SaaS businesses try tooth and nail to conquer customer acquisition. But to focus only on acquisition without dealing with churn rate first makes for a perfect recipe for doom. High churn rates would only mean that new customers are replacing old ones, resulting in zero or even negative net growth. SaaS businesses need to outgrow this cycle of break-even, to achieve sustainable growth i.e a healthy NRR.

The Paradox of Customer Retention in Subscription Model Businesses

Miscalculated emphasis on customer acquisition takes the focus away from customer retention which is as crucial, if not more important. Every SaaS business needs a well-planned customer retention strategy to tackle their churn. 

Its common perception that customer retention is complex. Customer retention programs if at all implemented bear results only over a long haul. Since they bear no visible results in the short term, they are often perceived as ineffective and dropped. 

Only SaaS businesses that work towards customer retention gradually improve their NRR and reduce churn.

How to Improve SaaS Customer Retention with Content?

• Curate Guided Onboarding and Free Training

No business wants a complicated software service to add to its workload. B2B SaaS businesses with complex products should ensure that prospects learn about its unique powers in great detail. 

Conducting free webinars and online training sessions can be a great way to teach businesses how to retrieve full value from the platform. After all, the way a customer understands a software decides if they want to keep paying for it or not. Failure to demonstrate value during the customer onboarding can discourage them and lead them to unsubscribe. A good customer onboarding process focuses on the pain points of the target audience and demonstrates how to achieve success. It should lead users to their goal in a streamlined way.

In fact, SaaS businesses should set retention goals and assess them at regular intervals to check how engaged a user is with the software. At the start, a user should use the product more than once. During the mid phase of the subscription period a user should have established a pattern of using the software and in the long term a software should become an everyday essential for a user. Improving early retention through a guided onboarding process can improve ongoing retention gains for SaaS businesses. 

• Smooth Ongoing User Experience

So, you have a list of customers who have been subscribing to your software service for sometime now. Having a robust cloud infrastructure to meet their evolving needs is barely enough. Grab the chance to surprise, gift and delight them. Infact, 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services.

Contextual delivery is an important component that improves the ongoing user experience of a product. For example, writing empathetic and helpful copies and delivering them through a chatbot depending on where a user is in their journey helps. Infact, richer content for helping like video and helpful articles delivered across the way improve stickiness. Moreover, weekly webinars or weekly emails or weekly campaigns for existing users hits the sweet spots and improves retention for the SaaS product.

• Knowledge Base

If a customer engages with your product or service on a regular basis, it is common to get a lot of tickets. Use these tickets or other fancy analytical tools to find out areas on your app interface that a user finds hard to use. Then seek help from your content team to create content around these problems areas and solve your user’s vows. 

Creating a useful knowledge base focusing on difficult terrains of your overall product UX can drastically improve the product adoption as it encourages product usage. And creating content is the best way to improve retention by omitting problem areas and confusion. 

In the End

Regardless of the glorification around customer acquisition, customer retention is as ‘sweaty’ for most businesses, if not more . Unlike the former, it's never-ending labour, but if you look at it, it's also a dedicated pathway to business profitability. In reality, subscription businesses need to maintain a fine balance between their acquisitions and retention, never blind-siding either. 

A judicious customer retention plan is all that you need for long term SaaS success. Work up the way you treat your customers, ease their pains and meet their expectations with multiple content channels. Have them choose you time and again over others in the market with these content-centric SaaS customer retention strategies.