In the business world, it’s said that you’re either growing, or you’re dying – and this is especially true for the highly competitive, constantly evolving SaaS market.
For this reason, maximizing your business’ SaaS growth rate is vital. For bootstrapped SaaS businesses, two things are important to facilitate this high growth.
Firstly, making use of key metrics – such as your SaaS growth rate – is essential to judge your business’ success and identify potential bottlenecks to growth. You also need to be able to access capital to implement growth strategies. Both of these tools to supercharge your SaaS business’ growth rate can be found on the Founderpath platform.
What is the SaaS Growth Rate?
Your SaaS business’ growth rate is a measure of how fast your business is growing.
This is determined by measuring how much a specific variable changes over time. For many businesses, this variable is revenue, with performance being measured month by month (or year by year) representing the business’ growth rate.
But SaaS businesses – which offer cloud-based applications via subscription – can choose a number of other variables such as the number of active monthly users subscribing to the service, or the monthly recurring revenue they get from their subscriptions.
Whichever variable you choose, you can use this to calculate your business’ growth rate – for example, you could opt to measure growth according to the number of active subscribers the SaaS product has each month.
If the service had 1000 active subscribers in January, and this number grew to 1700 in February, then your SaaS growth rate would be 70%, calculated as such:
(variable month 2 – variable month 1) / variable month 1 *100%
(1700 – 1000) / 1000 * 100% = 70%
Why is Prioritizing Your SaaS Growth So Important?
Your SaaS growth rate is a key indicator of the health of your business. So, ensuring your SaaS business is growing should be a top priority.
Let’s look at some reasons.
It allows you to improve your product
The most important component of your SaaS business is your product.
This is why product-led growth – as opposed to growth led by marketing or sales – is becoming so popular in the SaaS sphere.
A stellar product is vital in ensuring your customers continue to use your service – increasing customer retention, reducing churn and, as a result, maximizing profit – as well as attracting new customers.
Let’s look at one of the most successful start-ups in the world, Airbnb. The site connects travellers to those letting out a spare room or even an entire property.
By monitoring their growth rate the Airbnb founders realized they needed to improve their product – a.k.a. their online accommodation marketplace – to increase the number of people booking accommodation through the site.
Ultimately, they were able to create a better product for both property owners and travellers. Now, the platform has 150 million users.
Similarly, by tracking the rate of growth of your SaaS business with the help of Founderpath, you can also monitor customers’ satisfaction with your product. When your growth rate reduces, it’s a good indicator that you should re-prioritize product innovation to attract customers and keep your growth rate high.
It allows you to develop competitive pricing for your product
Aside from improving your SaaS product, another bottleneck for your SaaS business growth may be your prices.
Specifically, setting your prices too low.
If you notice your growth rate is beginning to decline, or profits aren’t increasing as quickly as they should be, it can indicate that you need to raise the price of your subscription.
After all, even delivering a small price increase to your customers can have a huge impact on your revenue – and this is cash flow that you can redirect into the business to improve or expand upon your SaaS product and boost your business’ growth even further.
It improves customer retention over the long-term
Though attracting new customers is important, retaining the customers you already have is even more crucial to your business’ growth, since the cost to acquire each new customer is significantly more expensive than keeping the ones you already have.
This is especially true in the case of subscription-based businesses, which depend on their existing customers’ continued subscriptions to generate a regular income.
By taking measures to increase your business growth – including improving your product and increasing the standard of service you provide – you’re likely to retain your current customers, who will benefit from the ever-improving SaaS product your brand provides them.
Top 5 SaaS Growth Tactics to Employ for Your Business
1. Invest in Content Marketing
Over the last decade, consumers have become increasingly sceptical towards businesses’ claims about their products, and this lack of trust is often the difference between whether a customer makes a purchase or not.
Content marketing is a highly effective way to remedy this, not only by increasing brand awareness, but by winning the trust of customers. You can do this by proving yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
Content marketing with blog posts or video content is all about providing genuine value to customers, whether by solving common customer problems, sharing the latest SaaS industry news, or providing tutorials.
Not only this, but content marketing can become a huge source of organic traffic for your SaaS business’ website, as posting content online helps to direct the right leads to your brand.
2. Generate more leads with SEO
The only way you can convert leads into customers is to get new eyes on your brand in the first place – and effective SEO is pivotal in making this happen.
By optimizing your site – and any other content you have online – you have the ability to improve your site rankings.
When your site is ranked highly by search engines, it’s more easily found by those who need a SaaS product like yours. After all, most people don’t look past the first few search results when making a search.
So, make sure that when you produce copy for your site, you do the necessary keyword research to rank for queries relating to your product.
There are many more steps you can take to boost your SEO success, including:
- Implementing technical SEO
- Ensuring your site pages load quickly,
- Making sure your site is mobile-friendly
- Posting ‘complete’, valuable content.
3. Develop a Comprehensive Pricing Strategy.
The price you charge customers for their subscription to your SaaS product can make a huge impact on your overall revenue.
However, high prices can scare off leads – which can similarly hurt your revenue. So, it’s important to get the balance right. Make sure to research your competitors to get an idea of where your prices should start.
It’s also a good idea to offer a free trial of your SaaS product, since many people are hesitant to commit to a subscription before they’ve tested whether a product is right for them.
By offering a free trial, you give customers the chance to test out the SaaS product and check if it meets their needs.
A trial period also gives customers the opportunity to rely on the service, so that at the end of the trial they’re more inclined to pay a higher subscription fee, since they’ve experienced the value it provides.
4. Improve the Customer Experience.
The Customer Experience (CX) comprises everything from the experience your customers have using your product, to the interactions they engage in with your customer service team.
Analysing each of these components for improvements – and implementing those improvements as efficiently as possible – is one of the most effective strategies you can undertake to increase your SaaS business growth. It’s also a good idea to research your competitors to see what they’re offering and how they’re interacting with customers.
By improving the customer experience, you’ll enhance customer retention, attract new customers, and make your existing customers more likely to spread the word about your brand.
5. Use data to fuel your decisions.
As well as keeping an eye on your overall SaaS growth rate, there are a few key metrics to monitor, to guide you in making the best decisions for your business.
The five most important of these benchmark metrics for your SaaS business are: churn, customer retention, customer acquisition cost (CAC), monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and customer lifetime value (CLV).
In parallel with your SaaS growth rate, monitoring these metrics should allow you to gain insight into the state of your SaaS growth rate, and make changes accordingly.
Conclusion…
As a SaaS business, maximizing your growth rate is essential for success. Not only is growth rate a top indicator of your business’ performance, when used alongside other metrics it indicates where improvements need to be made to foster higher growth.
It’s vital for SaaS business owners to track their growth rate – among other key metrics – to identify areas of untapped potential, and implement growth strategies that boost their revenue.
The Founderpath platform makes tracking these metrics easy, by providing in-depth insight into metrics such as growth rate, churn, CAC and more. Not only this, but Founderpath is committed to helping bootstrapped businesses implement their growth strategies, by providing the capital they need instantly. Find out more here.
