As a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider, one of your top priorities should be acquiring new clients. However, while signing up a customer is a huge win for your company, it isn’t the end of the road.
If you want to minimize churn and retain as many clients as possible, you must also make customer success a priority. Your customer success strategy will have an impact on your retention rates and influence the efficacy of your marketing efforts.
You’re probably wondering what customer success has to do with marketing. The short answer is more than you might expect.
With that in mind, let’s examine how your customer success strategy will affect your brand’s performance and your ability to market your SaaS solution.
What Is Customer Success?
Customer success is the culmination of all your efforts to help clients overcome product use challenges so they can derive maximum value from your SaaS solution. Put plainly, customer success involves providing users with the resources they need to enjoy a seamless experience with your product or service.
To be clear, customer success is a proactive initiative, not a reactive one. In light of this, you must anticipate the questions and challenges that will arise in a customer’s journey after they sign up for a software subscription.
A common example of a customer success resource is a FAQ page, which answers the questions consumers may have before purchasing or after using your software. A FAQs page reduces the likelihood that consumers will need to contact your support team and takes surprises out of their journey.
For instance, you can use your FAQ page to provide information about how long your free trial lasts, what the renewal rate will be, and how consumers can cancel their subscriptions.
Customer Success Influences All Stages of the Client Lifecycle
Your customer success strategy colors every stage of the client lifecycle, including:
Onboarding
Onboarding is both a component of customer success and a beneficiary of it. By providing inbound customers with adequate resources during your marketing and lead-nurturing efforts, you can streamline your onboarding, as they’ll have already been exposed to your product, its capabilities, and the onboarding process itself.
Successfully onboarding your new customers will also help them derive more value from your SaaS solution. They’ll enjoy a shallower learning curve and an improved user experience. Ultimately, this will help you fight against churn and improve retention.
Renewal/Retention
Customer success also plays a vital role in keeping your churn rates low. By prioritizing customer success in your marketing and onboarding practices, you can proactively prevent user frustration and help clients make the most of their new software investment.
Conversely, neglecting the customer success component of the user experience can lead to unsustainable churn and poor retention rates. This, in turn, can result in less revenue and thinner profit margins for your business.
Referrals
A winning customer success strategy will help you effectively meet your clients’ needs. With those needs met, they’ll not only be happy with your product and brand as a whole but also likely share their experiences with other consumers. In this way, your most satisfied customers will become your best brand advocates.
On the other hand, customers that are frustrated with your solution or the resources you provide may leave negative feedback on public review forums. Those that had especially poor experiences may even actively discourage others from using your SaaS solution.
The Nexus Between Customer Success and SaaS Marketing
SaaS marketing is the means by which you increase brand awareness and introduce prospective customers to your software solution. It also represents the first stage of your customer success strategy.
Nearly every piece of marketing content will impact the efficacy of your customer success strategy. Likewise, the reach and influence of most marketing materials will be affected by the quality of your customer success campaign.
This includes marketing materials such as:
Informative Content
What better way to support customer success than by routinely publishing high-quality, educational blog content?
Producing such content will give your audience the resources they need to learn more about your SaaS solution and decide whether it’s right for them. Paying clients and trial customers can also leverage these articles to familiarize themselves with your software and its capabilities.
When creating informative content, address specific, focused topics and use clear titles, subtitles, and keywords so users can easily find the information most relevant to them. Building out your content library won’t just support customer success — it will also help you improve your online visibility in organic search. Talk about a win-win!
Landing and Service Pages
The primary function of your landing and service pages is to sell your SaaS solution. However, it also plays an important role in customer success.
Every page that’s explicitly advertorial should provide clear information about your product or service, as well as its capabilities and features. You must also be transparent about details like how long your trial period is, what your rates are, etc.
Sharing this information from the outset will help your customers decide whether your software is right for them before they commit.
Reviews
Lastly, investing in customer success will enable you to make use of an incredibly powerful marketing tool: client reviews.
When you develop a reputation for supporting the success of your customers, they’ll talk about it publicly. As your reputation and library of reviews grow, so will your reach.
Once you’ve racked up a diverse mix of reviews, you can begin to highlight them in future marketing campaigns. You can pull quotes from customers and use your reputation as a tool to attract new leads.
Let Insights ABM Align Your Customer Success and Marketing Strategies
Customer success and marketing are more than just connected. They’re inextricably linked.
You must align the two strategies if you want your customers to thrive and your marketing campaigns to drive business growth. To do that, you need a marketing partner like Insights ABM that understands the nuances of building SaaS brands.
Contact us and schedule a free consultation to learn more about our suite of SaaS marketing services and how they can help you build your business.
Joe is a digital marketing strategist and media buying/planning leader with 13+ years of expertise in marketing strategy and program management, omnichannel campaign delivery, brand building, data analytics, and customer experience/UX optimization. He has helped drive growth for industry-leading clients, including F500/F100 firms.