How to Retain SaaS Users with Beamer in Times of Covid-19

Businesses across sectors have been hit by an unexpected halt. COVID-19 has completely changed the business environment and some SaaS may face increasing churn rates, while others may have a booming demand. Some SaaS platforms, specially those related to tourism, restaurants or sharing economy need to focus on customer retention to control churn and maintain revenue.On the other hand, demand for remote working software, sales and marketing automation or online entertainment are on the rise, giving SaaS an opportunity to gain new users.Retaining and attracting users is key in this moment to preserve or grow your SaaS business, and Beamer has the right features to tackle each SaaS business' needs.

Here are ways your team can boost engagement, promote customer success, and retain users with Beamer in times of Covid-19:

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1. New features and updates
2. Value through content and informative updates
3. Push notifications
4. Ask users for feedback
5. NPS to strengthen your marketing efforts
6. Feature discovery and resources
7. Segmentation and personalization

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[anchor id="new-features-and-updates"]Get users excited about new features and updates.

Users love evolving products. As existing and new users login, you want them to stay excited about the evolution of your product and show that your team is actively working on improving the product for them. Sharing updates with users on new features, bug fixes, new content from your team, etc. helps customers feel connected to your brand and the evolution of it. The most common way to reach customers to alert them of updates and new features is email. Email doesn’t get great open and click through rates. Using an in-app, in context tool like Beamer can get you higher engagement from users. Beamer is an in-app changelog that opens when users click a simple icon in your interface. A native-looking newsfeed opens with your latest updates and news. You can add images, GIFs, and videos to your updates to make them more engaging. You can add CTAs to get users click through and engage them with updates. You can activate push notifications to bring users back to your product when you release a new feature, news, new content, updates, bug fixes, etc.  

[anchor id="content-and-informative-updates"]Provide value through content and informative updates.

Keeping users engaged also has to do with building a relationship with your brand. Relationships with users are important right now as users’ trust and reliance on products have increased. This is a good opportunity to position your team as reliable, helpful, and informative. You want to position your brand and team as authoritative, helpful, and valuable for users. Providing content that supports customer success if key to building that relationship. Creating content that teaches customers what they need to know to perform better with your product and beyond is key. Top SaaS companies like Shopify, Mailchimp, Hubspot, etc. are experts at providing content that engages and supports their customers interests. Using that content to create updates that bring customers back can help boost engagement and keep customers with your product and, most importantly, team.

[anchor id="push-notifications"]Bring back users with push notifications.

As mentioned previously, you can utilize push notifications with Beamer to bring users back when you share updates. Push notifications get higher open and click through rates than email and are a great tool for bringing users to your product directly to explore new updates and features or to your site when you share new content. Push notifications should be limited to important and interesting updates only so that you don’t lose users as a result of sending too many annoying updates. User opt-in is offered and taken care of by Beamer too so you easily abide by data laws like GDPR. Learn more about how Beamer and how to comply with data GDPR while serving customers.

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[anchor id="feedback"]Ask users for feedback.

Users want to stay where they feel their needs are being met and the team is going to work hard to improve the product to do that. Asking for feedback in effective and in context ways shows users that you care and you want their input in helping to evolve your product. They are more likely to stay with you as you make that happen. You can see the data on open rates, reactions, and comments on the Beamer backend. You can see feedback and reactions from specific updates so you know what users like most about what your team is working on. You have to also show customers that you are putting their feedback into action. You can do that with regular updates on how your team is implementing what users request. Notifying users when you’ve made a change, fixed a bug or friction point, or added new features they’re requested via Beamer is a great way to show users that you’re working on making the product better through their feedback.

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“When customers share their story, they’re not just sharing pain points. They’re actually teaching you how to make your product, service, and business better.”– Kristin Smaby, “Being Human is Good Business”

[anchor id="nps"]Discover your promoters with NPS to strengthen your marketing efforts.

Within your user base lies one of your greatest marketing assets: promoters. Promoters are users that are extremely satisfied with your product and most likely share your product with their peers. Your Net Promoter Score (NPS) lets you know how many of your user base are promoters compared to passives and detractors. Passives aren’t likely to rave about your product but are generally satisfied and detractors are not happy with your product and likely to leave. NPS gives you a great idea of how you’re satisfying customers and also how impactful that might be to your marketing efforts to bring on new users. It also lets you know if users are likely to churn out. You can use NPS to reach out to your promoters and utilize them for case studies and testimonials as well as referral programs to bring in new, hot leads that are likely to love and stick with your product as well. You can communicate with detractors to understand where your product or team is falling short to improve your product and service to avoid losing customers. Learn more about NPS and how to track it easily here.

[anchor id="feature-discovery"]Help new users be successful with your product with feature discovery and resources.

One of the biggest contingencies for SaaS in terms of keeping users on and reducing churn is your onboarding process. If users come on and they learn how to use the product to create value, they are likely to be long term customers. You should educate users on how to use your product for best results. Oftentimes, users can miss features and updates within your product and they aren’t getting the full value of your product. A strong onboarding process with actionable instructions on how to use the features of your product is necessary. It’s often not enough to just point out features and leave text descriptions. Showing users visual examples and taking users through actions to start working with your product right away is best. Adding feature discovery beyond onboarding ensures that customers are aware of the best and new features of your product.

Beamer is a great way to easily incorporate feature discovery: With Beamer, you can post new feature updates with videos, GIFs, and CTAs to your in-app newsfeed. All users have to do is click an icon in your interface to open up a newsfeed full of updates. Users can explore updates and quickly learn how to use them in one central place.

[anchor id="segmentation-and-personalization"]Segment your audience and provide personalized updates.

Users these days expect personalization. They don’t want to sift through the noise from your brand, team, and messaging to extract the value and meaning for them. They want you to speak to them directly in a way that is tailored for them. You’re more likely to boost engagement with users and keep them on board if you are direct and personal in how you communicate with them. There are plenty of ways to do this. You want to segment based on some key criteria that will help you send the most valuable messages to users. This can be industry and niche, stage in customer life cycle they’re at, and actions taken within your product. You can use Beamer with advanced segmentation to reach customers in a direct and personalized way. You can segment by language, location, past actions taken, demographics, etc. You can segment which updates you want certain user groups to see on their Beamer feeds. You can also segment push notifications so that you are effectively sending the most interesting notifications to the right customers to bring them back. Lastly, you can send single-user notifications for even further personalization. With segmentation, you can be clear in the value you’re working to provide to different user groups and show users that they are taken care of with your product. SaaS is about to see a lasting boom as we move everything online for the time being and business processes change far beyond this period. SaaS will be increasingly important for companies to stay flexible and perform better during this time and as they ramp up again after. SaaS companies want to do all they can to fix user churn issues, increase engagement, and retain users. For a simple way to get in touch with users and boost engagement with your product, try Beamer today.