The Best SaaS Growth Hacking Strategies You Must Try

           The fastest growing SaaS companies put the customer needs first. They listen to their customer's needs and understand their goals, behavior, and challenges. Effective growth requires a framework for extracting customer insights. There are two sides of smart growth framework,
     * Lean Strategic Planning: It is the process of regularly reviewing the performance against goals, extracting insights from the customer, continually updating the buyer persona & customer profiles, then developing new growth strategy ideas on the back of customer understanding.
     * Agile Execution: It is the process of prioritizing growth strategies in the backlog, developing new hypotheses, executing small-scale tests, analyzing performance, scaling up success and documenting lessons learned from failures on an ongoing basis.
         The highest performing SaaS companies growing at rapid pace. These companies are growing at an average pace as 56% per year, there initial public offering(IPO) has been doubled over the last 12 years, and the industry as a whole grow to $78 billion per year sector. This type of growth hacking has allowed creative founders, developers, marketers through the sheer virtue of experimentation - trying any and all tools, techniques, and strategies at their disposal to grow their businesses. The unique, inventive, cost-effective ideas with the goal of providing all the information that you can use to grow your own SaaS business.
The Key Metrics to Measure and analyze are,
  1. Customer Churn: As SaaS businesses are based on annual subscriptions, maintaining your existing customer is equally important than acquiring a new one. Churn help you better understand the retention by specific insight on activity across specific date or time periods.
  2. Revenue Churn: If subscription price is variable depending on the number of seats or users a customer pays for, the customer churn rate is vastly different than the churn rate if some customers generate more revenue than others.
 3. Customer Life Time Value(CLV): It is the average amount of money that your customers pay during their engagement with your company. This metric provides businesses with an accurate portrayal of their growth in 3 steps.
      * Find your customer lifetime rate by dividing the number 1 by your customer churn rate. For ex, if your monthly churn rate is 1%, your customer lifetime rate would be 100(1/0.01=100)
      * Find your average revenue per account(ARPA)  by dividing a total revenue by the total number of customer. If your revenue was $100,000 divide it by 100 customers and your ARPA would be $1000 ($100,000 /100 = $1000)
      * Finally, find your CLV by customer lifetime rate with ARPA. Here $100,000 ($1000 * $100 = $100,000)
 4. Customer Acquisition Cost: It shows exactly how much it costs to acquire a new customer and how much value they bring to your business. To calculate CAC, divide your total sales and marketing spend by a total number of new customer you add during given time, For ex, if you spend $100,000 over a month, and you added 100 new customers, your CAC would be $1000.
 5. Customer Engagement Score: It can provide you with how engaged your customer is - how often they are logging in, What they are using your software for, and other contributing metrics that indicate the likelihood they will or will not churn.
 6. Leads by Lifecycle Stage: A basic lead is a prospect who's starting to do his or her research exactly where they are in the buying process.
   Marketing Qualified Lead: A prospect who has takes additional research steps, such as downloading ebooks and returning to your website.
  Sales Qualified Lead: A prospect who has moved beyond the initial research phase is most likely evaluating vendors, and worth a sales follow up.
     Having a firm grasp on your lead qualification definition(MQL. SQL) will help identify and where leads getting stuck in the funnel.
7. Lead to Customer Rate: It shows you how well you are generating sales-ready leads and improving over time. It outlines, how many leads turn into paying customer. It is easy to calculate. Take your total number of customer for any given month, divide it by a total number of leads, and multiply that number by 100. For ex, 5 customers in a month with 500 leads would result in 1% lead-to-customer rate.

The 4 crucial components of growth hacking are,
      * Attracting New Visitors
      * Converting them to Identifiable Leads
      * Closing Sales and
      * Delighting your User

                                Attract New Visitors 
1. Create Viral Sign up Process: Customer acquisition doesn't have to happen one user at a time. Think about how you can leverage one user or subscriber, and double or triple the impact. Most sign up forms requires user information like name and email address. But, you can experiment with viral sign up forms and ask your new signees to share the signup form with a couple of friends. There is good chance you'll see big net gain signups when adding the social media integration and asking for 2-3 shares.
2. Targeted Press Release: Publishing your post on TechCrunch or Venture Beat could have a huge impact on your growth. Be smart enough your outreach, and stand a chance of success,
    * Write a short and sweet PR
    * Focus on the story of your brand
    * Personally reach out to a small number of relevant journalists
3. Build an Influencer List: If you want to grow your audience quickly, network with people of the established audience. Create a list of influential people in your industry, and start engaging with their content, commenting on their ideas, and when you have established a rapport, share your own content with them.
    Remember your influencer has,
      * an audience that matches your buyer persona,
      * to benefit from your content
    When you have a blog post, ebook, infographic or free trial to promote, send each person on your list a tailor-made email. You need an intriguing subject line to stand out from the crowded inbox, from there make your email concise, demonstrate your knowledge of the influencer and explain why your product/offer/resource relevant to their audience.
4. Leverage Q&A sites: Question and Answer sites lets you engage with potential customers in the discussion, and discover what they want from your product. It lets you raise awareness for your product and drive targeted traffic back to your site.
Here are a few of particular importance,
     * Quora is the powerful tool for improving the SEO
     * Inbound.org is the HubSpot's inbound marketing platform
     * Growthhackers is Q&A site dedicated entirely to the noble art of growth hacking
     * Stackoverflow is world renowned Q&A site for the developer.
5. The Skyscraper Technique: Link building is an important part of optimizing your website for search engines. This technique is amazingly as simple as,
    * Find a piece of content in another website relevant to yours which has been shared and linked to a lot
   * Publish a piece of content to your own website that is much better(longer, more detailed, better presented)
   * Reach out to all the people that linked to and shared that content, telling them about the piece of content.

                     Convert to Identifiable Leads

6, Exit Intent Popup: If some of your pages suffer from a big bounce rate (a higher number of people exiting from the page), enlist the help of exit intent popup. When the user clicks the back button, hit them with a message promoting free guide or resource. If it got the broad appeal, there is a chance they might just engage with it, and give you the email address.

7. Retargeting: It is the relatively new form of advertising that makes people show ads to people who have performed a specific action on your website. The key thing to bear in mind when considering retargeting campaign is "Do we have an easily understood value proposition?" If the answer is yes, the retargeting will work well in the given time. It is also classified as,

      * Email retargeting

      * Social Email retargeting

8. The Illusion of Truth Effect: The simple way to reinforce a message is to repeat it. The more we find exposed ourselves to a message, the more familiar it becomes. It is called an illusion of truth - Where we find ourselves more likely to trust and believe through sheer virtue of its familiarity. It is really useful in all manner of marketing context - allowing your business to reinforce its value proposition and those of free resources and downloads, by simply repeating a core message.

9. Micro Conversion: Free Trails, Signups, and sales are the crucial conversions and heart of the businesses. It also requires the biggest commitment and the greatest level of trust. You can also earn the trust from gradual stages - driving visitors towards a major conversion with a series of smaller micro-conversion. Instead of diving the user to the sales offer, start by encouraging the user to signup to your mailing list, or download a free guide. Make their experience rewarding and beneficial as much as possible.

10. Sales Funnel sensitive Landing Pages: Visitors will come to your website at all manner of different channels and looking for all different types of information. In order to maximize the chance of  securing a conversion, you need to tailor your offers to their individual needs and create multiple landing pages

   So, Your landing page should consider,

        * Buyer persona: what their basic needs and pain?

        * Channel: where did visitor come from?

        * Sales Funnel Stage:  Are they looking to buy or in need of some basic information?

        * Past Engagement: Have they downloaded other offers before?

                                    Close the Sales

11. Anchored Pricing: Our attitude towards prices can be influenced by myriad different factors - most notable being the context in which we engage with prices. For ex, $100 shirt seems to be expensive compared to a $50 shirt, but place the same shirt next to $2000 suit, and suddenly, it doesn't seem to be costly. You can easily leverage this by opening the pricing page with the most expensive option. Making all other packages seem more affordable in comparison, and driving up the average spend.

   By introducing useless price points into your pricing structure, it is possible to frame your highest price points in a more desirable way. This SaaS pricing of Product can easily incorporate into your own pricing.

12. Setup Automate Email WorkFlow: Once you have a lead in your contact database, it is important to focus on moving them through the buying process. An excellent way to do this is with the automated email workflows. Before you create an automated workflow, what is the goal of the workflow? how will this workflow move the lead further through the buying process?

                             Delight your User

  13. Send Behaviour Based Email: Behaviour based emails are great SaaS growth hack that can help you retain more revenue and customer, and its pretty simple. First, you need to setup with a piece of software like Intercom or Autosend. These pieces of software track how users are using your application, and give you the ability to send out custom message based on the behavior. 

For ex, You could send email to someone who hasn't logged in after a month, ask him if they need a help. For someone using the software frequently and taking lot of manual steps, you might email them to let him know there's a premium feature that could reduce their time spent in the software and help them to get work done faster if they upgraded.

14. Track your user's Success Milestone: A success milestone is any form of success between your business and user. By tracking these milestones, you can engage with users when they are most grateful to your brand and help reinforce positive relationship. You prove that you care about the success of individual users, and you take the time to recognize their success.

         To understand how you are doing as a company, and how you can improve and grow, you need to understand how well your customer is doing with your service. The best startups are those with the best understanding of their customer's journey, their goals and their success indicator. There are some indicators of customer success that are universal. Here the things to track and measure the churn,
  1. The frequency of login:  It is better that customer more regularly login to your website/ product. But, how regularly your customer will login to your tool depends on what your tool is.
  2. Product Utilization: It is the good indication of the value of your customer is getting from your service. Are they using all the feature or only small percentage of tool's full functionality? The more feature they are using, the more they are integrating into the workday.
  3. Support Engagement: This is the good indicator of customer health. Are they submitting lots of support tickets, viewing your website FAQ or engaging support services? Some engagements are a positive sign. But, the continual request could be a sign that they aren't achieving their goals with your service, and are at risk of churning.