WHAT IS DRIVING UP YOUR CUSTOMER ACQUISITION COST?
Generating Sales Qualified Leads
If you are facing problem #1,
read the next page
Reducing Your Customer's Churn Rate
If you are facing problem #2,
go to this page
Lack Of Stickiness With Your Products
If you are facing problem #3,
go to this page
Breaking down the cost-effective ways to generate Sales Qualified Leads
” STAT: According to statistics reported in Forbes, 89% of marketers say that brand awareness is their top goal “
ONLY WITH AWARENESS CAMPAIGNS, YOUR BRAND GETS VISIBILITY THAT ATTRACTS PROSPECTIVE CLIENTS AND SALES QUALIFIED LEADS.
QUESTION IS: HOW WOULD YOU DECIDE THE RIGHT AWARENESS STRATEGY FOR YOUR BRAND?
Maximum immediate sales are the ultimate goal for any business irrespective of size or location. To generate maximum sales, the team should reach maximum prospects using every marketing channel available within budget.
The first major concern of every SaaS company is growing sales and the lack of enough sales opportunities in their pipeline.
To overcome this, you need to promote extensively. But if you are a startup or growing business with a great product or a service, you won’t have a similar marketing budget of an established company. You cannot achieve the ROI of their extensive marketing campaigns, given their benefit of scale.
Great brands live in the customer’s mind all day and their names are synonymous with the products they offer. As a matter of fact, customers wait with anticipation for their new products and make an immediate purchase once they are launched, sometimes registering interest weeks or months in advance or working through beta offerings.
E.g.: Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce and the up and coming SparkToro, etc.
It is not easy to get the interest of such customers who became brand evangelists over time.
As such it is important to create a UNIQUE AWARENESS CAMPAIGN for your company.
The awareness campaign that states,
- You have a better product or a service and or
- At better pricing and or
- Provide better customer support than your competitors
In essence, if you are not better, quicker, cheaper or a combination of these, you will struggle to cut through the noise.
Making your brand/product visible on all channels where your target clients live. The best way to create awareness.
Visibility comes through advertising campaigns but you ought to choose the right medium or else you are sending the wrong messages to the wrong people. The medium should properly define ROI tracking. This is possible only with the new media like search result rankings, blogs, social media campaigns, and websites rather than traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, television, radio, and outdoor advertising where measuring is much harder if not impossible.
“WE LIVE IN THE WORLD OF IMMEDIACY QUALITY AND CONTENT.”
It is important to communicate how unique your product is to your customers and how well you can support them and today’s generation of clients. B2B also follows the “know before you go” buying pattern. They want to know the value, rating, and reputation of the product before they make a purchase. Their decision is often made while they research, well before their first conversation with your sales team.
This is why marketing your product through digital technologies does generate solid leads.
BUT WHAT ENGAGES YOUR CUSTOMERS IN THE DIGITAL WORLD?
ONLINE ADS OR CONTENT? WHICH IS COST-EFFECTIVE?
Here are some quick statistics on the cost of online ads:
- The average cost of an advertisement on Google Ads (AdWords) on the Search Network comes to $2.32 per click.
- The average cost for an ad on the Display Network is $0.58.
- The average cost per action (CPA) for a Google advertising search campaign is $59.18.
- It costs $50 or more per click for the most expensive keywords in Google and Bing advertising such as “CRM”, “Helpdesk” “Project Manage Software”, “Payroll”, Live Chat” etc.
- A typical small business spends between $3000 and $10000 per month in Google advertising on their online advertising campaigns (which makes $36,000 to $120,000 per year).
- 70-80% of users ignore sponsored search results and they want to learn about the product before they make the purchase.
- More than 500 million users across the world had downloaded ad blockers to prevent unwanted ad pop-ups.
- Small businesses earn a mere $3 for every $1.60 they spend on Google AdWords.
Investing in content and creating a well-optimized website is a smart way to build awareness.
If you are one among the thousands of smart business owners who grew your business through an optimized website or even consider doing it, you are heading in the right direction. But if you still struggle getting qualified sales leads, you are missing visitor engagement.
Customer is king
How to cut down your Customer Churn Rate?
One of the biggest concerns of SaaS companies is reducing the Customer Churn rate and the expenditure on acquiring new customers.
WHAT IS CUSTOMER CHURN RATE?
“The customer churn rate, also known as the rate of attrition, is the rate at which customers stop doing business with an entity. It is most commonly expressed as the percentage of service subscribers who discontinue their subscriptions within a given time period. The churn rate is especially important in industries where revenues are heavily dependent on subscriptions.”
Reducing customer churn is naturally a concern for SaaS executives.
To overcome this, we should look at how big brands like Apple, Microsoft, Zoho, etc. are retaining their customers and making them renew every time.
Generally, customers stay with a well reputed company not because their products are great but also because they believe such companies will be around to offer customer support for a long period of time. Usually, a well-reputed company does not stop interacting with the customers after they sell their offerings. Real relationship-building continues after a customer makes a purchase. They make a sincere effort in understanding how helpful the product is and gather the maximum feedback to improve. This makes customers realize that companies exist for customers.
If you ever wondered why well-reputed companies make so much effort to keep a healthy customer relationship, the answer is: No matter how much money they spend on marketing and promotions it cannot match the value of “word of mouth.”
WORD OF MOUTH PROCURES NEW CUSTOMERS WITH ZERO MARKETING EXPENDITURE.
Further, great companies adopt healthy customer relationships as their work culture. They make their organizations customer-centric. It starts with their employees' training and organizational leadership that walks the talk.
So, the formula for reducing your customer churn rate would be:
Knowing your customers + Anticipating their needs + Providing quick solutions = Reduction of customer churn rate
Many SaaS companies said they are not sure how to grow revenue quickly and steadily. Only by maximizing customers, a company would grow and this clearly indicates that customer satisfaction is the key for all business growth and particularly, recurring subscription based companies.
Feedback Is The Easy Measuring Tool For Customer Satisfaction
Some of the well-known ways to collect feedback are:
- Providing Dedicated Feedback Forms on Your Site
- Measuring Your Customer Service Performance
- Calling your Customers Regularly
- Using Email Surveys for New and existing Customers
- Monitoring Social Media Channels
- Using Polls
- Applying cart abandonment strategies
- Creating an Online Community
- In-App support and feedback
- Asking Feedback on an appropriate time After Purchase
If you have done all the above and yet the churn rate is still higher than you would like then, either:
The product is not updated constantly
Or your competitor’s value proposition is better than yours.
And the reason why this happened:
- You didn’t get the instant and accurate feedback
- You did not humanize the feedback channels
- You did not action the feedback you received
Hint:
“Any customer will engage in active communication.
The type of communication an excellent sales executive would make.
How do you achieve this on your website?”
Why your clients are not sticky; How to reduce client churn:
Customers stick with a company if they offer a high-quality product at a price that represents value and back it all up with great service.
Consider Dropbox for an example:
It acts as the one central place by creating a special folder on the User’s computer. The idea evolved when Dropbox founder Drew Houston repeatedly forget his USB flash drive while he was a student at MIT. His friends were immediately smitten when he told the idea of a common file sharing platform and they went on inventing the software.
They offered a freemium business model which is helpful for both basic and advanced users and it surpassed 500 million registered users in March 2016.
Every year since 2011, it has faced criticism related to data leak and privacy concerns yet the company kept informing all of the clients of their commitment to resolve these issues, perceived or otherwise and worked hard to overcome them all.
They also improved their product by making it available in all operating systems, in 17 languages, mobile apps and introducing Dropbox Paper and Dropbox Carousel.
When you go deeper into your niche and expand across all platforms, your product will stay to provide value much longer in the market.
Here is a quick statistics on the cost of online ads:
In the SaaS world, an innovative product does attract quick attention but soon another product gets the interest because it might be offering something extra (just like yours did some time back) or it’s just “the next great thing”. So, it is important to stay constantly updated and close to your market by getting client feedback and go deeper into the niche you operate in.
Innovate. Inform. Build. Sustain.
The little known solution to Increasing Website Conversion Rates WHILE Driving Down Customer Acquisition Cost for B2B SaaS Companies – Conversation as a Service
Understand how CaaS can impact your business:
Revenue – Client Acquisition Costs – Marketing ROI – Lead to Sales Conversion Rates
What is Conversation as a Service?
Conversation as a Service provides one on one human based conversations directly with your website visitors. Smart Companies use it to interact with their website visitors via instant chat on their websites round the clock using “as a Service” online sales executives. The USP of this service is to provide friendly and experienced support to web visitors using professionally trained OSE’s (Online Sales Executives). Nurturing visitors to the website's objective (Booked demos, free trials, qualified sales leads, etc) increasing revenue and providing engaging customer service and assistance to existing clients while also reducing website bounce rate.
How does Conversation as a Service (CaaS) benefit B2B SaaS Companies by Increasing Website Conversion Rates While Driving Down Customer Acquisition Cost?
It involves in Proactive Communication Strategy
Online ads and SEO drive traffic to your websites. But once the visitors reach your landing page, all the information is preloaded and there is no tool to influence their purchase other than the Call to Action.
The OSEs from CaaS greet every website visitor with a warm welcome and talk to the customers like how your salesperson would.
They involve human interaction with the Customers – the human touch
Human interaction is key to excellent customer relationships. A study conducted by Forrester Research found, “Many online consumers want help from a live person while they are shopping online; in fact, 44% of online consumers say that having questions answered by a live person while in the middle of an online purchase is one of the most important features a website can offer.” However, SaaS-based live chat tools operate using Chatbot and some of the loyal customers feel they are unimportant to the company as they are making them talk with a robot.
They nurture the web visitors and retarget
- Being helpful.
- Being genuine.
- Being present 24/7.
- Being identified
Are the few qualities that make a customer feel important to the company. Online Sales Executives from CaaS collect the contact details of visitors and based on the chat history, they would retarget the products every time the customer visits the website.
Reputed CaaS providers deliver a constant update to the companies on how their website is performing. It includes the analytics of average web traffic, the location and time where most of the customers are originated, the status of individual leads, retention time during the chat, the interests, and opinions on the company’s offerings. The sales team can use analytics to improve the effectiveness of future marketing campaigns.
Lead generation even during non-business hours
Companies operating live chat plugin software on their own are very likely to miss sales leads during non-business hours. OSEs of CaaS work 24/7, 365 days across the globe and communicate in the language of each customer for conversion.
