Looking at The Bigger Picture of SaaS: What is The SaaS Customer Lifecycle?
Attracting new customers is very important. However, your relationship with your customers doesn’t end when you make a sale.
As a SaaS business, it’s also crucial to keep customers onboarded as long as possible. If a customer loves your product and becomes a loyal, long-term user, they create additional value, by referring friends, subscribing to higher-tier services, or providing helpful, and detailed feedback. All of these factors contribute to Lifetime Value (LV).
Retaining customers is important. You might anticipate their needs at every stage of their relationship with you. Lifecycle marketing can help.
What is lifecycle marketing?
Lifecycle marketing means tailoring your approach to consumers, based on their stage in the customer journey. From the first time they hear about your product, to the moment they decide to make their purchase or the six-month mark of their subscription, and beyond, you should be ready to anticipate their needs.
A customer’s journey doesn’t have a fixed endpoint, and should always be evolving. Your strategy will change at each stage of the journey. You may prioritize different communication channels, or, as in the case of multi-tenancy systems, even target a different segment of your customer base.
Let’s take a look at the key stages of a customer lifecycle:
Create awareness
Initially, your customer becomes aware of a recurring challenge or problem in their business. They’re looking for software to help optimize their process. As a SaaS provider, you have a solution.
You need to use every tool in your arsenal to make them aware of what you have to offer, including marketing, referrals, and demonstrations. Customers must be fully informed about your product, highlighting its features, and showcasing why it’s the perfect match.
Content marketing is one excellent way to achieve this. Blog posts with text, videos, and graphics can help educate your potential customers about what your software can do. They also boost your web presence and search engine rankings. Use them to appeal to your customer by telling a story about your brand.
Use frequently asked questions, or common search queries to generate ideas for content that will draw customers to your web presence.
Customer qualification
The next phase is one of consideration and qualification. Your customer will browse materials, watch videos, and try demos to find out if your business is the right fit.
You want to make sure any prospective customer thoroughly checks out your brand. The more time they invest in your product, the more likely it is that they will choose you in the long run. You need to hold their attention to avoid shopping cart abandonment online.
During this phase, a customer may download a free trial of your product. While they familiarise themselves with the software, make sure your support guides are coherent and easy to find, and your teams are available to help.
Enhance the experience by taking an omnichannel approach. Use email and in-app messaging, as well as your online content. A chatbot or virtual agent could also be implemented on your web presence. Customers should feel they have a variety of options for seeking support.
Treat this phase of the lifecycle as the first step to onboarding. Welcome your potential customer with high-quality service, and they’ll be sure to return.
Purchase
Congratulations! You have a new customer. Thank them warmly and highlight the various channels for contacting your support services, and any other useful onboarding information again.
This is also a good time to ask for an initial round of customer feedback. You want to find ways to optimize and streamline the steps leading up to purchase as much as possible, so any data you can collect at this stage is hugely valuable.
Spend some time evaluating which strategies worked to convert them. Which marketing or sales tactics proved most effective? This data is useful for mapping the customer journey and refining your strategy in the future.
Activation
At this juncture, the focus of the lifecycle shifts. Instead of trying to engage the leaders and managers who make the initial purchase, you need to prioritize the daily user. These users are the ones employing your product to help solve their problems.
Strive to make a good first impression on these daily users. Your training materials are important; items such as courses, demos, and explainer videos. Your support team must also be available to consult.
Communication is key. Customers shouldn’t be bounced around from team member to team member as they struggle to find answers. Your team should have all the tools it needs to be able to problem-solve together effectively, whether that includes an online whiteboard or huddle room. Be responsive to queries, and do your utmost to accommodate every request.
Don’t underestimate this phase of the lifecycle. You need to fulfill the promises you made to your customers during the awareness and qualifications processes, to maintain a stellar reputation. Keep your customers happy, and ensure they return.
Regular use
Now your product is an intrinsic part of your customer’s daily operations. Your customer’s team should be confident, and able to achieve their objectives when using your software.
There are a variety of ways to engage your customers at this stage of the life cycle, for example providing opportunities to further training. Empower users to take full advantage of all of your software’s tools, and features.
Prioritize building your knowledge database, ensuring it is searchable and can serve as a reference for customers to return to again, and again. Include plenty of visual elements. Images, videos, and graphs look great on the page and can convey a dense amount of information efficiently. Visual aids foster information retention.
Always update and improve your services. Keep your customers informed of any changes through release notes, delivered through channels where they will reach the largest number.
Sufficient support should be provided to guide your users through any new features. All updates must be subject to rigorous testing. Check QA metrics in Agile to ensure the user experience stays high-quality.
To summarize, you need to provide comprehensive training resources for users to consult at any time. Customers will thank you, and so will your support team. Self-study makes customers feel empowered, and reduces the volume of calls, and emails to your helpdesk.
Renewal
It’s coming up to the end of the year, and your customer is evaluating their budget. They need to decide whether your product is worth renewing. You need to make sure your renewal rate stays positive.
Customers purchase a product because they expect it to be a net positive for their business. Customers renew a product because the product lived up to these expectations. More importantly, it made them feel good.
To seal the deal on renewal, make the decision as easy as possible for your customers. Send a friendly reminder close to the renewal date. Offer a discount for those who renew by a certain date as an incentive. For more engaged customers, you could even offer discounted access to a higher tier of services.
To remind customers of the progress they have achieved while using your product, you could also send them a round-up of their metrics. This way, they can see your product’s value for themselves.
If the customer doesn’t renew, use the opportunity to garner feedback. Insight into why the customer left will help you improve your services. Plus, keeping the communication lines open allows for the possibility of eventually bringing your customer back.
Overall, keep an eye on your renewal rate. If many customers fail to renew, this suggests scope for improvement.
Referrals
So you managed to secure that renewal. Fantastic job! It looks as though you’ve got an engaged high-value customer.
Make sure to follow up in an email, thanking them for their loyalty. While you are still fresh in their mind, ask them if they could refer you to their friends, colleagues, or businesses. You can further incentivize this using a referral program.
How you design your referral program depends on your business size. Creat a bonus for customers for successful referrals. Offer webinars, special services, a discount, or cash prize; always check it complies with state regulation referral selling first.
Ultimately, any incentives should be a way to reward the customers who are genuinely excited to spread the word about your product. If users are solely motivated by the prize, the referrals you receive may be non-targeted or low quality and won’t result in conversions. Plus, if your incentive is too extravagant, it may not be cost-effective.
Word of mouth is one of the most effective ways of generating new potential customers. After all, people are more likely to trust their friends than any customer service representative. Leveraging referrals is a great way to bring great value to your business.
Summing up
Pouring your resources into the sales process while neglecting your existing customer base is one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a business. Your customers add value to your business at every stage of their relationship with you. That might be subscribing to new services at different tiers, providing crucial feedback, and spreading the word about your brand.
A little extra consideration can go a long way to keeping them happy during every phase of the life cycle. Keep your customers engaged and business will flourish.
