How to keep your SaaS users Saas’ing
Right Time, Right Place, Right Value
Many SaaS product suffer from problems acquiring, keeping and growing their user base. The single hardest problem for online software is how to simultaneously make an experience accessible, while helping the user get the most from their experience with the product.
Don’t let your product decisions be influenced by what would be interesting, but instead focus your product efforts on understanding your customers and their interaction with your product, then deliver on a continuously improving experience across the software itself and your company’s engagement with that user during their lifetime.
Easy Access
Keep it simple. Packaging few easy to understand offerings with clearly stated value and no obstacles to sign up for at least trial is a good place to start. Many producteers find themselves in a situation where their analysis goes too deeply into sub-segments of the market leading to an everything-for-everyone offering, which may be reasonable for a more experienced user who knows what they want, but can be overwhelming for a prospective user you want to engage.
Minimize the roadblocks between that prospect and a trial. Do not require extensive user information validation steps while you move them through your marketing/sales pipeline. Give them access with little friction to get at least a taste of what your system offers. You can follow up after they are inside to bring them along.
Convenient Pricing
While not every application benefits from a free trial model, the more novel or unproven the idea, the lower cost of entry is needed to net the biggest base of early users. Once you get through the lighthouse phase with a base of early users who are committed to your product, it’s time to think about pricing for the masses. This includes what you will do with those early, influential users who will be used to a free or low cost early access pricing model and the new users you look to bring on board.
Keep pricing packages simple and tightly tied to what you are learning about your user segments. Does your base break down between basic users vs power users who are ready for more advanced features? Is there a clear interest and path for basic users to need more advanced features?
Rapid Onboarding
Equally as crucial to the front door of Easy Access and Convenient Pricing, once you have a user on board on a trial or a paid subscription, what will you do to help them to realize value out of this new relationship as quickly as possible. Online walkthroughs of key product features or common workflows; support bots or personnel who can provide a product overview and answer questions, user community features where users can help one another are just the basic ante here.
Effective Engagement
The biggest issue with any product is the ratio of value to usage of your product. Users often utilize your product, get their value and then forget all about it in the future. Communication is one part of this equation to contact users through automation and human touch. This can be laid out in a communication plan that exposes incremental features for the user to come back and access. Build this right into your marketing automation and product notification capabilities and make it a centerpiece of your communication strategy. Be there with real support for their product-related issues as well. The value of a human, or human-esque bot interaction cannot be understated in a world where companies look to cut the human capital they’ve invested in support and customer success.
Usage Analysis
Can you tell which products are driving your revenue? How about which features within those products? How does that map across segments of your user base. Building correlation analysis models is critical to understand how your product investments are turning into meaningful relationships and revenue. However, this kind of modeling requires real thought put into the metrics your system will track and honest assessment of your product priorities.
Visible Improvement
Your product must feel like it is improving on a continuous basis to remain fresh and interesting for your users. Does this mean piling on features? No. How about regular UI rework? Not really. Instead, think about the small things you can add or change that will help users the most. Be very careful when making larger changes to the core usage workflows your users follow today. A new usage paradigm might sound great and may very well be more efficient, but recognizing the hurdle your core users will have to overcome to figure out where their favorite feature went or the workflow burned into their muscle memory can be the difference between user satisfaction and departure.