By Adam Robinson, Cofounder/CEO, Robly Email Marketing
Even if you don’t run a SaaS business, in most cases, repeat customers are probably a very important part of your business.
If you run a SaaS business, you’ve probably seen this chart 1,000 times on all of the SaaS entrepreneur blogs.
Summary: If you want to grow faster, it’s more important to make people want to keep buying from you than to find new people to buy. Here are a few tips we use to make sure people stick around.
The Re-engagement Auto-Email – In the software as a service business, churn is a lagging metric. First people stop using your service, then they churn. At Robly, we can tell that someone is about to churn two ways – if they haven’t logged in to www.robly.com in over 45 days, or they haven’t sent a campaign in over 2 months.
We send a personalized, automated email that asks our users if we can sit down with them for 15 minutes to brainstorm a campaign, and tell them about a new feature or two that we’ve developed over the past month.
Is there a way for you to notice when your customers are going idol? Can you reach out to them to engage them in a personal way with something that will be genuinely interesting to them? Perhaps with a coupon, or a gift card?
The Re-engagement Phone Call – At Robly, we love the phone … If our emails don’t bring the user back in the system, they are added to a call list 15 days later. One of our account execs tries to lure them back in with the same consultation and feature bait that was in the email. People love hearing from us, and we can typically convince them to jump back in and send an email campaign.
The Email Newsletter – Sending out fresh, relevant content related to your product and space to all of your customers will build mindshare with your customer base, and if seen by a waning customer, might remind them that they actually need what you have to offer even though it’s slipped their mind of late.
The Holiday (or otherwise) Gift – Who doesn’t love receiving something from a vendor? There’s no data on exactly how well this works, but based on the number of gifts we get from our vendors over the holiday season, it’s working. Try giving random account credit to all your customers on your company’s birthday … People love that kind of thing.
Loyalty Programs – We don’t do anything like this for our business, but frequent flyer miles, Amex points, hotel points, coffee and sandwich cards … Time-tested way to make sure people stick with you.
Go the Extra Mile With Customer Service – Marriott did a study where they found that a dissatisfied customer that had her issue corrected before the end of their stay was actually more likely to return than a customer who had no issues at all. Use slip ups to build a relationship with your customers.
At Robly, we are laser-focused on retention, and you should be too. A customer in the hand is better than two customers in the bush … or however that saying goes.
Adam Robinson is cofounder and CEO of Robly (Switch to Robly – Five Minutes Will Save You 50% on Email Marketing). Follow him at @Adam_L_Robinson.
