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4 Must-Know Elements of SaaS Promotion management

SaaS promotions are not all that unheard of. Why would they be? After all, the SaaS and subscription business model companies need promotions to boost the SaaS conversion rate. What separates SaaS promotion management from everything else is how these strategies are created, their idea, and their purpose. In most cases, customer loyalty is the goal. SaaS promotion strategy focuses more on obtaining the appreciation of customers more than anything else. Planning SaaS offers is a complex marketing endeavor because developers are set on opening and maintaining new revenue streams. Upsells, cross-sales, discounts, and promotions come in different forms, each having a specific placement, intent, and target audience. Research and reporting are essential processes. Significant resources are required. Indeed, SaaS promotion management is complicated. But it’s not impossible.

Here are the 4 facts you need to know about SaaS promotion management.

Cross-selling vs. Up-selling SaaS: What’s the difference?

When discussing promotion in the B2B world and SaaS, you must clearly distinguish between a SaaS upsell strategy and a coss-selling one. They might be found under the same umbrella but are not the same and serve different purposes. Of course, they can be used in the same strategy, but as mentioned before, they stand for separate things. A cross-promotion for SaaS is focused on matching offers. When your customer is eager to invest in a product/service of your making, you focus on matching complementary products/services to his order. In strategies of this kind, you must make use of relevancy. You cannot display other products than those that are complementary to his initial order. The aim is to increase the conversion rate and ultimately make a profit. But you could easily use a cross-promotion SaaS strategy to gain a better understanding of your audience. You could gather relevant data regarding their interests based on their behavior and final decision regarding your offer. How many customers accepted your offer? Did they take the time to find out more about a certain service in your offer? Did they continue with the initial offer? Answering questions of this kind could open the door to relevant insights regarding your audience, and you could improve your offer or completely forget this strategy. In any case, you are making changes, which could be followed by actual results. On the other hand, a SaaS upsell strategy focuses on selling a feature-rich version of your product to existing products. While customer acquisition is among the top goal for a saas upsell strategy, remember that growth in retention can be achieved when designing strategic upselling campaigns. A comprehensive, effective saas promotion strategy will consider both these elements to ensure that multiple company growth objectives are achieved.

Know your offer, know your audience

Indeed, you need to plan your sales promotion management strategy carefully. You must consider several aspects when thinking about what promotion to suggest to your public. Luckily, it’s a mixture of knowledge and intuition that will give the much-expected results. And you have it, of course. An upsell indeed functions better than a cross-sell. Who wouldn’t want a better product, a complex subscription plan, for a lower price? More features for the same price. But, let us ask you this. You are an entrepreneur. Your goal is to make a profit. If you suggest an upsell to each of your customers, are you really going to make a profit? Because, from where we stand, it seems that you will be losing your trump card, meaning the features your software has. Budget management is everything in business. However, when you are trying to recover a customer, upsells are the correct choice. That’s when you must be the master of conversion and present your customer an offer they simply cannot refuse. Now cross-selling is something that can place the profit in your pocket. You are suggesting complementary products to a client that has already said yes to collaborating with you. Promotional campaigns really test your audience knowledge. Learning from past promotions will help you optimize future promotions. That’s what historical data is there, to begin with. Promotional planning is all about how much you know your audience. Planning a test strategy that can bring forward adequate insights is always an option.

SaaS promotions must make sense

As mentioned before, treating promotions with maximum care and attention is essential. Your goal is to make a profit. But if you throw around promotions that make no sense to your customers, you might as well give up this idea entirely. You need to bring forward real suggestions that have actual chances of being accepted by your audience. But how exactly can you be sure that your promotions will be seen with kind and eager eyes by your audience? Well, usually, you need to solve issues. In your each and every customer-oriented offer, you need to identify a problem and use your promotions to solve them. Organizations need to conduct effective promo planning and consider the pain points their consumers are facing. Demand planning is directly linked to promotional management. The two go hand in hand.

Presentation matters

Instead of bothering your customer throughout the entire shopping process, completely ruining their experience on your website, present the offer, turning it into the grand finale. On the checkout pages, your cross-sales and up-selling promotions can make their big entrance. Present them accordingly, using relevant Calls-for-action to create interest and entice audiences. Simple, catchy, relevant, and clean, that’s how you should present your promotions. However, speaking of promotion management, you should know that even though you know the rules of the game, you should find a solid partner in your eCommerce solution, ready to handle the changes in user status and allow you to run your promotions and test their efficiency. Yes, you will need your SaaS customer service team to interact with your clients and ensure the brilliant customer experience SaaS can offer.

Final Thoughts

Like everything else in the world of SaaS, having concrete insights based on historical data is essential. Running strategic promotions will give your business the push it needs and help you achieve all business-growth goals. However, SaaS email marketing or checkout pop-ups will only get you so far. You need to partner with an eCommerce solution that can offer SaaS billing software for smooth promotion handling. Not to mention that robust SaaS billing software will allow you to test monetization strategy until you know how to price SaaS the right way. So, focus on retrieving as much audience data as possible to personalize your offers and ensure a high conversion rate.