Believe it or not, the average SaaS company loses 5 – 7% of their customers per year. YIKES!
This is surprising because most SaaS companies focus on acquiring users more than keeping the users they have.
But why is user retention so much more important than getting new users? I mean, even if you lose 5-7% per year, couldn’t you just get more to replace them?
You could, but you’ll be fighting a losing battle.
Here’s just three reasons why your focus should be on user retention:
1. Increasing your user retention rate by just 5%, can boost profits by 25% to 95%.
2. 80% of your future revenue will come from 20% of your current customers
3. The probability of converting an existing customer is 60-70% while you’re only likely to convert a new prospect 5-20% of the time.
Ok so you’re convinced, now what.
The bad news is, improving user retention isn’t always a quick process. It usually takes a lot of experimentation and a little luck to see results.
The good news is, there are a few tools to turn help you turn your SaaS company into a user retention machine.
So I’ve put together a list of six to help you get started!
1. Kissmetrics – You’ll never know how well you’re doing (or not doing) without a good analytics tool to show you. And that’s exactly what Kissmetrics is. Kissmetrics is a lifecycle analytics tool that tells you what’s going on with your users in your app.
For instance, if you want to know which users have been inactive for a while or which users cancelled their plan Kissmetrics can tell you.
2. Autosend – Quite frankly, the best way to retain users is to stay in touch.
So you need to do whatever you can to talk to every user, all the time.
But wait a minute…that’s not at all scalable, especially as my user base grows. Au contraire! With Autosend it is.
Autosend is a tool that helps you send email, SMS, and push notifications to your users based on what they do in your app, automatically.
So imagine you set up an event to let you know when users view the cancel page in your app. You can automatically send a personalized email, text message, or push notification to those users to make sure they stick around.
And your users can respond back…genius!
3. Client Heartbeat – Do you ever wonder what users really think about your app?
Stop guessing and let your users tell you with surveys. Client Heartbeat is a tool that helps you stay on top of how users feel about your app. You can send simple surveys and learn about their experience. With Client Heartbeat you can even track your user’s happiness score over time and get emails that notify you about “at risk” users.
This can help you reach out to unsatisfied users proactively, before they leave. Nice!
4. Sidekick – Have you ever wanted to go your users’ office and show them how to use your app?
Since we don’t have teleportation (yet) and only a limited number of hours in the day, you’ll have to settle for the next best thing…Sidekick.
Sidekick helps you give interactive walkthroughs of your app. With Sidekick, every single user can click somewhere in your app and get a video walkthrough that shows them how to use it.
Now you can teach your users how to use your app without being there. Consider this user retained!
5. Zopim – Since we know the secret to keeping users around is communication, give your users a way to always reach you. Zopim is a live chat tool for your website. You can add it to your site and give users a way to reach out anytime they have a problem.
Imagine a user finds a bug. They’d typically close your app and look for a competitor. With Zopim you may be able to keep them around by acknowledging their problem right now.
Pretty neat, huh?
6. Helpscout – From time to time, no matter how many tutorials or FAQs you have, a user is going to need help. In fact 83% of consumers require some sort of help while making an online purchase. It just happens.
When users need help, the worse thing you can do is make them jump through hoops to get it.
Making users complete forms, enter CAPTCHAs, or log in just to tell you about a problem doesn’t cut it.
This is where Helpscout can help. Helpscout is a support ticket tool that doesn’t look like one. It lets your users send a support ticket the same way they’d send an email.
Even after they get your reply, everything will look and feel like it came straight from your inbox. Your users will never be the wiser 😉
So there you have it. That’s six tools you can use to keep more of your users.
Which tools do you plan on using to improve your user retention? Which tools are you already using and what unique ways do you use them?
Please share in the comments.
