With the effects of COVID-19 spanning into Q3, businesses continue to look for ways to cut down on their burn rate to ride out these uncertain times. Businesses are reevaluating which SaaS subscriptions are essential and which contracts they want to renegotiate or cancel. As a result, retaining customers has never been more critical or more challenging.

It’s valuable to focus on implementing strategies that bolster customer retention and consequently revenue, especially in a time where customer acquisition can be slow. Studies have shown that increasing retention by just 5% increases profits anywhere from 25% to 95%.

Here’s 4 powerful strategies that can drive customer retention for your SaaS company this quarter.

Deliver Value with each Log In

One of the most effective ways to ensure your product gets classified as a ‘need to have’ by your customers is to deliver value every time they log in. A great way to effectively communicate how users can get value from your platform is by setting milestones. Milestones create a sense of momentum and achievement for the customer, and they give the platform an effective way to monitor customer progress.

Product tours increase the rate and speed at which users reach milestones by guiding users step by step through completing important tasks in-platform.

As customer expectations change from needing to learn the basics of your platform to implementing advanced features, product tours adapt with the user journey to deliver hyper-focused support about the task at hand.

Personalize the User Experience

Staying aligned with customers’ unique goals and communicating actionable ways your product can help them achieve their goals is a tried and true way to win and keep business. When attempting to personalize the experience for thousands of customers, email campaigns and support centers can only go so far, and a customized in-platform experience is only viable for enterprise deals. 

To create a personalized experience that scales, group users into segments based on important shared characteristics. Segments allow tours and other product experiences to be targeted and customized based on users’ unique needs. It also enables just in time support by triggering product tours to start automatically when a user performs a specific action.

Know the Warning Signs

If a user is only utilizing a small portion of a platform’s offering, is slow to adopt new features, or has recently gone a significant amount of time without logging in, these are all warning signs that they may churn soon.

“If you see that a customer is failing to use a specific feature that could benefit them, point out that feature and offer training on its use for the customer’s entire team. That kind of unexpected value goes a long way toward generating positive emotions around renewal time.” - Totango. 

LOU helps companies keep track of their users’ progress by automatically grouping users into turnkey segments based on their experience in-platform. The resulting cohort data makes it easy to identify when users are progressing too slowly or halted entirely. You can then target customized tours and support to help them continue progressing so that they’re engaged and more likely to be retained.

Get Users Back in Platform

A big indicator that a customer will churn is if they have long periods of inactivity or if their monthly/annual log-ins fall well below the average user. If the user is no longer engaging with your platform, the only way to re-engage them is by catching their attention outside of platform. This usually resembles high pressure sales calls around renewal times or email campaigns that announce shiny new features in hopes of enticing users back.

However, if a user is no longer engaging with a platform it’s most likely because they have failed to see the value they were initially sold on when they signed up.

Rather than selling inactive users on more features or discounted prices, we recommend sending an email to the inactive user that identifies the milestone the inactive user has yet to complete and communicates the value they’ll receive in return.

To make this re-engagement strategy even more effective, include a LOU Link that once clicked takes the user back in-platform and guides them step by step through completing their next milestone.

Customer retention is challenging enough without a global pandemic, but you don’t have to do it alone. Give some of these strategies a try, and set your company and your customers up for long-term success.

Published on July 7th, 2020

SHARE THIS POST