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Valuable SaaS Customer Acquisition Strategies from the Experts

Needless to say, customer Acquisition is one of the most critical factors that determine SaaS growth. So if you want to grow your SaaS business, you have to understand how you are attracting and converting visitors into customers.

For sustainable SaaS growth, you need to look at: 1) Customer acquisition rate; 2) Customer acquisition cost; and 3) Customer acquisition speed. Ideally, you should have a high acquisition rate, at a low cost and an accelerated acquisition speed. However, you need to be careful how you achieve these. Acquiring quickly many of the wrong kind of customers will not do you any service. You will have a high customer acquisition rate and a low acquisition cost, but with a high churn rate, meaning that your acquisition effort is going down the drain. You’ll be starting from scratch, with less money in your pocket. To make sure you get it right, I asked a few of my favorite SaaS experts to share some lessons they learned along their career path on customer acquisition.

Here are some great points you should keep in mind on ways to increase your acquisition rate.

Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré

SaaS Consultant & Customer Success Evangelist

Twitter: @NikkiElizDemere

“The best advice I have for SaaS companies looking to boost acquisition rates is to focus on the customer – who they are, where they spend their time, what words they use to describe their needs, wants and experiences.

If you don’t know, it’s okay to ask. It’s more than okay, it’s vitally important to get voice of customer data to learn about your customers’ desired outcomes, expectations, hopes – and what they feel they need from you to achieve those things. And early on in the sales funnel, you can ask how they found you (as a clue to where you can find more like them). The answers to these questions will direct everything from your value proposition to how you spend your marketing budget.

Too often, I think marketers focus on the acquisition channels they are most comfortable using, rather than the channels their target customers use, which is usually because they haven’t done sufficient research into their ideal customers. As in – they never asked.

I would also suggest making a list of the most likely channels, from your customer surveys and interviews, rank those ideas in order of which you *think* will work best, and test the top three based on how many potential customers are there, how many prospects you get through that channel, and how many of those prospects fit into your ideal customer profile. Then double-down on what works best.”

Trevor Hatfield

Founder & CEO at Inturact

Twitter: @trevorhatfield

“The most important aspect of customer acquisition is to first know your customer. These aren’t your marketing personas, but your ideal customer profile. You need to know your customer pains and gains and make sure they align with your products gain creators and pain relievers. This is the first step in knowing how to talk to your ideal customer and ultimately attracting them with the right messaging. This is the biggest mistake I see in the SaaS space. Without really knowing your ICP, you don’t have a chance to acquire them, even with the best marketing tactics.”

Kaleigh Moore

Freelance writer in SaaS and eCommerce.

Twitter: @kaleighf

“Educating leads at different stages of the buyers journey with the help of automation makes customer acquisition a lot more successful.

Here’s what I mean:

Having educational content in different formats (interactive content, emails, blog posts, videos, etc.) for leads at the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel means that you can deliver a more relevant, personalized experience to SaaS leads and convert more customers. With automated tools, this becomes a lot simpler. Integrations between a CRM and a tool like an ESP for example, mean you can automatically trigger relevant campaigns based on lead activity.”

Patrick Campbell

Co-founder & CEO, Price Intelligently

Twitter: @Patticus

“My biggest piece of advice around acquisition and SaaS Growth is that having a good growth strategy is now table stakes. Given how dense the market has become for a prospect’s attention, you can’t grow your business effectively if you’re just focusing on acquisition; you need to focus on retention and monetization, which are 3-5x more effective at revenue growth than just focusing on getting new customers.”

Andy Mura

Head of Marketing at Userlane

Twitter: @andy_mura

“Everything boils down to three elements: brand, product and customer success. If you look at the fastest growing SaaS companies currently in the market, they usually have these three elements in common.

Sure, you need to generate some initial buzz and draw attention to your product, it’s a noisy world out there. To get some attention you need to be absolutely sure you are aware of every little detail about your customer persona and know how to address your target group. The single old “gotta catch’em all” funnel doesn’t work anymore. Nowadays, you need to define multiple personalized journeys and each lead generation activity needs to be extremely specific.

After you’ve managed to cut through the noise, your potential customers need to perceive the actual value of your product. A very distinctive brand with a solid positioning, a polished product that meets the needs of the target group, and a great UX combined with a thorough customer success program are the main elements that lead to acquisition and advocacy.

Some of the largest companies in the market often mention referrals as their main source of leads. That’s because customers identify themselves with their brand identity, realize that they’ve improved their lives by effortlessly implementing and using the company’s product, and know that such companies will always support and help them achieve their goals.”

Shayla Price

B2B Content and Email Marketer

Twitter: @shaylaprice

“SaaS growth depends on customer success. To acquire new customers, it’s important that your team focus on solving the customers’ problems. Eliminate any distractions that don’t achieve this goal. You want every customer interaction to lead to the desired solution. “

Joel Klettke

CRO and SaaS Expert

Twitter: @JoelKlettke

“One of the most valuable acquisition lessons a SaaS company can learn is also one that most SaaS companies seem to be ignoring: conversion does NOT end with trial sign up.

I’ve been tapped on the shoulder by so many SaaS companies who want to overhaul their websites or change their ads, but when we consult the data, we learn that lead numbers aren’t the real issue. The real problem is often that there’s been very little thought, planning or infrastructure built to carry the lead over the finish line: to turn them into a real customer.

SaaS companies need to take a long, hard look at how they onboard customers. Does your content and in-app experience drive a lead towards their “aha” moment of receiving value? Or are you blindingly chucking emails and in-app messages at them in hopes they’ll start paying you money one day? This is the blind spot I see most often, and the one I love helping them fix.”

Khalid Saleh

CEO Invesp

Twitter: @khalidh

“There are many channels that a SaaS startup should consider. Determine the top 3-4 channels you believe your customers hangout on and test them out. Some channels are easy to test, other are more difficult. PPC is an easy to test channel and you can get started and figure out whether it is a possible channel within a month. Social media or SEO on the other handle will take much longer. So, your initial testing for each channel must take the time and money into account. If your testing reveals that a a particular channel is a possible growth channel, then you can move into optimizing that channel and investing more heavily in it.

Most of our b2b clients get the best returns from either paid channels or content channels. Our b2c clients are doing very well with influencer marketing.”


 

That’s all folks!

Hope you found these tips useful. If you have any more to share, we encourage you to do so!

The post Valuable SaaS Customer Acquisition Strategies from the Experts appeared first on Rethink Commerce Blog.



This post first appeared on Avangate Blog | Rethink Commerce, please read the originial post: here

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