The SaaS industry is growing at a high rate, which is explained by more intensive use of technologies among the population and companies. The use of smartphones, tablets, computers, etc. is not rare but is common to a large percentage of people.
Grafico 1. Worldwide Public Cloud Service Revenue Forecast (Billions of U.S. Dollars)
According to a study developed by Gartner in 2019, cloud applications will grow in the following years. The most notable are SaaS applications, contributing approximately half of the total revenue.
On the other hand, an estimate is made for the next two years, continuing with a progressive increase in revenue.
Ways to improve the income of your SaaS product
In this growth environment, many people consider it easy to grow, but the reality is that you must know how to carry out a good strategy. But there is a big problem in wanting to grow, and that is that many of them are not even aware of the value of their company.
Many companies with good SaaS products do not grow at the pace they should. Companies tend to get frustrated after seeing results from market revenue increases.
Despite being in good times of growth, these companies do not manage to focus their efforts well. Their strategies are not clear and they do not manage to optimise their work.
Below, we will put some of the points to focus on if you want to grow your SaaS.
Minimize Churn Rate
One of the ways to improve your income is to stop losing it. It seems simple but many companies have a high abandonment rate. The most complicated thing for a SaaS company is usually to attract customers, so try to make sure that when they arrive they don’t leave quickly. The following tips can help you do this.
- Offers the user the best possible experience, minimises errors and makes them comfortable.
- Don’t sell something you can’t deliver. Creating too many expectations of your product can be counterproductive, as it will cause a sense of disappointment to the customer, favouring their abandonment.
- Outstanding customer service is vital. The support and interest of the company when a client needs it generates a strong relationship of trust. If the customer sees that there is a close relationship with the company, this will be a strong reason to give a vote of confidence in the face of possible errors.
- You must learn to let go. When a customer leaves, don’t be persistent, leave him with a good image and invite him to come back whenever he wants. Apart from that, try to get them to leave some detail of the reasons for their departure, as a way of researching future improvements.
Increase the average revenue of each client
In the same way that losing customers is a handicap for the company, not generating enough for each customer is also negative. Once we have made customers comfortable, we need to study their behaviour to see how we can be more efficient.
To do this we must use analytics to measure our progress. The most common metric to measure this is the MMR ARPA, which gives us the Average Revenue per account.
MMR ARPA (Average Revenue per account): Revenue from all accounts/Numbers of accounts in that period
To improve this ratio, we have three possible solutions:
- Improve your product: Focus on optimizing what you have or create new features. Every small change you make to your product will increase its value, thus making you increase your ARPA.
- Pricing strategy: To improve your ARPA the easy solution is always to raise your prices, but you must be careful as it can be poorly accepted by your customers and be counterproductive. Study your client, analyse their situations, and look for ways to make the price more attractive.
- Upgrades: Depending on the type of client, they will need some functions or others, therefore, investigate which clients are the most interested in subscribing to premium packs. These customers should be treated carefully, offering them tests and giving them facilities to upgrade to premium accounts.
Improve your registration rate
Most companies may be attractive to many customers, but they do not have an optimised process by which they turn a lead into a customer. The most important points to improve are:
- Make your proposal clear.
- Make your customers’ opinions one of your endorsements, show them on your page.
- Explain your product through videos, demos… etc.
Invest in marketing
Many of us find strange that a company that wants to grow does not carry out a marketing strategy, but the truth is that it is often the last option for many of them. If you do not have an easy process, you can miss out on many recruitment opportunities. Within the marketing possibilities, we consider some of them more relevant:
- Consider PPC’s options for interacting with your potential clients through their interests. Manage searches well to get a return on investment.
- Manage the relationships of trust with your clients, you do not have to fall into the error of “the more the better”. It matters the timing of our relationship for the impacts.
- Optimise your landing pages: They are the key to converting a customer, make it easy for them. Try to make the content coherent, visual, visible, clear and excessively easy to consume, do not make them navigate or change pages.
Social networks
Social networks are one of the most powerful tools available to a company today. Many people come to get information about the company on their social networks. If we manage to have attractive social networks, we can get many customers to become “commercial” of the brand. These clients will speak well of the brand and sell it for free, share information, give us visibility… Take care of your social networks!
On the other hand, we can achieve the opposite effect if we do not have active social networks. It is better to have no presence than a poor presence. Here are some of the most recommended activities:
- Talk about your team, your company, your culture, your concerns…
- Create a community, which integrates users by making them part of the company.
- Generate constant content that creates engagement.
- Adapt the content to the public you want to generate for your company.
- Do not forget that social networks should not be linear, you can afford to upload different content for each moment, including funny content that shows an image of closeness to the company.
Make good use of your free trials
Normally, companies offer a free trial for a time, but you must measure very well what you are going to offer and for how long. Some of the problems to avoid are:
- That customers can do what they need in the free trial and never buy it.
- Tests that are too limited, that do not show the potential of your product.
Except for some type of product, it is usually better to give a quick test that shows a high percentage of the profits to the customers. We will try to please the customer and keep them with us.
Create an Inbound strategy
From a marketing point of view, one of the most used methods right now is Inbound Marketing. This method works to attract customers with useful content for them, relevant and adding value to each stage of the buyer’s journey.
Inbound marketing consists of 4 stages: attract, convert, close and delight. In each of these stages, the content is adapted to the consumer. This means that an individual study of the consumers is made to adapt to them.
- Choose your objectives carefully: What do you want to achieve? Who do you want to reach? How are you going to do it? What would the ideal visit be like?
- Prepared by a personal buyer and build a Journey Map: Define your customer model by collecting information, analyzing and grouping different buyer persons.
- Convert your traffic into potential customers: To do this, we must obtain our customers’ contact details by filling in a form.
- Optimise your email contacts: When we obtain the email address of a client or a potential client, we must analyze their activity, see in what moment they are in order not to give them a wrong or untimely message.
- Personalize the message, it will make you more credible.
- Segment correctly to get the right message across.
- Keep in mind that your emails will be read from different devices, optimize it. Be concise, clear calls to action, one column templates and always test it before sending.
- Send the mail in the customer’s language, make them see your worth.
→ Download our ebook about “Why your SaaS should speak Spanish?” ←
- Invest in trust and credibility :To get your leads to become customers generates confidence. If a lead sees that the company is serious and that it has a reputation, it will have a better first impact. The following actions can help you generate credibility.
- Get privacy and security certifications.
- Companies that confirm the use of their SaaS.
- Guided problem solving.
- Online or telephone support available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
- Display your prizes. If you have won a contest or competition, have your audience see it.
- Measure your results.
You will need to measure your progress to assess your progress. To start with, try to make simple metrics that provide you with a lot of information.
Internationalize your product
Today we can reach a very large audience through the Internet. We live in a globalised world in which opportunities are no longer only in our city or country, but we operate at a giant scale.
Internationalizing your SaaS business won’t cost you much money. If we value the investment to reach another type of public with the number of people we can contact, we can see how it is one of the most intelligent investments.
There are two different concepts in this section: localisation and internationalisation. Internationalisation is making your product speak the language of the target audience, while localisation is the process of adapting your software to a specific region, with its most intrinsic components. Therefore, localisation is a somewhat longer but also more effective process.
If you want to increase the revenue of your SaaS business through internationalization you should consider the following tips:
- Website: Try to keep it at least in Spanish and English. Less than that, it will be a delay.
- Social networks: Whenever you can, upload the content in several languages.
- Customer service: If you want your foreign client to feel comfortable, make him see that you are ready for him.
If you have more questions about the internationalization of your SaaS product, you can always take a look at our eBook.
