Acquiring Leads Is Increasingly Difficult & Expensive For SaaS Businesses
Every SaaS business depends on generating and closing leads from their target audience. Sales and marketing teams at can drive these leads through a variety of means but most SaaS growth strategies will focus on generating leads from their own websites.
This means that most SaaS growth strategies will include some form of SEO/content marketing and paid advertising. However, the cost and time required to grow leads and new customers through SEO and paid acquisition efforts keep going up.
SEO is more competitive and more people are using AI to discover content. This means fewer searches you can rank for.
Google is constantly changing their search algorithm. These changes sometimes are good for you and sometimes are bad.
The cost per click for Google searches continues to climb.
The cost per click for social ads continues to climb.
More of your competitors are buying your branded keyword increasing your costs even more.
And, other paid channels are also increasingly expensive – native, display, etc…
With It Harder To Raise Capital, You Have To Find Sustainable Growth Channels
If you want to build a successful SaaS company, you can’t just grow your SaaS by overspending on customer acquisition and lead generation. You need a way of achieving sustainable growth. Too many software companies forget this in the name of achieving a high growth rate. They may actually achieve that high growth rate, but they run out of money in the process.
With it harder than ever to to raise capital, your SaaS growth will depend on your ability to achieve sustainable growth. This means you will need to be profitable on your customer and lead acquisition efforts.
To do so, you will either need to:
spend less money on getting people to your site.
-or-
get more of the people to come to your site to take an action (become a customer, a lead or en email subscriber).
-or-
Both! That’s the ultimate goal.
But, here’s the good news – while it can be hard to achieve the above, as you are able to do so, your prospects for raising capital will improve greatly. So, this buying the positive motion you need to grow and scale even further.
The Most Important Metrics To Achieve Sustainable Growth
Leaders of SaaS products need to understand a few key metrics to be able to reach sustainable growth.
Metric One: Customer Acquisition Cost.
CAC is the amount of money it takes to acquire a customer. Some teams will also calculate Cost Per Lead but let’s keep things simple for now.
Metric Two: Customer Lifetime Value.
A Customer Lifetime Value is the average revenue you will earn from each customer within your customer base. This is an average and is for the life that each customer stays with you. Some within your customer base will stay for longer and spend more and some will stay for a shorter period and stay less.
What you need is the Average Customer Lifetime Value. This is a function of how much your average customer spends per month and the average length of time a customer stays a customer (your customer success team should be tasked with customer retention).
The Key To Successful SaaS Revenue Growth = Your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) needs to be greater than your Average Cost of Acquiring A Customer (CAC).
It seems simple but if you want to achieve profitable revenue growth, this has to be the case. Taken a step further, you then need to decide how short or long you are willing to be “paid back” on your CAC. If you are okay waiting 12 months, you can afford a higher CAC then if you want to be paid back within a couple of weeks.
You Need To Understand Your Target Customer Acquisition Cost & Target Cost Per Lead Cost
You need to have specific targets for the maximum amount you will pay for a new customer or lead. These are referred to as the target customer acquisition cost and target cost per lead.
You need to be as specific as possible in determining your target customer acquisition cost and target cost per lead. And, you then need to have the discipline to stick to those targets.
Too often, people establish their targets are way off those targets but then believe that they can optimize to hit those targets. They keep spending, don’t have specific optimization tactics and end up wasting a ton of money. Facebook is happy. Google is happy. You and your company are not.
But, equally bad is when people are close to their targets but then don’t know how they can optimize to reach those target levels. This means that companies will stop spending. Facebook isn’t happy. Google isn’t happy. You and your company are not happy either.
So, the key is to figure out tactics that can help your reach your target customer acquisition cost and target cost per lead. Hello Bar is an essential and simple tactic for that.
A SuccessFul SaaS Growth Strategy Must Have Specific Tactics To Meet Those Target Customer Acquisition Costs & Target Cost Per Lead Costs
We meet SaaS business after SaaS business that don’t understand this. They have a general SaaS growth strategy or a series of SaaS growth strategies that just focus on growing the number of new customers. But, this isn’t good enough. A SaaS growth strategy has to include tactics for how you are going to reach your target customer acquisition costs and target cost per lead rate.
You Then Need To Measure Your Performance Against Your Targets
With your SaaS growth strategy in place, you have to then execute and measure those growth strategies. For example, paid Facebook may drive a CAC above your target. SEO expenses fully baked may drive a CAC below your target. The key is that you know this so you can make informed decisions on where to spend time and money to profitably reach your target audience and achieve sustainable business growth.
Hello Bar Is A Secret Weapon For Helping Many SaaS Companies Achieve Their Target CAC and Target Cost Per Lead
Hello Bar was founded in 2012 and its initial customers were thought leaders and SaaS companies. The company was founded by a digital design and marketing agency with a lot of software companies as clients.
For over 12 years, Hello Bar has helped thousands of online software companies achieve sustainable SaaS growth. Hello Bar is so effective because it helps companies get more customers and leads from their existing website traffic. Therefore, Hello Bar is a key part of the growth strategy for many SaaS companies big and small.
Hello Bar Is Easy To Add
Hello Bar is easy for any SaaS company to add to their site. We have a series of integrations and you can add Hello Bar from many website builders, CMS platforms, email marketing providers and more.
Hello Bar Quickly Converts More Site Visitors Into Leads & Customers
As a reminder, your growth strategy for your B2B SaaS company must result in your LTV being greater than your CAC. You can do this in a variety of ways.
You can go after new markets if you determine those new markets have customers willing to spend more (higher revenue per customer increases LTV).
You can target keeping more of your existing customers and task your customer success team with increasing customer satisfaction rates to retain customers for longer. This will increase your LTV.
You can increase your pricing. You can test different pricing models and/or increase pricing to earn more per customer. This will also increase your LTV.
You can figure out how to acquire visitors to your website at a lower price. This may take a stronger social media presence, better market positioning, figuring out to strengthen your competitive edge, or testing new acquisition tactics and channels. This will increase your total top of funnel which should increase your revenue (but may not increase your profits).
So, which of these should you do? Well, the simple answer is – you should test all of them. But, there is a much simpler and cheaper place to start.
THE BEST WAY TO INCREASE REVENUE AND DO SO IN A PROFITABLE MANNER IS TO GET MORE OF YOUR WEBSITE VISITORS TO BECOME A LEAD OR A CUSTOMER. THIS IS WHERE HELLO BAR COMES IN.
Hello Bar Can Drive Down Your Customer Acquisition Cost As B2B SaaS?
Hubspot says the best thing you can do to increase your conversion rates is to add a popup to your site to capture leads, customers and email subscribers. And, Hello Bar is one of the best, easiest and most affordable ways to do that.
Let’s say that with Hello Bar you can increase your conversion rates by 25% (our average is actually much higher than that – 83% to be exact).
This means that for every 1,000 people that come to your site, you will get 25% more of those visitors to become leads or customers.
This lowers your CAC and helps you to be able to ensure that your LTV is greater than your CAC.
With A Lower CAC You Can Afford More Advertising To Enjoy Increased Revenue That Is Sustainable
As you start to see your CAC drop, you now will have more room for your LTV to be greater than your CAC. This means that you can afford to spend more on paid acquisition efforts through search, social media platforms, native platforms and more. This leads to greater SaaS growth and starts to become a positive cycle. You earn more…you can spend more…so you can earn more and you achieve sustainable business growth.
Hello Bar Can Also Help You With Getting Better Search Engine Optimization Results
The search engines have a variety of factors they use in ranking websites. But, one thing they consider is the level of engagement rate of a website. This makes sense. If a user bounces from a website quickly after clicking on a Google search result, this probably means that this user didn’t find what he/she was looking for. But, if that user stays on the site for a long period of time, this probably also means that the site content was relevant. This sends a signal to Google to rank that site higher.
Hello Bar increases engagement rates and time on site for websites. This means longer time on site and can lead to better SEO results.
Hello Bar Is Affordable & Has A Lot of Happy Customers
Hello Bar has long believed in fair and transparent pricing. Just ask many of the happy customers that have been using Hello Bar for years. In fact, over 600,000 have used Hello Bar since our founding back in 2012.
You Can Accelerate Your SaaS Product Growth Potential Even More With Other Uses Of Hello Bar
One of the great things about Hello Bar is how flexible it is. So, while converting visitors into customers and leads is the most popular use of Hello Bar, there are a ton of other uses as well. And, every Hello Bar plan includes unlimited units you can put on a page. You can use Hello Bar to:
Reduce the churn rate of existing customer
You can place a Hello Bar as somebody looks to cancel and include a discount to stay. This can reduce churn rate.
Solicit customer feedback and suggestions through customer surveys
It’s important to be close to your customers if you want to achieve longterm SaaS Growth. One good way for any software business to do this is to gain valuable insights on your SaaS product (from site visitors as well as paying customers).
What should you add to your product?
Where are your users getting stuck?
What do your customer wish your SaaS product did differently or better or more.
A Hello Bar can quickly help you get feedback. You can easily add a simple net promoter score input field, do single question surveys or do longer form survey to conduct more thorough research on pain points from customers and how you can solve those pain points. And, it’s easy to segment your visitors so you can ask different question of existing customers vs new visitors.
Additional Best Practices To Use Hello Bar To Grow SaaS Revenue
As we have said, Hello Bar has been around for over a decade. In that time we have learned a lot of valuable best practices of how to use Hello Bar to achieve sustainable SaaS growth. Our long serving customer success team is here to share those best practices with our customers. Additionally, here are some highlights of how to use Hello Bar to grow your SaaS revenue.
Have A Clear Goal
You need to be clear in what you are using Hello Bar for.
Is it to drive leads that you will nurture over a long period of time?
Do you want to get visitors to schedule a demo?
Do you want to get people directly into the purchase flow?
Be clear with what you are trying to achieve. Hello Bar can help with one or all of those but each Hello Bar should be matched to each goal. The good news is our pricing model is based on unit views among all Hello Bar units and that pricing model means you can create as many Hello Bars as you would like.
Test Different Designs & Formats
We have a ton of different formats and design templates. Our plug and play no-code popup builder makes it easy to create highly engaging and beautiful conversion units. But, it’s often difficult to know which one is going to perform the best. So, take advantage of Hello Bar’s built-in A/B testing and optimization features.
Use Lead Capture Content
You want to add value to your visitors. A great way to do that is to offer content to your visitors in exchange for them providing their contact info. With Hello Bar, this is super easy.
Integrate Hello Bar Into Your Overall Marketing and Sales Process
We have prebuilt integrations with your favorite marketing and sales tools so that you can make Hello Bar part of your efforts in a seamless manner. You can connect Hello Bar to your Sales CRM, marketing automation platform, email marketing provider and so many more. And, we have a Zapier partnership to help you extend Hello Bar even further.
Push Leads To Your Sales and Marketing Teams Quickly
You can automatically send leads into your Sales CRM. But, you can go a step further by also notifying your sales teams by pushing leads to email and/or Slack.
Add Value To Your Visitors
In addition to offering content, you can add additional value to your visitors. Offer a webinar. Help them schedule a demo to learn more about your product. Provide benchmark information or calculators for them to estimate the impact your software company and product can have for their own growth.
Have your Marketing Team and Sales Team Work Together To Optimize Your Hello Bar
Hello Bar is usually managed by the marketing team at companies but we have found that the best performance comes from companies where Hello Bar is a regular part of their sales and marketing processes. Therefore, we encourage teams to make Hello Bar a regular part of a sales process and include Hello Bar as part of your overall growth strategy.
Target Different Target Audiences With Different Hello Bar Units
With Hello Bar’s built-in targeting features, it’s easy to target each target audience with a different Hello Bar. As with any successful growth strategy, converting leads comes down to making your website relevant to the user and context of that user. With Hello Bar, your marketing efforts can include targeting users with different conversion messages based on user info, behavior, source, content, etc…
Don’t Forget To Add Hello Bar To Your Landing Pages
With Hello Bar, you can add units to individual pages or globally to convert more potential customers. But, don’t forget to add Hello Bar to your landing pages. You can do that easily if you built custom landing pages within your website. If you use a separate landing page builder, it’s easy to integrate Hello Bar into that builder.
Use Hello Bar To Help You Determine Better Product Market Fit
Don’t forget that you can use Hello Bar for a variety of goals. One important way to use Hello Bar may be to figure out product market fit for specific markets. You can launch surveys or other feedback units to do so.
Conclusion: Hello Bar Is A Secret Weapon To Help You Grow SaaS
Since 2012, Hello Bar has been helping companies of all sizes convert more website visitors into visitors, leads and customers. We are loved by marketers, sales reps, CRO specialists, agencies, thought leaders, course creators and so many more. But, one of our most popular uses is to help grow SaaS companies by helping those companies generate leads, close more sales, and grow market share.
Hello Bar pricing is affordable and transparent and our experienced customer success team is here to help you gain traction using Hello Bar. We have a variety of growth plans that allow you to get started with Hello Bar and our pricing scales with you as your growth rates multiply.
