Customer retention is one of the pillars of a SAAS company’s revenue. While a lot of time and effort is spent by companies on customer acquisition, the real effort lies in retaining a SaaS customer.

A report claims that,

Increasing retention by 5%, profits can be boosted by as much as 95% 😲

The way to boost customer retention, however, is not very straightforward. Boosting retention requires heavy customer obsession. Here are some strategies to ensure customer success that is heavily correlated to customer retention.

Capture the goal of the user before they start using the product.

A great SAAS product has a wide use-case since users love an all-in-one solution. However, it’s your job to ensure you capture

• Which features they can’t live without 😻, and
• Which features are nice to have 🤙

This is critical because if this information is not captured during onboarding, ensuring customer success is sincerely a shot in the dark.

Group customers by a primary goal.

Although your software might be capable of performing several functions, define a primary goal for the customer.

For example,

if you ran Twitter 🐦- your customers would be grouped on the number of tweets they’ve posted/engaged on per week.

Youtube would measure customer success by grouping users based on hours spent per week.

We’ll spend the rest of this tutorial with the assumption that you’re the chief customer success officer of Twitter.

Identify areas of knowledge-gaps

Even though we assumed that you are running Twitter, you must understand Twitter is a product that has been in existence for the past 10 years.

Your SaaS, on the other hand, might take some more time to create an extremely simple experience to create a zero-knowledge-gap experience.

The best example of this would be Whatsapp and how they can capture more than 50% of people over the age of 65.

In this case, target the users who have posted 0 tweets the past week and send them a knowledge-gap campaign to let them know how to post a tweet.

Let’s decode the above message,

1. It explains the value proposition on the subject line. (“reach-number”)
2. It stresses the fact that it’s easy to complete. (“It’s very easy to tweet”)
3. It creates a sense of urgency (“ expires in 24 hours “)
4. Use simple language (“blue button”)

Identify value-gaps

Now that we have incentivized the users who potentially have a knowledge gap, let’s give attention to people who are tweeting but aren’t fitting your goal yet.

There are a lot of questions to answer here before designing the campaign,

• Is it plainly because of a lack of time?
• Are they not able to get the value they aimed for?

Let’s decode the message.

1. Appreciate them for their efforts (“Killing it 🎇”)
2. Make it seem like a fun game (“Accept challenge”)
3. Show them what value is possible — this is advertising 101.

Turn the super-customers into promoters

These are people who fit your ideal customer profile and churn here is crucial. If you’re able to somehow churn people in the ICP segment, you should make it up at any cost.

However, assuming they are on the right track, let’s send them -

Having a testimonials page is super-awesome for a lot of reasons.

• It allows businesses to cross-sell each other.

• It’s easy to push something that’s bringing traffic to the customer. (Unless you’re selling to enterprises)

About Crewcharge and the author

Crewchargeensures customer retention and customer success using

1. GDPR-complaint, Cookie-free self-hostable Analytics,
2. Segmented marketing to unlock huge revenue, and
3. Feedback driven development.

Feel free to book a free demo with Crewcharge to boost your SaaS customer retention here

We have over 50+ workflows and a platform to build your personalized customer journey campaigns and integrate with tools you use like Mailchimp, SMTP, and even widgets you can embed inside your app.

This article was possible because I quit my full-time job to build Crewcharge. Read more on my journey here.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.