The SaaS industry is a demanding one. In order to promote your products successfully you need to attract potential customers and stay step further ahead of your competitors. Moreover, you need clients to stay with you for a while and spend some money on your solutions. It is not a piece of cake.
Additionally, it is not so easy to create a marketing campaign about SaaS products. Digital products are harder to promote than physical ones since you can’t show customers how beautiful they are or encourage them to choose from a large variety of designs, for example. It is hard to present why the product should be chosen by potential customers when they want to see visual proof.
People talking about your product provides similar evidence for digital products. In this case, what can you do to make a buzz about your SaaS? One way is referral marketing, or to be more precise, creating a referral program with EarlyParrot.
Let’s start from scratch, what are the benefits of referral marketing for SaaS businesses?
Why is it worth starting a referral program in the SaaS industry?
The following reasons should convince you to set up a referral program for your customers. As a SaaS business you need to take care of your leads; they should have a long lifetime value and be high quality in order to deliver you some results. What are some reasons to fall in love with referral marketing if you run a SaaS business? Does the referral process give you qualified leads and increase revenue? Let’s find out!
Greater customer lifetime value and lead quality
As we mentioned, customer lifetime value matters across all industries, but in the SaaS field it is even more important. When it comes to referral customers, they have up to 16 times longer lifetime value. This means they stay with you longer, trust you, and spend more money on your solutions. Moreover, thanks to a referral strategy, your churn rate may decrease too. Doesn’t that sound promising?
In addition, as a SaaS, you need to build an audience of qualified and knowledgeable people who will be able to use your solution, as well as people who are familiar with the challenges it can solve. All the boxes will be checked when using referral marketing – your clients spread the word about you to their friends in the industry, which means they will be knowledgeable about the field and have experience in the area.
People are more likely to trust referrals from known people than strangers
This is always one of the first advantages stated about referral marketing. No surprise, since it is a very important aspect and the main power of referrals. Advice from your friends is probably worth more than that from influencers, as you can probably say from your own experience. After all, our close ones are close for a reason. They are reliable, and that is one of their big plus points. When it comes to referrals, the same applies. If clients have doubts about what to buy, they may ask their friends. If they recommend your site and share a referral link too, it’s mission accomplished. You will probably gain new, loyal customers this way, provided you meet their expectations and deliver a great user experience.
It decreases costs
Referral marketing is relatively low cost. The price of the software shouldn’t burn a hole in your pocket, plus it can help with lowering other expenses like customer acquisition costs. Referral links can bring you a 25% higher profit margin. As one of the cheapest distribution channels, it can be said that referrals marketing is highly reliable. Moreover, it does not require big investments in resources either. No need for an IT team or a bunch of marketing people, you can do it yourself provided you choose the right software to support you. What’s more, creating campaigns is also a very easy process that doesn’t require much time.
Referrals build brand awareness
Generating a buzz around your brand might get you some fame. Riding a wave of popularity can build your brand positioning in many people’s minds. Moreover, you may become the go-to solution when a given company hits bumps on the road. Needless to say the more people who know about your brand, the more will be curious about your solution and test out a free trial and/or buy your product.
Great examples (click here for more) of such buzz are Uber’s referral program and the latest flavour of the month, Clubhouse. People were curious about the latter, and its popularity went wild recently, with everybody talking about it and asking for referral links.
Referral marketing software – why choose EarlyParrot?
You might ask yourself why it is so important to choose the right referral software. Well, without a good tool you won’t be able to achieve any of the above results, at least not on a large scale. What criteria should the best software solutions meet?
- Implementing and integrating it with other apps/programs should be easy.
- It has to be simple to create a referral program and track its performance.
- This should make it easy for you to follow the analytics of your programs.
- You must be able to customize your campaigns as much as you wish.
And we have some great news – EarlyParrot meets all of the above requirements!
So now it is time to show you how to use EarlyParrot to its fullest potential. Let’s start from the beginning – the installation process.
#1 It takes up to 15 minutes to install
EarlyParrot is so user-friendly that it will guide you through the installation process step-by-step. You don’t need to have an IT degree to install it, as the tool will advise what to clink and when. Moreover, the whole process only takes up to 15 minutes, so there is no long-term plan or implementation strategy needed.
#2 Creating a referral marketing campaign is quick and easy
Once the software is installed, you should focus on creating your referral marketing campaign. You need to start by establishing your goal, which for most SaaS businesses is simply generating more sign-ups.
Now it’s time to click next and start your campaign. The first step here is choosing a reward system. You have three options to choose from: Reward Unlocking, Top Influencer, or Fast Lane. Once you choose the system, it is high to establish the rewards themselves. Think about what would work best for you – cash incentives, free gifts, extended free trials, or perhaps something else?
EarlyParrot allows you to name your reward, establish a target, and choose whether it will be a welcome gift or a referral one. In other words, take care of your reward structure. Moreover, you can even upload an image of the reward. No worries if you are creating your first campaign. An explanation appears on each text box when the pointer hovers over it to help you decide what to type into each one. What’s more, this referral program software will not let you hit next until you complete all of the required fields.
In this step, you can also design a unique coupon code to be sent with a referral reward email. Small things that matter!
#3 EarlyParrot handles communication on your behalf
Communication is an essential factor when it comes to building relationships with your customers and improving the user experience. Thanks to EarlyParrot you have it covered! What’s the plan? Start by writing the content of invitations.
The first step is to invite people, so you need to design messages and their content for customers to be able to share across social media channels. You have Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to choose from, as well as messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Messenger, Viber, and Telegram.
Speaking of invitations, you should invite people from your customer base to join your referral marketing program, and it is very easy to do so. You can import your existing customers via CSV. Such a massive injection of participants will allow you to hit the ground running with your customer referral program.
However, let’s return to your communication. You can design emails too. First, fill in the “From field”, i.e. your name and email address. Then you can choose email templates and triggers. There are various options depending on the type of email you want to send. Once you choose the template you can go to the next step.
The most crucial aspect when it comes to sharing pages is their design. You can set how sharing widgets will look for your referral program participants. Also, sharing widget activity and the appearance of reward widgets can be customized according to your taste.
In keeping with the sharing topic, referral links can be branded. This will be a great boost for your SEO efforts, and may also help improve brand awareness.
#4 The analytical aspects of your campaign are not a secret anymore
EarlyParrot’s dashboards allow you to get a quick overview of each of your campaigns. Additionally, you can edit them any time you log in to the platform.
It is possible to track the number of invites sent out, shares on social media, conversion rate, and more crucial indicators. Since there is no ready-made recipe for working together with people, it is important to follow such KPIs. The program needs to be adapted to continuously changing market needs and preferences. Monitoring such measures helps also with arranging or redesigning your referral marketing strategy.
As a recap, to run a successful referral program you should focus on analyzing your referral model and providing some tests from time to time. Only this way will you be able to stay up to date with market trends. And EarlyParrot is on duty!
Over to you
There may be a perception that referral marketing is timeless, even though online marketing trends change all the time. Recommendations from friends will always be precious, and that goes for SaaS companies too. In this industry, more money is involved than the consumer market, which means the risks are greater. So good advice from a reliable source is even more valuable for SaaS businesses.
We hope that after reading this article you will be curious about referral marketing and want to give it a try with EarlyParrot. It could drive you increased traffic and help with decreasing costs. If you want to dive into the topic even deeper by reading more about starting your own referral marketing program, feel free to check out this article.