For marketers, retaining your current customers is just as crucial as reeling new ones in. A study by Hubspot showed that retaining just 5% of your customers can boost your company’s revenue by up to 95%. Moreover, it’s a lot cheaper to retain your current clients than it is to attract new ones. Due to this, various corporations and companies are putting a lot of effort into B2B SaaS customer retention strategies. If you want to achieve similar results for your company, here are 11 proven B2B SaaS customer retention strategies that experts and marketers swear by.
Pinpoint Your Brand’s Customer Retention Metrics
There are various metrics other than customer retention rate that offer indispensable KPIs to strengthen your customer’s loyalty. Some of these include:
- Revenue churn: the revenue your brand lost in a stipulated period
- Monthly recurring revenue: your company’s monthly revenue
- Customer lifetime value: your customers average revenue generated during their entire collaboration with your SaaS company
- Customer churn rate: the rate at which your clients stop buying from you
Determining your benchmarks and KPIs should be your first step in formulating your marketing and B2B SaaS customer retention strategies.
Lets Start..
Identify The Main Factors For Customer Churn
You must figure out what’s causing customer churn for your company. For this, many companies utilize the software to examine product engagement and usage. For SaaS companies, common triggers for customer churn include:
- Engagement: are there prolonged delays in product engagement?
- Tools limits: are your customers being restricted by tool limits?
- NPS results: how satisfied are your customers?
- Frequency of usage: What is your product’s frequency usage?
There are a few examples of customer churn triggers, and identifying them precisely will help you better formulate and target B2B SaaS customer retention marketing strategies.
Clearly Reinforce Your Value
You must understand why your customers choose your SaaS products over any other companies. Take your time to properly analyze this, whether it’s through a questionnaire or a 10-minute phone call with numerous of your clients. To retain your customers, illustrate these critical points in your content to remind your customers of your product’s value. You must routinely reinforce your value proposition throughout your client’s lifecycle. By doing this, you reassure your customers that they’ve made the right decision in collaborating with your brand.
Set And Assess Your Customers Expectations
When you set your customer’s expectations and fulfill them through your service or sales team, your customers will be content with your company. You must be clear about the value your company offers to your customers. Let them know precisely what they get when they sign up with your brand. Generally, it’s an excellent strategy to slightly under promise your value and then over-deliver. However, the vice versa can prove to be disastrous.
Upsell
Forming long-term relationships with your customers is also one of the best B2B SaaS customer retention strategies. When they see the value you offer, your consumers will turn into long-term customers. When you upsell, it’s a win-win case for you and your customers; they get exceptional services, and you receive more revenue. You’re confronting your customer’s multiple pain points, and as a result, your relationship deepens. Your customer’s commitment will increase along with a higher billing amount, increasing the likelihood of sticking around for a longer time.
Unearth The Best Content Platforms For Your Brand
Effective content marketing is critical for any business or company. To boost customer retention, ensure that your content is presented in appropriate channels. If you’re a SaaS software brand, you may consider LinkedIn or Facebook. What works for one company won’t necessarily work for you. Research and analyze the metrics for the platforms you’re considering. For B2B SaaS customer retention, your goal is to retain clients who possess in-depth knowledge about tech topics. Utilize the channel that connects with your target audience.
Hook Your Customers With Interesting And Well-Crafted Content
This is a time-tested and proven B2B SaaS customer retention strategy. You must always provide killer content that’ll engage and hook your customers. However, bear in mind that the taste of your audience will shift with time. In recent times, more marketers are shifting their focus to content marketing, and video channels have risen in popularity, with 41% of marketers planning to include Facebook Video in their marketing strategies. Constantly re-invent your content and marketing strategy to prevent customer churn. The below graph shows how B2B marketers have changed their use of the content format.
Schedule Your Content
Schedule and consistency are critical for good results from your email marketing or other forms of campaigns to enhance your customer retention. Don’t make your customers wait for a long time. For instance, it’s highly recommended that you upload new content to your blog at least once a week. By committing to a punctual content strategy, you’re demonstrating to your audience that you’ll always be there for them with valuable content.
Produce Relatable Content
To maintain your audiences’ interest and engagement, produce relatable content. For this, you can share reviews and testimonials of your customers. You can also include stories about how other customers benefited from your software and products. A study showed that 73% of marketers use case studies for customer retention. By humanizing your content in a world ruled by technology, you’ll automatically develop a deeper relationship with your customers and boost customer retention.
Listen To Your Customers
Your customers understand their needs better than anyone else. If you want to boost your B2B SaaS customer retention, ask for their feedback and take concrete actions. According to a study, as illustrated in the graph below, more than 60% of organizations consider customer feedback as necessary. Understanding your customer’s pain points will better allow you to sharpen your B2B SaaS customer retention strategies.
Continue To Upgrade And Release New Versions
Like the point mentioned above, you must continue to invite constructive feedback and enhance your products through new features and upgrades. When your audience sees that you’re continuously increasing value, the customer retention rate will also increase. If the quality of your product stays stagnant for a long time, there’s a high chance that your customers will get bored. As a result, perceived value will decrease along with customer retention. Upgrades should tackle this issue.
Reward Your Customers For Engaging
Don’t bombard your customers with information about new products; instead, opt to deliver them a consistent flow of valuable data that aids them to effectively and quickly perform their tasks. For this, you could opt for email marketing. Data shows that about 80% of companies consider email marketing as an essential customer retention strategy. You can utilize your email marketing strategy to motivate your audience to delve deeper into your content, such as your white paper and blog posts. Make sure that you use the best practices for email marketing.
Utilize EDM Marketing
Right now, many marketers use EDM marketing for B2B SaaS customer retention. It stands for electronic direct mail marketing, and this strategy can help you target both potential and existing customers. EDM marketing primarily focuses on email blasts, similar to email marketing. However, it’s more refined as it encompasses social media promotion, Google ads, YouTube ads, cross-media channels, and even SMS services. EDM marketing is customizable, cost-effective, and is easy to track and measure.
Go Overboard With Your Customer Service
This is a rule that’s set in stone-your customer service can make or break your business. Whenever your customer has a problem, go overboard in solving them. If your user interface has a bug and you’re able to solve it, most customers will be able to ignore it, but if your customer service is horrible, it’ll turn off even your most loyal customers. In fact, a study shows that 9 out of 10 customers abandoned a company due to bad customer service. Through this, you can turn a bad experience into an opportunity to turn a user into a loyal customer.
Exit Surveys
It’s inevitable that regardless of how good your company is, some customers will inevitably leave. If they’re going to leave anyway, don’t make it hard for them. Keep your cancellation policy as simple as possible to prevent grumpy users from broadcasting their frustration on social media. If they’re leaving, there’s probably a reason, and you can use this opportunity to gain valuable insights into what went wrong. This can help boost retention for future customers.
Conclusion
B2B SaaS customer retention is all about delivering a quality experience, respecting your customer’s problems, and ensuring that you’re continuously improving. Customers will always be happy to pay if you can solve their problems and make their lives easier. The more you understand your customers, the longer you can get them to stay. The above B2B SaaS customer retention can help you boost your customer’s loyalty.