Emilia Korcynska is a marketing manager at User Pilot, the onboarding tool for SaaS businesses. She is also the head of growth at Postfity which is a social media scheduling tool that allows you to save time on social media.
Show Notes
[1.48] – Emilia talks about how she started working in SaaS
She was running a content marketing agency a couple of years ago and she started getting more SaaS clients. Her partner also had a SaaS business during that time.
She eventually became very interested in SaaS tools and in the last couple of years she has worked exclusively with marketing SaaS tools.
[2.16] – What can you do on the onboarding stage to help with your churn?
Some statistics estimate that the median annual churn rate for SaaS businesses is about 20%.
Low growth companies tend to experience high churn rate.
The acceptable churn rate is somewhere between 5% and 7% annually.
[3.00] – What are important steps we can take during the onboarding stage to help improve SaaS churn rate
You need to personally your onboardings, you need to think of the target users you want to attract with your product and you need to consider the different demographics and groups you have.
If you have different plans for your products, you cannot treat individuals, self-employed, small businesses and agencies the same way.
You need to show different features to the different groups of your customers and you can do this on the welcome screen where you ask one to three questions about your user role.
[7.19] – Is there anything founders can do to retain customers better in these times?
You can communicate with your customers via email and that is the first place where you should do that.
You should pay more attention to user behavior using analytics tool. Communicate with all the different group of users you have and offer them personalized help based on what you have seen them doing during this time.
You need to make them see the value in your tool because everyone is kind of going into saving mode and they are looking for places to cut costs.
[8.53] – Are there any specific examples of ways we can help customers achieve their goals?
For example when it comes to email marketing tools if your users are struggling with collecting subscribers. You can send them articles from your knowledge base or even invite them to jump on a call or create a special workshop to show them how to collect subscribers and how to do it effectively.
[10.20] – Emilia gives her take on discounts
She was initially against dropping prices and discounting because it kind of devalues your products and shows that maybe it wasn’t well priced in the first place.
However if a specific sector of your users is struggling due to the Corona situation and you have asked them or they wrote to you about how they are struggling you can offer them a discount for a limited time such as 3 months or a subscription break.
The key goal is to keep them using your tool because it is very difficult to find new customers, onboard them and teach them how to use your tool. It is way easier to retain existing customers even if it means they won’t be paying as much for a while.
[12.44] – She sheds more light on the findings from her company’s research on more than a thousand SaaS companies.
They took over a thousand SaaS companies and signed up for them and they were stunned by the lack of personalization in most of them.
It was also discovered that only 40% of SaaS companies use a welcome screen and this sets the tone for a relationship with the user as you miss an opportunity to find out more about them.
They found out that only a few SaaS products are using video within their app to explain certain features or welcome the users. Video usage within Saas apps was under 20% according to their research.
[15.36] – Are there any books you feel SaaS founders would find valuable on the topic of churn?
It is on how we have entered the product led growth era and it shows the difference in how software is purchased these days and how it should affect the way we build and market software.
[17.20] – Emilie talks about User Pilot
User Pilot is primarily focused on SaaS onboarding but they are gradually transitioning to an all-round tool for building product experiences without coding.
It allows product managers to create various experiences that enable the user use their tools more effectively without engaging the development team.
That is very important especially for up and coming SaaS businesses because development time is very expensive.
