Discover the right SaaS

customer Customer development tips and discovering who to focus on?

What’s in here

• Attracting your target customer

• Identifying who to focus on during the customer development activities

Before we begin

You need to know a couple of things

Startup metrics for pirates?

If you don’t know this, Google “startup metrics for pirates” before you go through this deck.

Made by this guy! (link to original presentation)

which says …

Dave McClure – 500hats.com

How your customers are acquired

Your SaaS app’s customer acquisition consists of 5 steps

5000

250 100 50 5

Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue

Your customers come to your website from

different channels

Users signup and enjoy 1st

visit

Users come back, visit site multiple times

Users like your product/service enough to refer

others

Users pay in some form

We concentrate only on

5000

250 100

Acquisition Activation Retention

Identifying and attracting the real prospects in these two steps

A little about us

Just to set the context for this deck

“muHive is a social conversations manager which lets brands discover and reach out to its customers on social, web

and email”

We are a SaaS solution looking to acquire customers on the web with digital and

content marketing techniques

Alright!

So, you have a SaaS product

You are looking:

1. To acquire customers on the web

2. Identify the right customer to develop

Define your target customer

Our ideal customers is a : Brand/relationship, Marketing or Customer service executive In a small and medium business who is interested in using social media for - Discovering his/her brand reputation - Discovering customers - Gathering feedback - Monitoring competition - Responding to customer queries Someone with a Marketing or a sales background and understands the power of the social web

… or

A small productive marketing, sales or customer service team of an enterprise interested in - Social customer data - Understanding competitive

strategy - Talking to customers about their

new product/service/event - Building long term relationships

with customers using a Social CRM

After this, acquisition is easier You need to: - Be where they hang out (online, offline) - Write content that they can consume - Share interesting strategies and product use cases - Push your product to them via campaigns - Targeted advertising to reach this audience

But how do you attract and

identify a good prospect?

Here are some of the tricks we used to help distinguish casual signups from actual prospects

On the website

Generic product pages don’t

appeal to customers

Our homepage doesn’t talk about the sectors/industries that we cater to. We decided to focus on e-commerce & travel brands as our initial target.

How do we position ourselves

for different industries?

Here’s what we did

Multiple homepages

We added 3 home pages to start (accessible via URL params)

Generic homepage Travel specific E-commerce specific

CTA from industry specific pages go to their corresponding resource pages.

The cookie trick

When a customer lands on an alternate homepages, we add a cookie on their browser indicating their landing page.

For 45 days, whenever that customer visits muHive.com they will always land on the alternate home page.

But, how do we get people on to these homepages? ->

Share it right!

We share the right URLs (including the right parameters) with the right audience via these channels. - Cold emails & newsletters - Social media updates - Relevant blog posts and content - Blog & forum comments Ensures that the folks from the right industries see only the homepage that they can relate to.

One last trick when it comes to automating entry to alternate homepages

HTTP Referrer

Every web server tells you where a customer is coming from.

Scan that URL for trigger words specific to the industry and land them right

http://shopping.indiatimes.com

http://lonelyplanet.com/blog

URL has words shopping, cart, ecommerce, retail, flipkart etc.

URL has words travel, trip, tour, adventure, OTA, flights etc.

muHive for Travel

muHive for e-commerce

Figuring out which customers

to actually work with?

We currently have 100+ signed up businesses on muHive. How do we

identify which customer to pay attention to?

Contact us form

• Nobody can deny the importance of a contact us form, especially for an early stage SaaS product. Here’s our form

• In our experience prospective customers usually tend to fill out most, if not all, fields in a contact us form.

• If there are 2 or 3 intended uses for your product, then adding that category as a choice in the form helps tremendously.

Necessary evil?

Website navigation patterns

• We wrote a fun little plugin on our website that does the following:

– Captures the user’s requesting IP address and maps it to a geographic location

– Adds a breadcrumb trail about the user’s page visits and their timestamps into a database.

– When a visitor clicks on the button, sends an email to us with these data values.

Here’s a sample

IP address

Geo-location Timestamp

Simple stuff right? Look at the results ..

Who’s a better prospect?

We found this kind of data really helpful

Somebody who spent 1 minute looking at the website before signing up

Or somebody who spent 30 minutes looking at the site and then came back the next day and took 5 minutes to sign up.

On the application

Post sign up experience on the product

Track navigation paths

• Prospects who really like the product will be more forgiving of your user experience

If you have a self configuring product with an open signup, you can identify good prospects by looking those customers that have explored a good % of your product.

Understand goal flows

in your analytics tool!

Here’s a tip Create an ideal goal flow that you believe is your “ideal path” to get onboard your product

Now see how many customers follow that path.

You will be wrong and might need to change your product usability/onboarding to get customers to follow your ideal path.

For our early customers,

we conducted personal/online

walkthroughs

Our customers found it hard to

understand and use our

application initially

We would follow this up with onboarding guides post the walkthrough.

But, - It was difficult to scale once we started public signups - Onboarding sessions packed too much information

Few customers would come back to the application even

after the session

Started educating customers about one feature a day, gradually over 5 days, using email.

Day 2 Day 1 Day 3

#WIN: one of our customers saw our day 3 mail and tried signing up again!

Now this is a serious customer

Simplifying onboarding

Customers like it when people talk to them rather than automated bot mails. We send out an email with the reply-to address of the founders welcoming people and asking them to reach out to us in case of any queries, feedback etc. #WIN: lots of customers have written to us thanking us for our email, asking

us queries about the product. Great conversation starter

Welcome mail from CEO

Trick: it’s still automated!

Track time spent on the product

Prospects that are looking to genuinely use your product will spend a considerably longer time using your product.

Google Analytics

Before you go and build something to track time, here’s a simple one line hack to get you this information using the Events feature.

• Events: Add this line and replace the username and page with values to identify your customer and the page they are accessing.

onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', ‘access', ’username‘,’page’]);"

Gives you a nice report on total pages accessed and the username

That’s it!

We hope you will use all these tips in your SaaS initiatives

Team

Sagar Vibhute

Co-founder at muHive

Technology interests:

databases, information architecture and evolving role of social tech

Twitter: @biggfoot

Ritesh M Nayak

Co-founder at muHive

Technology interests:

social software, information retrieval, distributed systems and ICT4D

Twitter: @itsmeritesh

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thank you

@muHive /muHive

www.muhive.com

Credits & references

Slide 1: Photo Credit: Robert S. Donovan via Compfight cc Slide 10: Photo Credit: Victor1558 via Compfight cc Slide 11: Photo Credit: kevin dooley via Compfight cc Slide 33: Photo Credit: eflon via Compfight cc Slide 29: Photo Credit: TonyHall via Compfight cc Slide 18: Photo Credit: AMagill via Compfight cc