Acquiring new customers for your SaaS business is a big achievement. After all, it’s no cakewalk. Now, you have to find a way to retain them for a longer period. That’s where the customer retention metric comes into the picture.
Customer retention involves keeping existing customers satisfied and engaged so they don’t leave your services for another player in the industry. This metric will decide how stellar your products and customer support strategies are.
Beyond product quality and customer support, content marketing can also help entice your customers to stay. It will help you build deeper connections and impart essential feature updates to your customers, fostering a sense of belonging with your brand.
In this article, we will discuss every aspect of how content marketing can help you boost your SaaS retention rates.
What is customer retention & why is it so difficult?
Customer retention refers to a company’s ability to keep customers from leaving and encourage them to continue buying or using its services. This metric contributes to your business’s overall success and helps you gauge your customer’s loyalty.
Retaining customers sometimes proves to be more challenging than it sounds. But don’t forget that acquiring your ideal customer is even more difficult, so you might as well put effort into retaining existing ones.
Here’s a list of some significant factors that make it difficult for SaaS companies—or just companies, in general—to retain customers:
- Low switching costs: After a minor sign of difficulty, price change, or even when there’s no reason, your customers are free to switch to another company without a significant financial loss.
- High customer expectations: Customers have very high expectations from a company. This is especially true for SaaS products. They want it to be reasonably priced, easy to use, secure, regularly updated with new features, and reliable. One sign of trouble, and your customer will switch to your competitor!
- Lack of customer loyalty: If customers don’t feel a sense of loyalty toward your product or company, they’ll likely move to greener pastures after even minor issues. Factors like peer recommendations, reviews, or promotions can also sway their decision to stay or leave.
- Increasing competition: Businesses are no longer relegated to their local regions in the internet era. Every other business is now going global, leading to fierce competition in the market. Competition can tempt existing customers to leave your business for relatively better options.
What is a good customer retention benchmark for SaaS?
Customer retention rate is one of the essential SaaS metrics to determine how well your business is performing. It can vary for different SaaS companies based on factors like pricing structure, type of product, target audience, and the business stage. However, we can still gauge industry benchmarks.
If you look at the statistics, a retention rate of over 35% is considered optimum for the SaaS and e-commerce industries.
However, different studies and surveys show different results. It’s a given, considering how retention rates differ depending on various factors.
For instance, according to a recent article by Forbes, the ideal churn rate for mature and established companies is 5% to 7% in annual churn and less than 1% in monthly churn. This means you shouldn’t lose over 7% of your existing customers.
The role of content marketing in SaaS customer retention
Content marketing is at the heart of SaaS customer retention. It helps boost your retention rate and overall success by engaging, educating, and nurturing your customers.
If you look at the statistics, SaaS companies that use content marketing see 30% higher growth rates and 5-10% better retention rates.
What makes content marketing even more remarkable is how you can continue to reap its rewards for years. After all, several blog posts and tutorials about product features usually have continued value delivery.
5 ways to use content to boost customer retention in SaaS
Offer educational content on product features and updates
Creating educational content about your product features and updates can help improve your SaaS retention rates in two ways.
First, it helps you provide your customers with a detailed breakdown of your product’s features. This will help them make the most out of their subscription or purchase. The more profits they earn from your services, the longer they’ll stick around.
Secondly, regular product updates keep them up-to-date on every change you make in the product. For example, they’ll know right away if you’re introducing a new feature and how to use it for their benefit.
Incorporating AI video generation for e-learning can be a game-changer in this context. Utilizing AI for creating engaging, interactive video content can make learning about product features and updates more dynamic and accessible. AI-driven videos can tailor content to individual learning styles, ensuring that customers not only understand your product better but also enjoy the learning process. This approach can significantly enhance customer engagement and understanding, further boosting retention rates.
When it comes to offering educational content to its users, Slack does it well.
The communication giant offers an extensive library of self-help articles, tutorials, videos, and guides explaining its functionalities in detail.
Not just that, they also host live events or on-demand webinars regularly to impart knowledge on various topics—from Slack hacks to new updates.
Educational content also helps you establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry, making your customers trust your words. This builds trust and invokes a sense of loyalty—both of which are helpful in boosting online sales, retention rates, and higher customer lifetime value.
Share customer success stories to invoke loyalty
Customer success stories will show your existing customers how others are benefiting from similar services. This will come as a reassurance, affirming that their decision to do business with you was the right one.
It will also boost their sense of loyalty towards your brand, thus increasing the retention rate.
Customer stories aren’t your same-old testimonials and reviews. They should drive deeper into customer challenges and how you helped them overcome those obstacles.
Here’s a quick customer success story checklist:
- Share the context and challenges the customer faced
- Explain how your product or service specifically solved the issue
- Outline the implementation journey
- Mention measurable results (for example, percentage increase in revenue)
- Include direct quotes from customers
- Make it engaging by incorporating visual elements like graphs and infographics
- Share on social media channels to boost engagement
For instance, Omniscient Digital, a leading B2B content marketing agency, has a dedicated section website featuring customer success stories that give a full overview of how they helped their clients.
To make it even more effective, they incorporate quotes, video testimonials, and measurable results in their case studies.
Send personalized newsletters to engage customers
Sending regular newsletters keeps your brand top-of-mind and helps you build relationships with existing customers. Besides blogs and knowledge base, newsletters are another way of keeping your customers informed about new updates and features.
To further enhance user engagement and boost retention rates, offer personalized newsletters catering to different customer segments based on their preferences and behavior.
Another non-negotiable is offering relevant and actionable content. Your newsletter content should offer helpful tips, industry insights, and offers—everything that will help you retain them for a long time.
Here’s a personalized newsletter by Airbnb that’s a great example:
(Source)
Taking note of the customer’s trip to San Francisco, they send a tailored day-to-day itinerary, addressing the common concern of how to spend time in a new city. What makes this newsletter so special? It not only sends actionable tips to the customer but also incorporates content localization, making it even more valuable.
Create exclusive content for existing customers
If you want to retain your customers, you have to find a way to make them feel special. One way to do it is by creating exclusive content for them. When they see you’re going out of your way to craft valuable content for them, it will make them feel special and worth spending their resources on your business.
You can offer exclusive content to your customers in the form of:
- Webinars and workshops
- Advanced guides
- Early access to new updates
- Personalized support or consultation sessions
- VIP events and networking opportunities
- Premium content libraries featuring whitepapers, courses, and research reports
Creating exclusive content just for your paid customers will also help SaaS companies deepen their relationships with the target audience. It will no longer be just a company for them—customers will feel an affinity with your brand, making them stick longer.
Develop interactive quizzes related to your SaaS product or industry
Interactive quizzes will help you kill two birds with one stone. They will help you engage your customers while also acquiring their feedback. You can further use this feedback to improve your products to ensure they don’t look for other options.
Atlassian is an excellent example of a SaaS brand using quizzes to educate its customers about agile software development and to promote its products. For instance, they offered a quiz called “Which productivity hack will work best for you?”
After the quiz ends, they help you identify the best productivity methods for your needs and tips on how to improve.
(Source)
How to track customer retention in SaaS
Retaining customers is the key to scaling your business to success. But how will you track this metric?
One direct way of tracking this metric is by measuring how many customers stay with your business over a specific period. There’s a simple formula to calculate your customer retention rate:
Customer retention rate = [(number of customers at the end of the period – number of new customers acquired during the period) / number of customers at the beginning of the period] x 100
However, if you don’t have access to these numbers, there are other ways to track customer retention:
- Define other key metrics: Determine metrics like churn rate, customer lifetime value, and repeat purchase rate.
- Segment your customers for better insights: Analyze retention rate metrics based on customer segments and behavioral patterns.
- Use analytics tools: Utilize new-age tools like Eclipe.ai that leverage artificial intelligence to monitor customer analytics and drive retention.
- Gather feedback: Gather regular feedback using surveys and polls to monitor how they perceive your brand.
Your turn to elevate SaaS customer retention with content marketing!
Content marketing can be your secret sauce to increase your SaaS customer retention rate. It helps you educate, engage, and nurture your audience and not only retain them but also turn them into loyal brand advocates.
If you’re looking to level up your digital marketing metrics further, Dive into DemandPlaybook for the latest digital marketing news, trends, and advice.
