care and feeding of saas customers | 10 tips to drive loyalty

#saas series | jeromepineau.com

“CARE & FEEDING OF SAAS CUSTOMERS”

10 tips to drive loyalty

1.churn is bad

if you leave me now...

churn is a critical metric for SaaS

businesses.

churn measures the rate of customers who

bail out every month.

healthy SaaS businesses have low churn.

2.LTV is good

renew, renew, renew

lifetime value is the customer’s total $$

worth from the day he signs on to the day he

stops renewing.

as it happens, churn and LTV are inversely

related such that churn = 1/LTV.

healthy SaaS businesses have high LTV

3.forever yours

we’ll always have Paris…

so what makes SaaS customers loyal?

or how do you minimize churn?

or how do you maximize LTV?

or how do you succeed at SaaS?

4.consumption gap

big deep mouthfuls

customers who do not use your product

wide and deep are more likely to defect.

it means they simply don’t “get” your

product.

which means it has limited value to them.

which means either your product has limited

value, or you’re not communicating the

value hard and often enough.

or both…

5.keep talking

oh, one more thing…

customers you don’t interact with frequently

are more likely to defect.

remember the old saying: out of sight, out of

mind.

any excuse to converse with customers is a

good excuse to feed the relationship and

keep them engaged.

engaged customers are loyal customers.

6.new features

now with 25% more!

new features aren’t just important as a way

to enhance your product. they’re also an

opportunity for communication.

never waste an opportunity to inform and

enchant customers at the same time.

but don’t saturate them with trivial new

feature releases either.

7.make heroes

believe it or not, I can fly!

customers who feel like heroes at their job

from using your software will never leave.

if they succeed, you succeed.

your job is to make heroes.

8.build community

vires in numeris

can you think of any great product that

doesn’t have a rabidly loyal community

supporting it?

I didn’t think so.

design, build, and nurture it – or your

competition will.

9.learn the word ‘no’

saying ‘no’ is ok too

this one can seem counter-intuitive, right?

but saying ‘yes’ to every customer request

indiscriminately lowers quality for a

majority of customers in the long run.

so be crystal clear from the onset about

what saying ‘yes’ means for overall product

experience.

and remember, it’s not the ‘no’ itself, it’s how

you say it.

10.how’m I doin?

#embracethefeedback

survey, email, tweet, post, blog, but whatever

you do…

ask customers how you’re doing as often as

humanly possible.

but don’t ask unless you have the will and

means to adapt and adjust accordingly.

11.bonus tip!

measure, don’t assume

if you don’t instrument your backend, you

won’t have a clue what your customers are

doing, where, when, or why.

so you won’t know how they’re using your

product. or not.

and if you don’t know that on a daily basis,

you’re flying blind.

never assume. always measure.