Push Notification Tactics for SaaS Companies Across The Entire Customer Lifecycle

We’ve already seen how E-commerce websites can benefit from a push notification strategy. We’re going to keep the knowledge train rolling and move on to push notifications for SaaS companies. SaaS is becoming more common as a delivery model, and it’s important we address how these operations can use push notifications to boost engagement and conversions.

Push Notifications for SaaS

If you’re developing a SaaS application, you may not have a marketing plan in place from the outset. Push notifications are an easy way to kick off what could eventually become a more fleshed out campaign. Let’s take a look at how push notifications for SaaS can be employed across every stage of the customer lifecycle.

Awareness

This is the first time your target customer finds out you exist. It’s the equivalent of making eye contact with someone across the room and realizing you might be into them. That isn’t to say your customers are into you already; they just know you’re a thing and could potentially solve a problem they experience. Here’s how push notifications for SaaS can help you maximize interactions with prospects at this point.

Contextual Messaging

At the top of the funnel, context is everything. It tells your audience why they are where they are and where they could be if they stay on that path. This ties in with a lot of the other tactics you will use to bring people to your SaaS website. For example, you might kick off an AdWords campaign to drive traffic to a landing page. You can use push notifications to explain how the ad is related to the webpage and what visitors can gain from perusing its contents. Google states that landing pages linked from ads should foster trustworthiness, and that’s exactly what you can achieve with the right contextual push notifications. Even the alert that asks for permission to send push notifications can provide some context on why users should opt in.

Delivering Content

The next thing you will want to do at this early phase of the customer lifecycle is syndicate content. Use this as an opportunity to address potential pain points and inform users why your SaaS is the ideal solution to them. We have already seen how media outfits can use push notifications to gain eyeballs. The implementation of push notifications for SaaS is similar, except they would deliver links to blog posts and whitepapers about your product.

Consideration & Qualification

At this juncture, your audience is cognizant of the problems they face and the inefficiencies in their processes. They know your company provides a solution, but are also aware that there are other solutions out there. This is the stage at which push notifications could have a real impact on your bottom line.

Retargeting

Now that you have a sizeable cohort that has traveled down the funnel, it’s time to develop a strong bond with them. This is the first point at which you have people returning to your website or signing back in to make use of their free trial. What that means is that you can communicate with them based on actions they have taken in the past. Are they looking at the pricing page a second time? You could use push notifications for SaaS to announce an ad-hoc discount. You could retarget users who clicked on a particular ad with a push notification that contains related content. Retargeting is an effective way to capitalize on intent that your audience has displayed in the past.

Hard selling

There’s only so long you can go before having to have the tough conversation about making a purchase. As much as creating relationships is important, monetizing customers is what’s going to keep your business alive. Sending timely push notifications can help you cash in on the customers at this stage of the lifecycle. Since a lot of SaaS providers use the freemium model, you can use this as an opportunity to upsell to people who have already been using some of your product’s features for a sustained duration.

Activation & Retention

Now you’ve reached a stage where your SaaS has actual paying customers. This calls for celebration. But also, it calls for activating those customers, because you want them to keep paying to use your services. By now you have a deep understanding of your users and their behaviors, so it’s easier to craft push notifications that get the job done.

Create Network Effects

There are a number of different ways in which you can activate your existing customers. One of the more commonly used techniques is by leveraging community actions and social proof. Adobe does a great job of highlighting some of its more renowned users on its blog. SaaS companies use this as a way to encourage users to return to their product and integrate it with their daily workflow. Push notifications can be an effective vehicle for such messaging considering that engagement levels tend to be high.

Gather Feedback

Now that you’ve got customers doing what you want them to do, it’s time for you to do what they want. Understanding what your existing users love and don’t quite love forms the basis for future iterations for your SaaS. It will also contribute to key metrics like churn and lifetime value. Rich notifications can be especially handy at this stage. They can be used to gather both qualitative feedback, as well as quantitative feedback like net promoter scores.