How to Engage Your Subscription-Based Customers Better

Managing a successful subscription-based or SaaS business means having a very engaged userbase.

Engaged users spend more money, never miss failed payments, recommend you to others and never want to cancel.

Yet, engaging users is getting more and more difficult. As web users have access to more communities and platforms, they easily get distracted and may often forget about you and your business:

Six Meaningful Ways to Engage Your Users

1. Offer exclusive discounts for upsells

Most customers enjoy feeling special. If you offer exclusive deals to your current users, they are likely to appreciate it. If you personalize those offers, you may achieve even better results.

For example, you can give exclusive deals:

• On your customer’s birthday
• On your customer’s anniversary (on the date when he/she joined your platform)
• After a certain personal milestone is achieved (e.g after your customer has purchased a certain amount of your products or spent a certain amount of money with you)

Using email automation these triggers are easy to set up.

2. Offer a freebie

Taking the previous step even further, why not give them a freebie instead of a discount?

Don’t underestimate the power of free. No one will complain when they receive a freebie. Free is always better valued than very cheap, even if it doesn’t make economical sense. 

Giving anything for free is always a great way to get your customers more involved and consequently spend more money with you.

A freebie can be anything – from a free ebook to a branded swag. You can experiment with multiple ideas here to pick the ones that seem to be most appreciated.

You can even re-use your existing content as a freebie by expanding it and turning into a downloadable asset.

Text Optimizer is the tool which will allow you to find meaningful way to update and expand your existing content to turn it into a content upgrade (i.e. a downloadable asset you can use for lead generation as well as engaging your existing customer base):

3. Hold a webinar

Don’t underestimate the power of free education. SaaS business thrives when the company and its clients grow together. You want your users to become better at whatever they are doing, get richer and then spend more money with you.

While webinars are great lead generation tools, they are also great for engaging and educating your current users. The best approach to creating an effective webinar strategy:

• Listen to your current and target customers to identify their pain points
• Create customer personas
• Develop webinar schedule targeting all kinds of personas to help them in their struggles
• Use one of these plugins to integrate webinars into your blog and content marketing strategy

If you make it very clear that those webinars are not for upselling and that you genuinely want to help your customers, you will be surprised to see how well this will work. 

PayKiskstart offers a variety of webinar integrations for you to use your current solution in combination with your vendor dashboard:

Also, make sure to check out our on-demand webinars to learn more about SaaS marketing and boosting your revenue.

4. Start a referral program

If your customers are using your platform, they are very likely to really love it. And they probably already recommend it to their friends or colleagues. Now, if you offer them a referral fee for their recommendations, they will love you even more!

With PayKickstart makes it easy to start your own affiliate program (if you upgrade to the Growth (Professional) or Scale (Premium) plan). With it you can structure your program The way you want:

Affiliate marketing works well with blogging as well, so you may find all your marketing efforts benefit from this move.

5. Invite feedback

Customer feedback is priceless: Your current userbase is your most unique, most valuable asset. They can help you improve your product and make it more competitive. They will also help you fix internal errors (customer support, sales, etc.) to help you make your marketing more efficient, while avoiding the risk of reputation crises.

It is not a bad idea to add a separate call to action in each of your emails inviting feedback. You can also automate feedback collection by using PayKickstart’s “Surveys” option.

You can trigger your customer feedback survey based on your customer’s action (purchase, cancellation, refund request, etc.)

6. Invite beta testers

If you are still developing your platform and work on new features, make your current userbase part of your development project: Invite them to beta test.

This will help you on many levels:

• You will be able to identify your most engaged users
• You can now turn your active customers into brand ambassadors
• Your current users, who know your current product, will provide the most valuable and actionable feedback on your new features

Setting up a brand ambassadorship program is also the first step to starting an effective influencer marketing strategy. According to Megaphone Marketing, influencer marketing can boost both sales and engagement.

How to Reach Out to Your Subscribers

1. Send an email blast

Sending personalized emails to your customers and trial users is the most effective way to keep in touch with them. Make sure you obtain their agreement to hear from you. When they are creating an account with you, they should check the box agreeing that you can use their addresses to email them with updates. This way you keep your business safe from any complaints.

PayKickstart allows you to connect any of your email marketing solutions to turn your customers’ emails into an email list. Use any of the available integrations including ConvertKit, Getresponse, Mailchimp, and more

2. Use Facebook Custom Audiences

Another great way to keep in touch with your current userbase is by using Facebook custom audience.

Facebook takes your email list and matches it to their users to create your custom audience. Facebook will not show you who is included in that list (for privacy concerns) but you will be able to serve ads to your users on Facebook.

This is a great way to capture the attention of those users who, for some reason, miss your emails.

Track Your Progress!

You cannot improve what you are not measuring, so it is essential to monitor your engagements. Keep an eye on your site returning visitors as well as your email list engagement. Finteza is the tool that can help!

Finteza is a powerful engagement and retention analytics platform that will help you identify whether you are making any progress in engaging your current customers.

Conclusion

Engaging your customers and users is a never-ending task. You need to always re-discover your business and find new ways to get your users closer to your brand. Don’t get discouraged. Working closely with your customers will ultimately make your business better and help it stand out in the crowd of competitors. Good luck!

Ann Smarty

Ann Smarty is the Brand Manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas, as well as co-founder of Viral Content Bee. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for over a decade, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Ann is also the frequent speaker at Pubcon and the host of a weekly Twitter chat #vcbuzz

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