6 Best Customer Retention Practices for SaaS with Email Marketing

Today, the digital marketing industry is so advanced that the endless list of tools and methods to improve business performance can be confusing. That’s why it is essential to prioritize key tasks for each type of business. 

One such crucial aspect to consider is customer retention through email marketing, which is especially important for SaaS platforms.

Why email marketing?

The answer is simple: it has consistently proven to be the most profitable channel in terms of return on investment (ROI), which is supported by market research:

Keeping your customers engaged depends on your ability to achieve their business goals with your product. If you want to increase the likelihood of renewal, it is important to focus your efforts on ensuring that customers clearly understand how your product contributes to their business objectives. And it is email marketing that will help you convey this idea to the customer.

Several successful practices help achieve this effect. Let’s take a closer look at them:

• Know your customer

Yes, it seems like an obvious tip, as creating customer profiles before launching campaigns is a common practice, BUT the most important information for you should be not the one you created, but the one provided directly from the source. Customer research is an ongoing process that evolves with your product. Every day observe user behavior, collect feedback, and gather insights from teams that interact with customers, such as customer support. The better you understand your customers, the more effectively you can help them achieve the results they value.

• Deliver value at every stage of the customer journey

Customer expectations change over time. What starts out as a need to learn how to integrate your product into their workflows eventually turns into a desire for advanced features that deliver specific results. That’s why it is important to stay closely connected with the customer throughout their journey. By constantly checking the effectiveness of products and features and their implementation in your customer’s business, you can personalize your approach and proactively engage with them.

If you see that your customer is not using a particular feature that could benefit them, point out that feature and offer training on how to use it to the customer’s entire team. Providing unexpected value enhances loyalty and strengthens the relationship.

• Personalize

This approach cannot be overemphasized because, as we mentioned earlier, the core of SaaS means customers expect their partners to provide personalized services tailored to meet their unique goals. The best way to create such an environment is to infuse your communication with your customers’ current experiences. Personalizing your messages with up-to-date knowledge of customer progress, behavioral patterns, and industry information tells your customer that you are listening and committed to helping them grow.

• Create and celebrate joint success plans

Milestones have become a common practice in SaaS as they provide a step-by-step plan for achieving a goal and have a two-fold benefit for SaaS businesses. First, they create a sense of momentum for the customer to act and achieve. Second, they give the company a metric to measure and monitor customer progress.

Above all, this means setting clear goals for the adoption and use of your product and linking its adoption to business success. This will convince customers that they have made the right choice to work with you.

It also enables the business to track customer progress and identify when they are successfully advancing or falling behind. These milestones can be used to turn a seemingly endless customer journey into a series of goal-based actions that define the customer success process.

Even small occasions can be used to celebrate:

• Focus on the future

Customer retention is a promise of future growth. Your messaging should always reinforce the added value that comes with greater skill and adoption of your product. Once the emotions of the initial sales and onboarding phases have faded away, you should continue to communicate about future challenges, skills, and benefits.

Position your product as the cornerstone of your customer’s future success. Emphasize that there are always new features to explore and more efficient techniques to learn. Use the full potential of your product to demonstrate to your customers that your partnership is the only way to ensure their future success.

• Adapt to your customer’s business needs

Customers’ goals may change depending on their business needs. In some cases, these goals change quite quickly due to unforeseen circumstances such as economic downturns, industry shifts (legislation or legal requirements), etc. Your company, product, and customer success teams must be able to adapt to these changes thoroughly and quickly. Evaluating the impact of changes on customer business needs and adjusting your strategy accordingly is critical and time-consuming, and it may require making strategy changes in a matter of days rather than weeks or months. While you may not have all the answers upfront, it is important to be flexible and responsive. Keeping clients engaged as their business needs and goals change is a skill that sets market leaders apart.

Conclusion

With knowledge of how to retain customers throughout their journey, you are one step closer to understanding the value and opportunities of email marketing in the new reality of SaaS customer retention: crucial moments in a customer’s decision to “renew” or “leave” occur at any point in their journey. The best way to increase renewals is to work on delivering value at every interaction and communication. Our marketing analytics agency for SaaS companies has case-proven experience and extensive knowledge of customer retention techniques, including creating content writing for SaaS, and we are always ready to help you achieve new goals!