How We Got The First 300 Clients for Our Saas Software

Published in

The Startup

6 min readSep 7, 2018

Our MMF appointment software was launched 5 months ago, we had no idea how to start our jobs on marketing and brand awareness since we don’t know much about the Saas software market in North America, so we have tried different channels to promote the software: Reddit, Facebook group, Pinterest, Twitter, Cold-email, Instagram, Google ads, some of them work and some don’t. I am going to talk about them respectively on below and hopefully provide you guys with some insights of doing a better job on Saas marketing.

Working on MMF

For the past four months, we have revised our code and rebuilt the entire system. MMF is a cloud-based appointment software which enables small business like salon, and massage spa to schedule service appointments more efficiently. It is challenging to start promoting the software when the market is already occupied by several giant companies, it is even more challenging because we are not a local company in the market, we are from another country who need to compete with the local ones. In the beginning, we had some warm-up strategies such as content marketing, paid ads, email marketing. With limited time and amount of money, we started our journey from 2 business blogs each week, $80 dollars budget for Google AdWords every week and about twice a week of email marketing with total 300 business email sent to our potential customers. We felt exhausted during the period of time that we have many inactive accounts created and did not have a lot of clicks on the website since we have been doing marketing for almost 2 months. We then grouped our tasks into two kinds.

Tasks that maintain existing clients (inactive accounts)
Tasks that attract new/potential clients

Things are working better from here when we only focus on one kind of task each time, we launch our software on couple software review websites: Capterra, Financesonline, SoftwareAdvice. Some social media accounts mostly Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest are also created by us in order to get in touch with more potential clients in the market.

Current Numbers

Currently, we have 5–10 sign up every day, most of the clicks are from paid ads, email marketing, and Instagram. Even Though we are also doing content marketing but mostly we just do it as Quora answers and retweet them to our followers on Twitter, so that we don’t have the accurate numbers of traffic from the content marketing, all we are sure is that it is our long-term strategy and it’s working. We want to disclose some of our data parameters with you on below.

Google ads

We always believe Saas software is hard to promote because of small marketing scale and scale of the target customer, so we started to use google ads from the day we launched the software. Obviously, it has better performance in terms of our google ads analytics. Typically we set up the daily budget at $80, and get 2%-8% click-through rate, which is acceptable. As the total spend of $8300 for 4 months, we get the result of 3% conversion rate, which means there are 3 sign up out of 100 people click the ads. We have tried many kinds of keywords on different groups of the target audience, the result shows that only keywords directly related to our software have the best performance. Targeting the right group of people allows us to spend less money to pursue higher conversion rate, even though in many cases it has a smaller scale of population. After several months of using the Google AdWords, we achieve our first 100 clients goal and we are still on the road the reach further 100s.

Email Marketing

We started email marketing right after the software was launched with tons of email addresses that we grabbed from salon & spa websites. In order to get more click-throughs, we test both HTML and plain-text version emails, and HTML with one image on the body results in more clicks to our website. There is also a little trick here for the subject line of the email that boosts our open rate beyond 50%, for example, we use the subject line ‘An Invitation from MMF’ for many times and it is never getting old. The secret here is the utility of client’s curiosity and try to make the email as personal as possible. We usually have 4% — 6% click-through rate on emails we send out, and bring us some new sign up for the software, which is very nice and unexpected since our goals here are trying to maintain a good relationship with our potential clients and doing brand awareness, so that next time if they want a shift to another software we will be kept in mind.

Instagram and Content marketing

Instagram is a good marketing channel that we are using to reach new salons and their owners, ask for feedback and if they would like to join us. Finally, it turns out we don’t get a lot of sign up on Instagram, but we do receive many useful feedbacks that figure out one important thing, the most of our potential clients are already subscribing an appointment software for 1 year in advance, so it is hard to ask them to shift. But there is an amazing thing happen that the SEO of our website is much better since we have been doing both content marketing and social media on Instagram, we finally get our website listed on the first page of google search result with some keywords. Everytime we spend couple minutes to post our blogs on several platforms such as Buzzfeed, Flipboard, Medium, and Pinterest to increase our website’s backlinks, and they always do a good job on generating more traffic and leads. We don’t expect to get a lot of clients from blogs and social media since we have very special target clients, which are salons and massage spas. We mainly do this are because we want more exposure to our software and improve our SEO result.