It’s an exciting time to be a content marketer. But it’s also a challenging time.
As more companies continue to jump on the inbound marketing bandwagon, the influx of content seems to be turning into a bit of a traffic jam. And few things have the power to cut through this noise like data storytelling.
Combining the visual appeal of images with the trust engendered by raw data, data storytelling is a force to be reckoned with. Marketers are using data storytelling to support every part of the buyer’s journey, from attraction and consideration to conversion and delight. What better content to offer a consideration-stage buyer than a comparison chart between your services and your competition’s?
Not a data analyst? No worries. Check out the list of tools below. From data collection to design, this roundup of resources is designed to make it easy for anyone to get started with data storytelling.
These are not the words you want to use to describe your clients’ reactions to your SaaS product – and they are all synonyms for “Churn.” Of all of these unsettling terms, I think churn is the worst. Churn is what happens when you’ve built up your hopes and dashed them on the rocks of poor management and failure to meet expectations. And, reducing (dare I say, eliminating?) churn should be the goal of every growing subscription-based company.
Qualitative, quantitative, testing, and workflow tools for conversion rate optimization.
Conversion Rate Optimization is one of the most powerful levers for driving online business growth.
The Conversion Rate Optimization process includes quantitative and qualitative data and testing with a scientific approach.
As Peep Laja mentions, “[CRO] tools aren’t as important as knowing what to do with them. Putting a scalpel in someone’s hand doesn’t make them a surgeon.” That said, building a CRO stack won’t make you an expert, but it’s a good place to start when familiarizing yourself with related methodologies.
Google Analytics (@googleanalytics)
An ad click here, a page view there, a video watched on a tablet before bed… but which one clinched the sale? Google Analytics has the latest in full-credit measurement, so you see all the stops people take on the road to action. The result: a measurable way to improve campaigns and reach new audiences as they go through their days.
KISSMetrics (@KISSmetrics)
Google Analytics tells you what’s happening. KISSmetrics tell you who’s doing it.
Mixpanel (@mixpanel)
Mixpanel lets you measure what customers do in your app by reporting actions, not page views.
Woopra (@Woopra)
No more guessing what customers did on your site or app. Know how engaged each customer is, and exactly what actions they performed — all in real-time.
Omniture / Adobe Marketing Cloud (@AdobeMktgCloud)
Analytics, social, media optimization, targeting, web experience management — and now cross-channel campaign management with Adobe Campaign — Adobe Marketing Cloud does it all.
Adobe Analytics (@AdobeAnalytics)
Adobe Analytics helps you create a holistic view of your business by turning all customer interactions, including offline data, into actionable insights. The marketing reports and analytics, ad hoc analysis, and data workbench technologies give you access to easy-to-use, interactive dashboards, reports, and visualizations. With the market-leading solution, you’ll better understand the whole customer journey.
Qualitative Tools
The Why
Qualaroo (@QualarooInc)
Analytics tell you what people are doing on your website. Qualaroo tells you why. Qualaroo insights lead to smarter tests and faster improvements in your website’s performance.
Survey Monkey (@SurveyMonkey)
SurveyMonkey is the world’s most popular online survey software. We make it easier than ever to create polls and survey questionnaires for learning about anything from customer satisfaction to employee engagement. Sign up to access our library of sample survey questions and expert-certified templates. Customize your survey questions, distribute your questionnaire on the web, and start collecting responses in real time. Our Analyze tool helps you turn survey data into insights and create professional reports.
Olark (@olark)
Experience the easiest way to boost your sales, help solve issues and understand your customers with Olark live chat.
Inspectlet (@Inspectlet)
Analyze user behavior instantly with eye-tracking heat maps, screen capture (record and playback actual visitor sessions), and user-interaction analytics.
ClickTale (@ClickTale)
ClickTale takes the guess work out of website optimization, conversion analysis and usability research. Knowing how visitors use your website will enable you better target specific audiences, improve customer satisfaction and increase conversion. Use ClickTale to analyze the performance of your online forms, keep visitors engaged in page content, and lead them through the conversion process.
UserTesting (@usertesting)
Get videos of real people speaking their thoughts as they use your website or mobile app.
FiveSecondTest (@fivesecondtest)
Fivesecondtest helps you fine tune your landing pages and calls
to action by analyzing the most prominent elements of your design.
Unbounce (@unbounce)
Marketers: build, publish & A/B test your landing pages without I.T.
Ion (@ioninteractive)
Easily create and test app-like digital experiences that generate leads, enhance brands, and drive revenue.
Visual Website Optimizer (@wingify)
Create and test different versions of your website to continuously discover the best performing versions that increase your online sales.
AppsFlyer (@AppsFlyer)
Mobile apps installation referral and conversion tracking service.
Adobe Target (@AdobeTarget)
Most marketers want to test and target but don’t think they have the time, expertise, or tools. Adobe has simplified it to a click.
Yozio
Yozio makes it easy for organizations with mobile apps to develop a deep understanding of their users and drive acquisition, engagement, revenue and retention.
Workflow Tools
The Learning
Google Drive (@googledrive)
Drive starts you with 15 GB of free Google storage, so you can keep pictures, stories, designs, drawings, recordings, videos — anything.
Panic (@panic)
We make Macintosh software: Coda, Diet Coda, Transmit, Unison, Prompt, and more.
PowerPoint
Build the story, present with presence and inspire your audience
Excel
Unlock insights and tell the story in your data.
Experiment Engine (@expengine)
Build your testing plan, source variations, run experiments, and gather results–all from one platform.
Python (@ThePSF)
Python is a programming language that lets you work quickly and integrate systems more effectively.
Customer Success is a topic that every Growth Hacker, Marketer and Startup Founder needs to know about in order to take advantage of the most effective methodologies for reducing churn and increasing retention for SaaS companies.
For that reason, I took the time to dissect the content of the very impressive webinar by Kate Leggett: ‘The Economic Value of Customer Success.’ This is, by far, the best webinar I attended in 2014.
I hope you find these notes useful.
Main topics:
History
What does all this have to do with Customer Success?
The Three Dimensions of Customer Success Management
First Dimension: Reduce Churn (& How to Calculate It)
Second Dimension: Increase Existing Revenue
Third Dimension: Influence New Sales
Customer Success Drives Team Performance
Conclusion
Bonus Video: Reduce Churn and Drive Revenue With Customer Success Management
Bonus Video: How to Drive Growth With Customer Success Metrics
History
Social media has ushered in the age of the customer.
Customers now control the conversation due to a shift to user-generated content. This means that businesses must become more focused on delivering experiences that are in line with customer expectations.
Our world is moving to a subscription-based economy.
Instead of buying products, we’re subscribing to services on a monthly basis. Examples: Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, and so on.
This means that industries are transforming their business models to embrace the subscription economy.
This business model is prevalent among enterprise companies:
13%of enterprises will be implementing SaaS within the next year
14%of enterprises have implemented SaaS
21%of enterprises will be expanding their existing SaaS implementation
There’s a whole set of software categories that are rapidly moving to a SaaS delivery mode
and some have already seen significant success — learning and talent, sales automation, HRMS, and e-purchasing.
What does all this have to do with Customer Success?
Because of the subscription-based economy, relationships are becoming more important.
In this economy, businesses are required to build long-term relationships with their customers. These relationships are validated every month as customers renew their subscriptions. Because it’s more expensive to acquire new customers than retain them,
making customers successful is the most strategic approach to business growth in the new economy.
Good relationships have business value.
A customer that is happy with your products is a loyal customer.
Loyal customers:
Are willing to spend a larger wallet share, leading to increased CLV
Are more willing to consider additional products and services
Are less likely to churn
Will serve as a brand advocate
Revenue uplift due to customer loyalty can be quantified, which is the basis for Customer Success Management. As well, good relationships help reduce costs.
Because managing customer relationships has a quantifiable revenue impact, businesses are now investing in Customer Success.
The Three Dimensions of Customer Success Management (CSM)
Customer Success Managers actively:
Manage customer relationships to reduce churn
Increase existing revenue
Influence new sales
Customer Success Managers help businesses get greater economic value out of their current customer base.
First Dimension of CSM: Reduce Churn
Customer Success Management helps reduce churn.
Companies follow a standard growth trajectory. When a company is starting out, all of its energy goes into acquiring customers. As it grows, there’s a focuses on retaining customers and minimizing churn. Once the company is established, there’s a focus on expansion through cross-selling and up-selling to customers. And during optimization and transformation, time and resources are spent on engaging with the most profitable customers and defining standardization for engagement.
During business growth, CSMs tier customers.
For each tier, there will be different engagement strategies.
Along the way, churn becomes increasingly important because a larger percentage of revenue comes from existing customers.
To calculate the impact of churn:
Net New MRR/ACV = New MRR/ACV (New Customers) + Expansion MRR/ACV (Existing Customers) – Churned MRR/ACV (Lost Customers)
MRR = Monthly Recurring Revenue
ACV = Annual Contract Value
The negative impact of churn can be quantified.
In the chart below, all else the same, the company that follows the green trajectory has a 95% retention rate and the company that follows the orange trajectory has an 80% retention rate. Five years later, the green company has only lost 30 customers but the orange company has lost 120 customers. This leads to a difference in two-million dollars in revenue.
Churn is dependent on deal size.
There’s a correlation between average deal size and retention rate. (This data is based on a study of over 200 SaaS companies.)
Second Dimension of CSM: Increase Existing Revenue
Customer Success Managers help customers realize the economic value of the products and services they’ve bought.
They have all the information about how customers are using the product. They understand their customers’ business goals and how the solutions that they’ve bought are helping them maintain a need-to-use business goal.
Using this data, Customer Success Managers help both the customers and the business to quantify the economic value of a purchase.
Third Dimension of CSM: Influence New Revenue
Customer Success Managers influence new sales by increasing advocacy.
Brand advocates are highly satisfied customers and are more valuable than average customers. Advocacy activity — such as positive ratings and reviews— have a positive quantifiable impact.
Brand advocates will also buy your products and services again.
They spend close to twice as much or more on products and services than the average customer and they act as a virtual sales force, driving new sales.
In the chart below:
Blue — Original purchase
Red — Upgrade bought in the second year
Yellow — Upgrade bought in the third year
Green — An advocate moving to another company and buying your product again
Purple — Revenue generated from advocacy activities
Customer Success Management Drives Team Performance
A hidden benefit of CSM is that it drives team performance.
To be successful at CSM you need to have discipline in four areas —
engagement strategy, engagement process, engagers, and engagement levers.
Conclusion
We’ve moved to a subscription-based economy — products and services are being consumed as SaaS. In this business model, being able to manage customer relationships to drive greater economic value is becoming even more important. Good relationships will increase customer loyalty, decrease churn, increase CLV, and help customers become brand advocates to influence new sales.
