SaaS customer Life cycle and importance of customer Retention
SaaS industry business model is unlike any other industry. A SaaS company requires its customers to avail their services every month. Considering the subscription model of the SaaS business, understanding and finding insights from customer life cycle stages are extremely important.
SaaS customer lifecycle stages can be broken down into three.
1.Acquisition Stage
2.Engagement
3.Retention stage
The Acquisition and Engagement Stages
The first stage in a business life cycle is the acquisition stage.
Creating awareness, attracting new customers, reaching potential customers with Ad campaigns, Closing deals, etc are the associated tasks in the acquisition stage.
The customer engagement stage is all about communicating with your customers. Major roles in this stage are, helping new users with onboarding, solving their problems, and making them comfortable with your platform.
Engagement is a continuous process, you need to send customers payment reminders, feedback emails, new features introduction, tips for productivity improvement, etc, and everything else to keep your customers loyal to your brand.
Why is Customer Retention is more important among the 3 stages?
We know Customer retention is all about retaining the customers for a longer period.
Customer retention is a process that requires more focus from a business point of view.
Customer retention is much easier than new customer acquisition.
Because acquiring a customer is expensive considering what it takes to retain a group of customers.At the acquisition stage, every company will get into paid advertising, social media, and search engine marketing.
The expense to run a full-fledged ad campaign targetting potential customers is really high and the worst part is that the results are not guaranteed.
You can only make a handful of informed decisions with these Advertising campaigns, and you don’t have any true control over the potential customers, who might see your advertisements and marketing Emails.
Scope of Stressing More on Customer Retention.
Customer Retention has great advantages. Not only the regular subscription payments from the subscribers but there is more scope for upselling and cross-selling.
Time to profitability metric is really important in the SaaS industry. The faster you could reach a profitable position, the better your company appeals to potential investors and debt financiers.
Word of mouth marketing is one great indirect source for gaining more new customers. For your existing customers to say great things to their peers, the company must create a positive impression in the first place.
How to be successful at customer Retention
1.Monitor customer activity patterns
Reach out to customers , who are likely to drop out of the application and also to those who are staying with you for a considerably long time.
If you find users who are becoming less active in using your service, give them a better offer and try to solve their problems, this might help you to retain them. And monitoring the usage patterns of your customers helps you understand your customers better.
2.Building Great Relationships
Keeping great connections with your users is important for building a loyal community.
A great customer service offering is helpful to building solid relations. Keep your customers updated about the product, help them use your product, well ask them how is it going at their end. Ultimately let your customers know that you value their presence.
3.Dedicated customer support
Customer Support is the most significant factor for a SaaS customer. 8 out of 10 customers research customer service before choosing a SaaS provider.
Potential customers usually check user reviews about your support services. SaaS customers are willing to pay decent bucks for your services, but at the same time, they expect proper support channels to help them out.
So it’s important to invest in customer services.
But investing in an in-house support team might not be feasible for everyone.
That’s, where an outsourced SaaS support provider could help you, realize your support services goals.
An outsourced SaaS support plan is cost-effective and is helpful to SaaS customer retention. Read more about the Benefits of outsourced customer support
Learn more about Activelobby’s outsourced support services for your SaaS Products.