The SaaS industry is gaining momentum these days. Isn’t it?
According to research, 73% of the companies are going to turn almost all their apps into SaaS by 2021. Hence, building a SaaS company is currently a skyrocketing business idea.
But, creating a SaaS growth strategy isn’t an easy task to be done.
Transforming your tiny SaaS startup app idea into a brand name with millions of users cannot be turned into reality unless you spend a ton of money and a few years. This is where ‘growth hacking comes - ideas and ways you can use to reach your SaaS startup goals faster than you ever imagined.
Here’s our list of data-centric growth hacking ideas and tips that you can implement in your SaaS product development today!
Growth Hacking - What Every SaaS Company Needs
As the digital landscape is evolving at a staggering pace, modern marketers are confronted with an expanding spectrum of terminology.
Growth ‘hacking’ is a business marketing term for unique and customer-centric marketing strategies focused solely on growth. Early startups that need massive growth in a short period of time on minimal budgets can implement growth hacking ideas.
Also Read: SaaS Product Development: The Complete Guide
The main aim of growth hacking strategies is to enable SaaS products to engage more customers with little funds and effort.
Sean Ellis is the CEO of Growth Hackers.
You must have heard success stories of 'disruptive growth hackers' transforming small-scale SaaS start-ups into million-dollar businesses.
The SaaS growth hacking ideas allowed young emerging entrepreneurs, skilled developers, and creative marketers to achieve incredible growth in a short span of time.
To help you achieve the same stellar growth, we have come up with the best and most effective growth hacking ideas.
Pro Tip: Software As A Service (SAAS) market size is projected to reach USD 307.3 billion by 2026
Top 7 Game-Changing Growth Hacking Ideas For SaaS Companies
Before going further in the article, let’s have a look at 5+ growth hacking ideas that bring SaaS companies massive success in a limited time.
1. Create A Big Massive Email List Of Subscribers
Email marketing is a powerful product marketing strategy used to nurture leads. According to b2b marketing research from the content marketing institute, 87% of marketers use email to educate customers with their content.
Businesses can use email marketing to:
- Educate customers about different ways to add value. It provides you with cross-sell and upsell opportunities
- Keep your customers involved in your company affairs,
- Update customers on product modification
According to a New York Times,
“Email matters. People don’t change their email addresses. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, people join and drop that pretty often. But changing your email address is a hassle.”—Jon Acuff
A successful SaaS startup AppSumo used advanced marketing techniques and built an email list of over 700,000 addresses. Enlarging your email list will help you get more subscribers and reach your customers.
2. Setting Up Referral Program can Save You
So, in today's fierce competition, what do you trust more when buying a product or a service, an ad, or a recommendation from a friend?
Today, customers trust other customers rather than anyone else.
You must have used Dropbox or may be referred to a friend. Because Dropbox gave you the bulk of extra storage space for every person onboard Dropbox.
According to the co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, Drew Houston, referrals increased Dropbox signups by 60%.
The growth hacking technique Dropbox executes is to get your customers to market your product. It places a “Refer a Friend” message everywhere. The strategy worked for them, and now Dropbox is a million-dollar company with cloud-based storage.
Referral programs not only increase your signups but also engage your current customers to come back to your website again.
So, if you’ve built an exceptional SaaS product, why not spread it to most of the customers in the market?
3. Free Marketing Platforms is the answer to all your queries
The Airbnb team implemented growth hacking ideas and turned their business into a million-dollar business.
So, what growth hacking technique did they apply?
Was it SEO, email marketing, PPC, or social media?
Their growth hacking technique was very simple. They leverage an already established free platform, Craigslist. They use Craigslist‘s platform to grow their user base.
Airbnb created a bot that stores listings on Craigslist. When customers view these listings, they will return back to Airbnb instead of going to Craigslist.
Also Read: Hiring Remote Developers For Your SaaS Development
4. Be exclusive in your offerings
One of the most powerful growth hacking techniques that SaaS companies often ignore is to be exclusive in this fast-running digital pace. So, do you want to attract more customers to your SaaS startup? Be the first to be exclusive.
LinkedIn is one of the best examples that have implemented this growth hack. It is the “World’s Largest Professional Network” that only caters to professionals. Build a SaaS product that shows exclusivity and serves a particular niche only. However, make sure that your SaaS product is so robust that it offers everything to that target persona.
Instead of investing your time and money, it’s better to make your SaaS company exclusive. Like if you offer translation services, think of ways to make it stand apart from the competition.
5. Giveaway some funds to your customers
If you’re a financially good SaaS company, you can definitely assist your customers with some funds just like PayPal.
PayPal was having 7 – 10% daily growth in the early 2000s.
In a question posted on Quora, David O. Sacks, the then COO and product leader of PayPal talked about how the company was able to achieve massive growth in the early 2000s.
“At first, users need to sign up, confirm their email address and add a (unique, authorized) credit card. With this, the money was simply added to their accounts.
This was the real money. Users can easily send it to someone if they want or else withdraw it for their own usage.
“The bonuses were gradually phased out, first by reducing them to $5, then by adding more verification hoops (like bank account verification), so they became more difficult to get. Then they have eliminated altogether.” – David O. Sacks
6. Content Marketing will work smartly
Content marketing is considered essential for driving organic traffic. Creating informative and engaging content for your targeted audience builds brand trust and quickly converts readers into ready-to-buy customers.
One of the best examples of this growth hack is Buffer App.
They created high-quality content to boost their online presence in a short period of time.
Buffer made killer and classic content. Long posts, charts, graphs, studies, data, etc. At present, Buffer is a million-dollar SaaS company.
Content marketing spreads your content across the globe, maximizes your reach, and performs all SEO techniques. The growth hacking strategy revolved mainly around their marketing strategy worked for them and Buffer did it so well.
7. Try first before buy
As so many creative SaaS product ideas snatch the attention of consumers in the market, you need to offer more value to the product to attract people. Consumers want to know what they’re going to receive before they reach out for their wallets.
Rafflecopter software allows users to test drive on its website. For this, you don’t even need to sign up to use what they offer.
One of the best ways to get this done is through the MVP development approach. This is where you build a prototype of your product with the best features first. Once that is done, you test it on the beta users and iterate the SaaS app based on the feedback that you receive.
Quick Reminders About ‘Growth Hacking’
Here are a few best tips right here for creative marketers to keep in mind always when executing growth hacking ideas:
1. One size does not fit all
Growth hacking will work differently for every business type. As your growth hacking strategy depends on your particular product offering, target market, target audience, and industry.
The key to getting the right solution for your business is just to be creative all the time, analyze the customer behavior, do market research and figure out the possible solutions based on your findings.
2. Focus on the targeted audience
The main objective of growth hacking is to expand your business on a limited budget in a short span of time. Don’t try to target a large group of people initially. Consider focusing on 1-2 buyer personas prior. It helps guide you in implementing growth hacking strategies.
3. Always listen to your customers first
Listening to your customer’s demands is key to a successful business. It will provide you with real market insights. It also shows you areas of improvement and potential modifications to your business. Accept the feedback whether positive or negative and look at it as an opportunity to grow.
4. Focus on the customer experience
By making the customer experience unique and incredible, you can turn your local customers into brand names. Always remember, providing referrals contains more value to your business than any other type. The more you excite your customers, the more they will be sharing your product with others. And a positive customer experience will definitely increase your count.
Putting it all Together
There is a myriad of other ways to growth hacking. Integrating your product development and marketing with an effective growth-hacking strategy will provide your SaaS startup with big achievements and also boost your ROI.
It took Facebook eight years to reach a $50 billion valuation. The kind of growth was unprecedented at that time. But, Uber reached the same valuation in 5 years. How?
Maybe they follow one of the above growth hacks along the SaaS development process or even during marketing.
All you just need to have is that surprise element in your product marketing strategy that can attract your customers fast. Always keep things updated in business from time to time and be innovative in how you reach out to customers to increase your conversions.
