Congratulations if your B2B, SaaS startup has made it past the 10, 100, or 1,000+ customers milestone.
Unfortunately, growth and success come with new challenges.
In the B2B, SaaS world, one problem you’ll face (or already facing) is finding ways to reduce churn.
It’s almost inevitable these days. So much that over 55% of SaaS businesses rated customer retention as the most critical growth metric to track.
Today, you’ll learn how to reduce churn in your SaaS business.
What Does it Mean to Reduce Churn?
If your churn rate is above 20%, growing to $100k MRR, or scaling to $10+ million ARR, becomes very VERY difficult.
In short, you have a 92% chance of existence in a few years at such poor SaaS customer retention rates.
Despite this, most executives only pursue growth through every possible customer acquisition technique that shows up.
Lemme ask you…
Are your growth hacks driving leads and bringing in tens of new customers from the front door monthly?
Good. But know that…
Regardless, you’ll still not increase MRR if you lose them (and others) through the back door without even squeezing out your CAC.
Why not lockdown your existing customers by reducing churn before jumping into every growth rabbit hole?
Can You Reduce B2B, SaaS Churn?
Yes.
Many B2B, SaaS brands accept reducing churn is difficult. I see it almost like David slaying Goliath.
Like the Israelites believed no one could defeat Goliath, churn can clog your growth so much you’ll feel helpless.
However, all it took David to bring down Goliath was a careful examination of the situation and proactive precision, using only his brain, a catapult, and stone.
You don’t even need to go looking for the special catapult or stone David used, meaning you may not need fancy tools.
You will, however, need a careful examination of your situation and proactive precision in the actions you’ll take to tame the monster called churn.
You’re reading this because you already got the brains. That’s 50% of the hurdle.
Keep going, what follows will equip you with how to optimize and apply that your brainpower to reduce churn…
by creating targeted awareness.
Download my Complete SaaS Guide to Create a Content Topic Cluster Strategy to build new categories or topical authorities to power your SaaS business.
Reducing B2B, SaaS Churn By Creating Targeted Awareness
Step back for a while and reflect.
Out of the tens or hundreds of trial (or new) users you onboard monthly, how many of them go on to become paying customers beyond one month?
One, 5, ten, 100?
For example, if you keep targeting and onboarding the wrong people who churn at 20% per month, your business won’t last long.
Let’s say you start with 100 customers who pay $500/month. Even if you add 10 new customers/month, as long as they’re not well-targeted, you still won’t survive.
If those numbers aren’t what you desire (or you think you deserve more), your product awareness isn’t well-targeted.
Without targeted awareness, you’ll only end up attracting, and onboarding wrong leads.
Can you fit a square peg into a round hole?
No.
In the same vein, you can’t convince people to become and remain customers if they were the wrong fits in the first place.
It’s like a forced date.
If someone loves you only for what you can buy for them; there are high chances that love quenches the moment you can’t afford more luxuries.
Growth hacks and paid acquisition kung fu can only lure people to your product, but they won’t pay for it if it’s not valuable to them.
Don’t feel sad about that.
Unqualified leads would never consider it valuable enough to pay for your product.
Hence, they’ll churn faster than they even joined.
And because they weren’t even fit or qualified in the first place, your SaaS startup ends up wasting:
- Customer acquisition costs (CAC)
- Time, and
- More resources, trying to delight or satisfy people you shouldn’t be talking to in the first place.
All to no good.
Enter the Creation of Targeted Awareness
Admit it.
Not everyone who likes your SaaS product would become a loyal customer. Only those who derive real value will.
Yes, you need to increase reach by creating as much awareness as possible, but the quality of people you reach plays a vital role, regarding how much churn you can reduce.
Consider the B2B, SaaS sales funnel below:
If you manage to convert at the SaaS industry average of 5-8%, you also need to ensure you’re doing that from the best sample of traffic in the first place.
For example, let’s say you convert at 5%.
What are you left with if you drive a traffic size of 1,000 visitors into your SaaS funnel?
If you manage to move those visitors through the six funnel stages, (pictured above), at a 5% conversion rate, only 50 people will become users (trial or paid).
However, if those 50 people only became users because of your coupons or growth hacks, they’ll churn before you even take a breath.
That’s what targeted awareness, using content topic clusters, will help you to overcome.
Don’t get me wrong.
Awareness and traffic are critical, but remember it’s ‘garbage in, garbage out.’
If your traffic to user-conversion rate is steady, yet you’re still fighting churn and struggling to grow MRR; then, you don’t need more traffic.
Hear what JR Farr of Weav.com says:
“It’s important to understand that churn is a symptom of something bigger.
The faster you can understand why your customers are leaving, the sooner you can get to fixing it. Stop trying to fix the sink when the well is broken.”
-JR Farr.
The well, in this case, is the quality of awareness, traffic, and leads you’re attracting.
Using Targeted Awareness to Reduce B2B, SaaS Churn with Content Topic Clusters
As you saw from the SaaS sales funnel picture above, nowadays, marketing takes up 4/6 (or 67%) of the cycle before sales come in.
So, how do you ensure your sales team is only talking to, and onboarding the most qualified leads to increase your chances of retaining them?
Content topic clusters can help.
The ultimate goal with content topic clusters is to educate prospects well enough and get them to seek your product without forcing them to do so.
An educated customer is your best customer.
Why?
They understand their pains, they know the options, yet they’ll choose your SaaS product because it offers them the best value for money.
Now, it’s your job to educate and help them navigate those hurdles, as well as feel the value you offer, using well-planned content topic clusters.
The five steps to achieve that are what follows…
1. Research, Observe and Understand
Your goal here?
Take the time to understand the prospects you should be targeting awareness of your SaaS product in the first place.
To be successful, you must go beyond surface-level demographic research metrics.
You’ve heard that for the umpteenth time?
Well, that’s because it matters, and taking the time to do it properly would ultimately save you from struggling to retain customers.
Remember, these prospects are real people like you. Hence, it’s vital that you identify their pains, challenges, objections, and goals.
In short, gather everything you can find and list out all of them. That’ll form the foundation for developing your content topic clusters.
2. Define Your Awareness Goal
Firstly, your product must be reasonable and MUST solve a real problem.
That’s a no-brainer. Nothing will work if your SaaS tool isn’t a cure to someone’s pain.
I know. Ultimately, you want sales.
Everybody wants that, too.
However, like you, no one, including your prospects, wants to be sold.
Having an ambitious revenue target is excellent. But that’s a commission you’ll get for helping people solve their problems when they use your tool.
So, what should your awareness goal be?
Simple.
To help the people you identified in step one appreciate the value of your SaaS tool in solving their challenges and achieving their goals.
Nothing too fancy.
To reduce churn in SaaS, the quality of product awareness created should surpass the quantity of traffic generated.
You can’t force people to buy things.
However, once a prospect is well aware of your tool as the best solution to solve their problems, that’s the easiest sell because they’ll proceed by themselves.
3. Figure Out Context
You’ve understood the pain points and challenges of your prospects.
The awareness goal of your SaaS tool is simple and straightforward: Quality over quantity.
Next, keeping your goal in mind, how do you talk about your SaaS product relative to those identified pains, challenges, and goals of your prospects?
To figure out the right context and manner of targeting your SaaS awareness, some questions you’ll answer are:
- How are you different?
- What’s your brand promise?
- Why should they listen to you above your competitors?
Excellent B2B, SaaS products are bridges that take prospects to a promised land where they can save time, become more efficient, increase productivity, make more money, etc.
In what context does yours fit in as that bridge?
For example, here’s a peep into how I apply the above steps to create super-relevant contents:
4. Create, Cluster, and Distribute
Competition in the SaaS industry is becoming fiercer by the hour. If you just create it, they won’t come.
Most importantly, please take it upon yourself to attract prospects you’ve identified, instead of allowing anything into your sales funnel.
For this reason, you’ll put everything learned from steps one to three above to develop, cluster, and distribute content pieces to achieve targeted awareness.
The way to do it?
For similar pain points and challenges of your prospects, produce content pieces educating them about how to overcome each.
No fluffs. I mean pure valuable, useful, and actionable information.
Don’t forget to sprinkle the context of how your SaaS product makes overcoming those problems easier.
Now, examine the goals and aspirations of your target audience relevant to those pains and challenges, and develop another set of content pieces to address each.
Again, insert insights into how your tool makes those goals and aspirations more realistic and lasting.
Now cluster these content pieces by linking them together.
In the end, you want to arrange them under a single topic.
Thus, creating a content topic cluster, which addresses the informational and transformational queries of your prospects comprehensively under the same theme.
Distribute your content pieces.
Ensure you link out relevant content pieces in the same content topic cluster so that readers can navigate and consume them as they desire.
Allow them to enjoy, just like you’re enjoying this article right now.
5. Qualify and Segment
You’ve reached the business part of using content topic clusters to reduce churn in SaaS via targeted awareness.
Here’s the stage where you get to qualify and segment prospects your targeted awareness attracted.
Within your informational content pieces, insert lead magnets or content upgrades to encourage people to take action and become leads.
Like I do it:
For transactional content pieces, invite prospects to your demo/product trials.
Like Grammarly does it:
In each case, don’t just give out these lead magnets or send invites for your demo.
Use pop up forms to segment prospects.
That’s how to get better information about their specific needs to enhance your personalization efforts.
Like Wild Audience does it:
For those who don’t become leads or sign up for trials/demos, observe how they consume your content pieces, as well as how they navigate from one page to another.
With Google Analytics or a similar tool, create goals segmenting people who visited specific pages, using your gut feelings to predict they were trying to solve relative to your SaaS tool.
Now, these are the people to target paid ads.
They are warm after being educated about their problems from your site.
However, don’t move straight into converting them into trial users. Offer them more valuable information to educate them further, as well as qualify them.
Summary of reducing SaaS churn through Targeted Awareness
The targeted awareness tactic of reducing churn in SaaS demands that you allow prospects to decide on their own that your SaaS tool is what they need.
Your goal is to concentrate on creating and distributing content pieces needed to influence such a realization.
Then, by using content topic clusters, you make it easy for visitors to find the content pieces most suitable for them.
Through the insertion of relevant lead magnets and upgrades, they’ll proceed naturally into leads and customers by themselves.
In the end, they know what they’re signing up for, the value they’ll derive, and how it’ll help them to become more successful.
Thus, they’ll stick around more and help to reduce your B2B, SaaS churn.
Download my Complete SaaS Guide to Create a Content Topic Cluster Strategy to build new categories or topical authorities to power your SaaS business.
