Combating Churn for a SaaS—Use Content to Attract, Educate, Convert and Retain Customer

Marketing is a mighty power in today’s realm. No business can afford to turn its back from any of the channels of traditional or digital marketing.

Businesses experiment with different types of marketing, monitor and measure their outcomes using hundreds of metrics and tools, and, analyzing the marketing efforts of their contemporaries and competitors, evolve.

Based on their size, niche, budget, and market, businesses choose their marketing channels, design their marketing and sale funnels, and drive their campaigns.

SaaS is Just Another Name of Startups

Startups have to deal with the challenges like constrained budget and other resources, extremely dispersed and widened market, uninformed opportunities, higher churn rate, and dozens of many more trials that make inbound digital marketing the best platform of marketing to attract to their market and influence them quietly.

The major components of inbound marketing include,

• Search Engine Optimization
• Pay-Per-Click Advertising
• Content Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Paid Ads
• Affiliate Marketing
• Email Marketing

Some of them are paid while some are unpaid inbound marketing types. One common thing among them all is their roots reaching out to the content.

In general, unpaid marketing is the best way of branding and attracting, educating, informing, and influencing the leads into prospects and, later can be used to retain customers, whereas paid marketing tools are mostly used to make sales and acquire customers.

The business model of the SaaS is a Subscription Model.

The subscription model emphasizes customer retention.

SaaS needs a marketing channel that makes customers stay with them for long. In other words, the SaaS business needs marketing that extends the customer lifecycle.

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Creating, refining, and repurposing the content across the marketing channels allow SaaS businesses to achieve their goals.

The daunting threat to the target of customer retention is churn.

Also Read: Transitioning to SaaS Subscription Model—Needs, Challenges, Strategies, Monetization, Management, And All It Takes To Move To A Recurring Revenue Model

What is Churn?

When the customers stop doing business with an, it is churn.

In SaaS terms, when the customers stop contributing to the growth of the recurring revenue due to the cancellation or suspension of the subscription account is churn.

Churn is measured by the key metric called churn rate.

It is the rate at which customers discontinue their subscriptions within a given time period. It is the one metric that directly impacts on SaaS business bottom line.

Tracking it unveils the reasons what cause the churn, also allows us to devise marketing strategies to persuade customers to refrain from the churn.

Here’s what you need to know to understand what causes customer churn, and how content can improve churn rates to boost customer retention?

10 Root Causes of Churn

Budget is not the only cause of the churn, customers roll back their subscriptions for several other reasons that arise mainly due to poor customer support, services, and experience.

It can mainly be occurred due to the following reasons:

1. Onboarding of Wrong Customers
2. Uninformed and Uneducated Customer
3. Not Beneficial for Customers
4. Poor Customer Support
5. Insufficient Customer Engagement
6. Incompetent Services
7. Powerful Competition
8. Subscription Suspension
9. Subscription Cancelation
10. Subscription End

How to Improve Churn Rates for SaaS Business Growth

Churn kills SaaS growth. Failure to retain customers leads to the death of a SaaS venture. Starting with affecting the recurring revenue streaming, higher churn rates can damage everything of the brand.

On the other hand, 1 percent of the improved customer rate can benefit the SaaS with 12 percent of the revenue growth.

Mitigating churn with some of the following measures shows results faster, better, and for longer:

• Improve Customer Support
• Remove Product Deficiencies
• Beat Market Competition, Develop USP
• Identify Right Market and Right Platform for Marketing
• Invest In product Development and, Consequently, to Market Them
• Carefully Conceive Marketing and Sales Funnels
• Include Incentives, Discounts, and Promotions
• Team Up with By-product Ventures
• And, last but the Least, Use Content to Inform, Educate, and Influence Prospects

Also Read: Learn the Reasons Behind High Churn Rate and How You can Tackle it with These Tips from SubscriptionFlow

Content Reduces Churn

If a SaaS finds that their churn due to unsatisfied services, uninformed experience, improper engagement, bad customer experience, influenced by the competitors, poor understanding of the product or service, financial constraints, or even payment failures, they can use the content as a most effective tool to combat with churn.

Reaching out to the customers with the right type of content can considerably reduce customer churn rates by drawing the right businesses, keeping existing customers satisfied by better information, educating, and persuading them on all that you have.

From social media, blogging, and email marketing to search engine optimization, affiliate, and paid ads marketing, content is the backbone of each type of marketing.

With the right content marketing targeted to identified customers not only attract them to the SaaS, but it can become a great source of referral marketing.

Focusing content for customer retention helps reduces churn rates. The only condition that can negate the effectiveness of the content marketing goal is the poor or inapt products or services that are not enough to keep the customer satisfied and successful.

However, if the products and customer service are substantial, then creating content multiplies the value of the SaaS products or service, and keep customers coming back month after month.

What is Content Marketing for SaaS?

Content Marketing is the type of inbound marketing that involves the whole process of planning, creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing the relevant and targeted informational as well as promotional content that brings brand awareness, enhances visibility, draws more traffic, increases sales, reaches to more audiences, improves customer engagements, interactions, and loyalty.

Also Read: AI Can Predict Churn—Harness the Power of Data-Driven Technology to Identify Reasons behind Subscription Cancellations

How Does Content Marketing Work for SaaS?

Content targets and influences the traffic without intruding and conveys the marketing messages in the forms of education, information, instructions, and awareness.

The SaaS ventures need effective and informational content in multiple forms for multiple purposes of customer acquisition and customer retention that are required by their customers, leads, and audience in the digital spaces. This content reaches out to their audience through organic and natural means and impacts them without disrupting their needs.

Content can be created, refined, and repurposed to achieve the following objectives:

• Use Content To Attract Traffic

The first step for customer acquisition is to draw traffic. Attracting traffic using content can be based on two purposes:

• Promotion
• Information

Promotional Content comprises advertising and branding material that lets people aware of the SaaS existence. The next step to attract them with informational content by providing data about your product, features, plans, and pricing.

• Educate, Inform, Or Entertain Lead With Influencing Content

The next step is to influence them by answering their queries and providing solutions of their problems with your product or services. The content created around the product, features, or services on the problems, impacts of problems, solutions to the problems, impacts of the solutions, content on other opportunities or risks related to the problems or solutions not only educate them, but it also enhances the understanding of the information that you have provided earlier about your product, services, or their uses.

When the customer finds a platform from where they can get the answer to their queries, they come back to it again and again, and here it is a sign that the traffic has now converted into the prospect.

This prospect soon shows its interests and contacts to get more information.

It is the time where efficient customer support and better product combination can convert a lead into a customer.

One of the best ways for a SaaS to convert lead into customers is to offer a freemium or trial version.

• Content Converts Customers

It is the stage where exposing leads with personalized content and content-based customer engagement increases the chances of converting them into paid customers and subscribing to the SaaS product or services.

These could be e-books, promotional, informational, incentives, discounted offers, seasonal greetings, FAQs, or any other media available in their emails, at their social media timeline, or at their product portal if they are using free trials.

• Boost Customer Retention with Content

In the SaaS business, customer retention is the only way to boost recurring revenue and fight churns.

Upgrading or influencing customers to continue using the SaaS product or resubscribe requires continuous customer engagement, personalized customer experience, negating competitive effects, promotes special or new features, and many more struggles.

Often taking all the measures still cannot ensure no churn. It mostly is an involuntary churn. It occurs from the end of SaaS vendors when they suspend the subscription account due to payment failures. It cuts the channels of recurring revenue and also causes revenue loss.

Mitigating the involuntary churn requires two robust actions:

• Dunning Management
• Informing and Influencing Subscribers Through the Content

Dunning helps SaaS to recover revenue and keep track of the subscription health.

This tracking of the subscription health can streamline the audience to be targeted to influence against churn.

Creating new content or refining and repurposing the existing content with the reduced involuntary churn goals requires not only educating them about the negative effects of the mid-of-the-cycle subscription cancelation, but it also deals with promoting incentives for the former subscribers to pay-off and get benefits.

Dunning emails can also be a way to share content with the customers to resume their subscription.

Use Data and Tools to Improve Content Marketing for SaaS

The SaaS subscription management software is the best place that not only allows you to track the metrics and identify the leakages and opportunities, it also explores the customer data that is essentially required to boost the personalized customer experience through content marketing effort.

SubscriptionFlow is an apt platform to automate recurring billing and payment processing, manage subscription handling with proration and dunning.

To design, track, measure, and manage the data-driven content and other marketing objectives, SubscriptionFlow offers easy, automated, and efficient solutions as third-party integrations. Some of the most effective marketing automation platforms include HubSpot Marketing Hub, InfusionSoft, ActiveCampaign, Zoho Marketing, MailChimp, BuzzSumo, and many more.

To learn more about managing the SaaS subscription billing and other RevOps, talk to experts at SubscriptionFlow.