Keeping an old customer is 5 to 25 times cheaper than acquiring a new customer, and that’s an important fact to keep in mind.
But it’s not just about money.
Keeping your customer coming back for more is faster, it helps you position yourself as an authority in your market, and above all:
It breeds brand ambassadors.
Need I say more?
Cost efficient, time efficient and it increases your word by mouth promotion efforts.
Retaining old customers is a gold mine.
So let’s see how to keep your customers coming back for more.
Churn (or rate of attrition) is the rate at which customers stop doing business with you. For SaaS companies, it’s usually expressed as the percentage of subscribers who discontinue their subscription in a given time period.
So here’s the most basic tactic to keep your customers coming back for more - don’t let them leave.
Yeah, easier said than done.
For eCommerce sites it’s easy. Just round up all the customers that haven’t returned in the past year and a half, send them a personalized message and see the numbers rolling in.
For a SaaS business, you may need to think a bit out of the box.
For example, you could track usage over time of your tool.
Think about how much mileage users can get out of it - for example, track the average session duration, and contact users that have consistently been under that average session time for the past 6-12 months.
Don’t just ask them to stick around.
Think of a special offer you can send them to prevent them from leaving, like a 10% discount for a renewed subscription, or a private session to showcase a new tool.
Even better yet - don’t guess what your current customers want.
Take the “at risk of churn” contacts you have and send them a feedback form to figure out what they want from your platform.
Just try not to make it a long form.
If they’re at risk of leaving your business for someone else, chances are they don’t want to invest too much time in a feedback form.
Lastly, try to be innovative.
Think about your business, your clients and what makes people choose you in the first place. Keep track of your strong points and double down on them.
It’s basically impossible to completely eliminate churn.
But you can make it less of a problem.
And once you’re done with that...
This is the next step to keep your customers coming back for more.
People don’t just buy products.
They buy the experience you serve them.
And yeah, you probably know by now that you should be nice to them and try to serve them at every step.
But how do you do that?
One of the biggest trends in eCommerce for the coming years is personalization.
Seeing not just who visits your site…
But specifically what product variation they want, and then helping them enjoy it with a discount.
Creating feeds of the things they’d like.
Installing bots that help them navigate your website at their own pace.
And of course, setting up a content marketing platform that helps them understand your company and convinces them to buy more.
If you’re reaching out to customers that left you for a different business, don’t just be empathic. Personalize your message to their needs and desires.
And that’s not just a tactic.
It’s a principle your SaaS business should embody if it wants to stay competitive in the long run. It’s just a short-term side effect that you also have customers coming back for more.
And this translates to all means of promotion.
For example, if you promote through affiliate marketing, make sure you choose the best affiliate programs, and do your due diligence to work with websites that will embody the same principles.
Reducing churn is also a numbers game.
Whether you have 50 employees and 5 offices, or you’re just getting started with a 5 strong team, your resources are limited.
You can’t focus on everybody, so you’ll need to prioritize the attention and service you provide.
And the best way to do that is to focus on your bottom line: the clients that bring in the most amount of money for your company.
Make a list of them and increase the amount of focus your representatives put on them.
Moreover, reward their loyalty.
Discount future purchases, add a bonus to their subscription, invite them to a beta…
The specifics will differ based on your niche.
But the underlying task stays the same - pick your top payers and offer excellent service to them.
If we’re realistic, most of your clients won’t jump ship just because a competitor has a sale going over the weekend.
As long as you stay true to your offer and work to improve your SaaS, a lot of your customer base will be satisfied.
That’s as long as you don’t have glaring issues that go unsolved.
Your churn can increase fast if you don’t solve all issues that arise as soon as humanly possible.
We’re not saying you should have an intervention team ready at all times, although that may help if you can afford it.
Just make sure you stay on top of problems and get hands-on when something threatens the satisfaction of your customers.
Take a SaaS like Zapier - the amount of things you can automate with it is huge.
So it only makes sense that they have an equivalent number of on-boarding documents and tutorials.
You should do the same.
Draft all of your software’s functionalities and create an on-boarding program or document that helps customers understand everything they can use your SaaS for.
If you have the resources, this can also take the form of demo videos for all of your features.
The benefits of good on-boarding are twofold.
First, your customers can make the most of your tool, maximizing their ROI and keeping them coming back for more.
Second, the time spent going through an on-boarding program is going to make them more invested in their collaboration with you, decreasing your churn overall.
Technology is moving very fast in today’s world.
And if you stay idle, you will fall behind your competitors and churn will only grow over time.
One good example of that is Jaaxy, a very good keyword research tool… in 2015.
Right now, because they haven’t spent the time updating their platform, new tools like Ubersuggest or the KWFinder are capitalizing on its churn.
You want to avoid that by staying on top of market trends and adapting to new technologies.
However, there’s a catch.
Don’t just integrate with the newest API because you like what it does.
Only rely on customer feedback (especially the feedback of lost customers) to decide what you should add to the platform next.
Besides what your customers experience in terms of customer service, you should always strive to increase the user experience of anyone on your platform.
UX is a big part of why clients choose you or a competitor.
A software is only as good as how well it can be navigated and used for the real needs of your customers.
So how do you improve User Experience?
The last thing you want is your customers feeling lost on your platform.
Sure, on-boarding will help decrease that.
But if you want to make sure users have a good experience on your SaaS, establish systems of support across all your dashboards.
A chat bot is great at taking care of that.
But it’s not enough.
Another thing you can do is use intuitive hints next to more complex features, or next to features that are part of a new update.
This way, your customers will be able to make the best out of your software, making it less likely they’ll jump ship.
Optimizing your user flow is not just an exercise in the development stage.
After a product is launched, aim to improve the user flow as much as possible. If you can cut a use case, do it.
For example, keyword research tools often have a SERP checker for a query you’re researching.
But KWFinder took it a step further and started displaying that screen in the main dashboard of their tool as well.
This makes it easier for your users to work, in turn keeping them happy and coming back for more.
No matter how hard people focus to be productive, a little fun and excitement can always help.
So, do try to make use of that in your UX.
Employ messaging and visuals that help your users feel like they’re achieving something in their work.
That while you can’t make everyone stay, there’s always a way to improve your bottom line.
And it mostly has to do with data.
Every little tip we gave you today is powered up when you use information about your users to figure out the implementation details.
So default to that.
And let us know if we helped you learn how to keep your customers coming back for more.