Post-Launch Strategies for Selling and Scaling your Saas Product Faster — Pressfarm
After launching your startup, it can take painstakingly long to start getting traction and selling your product. However, if your pre-launch PR strategies were done right beforehand, it is possible that by now you have some beta users and have appeared in a few blog posts or news outlets online. In case you didn’t do pre-launch campaigns, it might be a huge task growing your initial numbers faster. For both these two types of startups, post-launch strategies like the ones discussed below can propel your product to the next heights.
1. Sell the value of your product
Understanding the impact of your product in the current market enables you to come out with the best tactics and strategies for getting customers. From both expressively done videos to blog posts, startups that understand what their product brings on board to the users are able to exponentially sell that value.
Knowing your unique selling proposition and backing it up with some evidence can help Saas products scale faster. However, in the current market, several Saas products with a handful of features are always attempting to sell each part of their product to gain advantage. Suffice to say, this strategy mostly doesn’t work. Customers are usually interested in very few features, sometimes just one feature. Understanding your product will help you tell your core feature from your additional features. The core feature should express the value your product brings. Additional features are only there to diversify your product and support the core function.
2. Short trials
Making your trials short and sweet is a strategy that increase your sales, giving you more revenue and increasing the number of paying customers. While some Saas startups have found success in having one month or 14 day trial periods, it is important to test which trial period from 7 days to a month works best for your startup. A/B testing works great for comparisons so that you can tell the churn and uptake rates.
Do not give it more than a month because it is unlikely to be effective and by that time, the customer excitement has waned off. You need to gauge which trial period enhances user experience and makes them want to sign up and keep using the product. In most cases, 14 days is a good time, and always remember; short and sweet is the way to go.
3. Make your email campaigns personal
Users want to feel like they are connecting with the product. A lot of that has got to do with the communication and levels of personality expressed in blog posts, email campaigns, and videos. Some of the most successful companies in the world today have faces that have made them so. It does not increase customer confidence when the emails all go out looking like they came from some robot, with email addresses like [email protected] or [email protected].
Put a name behind the whole email. If it is your sales person sending emails out, let them have their names on the emails. For instance, [email protected] or [email protected]. Personalising your emails will bring out the feeling that there are people behind the Saas product which will make the customers even more expressive, improving customer relationships, increasing your credibility, and especially during the free trials this could increase your sales tremendously.
4. High value demos
Always, there will be a point in your product that customers have failed to understand. Of course, levels of difficulty differ from product to product. However, the reason some saas products have grown faster than others is because they have found out where the pain point in the product is, and the clever startups have created demos to run customers through these points. These demos can be stored as resources on the websites, and they should be very easily reachable and available. In fact, using tools like Appcues, some startups have been able to add these demos as guides within the apps.
It is all part of a successful user onboarding process. Most times, the pain points within the products contribute to high churn rates for any Saas product. Clearing out these points by making the features easier to use and implementing demos (video and written content) will reduce the churn rates during trial periods or initial sign up months leading to increased sales.
Additionally, demos do not have to only address paint points. It is always advised to have demos for your product leading up to a sale as a call-to-action (CTA). This is for new customers who are trying to understand your value before signing up, or for the free trial customer who just wants to learn more about the product they want to pay for. Demos with sales CTAs are a great way to increase your sales.
5. Follow up
If a customer doesn’t say no to a proposition then you never really know the answer; until you ask again. A Maybe isn’t a No. A No has to be a No for there to be no doubt. The only way to know if the customer who didn’t give their feedback is interested is by sending that email again. The most possible reason why they didn’t give an answer is because they opened your email when they were busy, and just didn’t get through to answering it. Or they haven’t opened that email.
Using products like Groove, Intercom, and CRM products like Infusionsoft, you can set follow-ups to go out when customers do not respond. This allows you to get a clear yes or no from your users or prospective customers. As they say, the money is in the follow up.
6. Perfect the onboarding process
One of the best secrets of a successful Saas product is in the first week of your customer’s life with your product. This period needs to be intense. It has to be refined over and over. Initially when most Saas startups launch, they have huge churn rates during the first weeks of a customer’s life. Refining the onboarding process changes this to a huge extent.
Customers want to be talked to a lot during the first week. They need to register in their mind that they are actually using your product. That doesn’t happen unless you are constantly talking, guiding, teaching, showing, and helping them. It has to be intentional. While you and your team may understand your product as soon as you login, users may suffer with that. Perfecting the onboarding process helps iron out most issues ensuring you keep your customers, do the sale, and increase your revenues.
7. Pricing your product effectively
In the rush to get a huge number of customers, some startups are usually tempted to price their products very cheaply. Sadly, this could work in your favour for a short time. In the long run, you will notice that you cannot deliver the value that your product should be delivering because you have grossly undervalued yourself.
At the same time it is also an impediment to your growth if you price your product too high. An expensive product does not translate to a high-value product and customers know that. Pricing too high as compared to market prices could be deterring your sales because of the questionable value in relation to pricing.
Therefore, finding out the sweet spot in pricing is an essential determinant of the success of your Saas product. Most successful products have used the cost of acquiring one customer as a determinant of the final pricing. Pricing properly ensures the optimum growth for your company in terms of sales, revenues, and user numbers.
Do you have any other strategies and ideas to add onto our story? Let us know in the comments section below.
Originally published at press.farm on March 21, 2018.
