SaaS companies face their own unique set of marketing challenges. Selling a subscription model is a bit different than traditional selling because it’s less about making a one-time sale and more about building a long-term relationship with the customer. This means marketing should primarily focus on the user and their experience. The goal is not only to convince people to use the service, but also to keep using the service in order to ensure a steady source of revenue. Customers are attracted to (and many expect) a personalized user experience. According to a survey conducted by Epsilon, 90% of respondents feel that personalized content is an appealing quality in a business, and 80% are more likely to do business with a company that offers a personalized experience. To stay competitive, personalized marketing should play an important role in every subscription-based service’s outreach strategy.
The Advantages of Personalization
Personalization is a valuable tool that can aid SaaS companies in attracting new subscribers and retaining current ones. Every customer wants to feel like they matter to the companies they give their business to. Targeting users specifically instead of generally not only creates a better experience for them, it shows them that the company has their interests in mind. Maintaining this relationship with subscribers goes a long way toward fostering brand loyalty, which subscription models thrive on.
Users are also more likely to interact with content if it is relevant to them. All content can’t be relevant to every customer, so personalizing the content that each user sees based on their preferences ensures that everyone is seeing the content with which they are most likely to engage.
How to Personalize a SaaS Model
There are many ways to implement a personalized approach to SaaS marketing. Here are a few examples:
Gather information
Collect information about the customer at the time of registration that can be used to personalize their experience. For example, you might have the customer identify how they will be using the SaaS (business use, personal use, etc.) or select an age demographic, and use that insight to provide them with content that is relevant to their needs and situation.
You could also collect information from customers via an optional survey after they have subscribed, since some customers may be wary of subscription offers that ask for a lot of personal information up front.
Use the customer’s name
Utilizing this easy-to-obtain information is one of the simplest ways to add a touch of personalization to your user experience, but it’s so basic that it sometimes gets overlooked. Displaying a message that greets the user by name when they log in or addressing them by name in automated support messages are a couple examples of ways to do this. It’s a small gesture, but it’s an effective way to reinforce the long-term customer relationships on which SaaS models depend.
Use targeted recommendations
Use information about the user’s current content consumption to direct them to new content they are more likely to engage with. This might look like including personalized recommendations in an email newsletter or targeted suggested articles at the bottom of a blog post.
The content the user chooses to read is the best indicator of the type of content they are interested in. Recommending content that is relevant to the user’s recent reading will improve the user’s experience, and directing them to the features and offers they are most interested in will boost revenue.
Personalize according to subscription age
Take each customer’s location along the subscription timeline into consideration. Are they a long-time subscriber? A new subscriber? Still within their free trial period? Each of these customers will be interested in different content based on where they are along the subscription timeline.
A customer who has been using the service regularly for a while might want to learn how they can take advantage of the software’s more advanced features. For a customer whose free trial is about to expire, it makes more sense to provide information about the service’s basic features in order to convince them of the benefits of sticking with their subscription.
Grouping customers according to which stage of the subscription life-cycle they are in is an easy way to organize personalized content into manageable chunks.
Customize based on location
If your SaaS caters to an international customer base, you can provide subscribers with a personalized experience based on their location in the world. Translating the service into different languages is the first step, of course, but you can further personalize each version to reflect the interests and experiences of different cultures. A service that makes international customers feel fully included is much more likely to succeed globally than one that makes them feel like an afterthought.
Video Personalization
Another opportunity for personalization lies with video marketing. Video has been proven to be significantly more effective than other forms of consumer outreach. 86% of video marketers say that implementing video into their marketing strategy has increased traffic to their websites, and 78% report that using video has directly improved their sales revenue.
This is simply because human brains love videos. Researchers estimate that our brains are capable of processing information 60,000 times faster when it is presented in video format.
Brands that use the way we crave visual stimulation to inform their marketing approach have an advantage over those that don’t; 69% of consumers say video is their preferred method of content consumption. It’s a safe bet that responding to this preference will improve revenue and growth.
When you combine the power of video with the power of personalization, you have a recipe for success. However, video is much more difficult to personalize than most text-based content. It’s expensive and time-consuming to create one marketing video, let alone multiple personalized videos.
Synthetic Video Personalization
One way that video personalization can be realistically achieved at scale is through the use of synthetic video technology. Deep Word can achieve an authentic level of personalization via the Deep Word API and upcoming CRM integrations for Hubspot and Salesforce. A video can be uploaded and synthesized to create numerous uniquely personalized versions in far less time than it would take to create a single personalized video the traditional way.
You can see the benefits of using personalized videos in your SaaS content strategy for yourself with Deep Word’s interactive demo. You will receive a free personalized video in fifteen minutes or less that has been automatically synthesized based on the information you submit.
Consumers have stated their desire for personalization, and it’s up to businesses to choose how to respond. Choosing to offer users a personalized experience is one of the keys to achieving the level of brand loyalty that keeps subscribers happy and keeps revenue coming in. SaaS marketing in general is a long game, as much about retaining as attracting, and putting effort toward personalization is a long-term investment worth making.
