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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:

 

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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:

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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:

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  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:

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  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:

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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.

Don’t you feel good about a tool that analyzes your customer data by itself, drives insights from it, works on those details in real-time, and streamlines the given strategy unswervingly? Thankful to marketing automation. It does exactly the same!

Marketing automation optimizes your communication efforts by reducing monotonous and time-consuming tasks and thereby helping you in the right utilization of time and resources. From customer procurement to loyalty marketing, it helps your brand to perform at a grand scale.

With the assistance of this mechanism, you would now be able to convey a focused message across client fragments, making coordinated connections conceivable in the advanced space. To put it plainly, marketing automation drives the client loyalty revival.

And when you make loyalty as a vital part of your strategy, you will be rewarded with high-value customers at a low cost. Check the graph below that speaks the same.

Image Source: Sales Mango

Other Benefits of Customer Loyalty Includes

  • Customers rarely purchase something different if they like a brand. It includes 55% of older millennials, 53% of younger millennials, and 51% of Gen Z. (Business2Community)
  • 80% of incomes come from 20% of a firm’s existing clients. (Fundera)
  • Loyalty pioneers develop ROI 2.5 times as quickly as their industry peers. (Harvard Business School)

The majority of the leading brands use marketing automation tools to delight the sales leads and hold them throughout their journey.

Apple is the most exceptional example of brand loyalty done right through marketing automation. The average brand loyalty of Apple is 87% across the US and Europe.

The tech giant leads the brands with the most loyal customers. It is followed by other famous names – Amazon, Lululemon, IKEA, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Starbucks. If you are interested to learn their tactics, read on to find out.

Steps to Enhance Customer Loyalty with Marketing Automation Tools

1.    Spot Active Brand Advocates

B2B and B2C brands require the support of advocates, who recommend your products and bring in referrals for your business. They will share your brand message with enthusiasm, and will always play a crucial role in its success.

Brand advocacy will help you gain new customers as well as create rewards/incentives for the loyal ones. Marketing automation enables you to track and reach these brand advocates. With social media integration, you can identify those customers who are advocating your product or service.

If you are unsure who is loyal to your brand, fret not. Utilize lead scoring dimensions to recognize the people who every now and again share, comment, or download your content.

Starbucks’ advocate marketing campaign called “Tweet-A-Coffee” allowed customers to purchase a $5 gift card for their friends through Twitter.

Image Source: Starbucks

Clients needed to Tweet the @tweetacoffee handle along with their own Twitter handle. The initial 100,000 individuals joining the program would get a $5 gift voucher.

Outcome:

  • This loyalty program generated around $180,000 in sales for Starbucks.
  • More than 27,000 brand advocates partook in this social event.
  • 34% of individuals purchased more than one gift card, and 32% of the buyingbefell on the first day itself.
  • Starbucks linked 54,000 Twitter IDs of active members to their cell phones and client identification numbers.

2.    Personalize the Experience

Marketing automation lets you personalize the customer experience across multiple campaigns, and make your audience feel special at every stage of buying. Especially by integrating CRM with the automated marketing tool, you can provide a stellar experience that’s worth remembering.

You might have spent all your time guessing the interest of your audience. However, it does no good for your business in this modernized world. Instead, you must learn their interest by tracking them across different channels, using tools like web trackers, and analyze their behavior based on clicks. Later, you can prepare content around these analysis report.

Speaking of personalization, Amazon has been doing it since 2013. I just finished reading a book on capitalism, and my pretty big hobby includes reading. So what does Amazon show me? A list of relevant books! It’s perfect.

 

]Image Source: Amazon

Amazon uses my purchase history and viewed products to recommend the related items that I would be interested in. Besides, it also uses a shipping address to customize the experience based on my current location.

According to Accenture, 91% of customers are more likely to buy from a brand that offers relevant content and recommendations.

3.    Re-engage the Inactive Customers

There are times where even a most loyal customer may abandon your brand for a tiniest of reason. In such scenarios, it is essential to gently remind them about you, or lure them with the offers to reactivate old accounts. You need to use automated tools to identify such customers and nudge them towards taking action.

For instance, if a customer has visited your website, but haven’t picked any product or abandoned the cart, you can automate an email to notify them of:

  • Limited time offer for the discarded products.
  • Remind them of ways to utilize the unused points in their account.
  • Reach out to them on special days, such as their birthdays or anniversary.

The re-engagement email by Skillshare draws attention to the new classes and features since the last subscriber engagement. They have tactfully highlighted the offer for $0.99 and hoping to push more engagement with loyal customers.

 

 

Image Source: Skillshare

4.    Analyze Customer Feedback

Seek customer feedback actively rather than waiting for their complaint on social media platforms. This method increases good-will and quickly detects at-risk accounts. Before beginning, segment your existing customer list into separate streams, then ask them how they feel about your product, service, or your relationship with them.

By asking these questions, you will learn more about their unfavorable experiences, and how to improvise it at the earliest stage. Social media automation tools help you garner the online feedback of a large number of audience in a short time. Here, you can encourage shout-outs from your followers, and make them feel how you value their voices.

One common example of how to do this is in the confirmation email from British Airways, with a visual scale for their NPS question and a link to a survey that takes 12 minutes to complete.

Image Source: British Airways

It shows how collecting the feedback at the end of the customer journey is an ideal way to try on. Here, travelers can assess their experience and share informed perspectives.

Final Thought

Marketing automation tools will let you successfully execute the customer loyalty strategies across correspondence channels. Right from segmentation to sending custom messages, or seeking feedback to sharing important material, automation tool does it all in a couple of snaps. So, without any delay, utilize this marketing armor and win your battle against competitors.