In our first article, we gave you the keys to launching your SaaS software and optimizing that launch by using a marketing automation tool.
In this article, we will see how, as a SaaS software vendor, your marketing automation tool will help you turn your prospects into customers.
Offer targeted content to your contacts
As you know, offering high-value content will allow you to acquire contacts; that is the principle of the lead magnet. I offer valuable content to the visitor of my website, and encourage them to give me their email address – and their consent – in exchange for obtaining the white paper or the video, for example.
Thanks to this process and my marketing automation tool, I acquire contacts and data about them.
This data will allow me to offer them relevant communications based on their behavior.
The goal of marketing automation is to send the right message, to the right person, at the right time, and through the right channel.
By tracking the behavior of my contacts, I will know which pages were viewed, and when.
Based on this information, I send different emails, adapted and prepared in advance, which will be a relevant message for my contact at a given moment.
Personalization is essential to help you get closer to your contacts, and marketing automation can help me do that thanks to dynamic content.
This dynamic content will allow you to personalize and adapt one – or several – parts of your website based on certain data you have about the prospect.
Let’s take the example of two people from the same company but in different roles: one in marketing strategy, and the other in development. These two people will not respond to the same content, since they have different roles and therefore different needs.
Since you have collected this data and worked on your personas beforehand, you can then personalize your website according to the target audience arriving there. This personalization is also possible in your emails or your landing pages.
Nurture your contacts
The acquisition of new leads is resource-intensive. When you acquire them, the goal is therefore to keep them and convert them. But what should you do if your prospect is not ready to become a customer? You need to go through the nurturing phase.
This is one of the essential phases in marketing automation. It allows you to nurture your contact until the moment they are ready to convert.
During this stage of the customer journey, you need to keep sending personalized content, which will allow you to build a relationship of trust and closeness with your contact.
Send your communications in step with their interactions, adapt your messaging based on their behavior. Your objective, once again, is to deliver the right message at the right time, at every stage of the conversion funnel.
In this case, the objective is to gain new customers. As a SaaS software vendor, you can use different levers adapted to different behaviors of your contacts. That is the whole point of automating your different processes.
Here are four distinct situations you might encounter with your prospects:
- The first contact opens all your promotional emails, but never clicks. They are therefore not ready to become a customer
You should then send them an email with downloadable content, such as a white paper, for example.
This valuable content will allow them to learn more about your product and reassure them about becoming a customer.
- If the contact clicks but does not convert, you probably need to revise the sales pitch, or call on a salesperson to close the deal.
This way, your sales team spends time on high-value tasks, in close collaboration with the marketing team. We call this smarketing!
- The second contact registered for your latest webinar, a participatory and engaging event.
Best practice is to find out whether or not they attended, and to adapt your communication accordingly (see article 1 in the series).
- Finally, think about contacts who have downloaded documentation from your website.
You can tag these people according to the engagement generated by this resource. As a software vendor, the ultimate engagement is signing up for a free trial of your software.
The free trial as a conversion lever
If you are a SaaS software vendor, and you think this tool is relevant to your business, offer a free trial!
Thanks to a form cleverly integrated into your website, encourage your contacts to try your software with a free trial, for one week for example.
After the submission of the free trial form, you can set up several automated actions such as sending an email after registration, or sending a satisfaction survey at the end of the trial. In the automated campaign below, we send an email to the user after the start of their trial.
After that, you can see whether it was opened or not, to gauge the contact’s engagement. Then, we send a satisfaction survey after 6 days, again with the aim of engaging our contact.
Finally, at the end of their trial, we offer them a meeting with a member of our team, and plan a follow-up if they do not book an appointment.
We could also imagine sending an email with a time-limited discount, in order to create a sense of urgency for the prospect.
This campaign allows your teams to handle all leads in the same way, and to stop forgetting any of them. Your marketing and sales teams work together and on the strategy. The sales team invests its time in qualified leads, and spends less time on cold calls.
In this example, implementing the free trial engages your prospects and allows them to use your tool, so it is a facilitator of conversion!
After conversion, retention!
The objective has been reached, your prospect has become a customer !
So what is the next step? Set yourself a new objective with the famous SMART method (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound).
As you know, the SaaS software world is an ultra-competitive market, in which you therefore need to double down on best practices and tips to keep your customers.
The next step is therefore the retention phase, which we will explain in the next article of this series dedicated to SaaS, “Retaining your customers through marketing automation”.
