are not part of your database but fit your customer profile, you will have concrete information to develop a persona suited to both your customers and your needs.

Now, to gather information for the buyer persona, you need to ask certain questions to these people. Some of the few common questions that you should include in your own list should be:

• What is your job type?
• What skills are required for your job?
• How much time do you spend at your job?
• Which industry do you work for?
• What are your job goals?
• What are your personal demographics? (Age, marriage status, children, location etc.)
• What are your educational qualifications?
• How do prefer to interact with sellers?
• Do you research before buying a product?
• Describe a recent purchase that you made.

These are a few types of questions that you can ask, you can add more depending on which field is more important to you.

You have to realise that through these questions you will be trying to understand customers’ and prospects’ goals, behavior and preferences.

You can now use the data that you have gathered and distill that data to identify patterns and generalizations that will help you develop the persona. You will be able to develop a primary persona and then you can modify that pattern according to different customer groups.

Marketing personas will help you connect with your audience and help you improve your marketing. When you have all the required personas ready and on-board, you’ll be able to prepare different marketing content for different personas so that customers can identify a sense of relevance in the messages that they receive from you.

What kind of experience do you have while creating your marketing persona? Do you need help developing your buyer persona? Feel free to drop us a line and we’ll be happy to help you out.