Top Customer Retention Strategies for SaaS Businesses in 2023

A subscriber leaves. And he not only leaves but shares negative reviews about the SaaS product that you offer as a SaaS retailer. It is indeed concerning! But it is alarming as well. How? Because the subscriber who cancels the subscription is commenting and reviewing negatively about your SaaS product. People do not believe in the hefty promises that SaaS companies make. They believe more in the word of mouth. That is the very reason SaaS companies are so afraid of the customers who leave (customer churn). 

The solution to churning customers is to always monitor your customer churn rate as well as your customer retention rate. And to improve the customer retention rate, you need to plan, implement this plan, and improvise it depending on the performance of your customer retention strategy. 

Never think that a single customer retention strategy will continue providing you with desired outcomes and results. A single customer retention strategy sometimes needs to be improvised so many times that it may lose its original form. 

If you are also confused about how to manage customer retention, then this article is for you. Sharing with you the following strategies to retain the customer base in 2023.

Learning Objectives:

The objective is to make you a strong grip on the following basic concepts and a lot more:

1. Customer retention strategy making basics
2. Improvisation of customer retention strategy with time.
3. Statistics and KPIs to monitor to increase customer retention.

Monitoring of Metrics

As has been mentioned earlier that you need to monitor the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or Metrics to retain customers. The following are the most important KPIs to monitor for customer retention:

• Customer Retention Rate
• Customer Churn Rate
• Monthly Recurring Revenue
• Customer Activity
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

When you monitor these KPIs or metrics, you will have a clear idea that which customers are about to churn. When you identify these customers, it becomes easier to convince these customers to stay on board. Also, it is difficult to convince the customer who has already left to come back.

There are so many competitors to hunt these customers who unsubscribe from your SaaS application platforms. So, KPI monitoring is the strategy to retain customers as well as to beat competitors.

Customer Feedback

If the customer is leaving or has already left, do not feel hopeless from that side. There is still something that you can extract from such customers. Always ask you’re leaving customers to share their feedback. Bring your teams to a table and ponder over this feedback on a serious note. Use this customer feedback to identify the loopholes where you need to work. It can be anything in your SaaS product, customer support, or even marketing strategy. Most of the time, the reason is the hefty charges and the online payment failure.

However, the reason for the customer to cancel the subscriptions can be varying. And only the customer side can help you know these reasons. You can use this feedback to add to your PLG and come up with better cross-sell and upsell options for your SaaS products.

SaaS Add-Ons to Offer

In the tech world, things change rapidly. So, you need to keep working on the improvement of your SaaS product. Come up with better SaaS product versions. Offer your customers add-ons (upsell and cross-sell) that they need for sure.

For instance, if a player needs a bat, then a ball is a must to play. Likewise, you need to develop and introduce such add-ons that will not feel like an add-on but something mandatory to the core SaaS platform that they are already using.

Personalized Experience

Keep in mind that the point when a potential lead interacts with your website, it is the first point of interaction with the customer. From this point, there will come many points of interaction with the customer. On all these points of interaction, the customer will expect exceptional customer experience on all these points.

It is the time when the customer needs to feel empowered. You can offer a personalized experience to empower your customer base. For instance, offer your customers a self-service portal and let them manage their subscriptions for your B2B SaaS platform from there. It is an instant dose of empowerment to the customers. Many SaaS platforms are already offering their customers this option to manage their own subscriptions.

Better Customer Loyalty Programs

Another strategy that always works is to offer a customer loyalty program. Many businesses offer this and that offer to onboard new customers. That is even good for customer acquisition.

But what about customer retention? Offering discounts and offers at the initial level can help bring the customer on board, but they are not sufficient to retain the customer. For customer retention, you need to go the extra mile. Offer your customers loyalty programs. Those who are your customers for a long time, offer them customer loyalty programs that are irresistible for them.

You can also decide on a Customer Loyalty Index (CLI) which is a metric that involves KPIs like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Repurchasing and upselling. Once CLI is defined, it will be easier to segregate customers who are loyal, then you can curate loyalty programs for these customers.  

Refund Policy

Though businesses need to plan to offer the best customer experience, the customer does not do anything to offer a business the best experience. So, to create a win-win situation, you need to work and plan a strategy that can benefit the customer and you as a retailer as well.

One of the strategies to retain customers in 2023 is to offer your customers a refund policy. For instance, in case, the customer is not delivered the subscription box that he ordered, then a refund policy will cause a little harm, but it will save your customer from cancelling the subscription for good. Even in the coming year, this strategy will help SaaS businesses to retain their customers.

SaaS platforms offering tech services can think of something else as compensation that is enough to stop the customer from cancelling the subscription.

Conclusion

Last but not the least, SubscriptionFlow is one ultimate solution that SMEs, as well as established businesses, can opt for as a retention management solution. These solutions are a suite of applications and software that can manage customers and core business activities in a way that you will not need to be worried about retention rate. These platforms automate KPI monitoring and reporting and a lot more.

So, gear up to create the best customer retention strategy for this new year and outperform to beat all competitors. Some of the takeaways for you from this article include:

• Craft a customer retention strategy and improvise it as per the market.
• Take feedback from churned customers positively and use it to improvise customer retention strategy.
• The focal point of the retention strategy should remain customer happiness.