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Another excerpt from my forthcoming SaaS Marketing Handbook – TM
Nurturing
Nurturing is the process of moving a lead closer to a sale through continued marketing. Nurturing is not unique to SaaS marketing, but it is especially important. Prospects in your database who are not yet ready to buy need to be “nurtured” until they are ready to buy. Email marketing is the most common form of nurturing. The trick is to understand what type of content is of interest, and how many times – touches – a prospect needs to see your content before they are ready. It may take five or ten touches before a prospect is ready. Make sure the content is valuable and you are not spamming them, or nurturing could backfire. But do some form of nurturing – it’s much more expensive to acquire brand new prospects than work with ones already in your database.
A/B Testing
Optimization is critical in SaaS marketing. The most basic technique is called A/B testing, which Direct Mail Techniques. In the case of email, marketers send out two variants simultaneously, known as “A” and “B.” These variants might contain two different subject lines, offers, copy, or layouts. Alternatively, they might send the same copy to two different lists—perhaps different age groups or cities—using a tracking mechanism to ascertain which demographic generates more responses. The marketer then adopts the “winner” of the A/B test as the preferred direct mail piece. The idea is to change just one thing in each A/B test, send it out to a limited subset of your list, pick the winner, and then continue tweaking. The new B is sometimes called the “challenger,” and the A is the “champion.” A/B testing can be used for web pages, landing pages, registration or sign up forms, pay-per-click ads – almost anything marketing creates.
Customer Success
Customer success is a company-wide approach to ensuring new customers are on boarded successfully. The most important goal is to ensure prospects are able to use the software productively during the trial period, and that recently-signed customers are able to roll it out successfully in their organizations. Some companies have created a new position of customer success manager that is part system engineer, part support, and part customer service. A customer success manager’s job includes making sure customers are making good progress on adoption, are engaged, and most importantly, are realizing the business results they expect from your solution.
A whole new crop of Customer Success Tool Comparison has emerged that allows SaaS vendors to monitor the progress of a prospect during a trial and alert the customer success team of issues such as continued errors or failures, or simply lack of use. Customer success managers may also play a part in the renewal process, depending on the company.
Have others SaaS marketers should know about? I’d like to hear.
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