Grow your software business
Grow your software business
1. Find your baseline by calculating the number of customers you lost over a standard customer return period.
If you offer a SaaS product, use monthly customer churn, or percentage of customers lost each month. Your target churn rate should be 2%. For something like ecommerce, you’ll be looking at engagement. More specifically, what does engagement look like X days after the initial purchase? How often are your customers utilizing your product, and are they generally forming habits around it? Calculate the length of your product’s average usefulness and determine when you’d like your customer to return. If you haven’t reached the point where around 40% of your customers are saying they couldn’t live without your company, shift your focus to achieve product and market fit. Without it, growth will always feel forced for you and your customers.
2. Segment your customer data to determine who your best customers are and how to fulfill their needs better.
KISS metrics segment their data to find their customer’s company size, industry, business model. They use their existing data to determine which kinds of customers are really the best fit for their company. Use information like churn rate and lifetime value to pinpoint your valuable customers.
3. Increase your existing rates or repackage your offer to make it available to a different segment of the market.
BufferApp opened Buffer For Business where plans range from $50-250/month, in addition to their original free & $10/month plans. Buffer reports that Buffer For Business was responsible for 24% of December’s revenue – or $56,208 in revenue.
4. Improve engagement with your software by sending custom notification emails to a user about their activity.
According to Harvard Business School, increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25-95%. For example, Tumblr emails you to notify you of activity on your profile. Weekdone makes us feel like slackers every Friday. Solidifying repeat engagement and repeat purchase processes are how businesses can invest in growth and minimize the associated risks.
5. Build a content team to create high quality and valuable blog posts that get people to take action.
Select writers who have a good writing history and have existing knowledge in the industry. Outsource tasks if your team does not have the expertise in a specific topic.
6. Capture email addresses and send out informative and useful articles with offers of free resources like ebooks.
Add each new recipient into a segment based on the blog post they are reading and ebooks they opted to receive. Use these segments to send targeted free offers.