Instead of making sky-high initial investments in technological infrastructure, businesses are choosing wisely to pay a convenient subscription fee and use the services offered by SaaS companies remotely. Safe to say that they owe a few drinks to SaaS companies for all the savings! 🥂 😋
The flexibility and the value this adds to a business's working model is what makes SaaS-based platforms so popular. As per SkyQuest Technology, the Global SaaS Market is expected to touch a value of USD 720.44 Billion by 2028.
But the question is, how can SaaS companies ensure quick engagement with potential customers? How can they reduce the time to product adoption? How can they multiply their customer base faster?
*Enters Marketing Automation*
A company can achieve scale in one of three ways - by undertaking a program of greater expansion, by gaining more paying customers and by lowering the churn of existing ones.
Having a cost-effective way of distributing marketing campaigns can be the difference between achieving scale intentionally and leaving things to work out by themselves as a result of fluctuating market dynamics.
To begin with, it is important to determine why you want to run a marketing automation program.
Have you as a SaaS company been dealing with any of these challenges? 🤔
If the answer is yes, you must consider engaging an expert in marketing automation to avoid suffering any losses.
And then to be able to overcome those challenges, figure out the key actions you want to accomplish first. This will help you determine the KPIs you want to influence with marketing automation.
Leads to trial conversion percent: This helps you evaluate the utility and success of your trial offerings.
It can be simply measured with the ratio of those who became your paying customers and the number of prospects who used your trial offer.
Click-through rate: It measures the number of people who view a page vs the number of people who click the advertisement being displayed on that particular page.
Bounce rate: The number of people who leave your website after viewing just one page.
Customer lifetime value: The revenue or profit that you derive from a customer of yours during its lifetime with your business.
Customer churn rate: The business that you have lost within a specific time period. It can be in terms of profit margin or headcount. It’s one of the most significant KPIs to help you strategize better.
Reverse churn: In a way, it's the essence of inbound marketing. That’s because it believes in retaining customers by providing exceptional value and service.
Customer acquisition cost: The cost here is all about the amount that you have to spend to win over a potential customer. This helps you to check upon the health of your ongoing marketing campaign and sales strategy.
CAC Payback period: The months that you take to recover the cost of a customer’s acquisition. And then you can measure when that customer will become a source of ROI for your business.
Lead to customer rate: This throws light on the quality of your of lead generation, as you get to know how many of your prospects are sales-ready.
Setting the objectives upfront will determine the next steps of the automation tasks for you to undertake.
It is also important to keep in mind that marketing automation is a cross-functional task and needs inputs as well as feedback from different teams including the customer support, account management, sales, and business development departments, in addition to the marketing team.
Before you begin executing your automation plan, there are a few things you need to do in order to prepare the ground and ensure that automation generates value for your business.
As simple as it sounds, data migration is about transferring your data from one system or location to another.
It comes in handy if you are looking to amp up your storage capacity, improve the website’s digital experience, simplify data management, or boost the system’s performance.
Also, it enables companies to leverage multiple automation platforms depending on the stage of their tech journey, business requirements, and expertise to help them come up with the best possible solutions.
However, it poses its own set of challenges like more errors, time consumption, and underutilization of the platforms concerned. But with the right guidance, you can overcome them to achieve your objectives.
With buyer persona, you can come up with the representation of your ideal customer to deliver the right content, to the right person, at the right time.
This means you must segment your pipeline and deliver the right messages.
To understand your buyer’s persona you need to determine their profile, aspirations, challenges, and why they might need a product like yours.
According to Salesforce, 70% of your interactions with your prospects are going to be through automated chatbots.
Source: Salesforce
They make responses more rapid, help you save the cost of customer service, and allow you to spend more time into building and enhancing your overall marketing strategy.
Like the other components of marketing, automation is going to be affected by AI more than ever and you can’t afford to sleep on that.
Let’s take the example of Predictive AI, which uses historical and current data to identify patterns that can help you strengthen your marketing strategy. For example, you get a clearer picture regarding how much more engagement your prospects need to be your loyal customers, or you identify the key areas that you should focus on to meet your revenue goals.
Similarly, Generative AI, which is used to generate text, images, and videos is turning the heat on and a platform like ChatGPT is its red-hot example.
You need to map the various steps your customer will go through before purchasing your product. You also need to define, at what point your customer would move from one stage to another in the sales funnel.
source: Forbes
This is important since the kind of content and nature of your interaction with the prospect depends on where he/she is in the sales funnel, to be able to nurture him/her effectively. And then, with lead nurture automation, you can reach your prospects at the relevant time with the relevant information effortlessly with minimal marketing efforts.
Behavior analytics paves the way to understanding your prospects’ interests and pain points, making your strategy to win them over, a cakewalk.
This approach is preferred over the traditional survey methods. For instance, merely 16% of the customer experience leaders believe that the traditional methods can help them overcome the challenges associated with customer behavior and performance issues.
Automation tools should be selected based on your expertise, the extent of requirements, and the stage of your company’s journey. For example, if you are in the start-up ecosystem, thankfully, there are plenty of budget-friendly Marketing Automation tools for startups.
Once you have finalized the tools that would meet your needs, you need to ace the workflow game, have clarity on how to create effective lead-nurturing campaigns, the anatomy of a successful email nurture campaign, or any sort of campaign for that matter which can help you automate some of your key marketing activities.
Understanding your competitors and their strategies can help you position yourself better, differentiate your product in a crowded marketplace and put your own performance and product metrics in context.
A top-notch customer experience can be created only through your customer's historical data as well as the changing insights derived on the daily basis.
To be precise, the pieces of information like him/her visiting your website, clicking the link, filling out forms, etc. would qualify as dynamic data. On the other hand, their demographics, or the buyer persona that you create, would serve as static information.
To drive the point home, let’s take an example of one of the customers of ActiveCampaign. When they personalized onboarding by adding static questions (company size, industry, key pain point) and dynamic behaviors (web visits, email clicks, event triggers, etc.), they increased trial conversion by about 6%.
Content to rule 2024! The content must be highly personalized and not merely have the name of the targeted customer in an email. For example, our technology partner, Potion can help you boost response rates by up to 500% using its dynamic video personalization.
Lead nurturing is heavily influenced by relevant content which can provide value to your potential customer. The content needs to fit in with the buyer persona and can include webinars, product guides, Q&As, checklists, demos, videos, and white papers.
It may sound basic but just imagine how much ahead of time you could be by planning your social posts in advance, and then scheduling them for the targeted days.
This can be a game changer as the social media algorithms reward the consistency of your posts tremendously. Furthermore, this could help your marketing team to be worry-free and direct their energy towards other important tasks.
Some popular tools to schedule your content are SocialPilot, ContentStudio, Hootsuite, Post Planner, etc.
How will you reach out to your intended audience? Are emails the best way to communicate with them or should landing pages be used to seal the deal? Once you determine which channel needs which type of content, deciding on the right tool for marketing automation will be easier.
When a buyer extensively researches a product before making a purchase, you need to present him/her with valuable content to help them make a decision. Here are some of the areas where marketing automation is being used to drive measurable results in SaaS companies.
Automation allows marketers to gather contacts, manage lists, and provides insights into the performance of email campaigns. It allows the setting of triggers to send notifications and follow-up emails based on specific user actions (or even in the absence of action).
For instance, if a user visits a product landing page, the automated system can wait for a certain amount of time and then send an email to the user with further details related to the product.
Automation is also useful in educating the leads and keeping them updated about new offers through periodic newsletters.
Creating and distributing content that helps drive inquiries and in turn, qualifies high-quality leads, is very important. Not just one or two, there are 7 Steps to achieve success in content marketing for SaaS.
Automation can help companies demonstrate thought leadership, shorten the sales cycle, and resell over some time.
Marketing automation platforms take the headache out of having to manage multiple social media accounts manually. A company can easily organize messages and posts across various channels and manage different social media accounts from a single dashboard.
Also, you can utilize this comprehensive guide on social media marketing for SaaS products for successful social media campaigns.
You might wonder why customer-centric marketing is important. 🤔 And, that’s because your customers are not just the repeat business, but your marketers and promoters as well. Yes, you heard it right!
And with the right tools, labor costs can be lowered and the speed of services can be improved. The use of intelligent routing, AI chatbots, and a customer service portal are some of the practical ways of using automation to enhance customer service levels.
Attracting higher-quality visitors to the website and engaging with them is important for all types of businesses, but it is a lot more critical for SaaS companies.
Automation lets you measure and analyze traffic and audience behavior, making it possible to efficiently convert visitors into leads, drive leads to trial signups, and finally nurture those leads into customers.
Thus, data-powered insights can do wonders for your business as you go from mere speculations to concrete reason-based decision-making.
SaaS companies are in a position to power significant results through the automation of marketing campaigns.
As marketing automation enables you to save precious time, it empowers your team to take care of tasks that require more manual work.
Imagine how life-changing it can be, especially if you are working on amplifying a startup’s business.
You must be harnessing a variety of platforms to improve your outreach. Thus, with automation, you can make your brand’s unique voice heard across channels with ease.
With automation, you can minimize the need for outsourcing and even recruiting additional employees. As a result, your bottom line would thank your marketing strategy.
Automation is used in generating qualified leads more effectively through optimization techniques for increasing brand visibility, generating awareness, and promoting product adoption.
Managing customer health using lead scoring and pipeline stages makes the organization and management of the sales process more streamlined and reduces (or even eliminates) manual processes, decreasing task repetition and human errors.
Teams can create and deliver a more personal experience to potential customers and form the basis of a sustainable relationship in the long term.
Automation provides analytical tools, giving valuable insights into the inbound marketing initiatives, and helps teams deliver better campaigns in the future.
A well-executed marketing automation program can help you create, retain as well as extend customer relationships at scale by improving lead generation, sales nurturing, lead-to-sales conversion, and customer acquisition.
All successful SaaS companies focus on increasing the customer's lifetime value after the initial transaction or sale has been conducted. Marketing automation can be a game changer in this regard - driving faster trials, product use, resales and ultimately, generating more revenue.
With our RevOps experts at RevX you get tailor-made solutions to your marketing automation needs to boost your SaaS business and derive more ROI out of your Revenue Ops.