Get a free sales audit to uncover hidden revenue opportunities!

Get a free sales audit to uncover hidden revenue opportunities!

With a global pandemic transforming the way companies operate, fear of slow growth and rising churn rates are valid concerns. And if you think SaaS companies are exempt from experiencing high churn rates in this uncertain business environment, think again. Data claims that around “Two-thirds of companies have experienced churn rates of 5% or more” – with over 30% reporting an increase in churn rates over the past year. 

To put things in perspective, a Report by SaaS Capital claims that a mere “1 percent difference in churn can have a 12 percent impact on company valuation in 5 years.”

So how can companies reduce their churn rate and prevent losing even a single customer? You need to start at the very beginning. We have three words for you: Seamless Customer Onboarding.

Top-4 Ways in which Companies can Lower Churn Rates

  1. Make your Customers your Priority with Live Chat

If experience is anything to go by, the secret recipe to establishing a successful business requires companies to convert new sign-ups into active users on an ongoing basis. Undoubtedly, one of the best ways to achieve this is by putting your customers at the core of your offering by using live chat services such as the one Acquire offers:

 

Image Source

First off, you’ll notice that the moment one lands on their website, the visitor is greeted by a live chat window that actively asks the user if they have any queries. There are two big learnings here:

One, it offers customers the chance to connect with the brand instantly, should they have any queries. Conversely, this platform also allows companies to educate customers about new offerings, perceived value for users, and deals that may be of interest to the latter. Let’s take another look at Acquire’s live chat tool which asks the user if they have any queries, without being annoying:

Image Source

Two, using a round-the-clock platform like live chat encourages customers to air their concerns over recurring plans they may have subscribed to. As long as the queries get addressed in real-time and as effectively as possible, you can rest assured that your customers are not going anywhere. All thanks to greater convenience and a friction-free experience, courtesy live chat.

  1. Enhance your Customer Experience with Co-Browsing

“9 in 10 customers abandon a business because of poor a experience.” – Oracle Study

Apart from offering true value to your customers, there’s another element in the mix that can lower your churn rates: building quality-driven relationships with users. Say a first-time user is having trouble navigating your website. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could be their eyes, hands, and ears, guiding them visually in the right direction?

That’s literally how the co-browsing feature works. It simple words, you can troubleshoot collaboratively on-screen, anywhere. Plus, by communicating with your users on a more personalized and interactive level, you can start developing real bonds with them so that they turn into loyal customers- and even voluntary brand advocates! Here’s a snapshot of what co-browse feature looks like:

Image Source

  1. Focus on Rolling Out Research-Led Content & Test Key Elements in your Brand Mix

Sure, images and graphics have a big role to play in garnering human attention, but where the image is queen, content is king. Whether it’s an in-app experience or your website, your customers need to be greeted and treated right.

Historically, customers have been known to stop renewing subscriptions because they start viewing their subscriptions as pointless. In such a scenario, it becomes imperative to gather insight into what is driving customer behavior and what their primary pain-points look like. Here are a few ways in which you can get a better pulse of your customer’s likes, dislikes, and problem areas:

      • Roll out surveys and polls to understand what customers need or what’s lacking in your offering so that adjustments can be made based on actionable and authentic feedback.
      • Work on creating a brand personality: It could be more humane, witty, smart, funny, whatever fits with your brand’s overall character and tone. The idea is to create a compelling story with slice-of-life segments so that it resonates with users, and they connect better with your brand.
      • A/B Test different aspects of your communication/platform/offering to see what’s working and what’s not. Do customers prefer live demos over email support? How overwhelming is your onboarding process? Do you have too many notifications, freebies, and webinars on offer that will ultimately drive your customer away? These are just some of the questions you can ask yourself at this point.
      • Integrate your sales management initiatives effortlessly into your existing CRM with Teamgate’s 360-degree inbound sales CRM software. Using this capability, you can get your hands on critical insights, reports, and forecasts required to keep your pipeline flowing smoothly. Additionally, generating leads and closing deals becomes a smooth process. Here’s a snapshot of the various advantages the software provides:

Image Source

  1. Create a Holistic Onboarding Experience for Enhanced User Satisfaction

Onboarding isn’t about sharing everything. It’s about taking the user through the first critical steps to success.

Think of onboarding as a first (blind) date between you and your customer. It can either become a memorable experience or a horrifying one depending on your customer experiences the brand.

Whether you call it the stepping stone to success or the foundation upon which a satisfactory user experience lies, ensuring a seamless, interactive, and engaging onboarding process is key.  How can you achieve this? Follow these simple steps:

  • Streamline your onboarding process: You could pepper your website, social media platforms, etc. with useful and informative “How-to” videos and tutorials so that customers can immediately understand the core benefits they can leverage from your product/service. As mentioned earlier, Monday.com’s onboarding process is quick and effortless. Once the user signs up, they get an educative email explaining various features of the offering:

The Email Clearly Spells Out the Product’s Various Benefits – Image Source

  • Highlight your offering’s value upfront, set the right expectations, and integrate convenient Call-To-Action opportunities by using proactive tools such as live chat. Let’s take a look at how JustGoodFoodBazaar’s integrates all the three elements in a collaborative manner, ensuring the new user feels comfortable using the new platform:

Image Source

Plus, you can also establish a strategic email onboarding campaign like Monday.com does (as shown below) so that the users feel informed, inspired, and motivated to try the product or even renew their subscription:

 

Closing Thoughts

“The total size of the public SaaS market in 2020 is projected to reach $157 billion.” – 99Firms

All things said and done, getting your customers to simply “Sign Up” for your products/services isn’t going to make the cut for creating a loyal and long-term customer base. The trick lies in demonstrating when and how your customers will achieve their first big-win and onboarding users in an effective, effortless, and agile manner. If you achieve both, retaining customers will be a cake-walk. Try these handy tips and optimize your churn journey, the true SaaS way.

Today, customer experience defines a brand. Quality, variety, and discounts are important. Yet, they are minor when it comes to customers’ feelings.

According to MarTechToday, by 2020 customer experience will be the biggest factor in brand differentiation. It will leave behind both price and product. So, customer experience improvement remains the top priority for digital marketers. Brands who don’t invest more in it won’t be able to compete. 

To deliver outstanding customer experience, it’s crucial to refocus on digital personalization. New technologies have changed a lot in the sales process, except customers. They are still ordinary people who want to be understood and cared about more than anything else. And understanding and care is what brands now need to offer.

Understanding the role of a personalized digital customer experience in sales

The idea of a personalized digital customer experience wasn’t invented yesterday. It’s been part of marketers’ daily lives for a decade. Marketers have learned to send personalized emails, show different landing pages based on location, add chatbots to websites, etc. Those first steps worked for a bit, but not anymore. Not the way marketers want.

Customers are demanding more. They want brands to figure out what they need in less time than it would take them to say it. In fact, customers expect a brand to connect with them as fast as they connect with a brand’s website. To be exact, about 71% of customers feel frustrated when they get impersonal service, according to a 2017 report from Segment. It’s a big issue. Yet, that means even more room for improvement.

Implementing a personalized digital customer experience isn’t cheap. But there is a fact that makes that bitter pill easier to swallow. After a personalized experience with a brand, 44% of customers say they will likely buy from that brand again, according to the same report from Segment.

Yes, a personalized customer experience turns almost half of new clients into loyal ones. As a reminder, loyal customers are responsible for generating about half of business revenue of an average company.

So, how can a brand increase sales by implementing a personalized digital customer experience? Here are five big developments in tech worth looking into.

 1. Artificial intelligence

Make customers feel more confident about their choices.

Robots will take over the world. No panic though. There is a simple rule: if you can’t fight them, join them. To start, add artificial intelligence to your marketing routine.

Let’s start with a simple example: It’s been scientifically proven that when someone calls your name, it impacts your behavior significantly. Imagine you’re in the center of a noisy crowd at a rock concert. Suddenly you hear your name. Wouldn’t you turn to the source of the sound? I bet it would grab your attention.

Now imagine you don’t just hear your name but feel chosen and valued. Imagine that someone learned your preferences, likes and dislikes, and principles. They’ve taken care of you and respected your individuality.

An excellent example of a company taking such an approach is a startup called Thread. This young fashion company decided to look at shopping from a different angle. They offer their customers clothes chosen by artificial intelligence.

To get stylish advice customers complete a few forms and answer some simple questions. After that, the “Thimble” algorithm does all the work. Thread emphasizes it takes only three minutes and you’re free from making choices forever. Great deal, isn’t it?

 

 

Customers get personalized recommendations they can approve or disapprove every time they visit. Thread’s stylists use this data and the Thimble AI to find styles that match a customer’s preferences and tailor their offers.

At the moment, the company has one million users. Sales are growing by almost 80% a year. And a quarter of the customers shop exclusively at Thread, says Alex Alcott, Thread’s head of brand.

2. Augmented reality

Give offline shopping fans a recent to shop online.

In 2019 you don’t need to go to a regular store to try on hiking boots. You can do it online while sitting cozily on your couch. Augmented reality (AR) improves customer experience by letting them see how shoes look on them or how a new cozy couch looks in their apartment.

Lacoste is already using it. Its app makes it possible to try clothes online and roughly see the look and fit.

AR is an inevitable next stage of retail development. Today, over 70% of customers would rather shop at a store using AR than one without it. And 40% agree to pay more for an item if they can experience it through AR.

In the US alone, the number of AR users will jump to almost 70 million this year, according to an eMarketer report from earlier this year. The same report predicts that number will be around 85 million in 2021.

Any retail operation selling online can’t afford to miss out.

3. Location-based marketing

Make the best offer at the right time.

The main goal of this kind of digital marketing is to show the customer a highly relevant message at the most appropriate time.

Whole Foods proved this method works. In fact, the geo-conquest strategy helps them to increase their conversion rate to 4.69% – three times the national average.

Starbucks and Macy’s use their apps to show the best offers to customers when they are nearby store locations.

When they are getting closer to a store, they can make an order online in advance. They don’t have to wait in lines and can quickly buy exactly what they want with a flick of the wrist.

This feature saves customers time and increases their loyalty. It shows the brand is attentive to its customers’ needs and values their time – a complete win-win for the brand and the

4. Personalized content

Choose relevant messaging and an individual approach over general marketing pitches.

“To make customers loyal, we need to identify their preferences and make the best offer. However, the best offer is not always a product we sell. It also could be a message that resonates with a certain person. Customers want to feel cared about, otherwise, they won’t stay loyal”, says Adam Simon, Head of Customer Service at LegitWritingServices.

It’s crucial to know your customer and be able to make them feel valued and remembered. My Admissions Essay, for instance, always addresses its clients by name and tries to collect some personal information about its customers (it can be their cat’s or child’s name, their birth date, etc.). These little touches can, when used in a smart way, can have a big impact.

There are three levels of personalization that the company uses:

      1. Sociodemographic (age, sex, family status, profession, education level)
      2. Behavioral (email ads based on what a certain customer ordered before)
      3. Situational (ads and promos that are linked to holidays and special events)

Sometimes it takes very little personalization to achieve better results. MyAdmissionEssay has recently managed to significantly increase the open rate and CTR of their referral program promotion emails. It was decided to add a little bit of personalization to the subject line of the email, as well as to the content of the email itself. As a result, the open rate increased by 28% and CTR by 17%, bringing more repeat orders and more profit. Take a look at how these emails differ.

 

IBM shares the secret of efficient content strategy. Instead of sending cold emails, they invented amazing personalized content. It is delivered through different channels and doesn’t seem generic.

Let’s say, a customer viewed a sleeping bag in an online shop a few times. But they never made a purchase. In this case, they receive a personally crafted message about the upcoming hike season. Such email or SMS doesn’t trigger negative emotions like when you receive blatant spam. On the contrary, it sounds like a thoughtful reminder to get ready for the season. And, obviously, to come back for the sleeping bag. 

Yet, content isn’t just verbal information. For example, Netflix plays with shows posters. Different customers see different posters for the same shows. It depends on their preferences and searches history. 

And how does Amazon drive 35% of its sales? They never miss a chance to offer customers a supplementary product. A simple recommendation feature brings them a third of the income.

At first, a personalized digital customer experience may sound like an oxymoron. People have never been so far away from each other. Sure. And that’s why they so desperately lack a personal approach. And surprisingly, the world of technology can give it to them. And even level it up. 

Now, to stand out from the mass of product and service providers and increase sales businesses have the only option. Listen. They should listen to their customers carefully. Nothing changed, after all. People still want to be heard. But this time we have modern technology that makes a process more challenging, yet, even more predictable.

Big companies and small startups already proved that personalized digital customer experience rules. So, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and crafted content are going to become digital marketers’ satellites for at least the next few years.

You want loyal clients and higher revenue. Your customers want a personalized customer experience. Connect the dots and do what’s needed.