Don’t Build That: Why you Should Use No Code Tools for SaaS
Mariano Rodríguez.
Sep 3, 2024
Saas teams from conceptualization to post-launch are overloaded with a pipeline full of bug fixes, changes, re-designs, and new features to take care of. It’s truly never ending. The idea is to keep your product evolving consistently to meet users’ needs as well as keeping a good pace of feature velocity so your product doesn’t appear stagnant and rises to meet the market and your competitors. For a smaller team or a new team, it can be hard to keep up while scaling up. Luckily, there are plenty of shortcuts your team can take in terms of developing different features as well as integrating tools for sales and marketing that your team just doesn’t have the time to build. No-code tools are the perfect solution for your dev team to focus on your core business, while adding value to your team or users.
Here is why you should implement no-code tools into your SaaS product and a few examples:
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[anchor id="implementation"]Why implement a no code tool into your SaaS product?
SaaS products require constant improvement and growth despite the size of your team. Resources are always limited but to stay ahead of the competition and become a player in the market, you can take advantage of no-code tools.
Save on coding time and leverage expertise:
If you don't have a huge team of developers ready, it's better for them to focus on your core product than spend time developing other things that are not key to your product. Allowing another SaaS company to take those features off your hands will also ensure that they are built well and with a specific expertise your team shouldn’t have to worry about.
Save on cost:
It’s almost always cheaper to pay for a small monthly subscription fee rather than develop a whole feature and maintain it in house. There is no massive sunk cost in labor or time. You can begin right away and you can cancel any time you want or find you don’t need it anymore.
Get help with maintenance and specialized support:
With a subscription plan with another company, you get the support and consistent maintenance without having to rely on your internal team. The feature will be updated and kept bug-free without needing to take away any time from your team. Your team can also call on support as part of your plan, allowing other non-technical members of your team to take initiative.
Involve other departments and free up time for your development team:
With a no-code tool on a subscription plane, anyone can use it without the need of your developers. Often times, a very user-friendly backend has been built to accompany them already so anyone can use them. This is often the case for sales and marketing tools.
Your team can focus on feature velocity:
Your marketing and sales teams can continue to add on the features they need while your development team focuses on building out the features that provide the core, unique value of your product. You’ll be able to make improvements and scale your product much faster in response to customers and the market.
[anchor id="examples"]Examples of where to implement no code solutions for your SaaS.
[anchor="landing-page-builders"]Beef up campaigns with landing page builders:
How great would it be if you didn’t have to bother your dev team everytime you wanted to try something new on the website for a campaign? With a landing page creation platform, anyone on your team can easily create new landing pages and duplicate pages to A/B test using your URL with a drag and drop editor. You can have plenty of landing pages running and test various elements without needing any code work. Most builders also support forms, squeeze pages, pop up CTAs, integrations with tools you already use like Mailchimp, Hubspot, Adroll, etc. to make creating dynamic experiences really easy for your marketing team.
[anchor id="chatbots"]Install and customize a no-code chatbot:
Customers have become used to being able to find a chatbot within apps and on sites where they can get answers to questions immediately. To develop one that fits into your interface natively can be fairly costly and take weeks of development time. It’s also a huge time commitment to be on top of responses without tools like AI answers and filtering built in to help out your team. To build these out is an even bigger ticket.
[anchor id="changelogs"]Engage users with a changelog:
Updating users on important changes and new features is vital to keeping users engaged with your app. Building a system that natively sits within your app and website for sharing updates with users can take your dev team months. Beamer allows you to add an interactive, discreet changelog that looks native to your app where you can publish updates for users. Users just click an icon or a “What’s New” tab in your navigation to open your newsfeed as a sidebar like it’s native to your app. Additionally, Beamer allows you to add photos, videos, screenshots and CTAs to your updates to better engage users. You can enable push notifications to bring users back to your app when you’ve made an improvement. Beamer also collects helpful analytics and feedback from your users. Users can leave comments and reactions to your updates that you can analyze along with open and click rates on the Beamer backend. You can better engage users by segmenting your updates and notifications by demographic, location, language, and past behavior. The best part is all of this can be installed with just a script saving your team months of work!
[anchor id="ticketing-and-support"]Outsource ticketing and support:
Customer support on both your website and within your app is vital and expected from your customers during the sales process and also after. Building out a system to support takes time your team doesn’t have. HelpShift or Zendesk are a few fairly robust tool that you can pull whatever features you need in terms of customer service from. You can have a phone, live chat, and email support and support ticket systems integrated into your app or website with automated with AI and fit with segmentation to help your team easily tackle support tickets and questions from customers in a timely and easy manner.
[anchor id="outsourced-analytics"]Better understand your users with outsourced analytics:
A complete analytics system specifically for your app and website that covers the full spectrum of your users’ journey is not easy to create. Google Analytics only cuts it to a certain extent. But normally, adding this kind of coverage to your app, connecting it with analytics from other areas of the customer journey, and creating a backend to help your marketing team analyze it is a lot to ask. FullStory takes care of it by allowing you to simply use scripts and integrations with other tools you’re already using to interact with customers to aggregate the full picture of your customers’ actions. You can see interactions, clicks, pages, etc. for individual users’ sessions as well as data on the tiniest details in your interface to help your team better understand what’s working and what isn’t. All of this can be analyzed in one easy backend where the dots are connected for you. You could also use a heatmap tool like Hotjar to watch your users’ behavior real time with your website and within your app to get a clear picture of their journey through your product. You can see where they tend to linger and where they drop off to improve your experience.
[anchor id="translations"]Localize and translate easily with an API-based translation tool:
Making your app and website native is a huge task that ultimately relies on a translation service and then your developers. Every time you update something within your app or on your site or you start to expand globally, you need to make some time-consuming adjustments across your app and site. You can try Transfluent. It takes care of translations on your frontend with a simple API. API translators also work with multiple CMS to auto-translate your content. You can also integrate with Zendesk and other support systems to auto-translate your support messages into your users native language to further personalize their experience with no extra effort on your team’s part.
[anchor id="automated-workflows"]Automate workflows and connect with other apps:
Plenty of no-code tools can actually simplify your work flow internally for your sales and marketing team. Normally creating connections between tools and your SaaS can take weeks to develop a custom solution. Tools like Zapier help connect tools you’re already using with a few simple clicks. Your marketing and sales team can easily take care of this without the help of your development team. This saves a ton of time and expands the possibilities of creating a seamless sales, marketing, and customer service process without any dev time. Other tools you can look at are IFTTT, Workato, and Elastic.io.
[anchor id="social-tools"]Make your app social by integrating social tools:
Social elements can be really effective at users on board and bring new users on. There are plenty of tools that allow you to incorporate some of these elements into your app without having them to create them yourself. With tools like Get Social or AppVirality You can build referral campaigns that interact with users in your app, enable content sharing, connect users with each other, create activity feeds, enable users to invite friends and reward them when they do, etc. There are plenty of options for targeting, automation, and segmentation that can make your app even more “sticky” effortlessly. Your team can completely customize the UI to match your brand and look native to your app. Your dev team’s focus should be creating amazing new core features for your app rather than developing what’s already been made! Utilizing these no code tools in your SaaS product can save your team plenty of time in creating a better user experience. For an easy, no-code way to engage with users, try Beamer today.
This article is about Customer Engagement + customer feedback + Product Management + User Engagement + User Feedback
