Marketing for SaaS: Recovering From COVID Sales

Lean Into Email and Inbound Content Marketing

These two channels are extremely cheap and known for their incredible ROI. For example: 

• Content-based inbound campaigns cost 62% less per lead—at $135—than the $346 per lead that’s typical of outbound campaigns. At the same time, content marketing generates 3x as many leads.
• Email has always had a high-rated ROI—in 2018, Campaign Monitor pegged it at $44 for every $1 spent. This is higher than any other channel, including social media, direct mail, and paid search.

One reason for this is that digital marketing materials are evergreen. They’re infinitely reproducible at minimal cost, and retain value for as long as you choose to host them. A well-stocked blog can boost SEO and drive traffic to your SaaS brand website for years with periodic updates. Valuable newsletters, eBooks, or whitepapers can be gated for lead acquisition every time you pique a prospect’s interest.

Marketing for SaaS companies is even more suited to inbound content than other industries. Why? Tech buyers love to read. Research from LinkedIn has shown that tech people consume more of the online content posted through their service than professionals in any other industry:

Source: LinkedIn

You might try building out a robust FAQ library with short blog-style posts that answer common queries around your service. Or you could stock up a help portal that’s full to the brim with focused tutorial videos, troubleshooting guides, and general training resources. These efforts will boost SEO to drive traffic to your site and make your service easier for clients to use and keep them delighted. This is critical to client retention when sales are down.

Email is a low-cost avenue for lead nurturing and client retention campaigns. Automation platforms will drastically increase your team’s ability to do more with less. Try email best practices like these:

• Focus on Content Offers: Emails that promote your business sound salesy and are likely to be ignored unless they come with a great incentive (discounts, deals). Instead, you can build a relationship with the lead with free value offers like links to helpful blogs, videos, eBooks, or whitepapers that educate or inform. These pieces could be about using your service, industry news, or advice and solutions for audience pain points.
• List Segmentation: Create targeted workflows tailored to each segment of your contacts. These lists could be segmented by how often they interact, their job roles, the services they expressed interest in, region, company relationship history, or anything else. Segmented email nurturing campaigns can generate a 760% increase in revenue.
• Email Event Invites: Have you got a trade show, conference, webinar, or speaking engagement coming up? Emails are a great way to drive traffic to the event and nurture your relationship with a lead or existing customer beyond the inbox.
• Don’t Overdo It: An email cadence is about staying top-of-mind, but frequent updates can become an annoyance if you’re not careful. Try to keep it to no more than an email a week.

Reduce Commitment and Increase Urgency

One reason SaaS sales drop in a time of crisis is the perception of being “trapped” in a service contract. There’s a reason contracts exist—they’re good for revenue stability and ensure consistency for both you and your clients. However, this might be a good time to consider restructuring your offerings to reflect the audience’s immediate needs.

Companies and individuals are hesitant to buy in a crisis, even if your marketing messages sound professional and compelling. If your brand can introduce a workable month-to-month package, this could be the lead gen rocket fuel you need to get through tough times.

Marketing for SaaS companies typically involves messages about how much your service makes the client’s life easier. But what they really need is an easier way to justify the purchase. You’ll get a lot of mileage out of 30-day trial contracts, shorter renewal intervals, incremental billing, and other flexible, low-commitment talking points.

Urgency is the other side of the coin, here. Charles Kirkland would tell you to offer a “painkiller” instead of a “vitamin.” This is strong call-to-action advice, but urgency also means demonstrating to the client that you’ll get them going ASAP. 

If onboarding, installation, implementation, and training typically take 30 days, you may be losing sales because prospects aren’t even sure if they’ll still need or want your services after 30 days. See if there’s a way to get them going faster, then market the heck out of it with messages like:

• “Fast-track onboarding for an agile COVID-19 response!”
• “We know time is of the essence right now. Our team will have you up and running in under a week.”
• “New rapid installation service to get you started immediately.”
• “Call now and we’ll get you started on the same day.”

The sense of immediate gratification is especially compelling in a stressful, shifting landscape like this pandemic. See what your team can manage and make it happen. This is one of the highest-impact tools in the box when marketing for SaaS companies in a crisis. Appealing to your audience’s urgency with a sense that there’s ‘nothing to lose’ can drive sales directly.

Now Get Started!

To sum up: expand your focus on inbound tactics (which techies love to consume), embrace the more cost-effective digital channels (to reduce spending), do everything you can to streamline onboarding (and talk about it!), and consider campaigning on lower-commitment offers (at least for now).

Together, these tactics will cut costs, reassure clients, and improve your ROI ratio—all at once. Lost sales aren’t ideal, but it’s within your SaaS company’s power to recover and come back stronger than ever.