Proven strategies to get customers for your SaaS
If you are not having any customers that too even the paying one then you are not growing your SaaS business. You’ve made a nice product but if that product is not making any revenue then you cannot grow it or fund it further.
Thus in this article, I’m going to share with you some strategies that I’ve used and seen people using in their SaaS to get customers and retain them.
But before we start, if you are considering launching a SaaS application but are confused about where to begin or what might cost you, in that case, you’ll find invaluable insights in my book “Building SaaS the Right Way”. I’ve put my years of experience into a comprehensive guide that covers everything from finding a SaaS idea to developing a fully functional product and making the right market-fit product.
Strategy number 1 (Start building an early access list)
This is something that you should start to do from day one when you get the idea to build your SaaS. You don’t need a functional application or even a POC for this work.
You can have a basic 1-page website set up for this, where you can describe what problem you are solving and what is the pricing for it. You can use the No Code approach like Webflow or Shuffle.dev for building a website for the use case.
Once you have the website built now you need to pick up an Ideal Customer Profile, for example, let's suppose your SaaS is built for Artists or Employees. Now once your ICP is built up you need to find a way how to reach out to these audiences, to do this we have some approaches,
- You need to start to educate such people by providing valuable information, tips, or resources that can save them time in their daily work. To do this you can either have a blog running on Medium or may have a social network on Instagram and LinkedIn. By doing this people will start to follow you as they will find your content valuable and useful for their work, and you will build a healthy network. (This process might take some time but it’s very helpful for the longer run as you are not only building a network for 1 application but any application or business you need to have in the future.)
- Second, what you can do to approach such people is by participating in someone else podcasts or interviews. You need to find such people on the internet who have an audience that best suits your niche and you need to ask them to take you with them. The same applies to partnerships or affiliates where you will ask these people to promote your SaaS product among their audience.
- You also need to participate in groups and communities on Reddit and Facebook. For example, if I’m building a Cold Email Marketing SaaS I will participate in Facebook groups of my competitors like Instantly and Smartletds.
In the end, what have we learned from Strategy 1 is that if you don’t have a strong network as a SaaS funder then my friend you will face issues in getting users for your SaaS.
Strategy number 2 (Retaining your customers)
The moment you get 5 or 6 paying users on your platform, it’s very important to retain such users for the long run you don’t want people to leave you or file disputes after using your application for the first month.
To do this, you should collect feedback time by time from your customers, you don’t need to work on all the feedback only the relevant ones.
I would also recommend having regular meeting calls with your customers every week, just to make sure they are good and not facing any trouble.
The more you understand your customers and become familiar with them the more they will become comfortable with you over time.
Strategy number 3 (Cold Outreach)
Strategy number 3 is cold outreach, this can be either sending cold emails or doing cold calls to your prospects. You can have a prospects list from Rocket Reach or Apollo and start sending cold emails outreach to these prospects.
You can use software like Instantly or Smartlead for such activities, the same applies for cold calls as well.
Cold Outreach mostly works with B2B, and makes sure to keep your emails short and straight to the point, like the one I’ve added below.
Strategy number 4 (Running Ads)
Running Ads are helpful like on Google, Instagram, and Facebook. I’ve seen a lot of SaaS founders who can run their SaaS business just by running Ads on Google. They choose products that are easily searchable on Google and then they run Ads for them.
If you know your market very well you will be able to run good Ads and will be able to get conversation from it.
Please don’t run Ads in the dark, make sure you know where your target audience is and what are they looking for then, and only run Ads for it.
There are some other ways too like listing your SaaS on marketplaces like ProductHunt or AppSumo but it’s kind of a lunch strategy. Yes, it will give you users too from there also but not something that you can do every day.
These are some of the strategies that you can follow to get customers for your SaaS product and might help you retain them for a longer term. Please remember you will only be on profit by the number of months a users spend on your SaaS not by how many users are using your SaaS.
I have also written a book on marketing if you want to take a deep dive into marketing and know how to get long-term paying customers for your SaaS, “Marketing Strategies to Grow Your SaaS” which will cover all the necessary steps and strategies in depth to help you take your SaaS from scratch and get some real paying users.
