Updated December 2020. Most B2B SaaS marketers know that keeping customers is just as important as landing new ones. But did you know that SaaS customer retention is actually much more valuable to your company’s bottom line than customer acquisition?
Research shows that keeping just 5% of your customers can increase your company’s revenue by up to 95%. And, it’s up to 25 times less expensive to retain your current customers than to acquire new ones. Because of this, companies are putting more effort into analyzing SaaS customer retention, and figuring out how to keep customers from jumping ship.
With that in mind, SaaS companies can benefit from thinking about how great content encourages customers to stay loyal to their brand. Here are 6 ways to do this:
6 winning SaaS customer retention strategies
1. Customer onboarding: start out on the right foot
It’s important to not only focus on how you get your customers to buy from you, but also how you interact with them after they’ve made their first purchase. Over 80% of consumers have stopped doing business with companies due to poor customer service.
When SaaS companies talk about customer onboarding, they often use the phrase ‘high-touch’ onboarding—a concierge approach that helps each customer successfully adopt and implement their solution. Content plays a key role in this approach.
Customers have a lot to learn when getting started with a new software. They want to know that a SaaS company has the skills and knowledge base to offer competitive products and solid support. As part of your high- touch onboarding strategy for SaaS customer retention, reach out to your customers with useful content as soon as they start engaging with your company.
Through educational and how-to content, you can take the proactive steps needed to help your customers implement your software and maximize the value they get from it. This builds a relationship that can extend your customer lifecycle and improve SaaS customer retention.
2. Clearly communicate your value
It’s essential to understand why your customers like your company’s SaaS products. Take time to find out the reasons why your customers choose your products (this could be a 15-minute phone call with a different customer every week), and talk about those key points directly in your content to remind your audience of your value and to increase SaaS customer retention.
SaaS companies must reinforce their value propositions regularly throughout the customer lifecycle. While it’s normal for 50% of customers to churn every 5 years, it’s also true that 85% of customers churn for reasons that could have been prevented. By emphasizing your products’ value, you reassure your audience that they’ve made a good decision in partnering with you. This will grow trust and encourage SaaS customer retention.
3. Research the right content platforms for your SaaS company
Another major way to improve SaaS customer retention is to make sure that your content is presented in the right channels. For a SaaS software company, this might involve using Facebook or LinkedIn as your primary channels. Nearly 50% of B2B marketers have closed deals thanks to LinkedIn, and it drives almost 300% more leads than Facebook, so it’s certainly worth exploring. Or, you could try out other, more audience-specific channels like Spiceworks or TechMap that cater to professionals in the tech community.
Find out what channels to use by doing your research—look at metrics for the platforms you’re considering as they relate to your industry. The point is that channels matter, and what works for one sector (or even one company) may not work for another. Your goal with SaaS customer retention is to keep customers who have strong knowledge of specific tech topics—so create content accordingly, and use the channels that make the most sense to connect with your target audience.
4. Schedule your content to keep it flowing consistently
Consistency and scheduling can help optimize your email marketing campaigns or other types of channel marketing to boost SaaS customer retention. You don’t want to leave your customers hanging for too long with sporadic, piecemeal content. For example, as a general rule, it’s best to publish at least 1 blog post per week.
Looking at each of your content resources as a part of a greater ecosystem enables you to establish a better long-term vision. For instance, if you have a white paper full of rich research and actionable takeaways, how does that fit into your long-term effort to keep your website up to date and your customers engaged? The “relationship” between these marketing pieces could include repurposing sections of your white paper into blog posts on a regular basis.
When you commit to an ongoing content strategy, you show your customers that you’ll always be there for them with useful and valuable content that helps them overcome their challenges. This is an excellent way to gain their loyalty and drive SaaS customer retention.
5. Reward customers for engaging with your content
When your B2B SaaS content is valuable, it inherently rewards your audience for taking the time to read it. So, instead of just telling customers about new product features, provide them with a consistent flow of useful information that helps them do their job better—and makes their lives easier.
For example, this SaaS customer retention strategy could be an email marketing campaign. Email marketing is a key customer retention activity for 80% of businesses, and is considered the number one customer retention tactic by 56% of marketers. You can use your email marketing campaigns to encourage your customers to dive deeper into your other content, such as the blog posts and white papers we’ve already discussed.
6. Write relatable content—even in the tech world
SaaS can be a dry, technical field. You’re not posting mouth-watering recipes or talking about idyllic tropical getaways. You’re discussing things like cloud gateways, encryption and algorithms.
To keep customers interested and engaged, make your content relatable—tell great stories of how other customers have been successful with your software, and how those wins made them feel. Use powerful quotes and testimonials to guide your reader through the story in your customers’ words. You can also use success stories like case studies to educate your customers on other use cases for your product across a variety of industries that might be helpful for them.
By inserting real people and real companies into your content, you immediately start to develop deeper, more trusting relationships with your customers. Case studies are a powerful way to tell these stories, which is why 73% of B2B marketers use this type of content. Creating and publishing relatable case studies and other content will ensure your SaaS customer retention goals are met—and perhaps even exceeded.
Keep your customers hooked with well-crafted marketing content
Now you’re up to speed on a few of the time-tested strategies for creating great content that provides value and drives SaaS customer retention for your company. It’s time to bring your ideas to life and produce some killer content.
Do you need help with content creation? Uplift Content writes case studies, ebooks and white papers for high-growth SaaS companies like Okta, WalkMe and LeanData. Check out our content writing services if you’d like a hand.
