#42 - Write your SaaS Growth 📈

Welcome 225 SaaS founders and marketers to the 42nd edition of Write your SaaS Growth Newsletter:

In this edition, we discuss:

• Landing Page: Simple tactic for high conversions

• Content Marketing: 10 short and powerful tips

• Community: 4 essentials for a SaaS community

• Email Marketing: 7 SaaS email flows for 12 months case study

• Growth Marketing: 340% MRR Increase Case Study

Let’s GO!

Growth Tip of the Week! 🚀

Luca says “if nothing changes on the new Twitter API limits and pricing my two indie products @HivoeHQ and @InboxsHQ will not be able to provide a good service anymore starting from the 29th of April. This is platform risk, and it hurts when it hits so hard.”

How dependent is your marketing on external platforms? Platform risk is real and it can hurt you at the most unexpected time.

Diversify your marketing channels and build your own lists.

P.S. Stay strong Luca. You will overcome this!

Landing Page

Liam has generated millions in ARR for SaaS companies. He says there is one tool that will help you transform your messaging. And it will bring a lot of growth!

And that is Specificity.

It enables you to:

• captivate an audience

• stand out from competitors

For example, Vague is "Automate your email marketing" and specific is "Improve short-term churn with improved onboarding - no development required".

He continues, being specific forces you to understand your target audience, their challenges & motivations. You must first understand the 'who', before you sell the 'how' and 'why'.

He shares some tips to be more specific:

1. Know your audience: • Who are they? • What problems do they have? • What do they want to achieve? 

2. Talk about outcomes: • What do they get from this? • Can we quantify it? • How is it achieved?

3. Back it up: • What proof can we share? • Can we demonstrate the benefits

Remember, you don't have to use a lot of fluff. Simple and present tense. Then Improve on it. Test level of success. Reiterate.

And another tip to help stay specific: Three questions you need to answer within seconds of a visitor landing on your website: • What do you do? • How do you do it? • Why should I trust you?

Related: 33 SaaS Landing Page Teardowns to Help Explode your Conversions!

Content Marketing

Dan shares 10 short (but powerful) Content Marketing tips:

1. Create for one Persona You either write for a beginner or an advanced user. They either prefer thought-provoking ideas or real examples. It's a hard choice. But postponing this decision will make your content ignorable.Q) Who is your one user persona who you sell your SaaS to and speak to?

2. Stop educating There is enough educational content on the Internet. You can also inspire, empower, and entertain. And your target audience needs it more than another how-to article.Q) What kind of content can inspire, empower, or entertain your audience?

3. Pick your style You are not alone in your audience's phone. Hundreds of Creators say the same thing and sell the same product. You need to stand out. Pick one big idea, color, and copywriting style. This is how you get remembered.Q) How can you be different and unique in delivering your messages?

4. Repackage the best content Your new followers don't know what you said 1 month ago. Your old followers don't remember what you said 3 months ago. Don't abandon your best content. Give it a second life.Q) What is your best content and how can you repurpose it?

5. Be opinionated Nobody needs another neutral listicle. Stand for something. Pick one "red pill" idea and repeat it over and over again. Sure, you will lose some followers. But others will know you have something to say.Q) What’s your uncommon opinion about your industry?

6. Pick either Viralilty or SEO There are only two distribution strategies:- You write something so good people share it constantly- You write something so optimized Google gives you all the trafficYou can't get both at the same time.Q) What distribution strategy works for your type of content?

7. Reduce introduction. Your audience is here to read your content, not your introduction. Reduce distractions. Focus on the value.Q) How valuable is your intro?

8. Sell your content organically Every line of your content must sell your product. CTA in the last paragraph is nice. But only 1% of your audience will engage with it. Don't create content to get likes. Create content to get sales.Q) What is your best-selling content and how can you create more?

9. Convert attention to email Attention is not constant. Your followers forget about your tweet as soon they see a new one. You can't build a profitable business in these conditions. Solution? Grow your email list.Q) Are you growing your email list?

10. Leverage Pattern Interruption I've read dozens of articles about target audience research. Nobody can surprise me with a new tactic. I've read zero articles about the drawbacks of listening to your target audience. It's risky. As with any pattern interruption.Q) Are you listening to your audience?

Personally, I find these content marketing tips GOLD for a SaaS. Harsh reality and truth explained simply.

Related: What is Content Strategy in SEO for SaaS

Community

SaaS companies will start to take advantage of community building and leverage community-led growth. We’re transitioning from generic sales messaging boring demos to customer advocacy and personal interactions.

Building a SaaS community can be a HUGE value add provided you do these 4 things right:

1. Authenticity: Look - you wont have the energy to run it for the long term if the community isn’t authentic. Authenticity comes from vulnerability. Your SaaS customers surely have a pain they are looking to solve. Help your community solve the pain further, together!

2. Engagement. A dead community can hamper your SaaS brand. It can be a double-edged sword. So make sure your community onboarding, values, goals, and systems are properly setup. You don’t want to run a dead community where only you keep shouting. It will affect your sales.

3. Personalization. A community does not mean you broadcast pre-written content and schedule it. You’ll need to invest in personally helping each and every community member. The value that you will generate will be HUGE and multi-fold in return.

4. Tailored Content. Your members might have the same pain but they might come for different reasons. It’s a good idea to segment and send tailored messages to your members. That’s where sub-channels in a community helps. Utilize them effectively.

Community is the future when everyone is the creator.

Related: 30 Steps to build a SaaS community from scratch

Email Marketing

Rohan shares an interesting case study on how https://jenni.ai can make $50,000 in revenue with emails in the next 12 months. It's possible if they implement these 7 email flows and automate them. Here's the complete breakdown of the strategy:

Essentially Rohan has 7 email flows:

1. Welcome Email Sequences. The most crucial email sequence This will form the backbone of your email campaigns Think of it as your first formal contact with your users. We will divide this into 5 emails. We will send one email out every day, with a gap of 24 hoursHe breaks down his Welcome Email into 5 components after a user signs up from a lead magnet page

   1. Lead magnet welcome email

   2. Your origin story email

   3. False belief story #1

   4. Hidden benefits + irresistible offer

   5. Scarcity-based email

2. Post free trial sign-up email sequenceWe will trigger this email sequence immediately after the sign-up for the free trial.This email sequence has 5 emails designed to convert them into paying users.

   1. Sign up welcome email

   2. Feature highlight email

   3. Soft sell

   4. Free trial value realization

   5. Scarcity and urgency

3. Seinfeld email sequenceThis is the 3rd email sequence we are going to plug inWe will trigger this for users who still haven't upgraded to the paid plan yet.This email sequence is interesting - we are going to use emotional as well as logical copy to persuade them.

   1. Interesting industry story

   2. Q&A

   3. Common mistakes to avoid in your niche

   4. Inspirational/testimonial-based email

   5. exclusive paid plan upgrade

4. Ascension email sequenceJenniAI has more than 1 paid plan. And the next step is to convert paid users to a highest-tiered paid plan. This email sequence is going to accomplish the task. We're going to apply some segmentation here. We're only going to send emails to the users who have joined the paid plan. So this is to convert hot buyers to buy more. We're going to implement 4 email sequences in this

   1. Nudged flash sale/discount

   2. Logic-based email

   3. Testimonial-based email

   4. Scarcity-based email

5. Re-Engagement Email SequenceThis email sequence will contain three emails and is used to make unengaged subscribers engage without emails.

   1. Incentivize

   2. Email Update

   3. Survey

   4. Personalized Survey

6. Tuberjacker and Post-Product Email SequenceWe'll combine these 2 sequences and automate them as one. The goal of this email campaign is to leverage a popular influencer's YouTube video in your industry that your users respect.

   1. Link to the YouTube Video

   2. Sell the Product

   3. Post-Product Email Survey

7. Churn Email Sequencehis email sequence is important - it is easier and less costly to sell to existing users. Here are the three emails:

   1. Downsell to Free/Last Plan

   2. Reminder Email

   3. Survey Goodbye Email

Of course, email marketing is a lot more than automated sequences but the setup looks exhaustive. Rohan goes into a lot more detail into each email and why he send it. You can read the full thread here.

Growth Marketing

Denis shares how he grew a SaaS company’s MRR by 340% in 3 months.

A few tweaks to their plan was all it took. Here’s what he did:

1. Intro: This SaaS company’s entire purpose was to use AI to fulfill hours of manual work. With a powerful algorithm and hours of coding, the product did its job well. There were a few holes in the plan though…

2. The Problem Initially, the company saw its target market to be freelance Amazon copywriters. They also tried reaching freelancers on Fiverr and Upwork. But with inconsistent sign-ups and a conversion rate below 2%, they needed a new approach. This is where we came in.

3. The Plan As a whole, we: - Changed their positioning - Tweaked their outreach - Designed a call process - And built out a repeatable funnel Let’s dive into it:. 

4. Positioning [I] To start, we identified the audience who’d pay the most for the product. Right, those who’ll be getting the highest ROI and saving the largest amount of time: Amazon agencies. Now we have to target them.

5. Positioning [II] For each buyer persona, we want to find the channel where they’ll be the easiest to find. Because their ICP is Amazon agency owners, we went to LinkedIn. We came up with an outreach strategy and this is how it works…

6. Outreach [I] The entire goal with this is to book meetings. We went for a 4 message outreach sequence that: - Brought high reply rates - Gave more market knowledge - And led us to a better understanding of who needs the product

7. Outreach [II] The outreach was a success and was able to get the SaaS company’s week booked with demo calls. All that’s left is closing the deals and we had something in mind.

8. Call Process [I] For this call structure, we went with the classic 4 step framework: 1. Learn the situation 2. Find their pains 3. Ask for feedback 4. Make an offer

9. Call Process [II] Instead of a low price of $30 - $60/mo, we let them decide what would be a good deal for them. 3 weeks in and the SaaS was closing $79/mo deals daily. This eventually transitioned into $99/mo - that’s a 10x increase that increased their growth rate.

10. The Proven Funnel [I] After we validated the ICP and found a repeatable way to book calls… It was about optimizing conversions and freeing up the company’s time for high-value tasks. So we automated.

11. The Proven Funnel [II] We installed tools to automate email research. Then we hired a VA to handle their inbox and lead generation. Delegating these tasks freed up so much time for the company.

12. Outcomes - Marketing plan with 3 acquisition channels (email, partnerships, Linkedin). - Free plan removed with no loss of user base after month 2. - Customer acquisition system that brings new paying customers daily. - High rates & monthly churn don’t exceed 5%.

13. Results By the end of the program, the SaaS company’s grown by 340% in monthly revenue. Without a single dollar put into ads.

Quite a solid cast study when you find your positioning and a good channel to convert your leads to customers.

Writes and Picks 💫

• Get a handpicked list of recently funded SaaS companies with verified employee email addresses, sent to you weekly. Sign up for SaaSyDB

• Let me help you build a marketing channel for your SaaS. Book a session.

• A CEO’s tactical guide to driving profitable growth: 40 practices SaaS leaders can employ across their business to improve operational efficiency and profit margins.

Thanks for reading! SaaSwrites is a humble attempt to help SaaS founders and marketers grow their SaaS.

See you next Saturday.

Ricky,

SaaSwrites