The software industry is not easy to understand for the regular customer. Therefore, SaaS companies must look for ingenious marketing methods to bring CX to the next level. This is a mandatory step for SaaS businesses that want to prosper in the Subscription Economy.
You’ve probably made the first step and put together a reliable and capable CX marketing team. This is indeed a great start, but it’s also important to make sure decision-makers truly understand what CX (or customer experience) is really about.
In short, CX refers to how the customer perceives your brand and how they relate to your campaigns and products or services. The experience starts with the moment a possible customer is introduced to the brand and can span endlessly as long as the customer is happy to renew their subscription and recommend you to friends and family.
So, while your SaaS marketing team works hard on positioning the product on the market and building awareness around the brand, you also need a team working on CX. Overall, both are important since an excellent customer experience leads to satisfied customers who will stay loyal to the brand in the long term.
Best Saas Marketing Practices
Moving forward, we will discuss some of the most successful marketing practices that put SaaS companies on the map for their target audience.
Focus on Each Individual User
Do you know why some possible customers give up on your subscription even before the first month ends?
While some of them may not be genuinely looking for a different product, most customers leave because they don’t understand your product and the benefits it brings them. So, the job of your marketing team may end once the user agrees to subscribe, but the job of the CX team is just starting.
To make sure new users are happy with the product, SaaS businesses must practice a user-focused approach and make sure everyone understands how to use the product to their benefit. In short, the CX team must work to create a positive experience for new users by delivering all the information and details in a format that’s easy to understand.
Make Users Feel at Ease
Technical terms and jargon are confusing and intimidating. Even more, you’re asking new users to invest some of their own time in trying to understand your instructions and guidelines. As a result, users will step down from their initial decision to subscribe and look towards the competition.
The right CX approach includes simple, jargon-free language and easy access to a comprehensive database with FAQs and user-focused guidelines.
Ask for Customer Feedback & Integrate the Results
Users are happy to provide feedback, as long as you don’t overwhelm them with lengthy questionnaires or ask them to go out of their way for it. So, work with your marketing team on creating short survey forms with questions that provide insight into how users think.
Additionally, once you get the feedback, it’s important to integrate the results into your product and let users know why/how they helped improve features or add new ones.
You can use social media platforms for both surveys and communication with users in general as this environment is less formal and more focused on people. We know it can be difficult to run an emerging SaaS business and keep an active social media presence, but this aspect is important for good CX. Luckily, there are lots of tools to help with social media management for small businesses – this way, you can focus on creating high-quality content and automate the management part.
Give User-generated Content a Chance
Speaking of social media, did you know that 81% of people read what other people have posted about a brand or a product? So, if you promote content generated by customers, you hit two goals in one move (make users feel heard & appreciated and get the word of mouth going).
Make Data-driven Decisions
Successful marketing campaigns are guided by real-time data and facts because they provide an accurate image of the market. Moreover, with the right data, you can get insight into users’ way of thinking (by following the right metrics).
So, in order to build the best customer experience, it’s important to follow the right customer experience metrics and interpret them correctly.
Work on Your Customer Service Department
Customer service and customer experience are quite similar, but each has a different job to do. The customer service department is the one to get in direct contact with customers and help them solve problems or clear things up.
If a customer isn’t happy with their experience with your customer service department, you risk losing them and getting a bad online review. Therefore, the operators and technicians behind this department must be well-trained in delivering a positive experience regardless of the communication medium.
Both CX and customer service are crucial in the relationship with the customer, so companies must focus on building up both.
A Few Examples of Good CX
The companies that are today at the top are the best examples of delivering a positive customer experience, so why not learn from them?
Here are a few examples to consider:
Avast – Focus on the End-User
Avast started as a cybersecurity software company focused on technology (as one would expect). However, they soon noticed a discrepancy between the future they envisioned and the reply they got from the market.
Customers were not responding to their efforts, and to make things better, their CX strategy focused on three main points:
- Fix what wasn’t working with their technology
- Focus on innovations easy to implement
- Work on customer personalization
Amazon Prime – Listen to Customers’ Needs
Prime was born after a brainstorming session during which the decision-makers listened to what their current customers were saying.
Here’s the summary of their CX strategy for this product:
- Lengthy shipping times – they built their own shipping network
- Checking out was too difficult – they created one-click orders
- Low customer loyalty towards the brand – Amazon introduces Prime as a service and charged a monthly fee to connect buyers to the service
Dell – A Change of Perspective
Dell has a troubled history, but the important thing is that they managed to pull themselves up and change the way they were doing business.
To change their CX process, they started asking for their customers’ opinions via social media or various surveys addressed towards both customers and partners. Today, Dell’s CX team focus is entirely on customers as they use tools such as data analytics to understand the people who support the brand and why. Additionally, they also ask their engineers to dig deep into the full customer experience to understand why people choose their products (a great strategy for improving existing products and building new ones).
Key Takeaways
In summary, if you want to improve your CX practices, it’s important to focus on customers (existing and future) and build your products on their feedback and way of thinking. Also, make sure that your customer service and marketing teams work to create a positive experience when addressing customers.
When you pair a high-quality product with positive feelings, you get the perfect recipe for success in a market that’s as competitive as the software industry.
