📕 Brand voices that reduce churn, the right marketing hires by stage, a new framework for customer experience...
Happy Friday, hope everyone had a great close to the quarter!
SaaStock EMEA is coming up October 12-15, and as always, they've got a great line-up of speakers covering everything from perfecting your sales pitch to nitty-gritty lead gen tactics. As a bonus, they're giving our readership a 20% discount on the conference price – you can find out more about the details here, just make sure to use the code THESAASPLAYBOOK20 when you register to get our discount rate.
🧁 There are countless articles on the different ways to reduce churn, most of them reiterating the same advice around segmenting customers to identify struggling users, and other common strategies. But this take on cutting churn by keeping a consistent brand voice is pretty interesting. Doing so builds a sense of loyalty and trust amongst your customers, which is hard to quantify, but easy to recognize. They use the example of how Betty Crocker created a cult-like following by giving the company’s namesake a voice and personality – the fictitious Betty Crocker spoke to customers in a language that they not only understood but that was relatable. The result was so positive that over time “Betty Crocker” became synonymous with baked goods.
🎡 Alright, your business is forced to only focus on only one of the following: customer acquisition or retention… which do you choose? It’s not a totally fair question because negative net churn is where most enterprise companies see growth, so retention would be the obvious choice. But if you’re a company that doesn’t have a strong customer base as it stands, there’s no point in trying to upsell your base. This is to say, your focus should depend on where your company is in its lifespan. If you are an early-stage company, make sure you’re laying the proper retention framework as you go. You don’t want a leaky bucket that drops customers just as you nail your acquisition model down.
🌱 As companies scale, their marketing needs inevitably evolve. Our best advice for you around hiring is to choose based on the specific skills your company needs during its different phases of growth. For example, you can probably get by farming out creatives early on, but if you are hiring your first marketer, you’ll want someone with a balance of strategy and execution, and scrappiness to get the marketing ball rolling. As you scale, it makes more sense to bring in-demand generation experts and specialists in areas like SEO and PPC even further down the line. Remember, building a marketing team is a bit like building a product, focus on essential functions first, then optimize with different iterations.
📦 The pandemic has accelerated the shift towards digital channels for all companies, with customers now looking for a seamless experience with brands that they can no longer connect with in person. How seamless? DemandLab reported that 69% of B2B customers are expecting “Amazon-like” buying experiences. Marketers stand the most to gain here due to their blend of technical skills and deep understanding of their customers, leading to the birth of what some are calling marketing-led customer experience. The difference between it and the previous customer experience is marketers interact with them more frequently and connect the dots throughout all stages of the customer’s life cycle.
👟 LearnWorlds CEO and co-founder, Panos Siozos, jumped on the SaaS Podcast to share the story of their now quickly growing eLearning platform. But it wasn’t always rainbows and kittens – Siozos “went into a bunker” for two years to build the product, and when he emerged, he didn’t realize the trouble he’d have landing early customers. It ended up taking almost a full year to reach five customers. After realizing the disconnect between what they built and what customers wanted, he worked furiously to iterate until he started to see more traction. It was through the mindset of working to be better every day that kept the team going, eventually building a wildly successful, multi-national company.