It’s getting harder and harder for brands to understand what their customers want. The needs of the customer are constantly changing and unfortunately, this means that it is becoming harder for SaaS companies to acquire more customers. But just because it’s harder doesn’t mean it’s impossible, and SaaS companies are putting their best foot forward to get more customers through the door.
Companies can’t survive without new customers (and existing customers) continuing to believe in their product, so it’s no wonder that 89% of SaaS businesses cite acquiring new customers as their #1 priority. For SaaS companies hoping to meet that priority, it starts by having a properly documented customer acquisition strategy.
Let’s delve into customer acquisition and explain everything you need to know about getting paying customers excited about your latest SaaS product.
What is Customer Acquisition?
Customer acquisition refers to the processes and activities that bring new customers to a business. It includes the entire customer journey, from the first point of contact with a new customer, to them entering into your customer funnel, all the way to them becoming activated and making a decision to pay for your product or service.
Acquiring customers is tougher than before but that doesn’t mean it’s just an expensive process you simply need to throw more money at. No, the secret to acquiring more customers is creating an effective customer acquisition strategy that enables you to continually bring new customers to your business on autopilot.
Creating a Customer Acquisition Strategy
Choosing the most appropriate customer acquisition strategy requires every business to think outside of the box. Differentiation is the name of the game when it comes to acquiring customers as you need to find ways to make potential customers enthusiastic about your brand before they decide to buy into your business and continue to stick around.
For any SaaS brand, the aim is to keep your customers interested, not just have them sign up for a short period of time and immediately churn out. Therefore, the strategy you use to acquire your customers is quite important.
Start By Defining Your Audience
Before you can start getting customers, you need to understand who they are. Begin by conducting market research to learn more about your potential customers and to make sure you’re targeting the right group of people.
Once you know the people you want to target your market research should give you an idea about the areas where they like to congregate. Armed with that information then you can begin to market to them and hope that they show interest in your brand.
What Do You Want to Achieve?
More customers, yes, we got that part. But what else? How does your product or service help the audience you just defined?
Finding product-market fit is one of the biggest challenges in acquiring customers. Knowing the audience you want to target is a great starting point, but it doesn’t mean that they will be interested in what you have to offer them, or if what you’re offering them is exactly what they need.
Even while you’re trying to discover product-market fit, you will need customers to help you do that. Set a target of the customers your product needs, whether this is linked to revenue goals or as a clear way to verify your hypothesis. Once you know who you want to help and the targets you want to achieve, you can then pick a strategy to help you get there.
Picking a Strategy
SaaS companies rely on choosing the right strategy for getting customers to sign up for their services. A customer acquisition strategy comes down to the acquisition channels and techniques you use, so you need to pick the ones that best resonate with your audience.
Before you can start selling to your potential customers, you will need to build a relationship with them and the acquisition channels and techniques you use play a major role in whether you can build a positive relationship or if your customers turn away at the mention of your brand.
Read More: 7 Customer Acquisition Strategies To Help Build Your Brand
Customer Acquisition Techniques
Your strategy includes the channels, techniques and more you will use to acquire customers. Once you’ve defined a strategy that fits your company, then consider one or more of these techniques to get customers interested in your brand.
Content Marketing
They say that content is king, and with good reason too, since 70% of customers feel closer to a company due to content marketing. Creating, new, exciting and relevant content for your audience can get them interested in your brand and eventually turn them into customers.
Social Media Marketing
Social media is a key component for boosting awareness of your brand and for distribution content that you create. Social media offers an avenue for both one-to-many and one-to-one interactions with your audience and with the plethora of platforms available today for SaaS businesses to exploit, including LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter and more, it’s worth a try as an acquisition technique.
Email Marketing
Many people say that email is dead, but the reality is, it is very much alive. For every $1 spent on email marketing, the average ROI is $42. That doesn’t mean you should suddenly throw all of your money into this customer acquisition technique, but simply recognize that it provides another avenue for you to build relationships with your customers, keep them regularly updated about your brand.
There are also several other acquisition techniques that can help turn website visitors into sign-ups and paying customers. Once you’ve made a choice about which technique would work best for your brand then you can mix and match to see which combination fits your audience. Also, you can try to use some additional tools to help build your customer base.
Read More: 7 Tools to Acquire More Customers
Measuring Customer Acquisition
Picking your strategy and various techniques can help you to acquire customers, but how do you know if what you’re doing is effective?
To prove that your marketing and acquisition efforts are working then you need to measure a few things, namely your customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer lifetime value (CLC), monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and churn rate. Having an understanding of these customer analytics provides some insight as to whether things are working, and where you need to make changes.
Obviously for customer acquisition purposes, the most important number is the CAC. This is the total cost of acquiring a new customer and includes the money spent on marketing or attempting to generate sales. A simple formula for CAC = MC/CA or Marketing Costs/Customers Acquired.
Read More: SaaS Metrics – A Guide to Measuring and Improving what Matters
Keeping Your Newly Acquired Customers Through Customer Retention
For any SaaS startup to be successful you can’t just focus on acquiring new customers, there has to be a tactic for retaining them as well. Eventually, some customers will leave and those customers that leave or churn can have a negative impact on your business if there are too many of them compared to the customers you acquired.
So, customer retention which helps you keep the customers already with you is vitally important. Ultimately, once you create a wonderful experience for your customers once they interact with your brand then the odds of them being retained increase significantly.