It goes without saying that SaaS is a fast-moving and often cutthroat industry — starkly illustrated by the fact that 90% of SaaS businesses fail, while only roughly a third of them survive past the ten-year mark. It’s clear, then, that SaaS businesses can seldom afford to drag their heels when it comes to keeping pace with industry trends, tech innovations, and crucially, their competitors.
In such a fast-paced landscape where time is invaluable and innovation is essential, automation is fast becoming an indispensable ally — particularly if you’re managing a growing SaaS business. One area that’s significantly benefiting from automation is marketing, and in this post, we’re going to examine how marketing automation can help SaaS businesses stay ahead.
Read on to discover 5 of the most valuable benefits of marketing automation for SaaS businesses.
More effective lead generation and qualification
One of the primary use cases for marketing automation in the SaaS industry is in generating, qualifying and nurturing leads throughout the sales funnel. These are fundamental factors of a successful sales and marketing strategy, of course, but they take ample time and effort to get right. Marketing automation tools can streamline and optimize this process, however, by making it easier to generate and engage leads, and by enabling more efficient lead management through a process called lead scoring.
An automated chatbot can provide a first point of contact for a prospective lead, for example, by engaging them as soon as they hit your website or show buying or exit intent. They can even route leads through to a sales agent to finalize a sale if necessary. And when it comes to lead qualification, automated tools can leverage data about your leads to determine whether they’re a warm or cold prospect, assigning a score to each potential customer and enabling you to focus on the leads most likely to convert.
A streamlined user experience
A seamless user experience (UX) is crucial to the success of any SaaS product, but it’s just as important when marketing your product to your target audience. Automation is fundamental here, since one of its advantages is enabling you to offer more personalized experiences. By integrating marketing automation tools with CRM software, for instance, you can leverage customer data to identify individual preferences and pain points, tailoring your marketing content to each prospect in a way that’s more likely to resonate with them.
You can also enhance the user experience by making it as seamless and straightforward as possible for your customers to sign up and pay for your product. A website that’s near-impossible to navigate or a payment process that requires significant hoop-jumping is likely to deter a prospective customer, while a smooth and barrier-free experience will increase the chances of a conversion: in short, ensure your website is designed for easy navigation, your checkout process is uncomplicated, and you can accept one-time and recurring payments with ease — using a reliable recurring payment provider for the latter.
More targeted email campaigns
Email marketing may seem old hat in the age of TikTok and Instagram, but it remains a highly valuable tool in the arsenal of any SaaS marketer — in fact, it may be up to 40 times more effective than social media, according to a report by McKinsey & Company. One of the reasons email marketing continues to drive results is that it allows for a high level of targeting — ensuring campaigns are relevant to their recipients and sent at the optimal times — and that’s increasingly possible through automation.
Take the marketing automation tool Dotdigital, for example: with its intelligent automation software, you can trigger targeted emails and SMS messages automatically throughout the customer journey. Automation can also help to convert hesitant prospects or re-engage lapsed customers, for example by sending an automated cart reminder to a user who didn’t complete the checkout process, or by generating a unique discount code for a customer who hasn’t renewed their subscription.
Greater capacity to innovate
SaaS is a highly competitive and evolving landscape, and therefore SaaS businesses are required to innovate and adapt in order to keep pace with their competition. You may have the most cutting-edge product on the market right now, but that doesn’t mean you can rest on your laurels: competitor brands are likely enhancing their own offerings, and your product could lose market share if you fail to keep innovating and improving.
While marketing automation may not specifically aid innovation, it can free up marketing teams so that they have more capacity to get creative, generating inventive new concepts and building leading-edge marketing campaigns. By automating the less engaging parts of the marketing process — qualifying leads or maintaining CRM data, for example — their time can be spent more productively, more efficiently, and ultimately more creatively.
An omnichannel approach
Now more than ever, marketing is a multi-faceted endeavor. No longer are there a mere handful of marketing channels to consider — there’s an almost endless list of ways to engage and connect with prospective buyers. In SaaS, this is no different, with SaaS businesses increasingly required to maintain an effective website, multiple social media accounts, email marketing platforms, paid search campaigns, and even more modern marketing tools such as podcasts, among others.
What this tells us is that marketing in 2023 demands an omnichannel mindset, whereby each marketing channel is not its own discrete entity but one branch of an interconnected strategy. Omnichannel marketing means being able to connect with consumers over multiple channels at once (Millennials and Gen Z users have an average of 8.5 social media accounts each), and automation enables you to manage all of these channels more effectively by reducing the manual processes involved in maintaining them (by automatically turning content into social media posts, for example).
In conclusion, marketing automation is a powerful tool that all SaaS businesses should be leveraging to supercharge their growth in this competitive industry. Automating certain aspects of the SaaS marketing process can enhance lead generation and qualification, streamline UX, enable more targeted campaigns, allow marketers to innovate more, and open up a number of avenues to connect with potential customers.
This was a sponsored post.