SaaS marketing is simply the method in which you market Software as a Service. Basically, you hire the use of an application for your business so your customers can use these cloud-based apps over the Internet. Now there are several targeted marketing strategies you can use to increase your conversion rates.
You already know that great marketing is when more people know about you today than yesterday. That’s all that matters. If more people know about you then they’re going to take action and enter into customer conversations. These communications with your target audience finally leads to your potential customer base. So you don’t want to lose out on them. If you invest your time and money on this section of people, it’ll make closing deals a lot easier.
If you’re a SaaS company, you can come up with novel ways to connect with your customers. This will become an important strategy if you want to expand your business. So if that’s the basic gist, how do you do it? For SaaS marketing, investing in customer education is an essential strategy. Now let’s get into customer education.
What Is Customer Education?
Simply put, it’s the secret to scale in customer success. Customer Education is the process in which businesses provide their consumers with the necessary information, resources and tools to become informed buyers. It’s a little more than product education.
It’s how firms and organizations improve the skills and abilities of customers to make them better buyers. For a long time, businesses have kept customers in the dark as if keeping them at an arm’s-length give them some advantage within the market. But research shows that that’s actually not ideal. In fact, businesses should be bringing customers into the kitchen and educate them on how they cook the product. When you involve customers in your journey as much as possible, it ignites interactions with the brand. It establishes trust in the brand. Rather than leaving your customer unaware if you’re investing in educating them with the knowledge of the market, it creates long-term relationships between the brand and the customer. Both these are essential if you’re here to make your brand big.
There are a lot of techniques you can use to invest in customer education. You can invest in online platforms to create blog posts, podcasts, and tutorials or set up meetings with company managers or even present case studies to them.
SaaS Marketing: Use Customer Education To Improve SaaS Metrics
If you’re into SaaS marketing, customer education can improve your metrics and change your business game altogether. To get into how you can actually turn your customer conversations into successful SaaS metrics, you need to get a few things in order.
So before the metrics become important, you need to find your product-market fit. Say if you’re looking for oil, you can’t go about drilling everywhere. Firstly, you’ll need to find an oil well with a lot of oil in it before you get concerned about the measurements and metrics.
Then begins your product-onboarding process. Unfortunately, many SaaS companies are yet to have a clear product-onboarding process. If you have this set, you can begin to educate your customers every step of the way. With effective strategies, you can make a lot happen if you keep your customer engaged and up-to-date with all the stages of the onboarding process. You can help with customer retention and acquisition, increase the monthly recurring revenue (MRP) or reduce the churn rate. This sounds interesting, but how do you do it? We will get into that in a while.
All You Need To Know About ‘Conversion Rate’
Now, one of the key metrics to know about your business is your conversion rate. The conversion rate tracks the number of people who’re coming to your website and determines how many of them turn into demo leads. In this kind, if your conversion rate (that is, the number of people visiting your website and turning into demo customers) is around 10% you’re doing well. Then if you determine what percentage of them is turning into paying customers, you’ll figure out that your SaaS marketing is doing better using customer education strategies.
The way you calculate your conversion rate is by dividing the number of paying customers by the number of leads. For example, if you have a 1000 leads and 100 customers, your conversion rate is 10%. The conversion process is almost like a funnel. On the broader top, you have people who check out your website/ educational content, then you have people who turn into leads and finally those people who turn into paying customers.
Correlation Between Customer Education And Conversion Rates
Now what do you do to increase your conversion rates?
Firstly, You familiarize your target audience with your SaaS product. You can use customer acquisition management techniques to reach out to various people by using this strategy of customer education. While you’re connecting with your potential customer base, remember a few details. Be specific, polarizing and consistent. Your content should be specific, you should be able to take a stand and be consistent in revealing content in your website. Also remember to talk about what makes your product worthy. By this, I don’t mean talk about the specifications of your product. Anyone can read that off the Internet. But if you’re going for higher SaaS metrics, you must be able to identify what will sell your product.
After including these in your SaaS marketing, you can inspire people to opt into your mail list. There’s a better way you can do this as well. Try to include free products or other intriguing educational content in your mail list. This way, you’ll have more people signing up for the deal.
You can also increase your conversion rate by educating customers on the entire journey of the onboarding process. This will keep them engaged throughout. Also, this is an effective strategy if you’re looking to bond with your customers and make them long-term and loyal buyers. The process is rigorous but with the correct amount of time and content, you’ll be sorting things out for the future.
Comparison studies conducted by many businesses show that their conversion rates have increased around 4-5 times after creating online education academies for their service. This means that there is a direct correlation between customer education and purchase intent. In simple words, people who visit your customer educational platform are more likely to turn into confirmed buyers in the future.
Finally, I can’t stress this enough but to build a relationship of trust and loyalty, it’s imperative to stay actively engaged.
The above were only a few ways in which investing in customer education can increase your conversion rates. Below are some other points in which customer education can benefit you. You might want to check out as well.
- It’s vastly scalable.
- Strengthens brand name and increases brand awareness.
- Provides a platform to display your product in a more appealing way.
- Customer education can lower support requests.
- You can train your staff in the future using these contents.
Are you ready to use Customer Education as your SaaS marketing? If yes, we have made a step-by-step list on how to go about it for you.
Follow This Step-By-Step Process To Use Customer Education
Before we get into this, bear in mind that each journey is unique. Different SaaS companies build Customer education platforms for varying reasons and so the journey is bound to be different. The preset goal determines your journey so it’s imperative to decide which goal you wish to achieve. We’ll begin from right here in the following section.
Step 1: Set Your Goals
As stated earlier, customer education can do a lot for SaaS marketing. Starting from reducing churn to increasing leads and cultivating them to gain long-term customers, you can use customer education to earn successful SaaS metrics. However, to pin your success you have to start with a solid base. What’s your base? It’s the aim that you set. You need to determine your target. Now how do you decide this goal?
For customer education to do the trick you need to find out what’s lacking in your current strategy. What is the thing that you want to change the most in your business? How do you make this change happen? Start by reading into your current marketing strategy. After that, try to think whether you need more leads or support tickets or increase product sales.
The basic goal is the same. But once you know where you lack, you can start working on those gaps and meet those requirements with the help of customer education. So determining your overall growth goal is the first step.
To make it easier for you, go through the flowchart below.
Learning Goal: Customers get to know about the full potential of the service or product.
Learning Objective: Customers get familiar with the various functions of the product and apply them accordingly.
Action: For SaaS marketing, you can create educational programs set on three levels ranging from beginner to advanced. You can even set graded assessments to make them more engaging for customers.
Once you have these straightened out, you can hop on to the next step.
Step 2: Plan The Content
Before you create content for customer education, you have to be ready with your content. So start planning! You can make an outline to demarcate the learning goals. Gradually you can decide on the type of content that’ll help you reach that goal. It’s important to remember that a lot depends on how you curate your content. If you have a set goal in mind and you change your track and start developing content that’ll bring different results, this strategy will not do you any good. Also, this is the phase where you get to be innovative and bring new ideas in the market to attract more customers.
The steps to plan the content effectively are:
Write An Outline: This is your starting point. You take your subject and start developing ideas on that. This is where you brainstorm and come up with novel ideas to work with.
Tip: When you’re dealing with customers, we recommend you to approach easy learning techniques. The more you make the content digestible, the more people you’ll reach.
Decide On The Type Of Content: Once you have a set topic. You need to decide what type of content. By this I mean whether you want to go for blog posts, video tutorials, Webinars, e-books, podcasts, audiobooks or case studies.
Always opt for the one which has greater engagement with the customer. You need to make sure that wherever you put your content, it successfully leaves a mark on the customers.
Get Organized And Start Creating Content: Once you’ve decided what medium you want to use to post your customer education and product training content, you have to organize yourself. If you decide on videos, you may invest in a microphone, a camera or a software that’ll make professional videos for you. Find out what you need and get going.
Reuse Content Where Possible: It’s not that you have to work on only one of the above-mentioned platforms. Use and reuse your content material to increase their visibility and reach. If you’ve already used your material on a particular topic in your video tutorial, you can also put a blog post about it or write more about it. The best thing is to get all your content in one place and work on them. Once a content is out there, it doesn’t mean it’s dead. You have to keep it alive by constantly updating it or referring to that content in other videos or case studies and so on. The basic point is to get through to people as best you can. So, always keep it coming.
Step 3: Choose The Right Delivery Method
If you’ve reached this step, then you already have amazing educational content. Now you don’t want it to go to waste. If you have the content ready at hand, you have to make the best possible use with it. This factor involves where you’re going to deliver your content material.
To simplify the process, find out where your target audience is at. By that I mean, which platform they are using the most. If you want your SaaS product to be effectively visible, there’s nothing better than doing research on which is the preferred platform for your audience. Then you can invest in those mediums and make an impact effectively.
Some of the methods are listed below. You can choose which one floats your boat.
Blog Posts: This medium is very popular and is becoming more popular by the day. A series of blog posts for your customer to go through can do the trick. The main criteria is that you have to be consistent and post regularly so that there’s a plethora of information a customer can dig into any type he likes. You can write articles, or case studies or features based on your SaaS product and post it on your blog as a SaaS marketing strategy.
Video/YouTube: YouTube is not about music albums or for amateur filmmakers posting their short films or documentaries any more. It has evolved. Currently, the how-to videos and tutorial videos are the biggest go-to places for YouTube viewers. It already has an established section of people dedicated to products and marketing. So you can target this active and engaging section to showcase your SaaS product or customer educational videos. You have the added benefit of using the visual cue to design your videos in an alluring way to increase your conversion rates.
Visuals/Infographics: Infographics is a new and attractive way to reach out to your customers. Moreover, you’re making customer educational videos, so what’s better than using this uber-cool strategy? With infographics, you can explain difficult or complex concepts easily. It uses graphics or animation to simplify concepts for the viewer. Now if you have a relatively complex SaaS product to market or teach then you can use this form to represent information in a more palatable form. This form will also come handy if you have statistical data to show to your customers.
Email: This is an established form used for SaaS marketing. It may not sound as trendy as the others. But this is a very consistent strategy. You can either mail the sequence of the onboarding process to your customer. This will keep them in the loop and give them all the necessary information regarding the product. There’s also another form of mailing called ‘Trigger Mailing’. For example, this way you send an email regarding the next step, immediately after the customer has completed one action.
In-app Messages: This is a more personalized educational space for the customer. In-app messages direct people towards educational content about your SaaS product. These messages redirect you to either a support page or an educational blog post or a video tutorial of your product. These messages have an additional benefit. They also increase your brand’s awareness when they pop up to redirect you to other educational content.
Chatbots: Chatbots are an effective addition to your SaaS marketing strategy. With the boom of AI (Artificial Intelligence), it strives to enhance user-brand interaction. Nowadays, there are live website chats which work on a 24*7 basis. These bots bridge the gap between your business and customer. These live chats can help strengthen relationships with customers and market your SaaS product more effectively.
One-on-one Training: This form is a great way to make your customer feel valued and special. This is a more traditional approach. Nonetheless, it’s quite effective. These can be training videos about your product or a feature release etc. This form has a personal touch to it. It requires more attention and effort from the company but with the correct techniques, one-on-one video calls or insightful training videos can result in long-term customers.
Course Platform/LMS: This is the last one. But this is an effective delivery method. An LMS is a learning management system that organizes all your educational content and material on product training and helps you in the entire process. It is like your online marketing buddy. It has other benefits which can make your work easier. it can provide thorough analysis and reporting on your onboarding process so you can pace yourself accordingly.
Examples Of Companies Using Customer Education As A SaaS Marketing Strategy
Most SaaS organizations have adopted customer education as a major part of their SaaS marketing strategy. The customer’s experience is really valuable in the marketing field. Many companies have started caring about giving their customers the best educational material. Branding and making product training videos or making video tutorials to create brand awareness is now the best way to reach your target audience, create your potential customer base and turn them into paying customers.
The list of SaaS companies using customer education is a long one. But here, we’ve listed out some for you:
- AWS Training (Amazon)
- Softomotive Academy
- HubSpot Academy
- Ahrefs Academy
- Aproplan Academy
- Stories On Board Academy
- Intercom Academy
All these platforms have something special to offer. Starting from training certificates to diplomas or free products or alluring tutorials, they are going big because of customer education.
If you want to get into SaaS marketing, check this out to learn all about customer education and increase your conversion rate effectively.
