Top Challenges SaaS Companies Face in Lead Nurturing

Let’s assume a situation – you’re pleased as punch that a lot of people have signed up on the landing page of your SaaS product. Now what? It’s time to wake up and smell the coffee – you still have to achieve a more unnerving job. You still need to nurture these leads and convert them into customers who are ready to part with their money. According to a study that was undertaken recently, 40-60% of users who have willingly and happily signed up for your product don’t even become loyal customers or even revisit your landing page. Even after putting in your heart and soul into this, there are still quite a few challenges faced while attempting lead nurturing with a SaaS marketing strategy. Some of them are mentioned below.

1. What should the lead nurturing timeframes be?

Is there any time that can be called right, per se? Chasing after a lead who has left you a long time ago can be quite unfavourable. So, should you just give up? There are no definite answers when it comes to choosing the right timeframe, but you can look at your customer’s buying cycle and decide wisely based that data. You need to look carefully at how long it takes for your leads to get converted into customers. Your lead nurturing campaign will need to be looked at again, once you have all the answers. Your messaging and timing would ultimately be dependent on your prospect’s stage.

2. Know how often to contact leads

What should the frequency of your emails be? How many times can you flood their inbox? Most businesses lean towards sending more offers and educational emails at the top of the funnel. (TOFU). It is at this stage that the lead does not find the emails cumbersome or intruding. This will work especially well if the content is engaging and unique.

3. What should the focus be on - Quality or Quantity?

Looking at the prevailing scenario, we can confidently say that there are two ways to come up with a content strategy for SaaS. The first way is to create a massive amount of content that caters to a lot of questions which are asked frequently and repeatedly. Generic content can be curated to take care of these queries. This helps in tackling the traffic issue, as it manages to pull a lot of visitors to the site. But at the same time, this does not guarantee that leads turn into customers. The second option is to aim at creating valuable and unique content for the visitor, which will obviously take more time and effort. So, given your inclination, size of the organization and the time available, you will need to decide between the two choices. Limited content might pose a few challenges, but in the long run it helps with finding quality leads that can be nurtured as well.

4. Paid or unpaid social networks don’t guarantee customers

Your audiences can possibly love what you present to them as your social campaigns. But this doesn’t mean that you will definitely be able to garner workable leads from there. Your total number of followers will determine your organic growth, which is quite a tiresome process. Smaller companies may face the inevitable hardships when it comes to generating followers as well. All in all, it will remain a slow process and there isn’t much that can be done to speed it up. At the same time, paid channels can help you with greater reach if the quality of the content is appreciated by your target audience. But that said, this too is not exactly an effective lead-generating campaign.

5. Developing workflows on the basis of content

How do you decide what content needs to be placed at precisely what place? You need to know what is classified as Top of the Funnel (TOFU) content, and what goes into the Middle of the Funnel (MOFU). Designing the workflow on the basis of content might not be as easy as it seems, because any updated content piece or offer could throw the whole strategy out of gear.

6. Taking into account and managing sales

If your workflows are not working as per your expectations, then it’s recommended that you consider the tried-and-tested sales process and go back to it to nurture leads. But – more often than not – the pitching of the product (which is undertaken by the sales team) kills any remaining possibility of lead nurturing, and you stand to lose the prospects you were banking on.

7. What needs to be done to get back the ones who have left?

When do you think would be an opportune moment to revisit a prospect who doesn’t seem interested anymore? Maybe a strategy that will help you get in touch with them could be devised, rather than just relying on salespeople to do the job. Dropping an email or something similar can help as well.

8. Don’t fail to follow up

Once you know who’s interested in your product and who’s not, make sure to not ignore the ones who have shown any sort of interest. Basically, don’t leave them high and dry. Get in touch with these people and establish contact as soon as you can manage to do so. Maybe they do not want your product right away, but mindsets and situations can change later on. Follow up and remind them that they had shown interest in your product. Reports have shown that following up on leads within an hour or so have improved the chances of conversion by over 7 times.

9. Customer referrals can only help a bit

Though it is a fantastic way to acquire new customers, customer referrals is not a method to rely on. It is not a scalable method, and you constantly need to push your existing customers little by little. Even with conversion rates of around 60-70%, referrals do not guarantee loyal customers.

10. Marketing based on triggers

Cash in on opportunities when they present themselves in the form of behavioral triggers. You can positively impact sales if you get in touch with a lead within a short span of time after he/she has checked out your product. You might not be able to close a sale, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to try.

11. You need to track and monitor the lead nurturing results

You’ve left no stone unturned to attract and nurture prospects. So, don’t adopt a laidback now of all times. It is quite easy to keep introducing new lead generation campaigns, but you need to know how you have fared in the earlier ones. This will assist you in the knowledge of what the best practices are, which also entails what has worked for you and what hasn’t.

12. Analyze and optimize using the results that lie before you

Monitoring lead volume in the sales pipeline, analyzing increased revenues, and carefully looking at email click-through rates will help you decide the next step in your lead-generation process. This will provide you with an answer to the following questions – what emails need to be worked upon, which ones fared really well and which ones did not make a difference at all. Taking a critical look at your past performance can also help you determine a lot of other things, such as the frequency for sharing content and the timeframe that you should consider to get the best results. To wrap it up, we can safely say that lead nurturing is a not an easy task in the slightest for a SaaS Company, and however hard you try, you can never have all the answers. But at the same time, with some amount of experimenting and the analysis of quality and reliable data, lead nurturing campaigns can provide you with larger revenues and profits without burning a sizeable hole in your pocket. >>Hubspot is one of the Essential tools for SaaS Companies. Know more about Hubspot.