SaaS businesses face unique challenges when it comes to marketing. With competition increasing every day, SaaS companies need to constantly evolve their marketing strategies to stay ahead of the curve. One approach that has gained popularity in recent years is funnel automation. By automating key processes and touchpoints throughout the marketing funnel, SaaS companies can improve their marketing metrics, streamline their sales process, and ultimately drive more revenue. In this blog, we will discuss strategies to improve SaaS marketing metrics through funnel automation and provide insights into how businesses can leverage this approach to achieve their marketing goals.
What is the Marketing Funnel for SaaS
Marketing funnel automation is a powerful tool for SaaS marketing, as it allows companies to streamline their marketing efforts and increase their efficiency. A marketing funnel is a model that represents the journey a potential customer goes through before making a purchase. It typically includes several stages, such as awareness, consideration, and decision. Automation allows companies to automate the process of moving prospects through the funnel, from initial contact to purchase and beyond.
As potential customers move through the marketing funnel, they experience many stages including: awareness, consideration, decision, and retention. There are many unique qualities within SaaS marketing that create unique opportunities for marketing and automation. In consumer funnels, marketers have to convince a single buyer to make a purchase. For SaaS marketers, they must sell their software product on an enterprise-level, and convince key decision makers that their organization should purchase a product. Additionally, SaaS companies earn revenue from recurring subscriptions, and often track their growth by monthly recurring revenue (MRR). The unique use of MRR extends the marketing funnel beyond ‘decision’, and includes a final stage of ‘retention’.
Due to the unique qualities of the marketing funnel for SaaS professionals, there are exclusive opportunities to automate manual tasks. By introducing marketing funnel automation, SaaS companies can increase their efficiency, reduce their costs, and improve their customer retention. There are many automation tactics a marketer can employ to optimize their workflows, including creating unique messaging to better target enterprise-level accounts and implementing paid ad-optimization with AI.
Implementing Automation into your SaaS Marketing Funnel
Implementing automation into your SaaS marketing funnel can be a game-changer for your business. It can help you streamline your marketing efforts, save time, and increase revenue. At the recent RevTech Summit, presented by Signals, Dan Baird shared insights into how to implement automation through Wrench.ai’s platform.
Dan Baird is the founder and CEO of Wrench.ai, a platform specializing in enriching customer profiles, and delivers consumer personas and unique segmentation and targeting information. Many companies have increased their focus on automating all stages of the customer funnel by investing in creating ‘perfect’ websites by maximizing their messaging to resonate with the largest possible audience. While Dan agrees the this works, he advises that “you probably don’t have the one perfect message because there isn’t one… the trick is for you is not to find the perfect way to describe [your product] so everyone gets it. It’s how do you describe it for the audience in front of you.”
Dan advised marketers at the RevTech Summit to create dynamic funnel messaging based segmenting website visitors. He suggests segmenting by their funnel position, their personality type, and their purchasing styles. He shares that personality and product enrichment drives 50% more customer acquisition.
Will Allred, founder and CEO of Lavender.ai echoed Baird’s sentiments in his own presentation at the RevTech Summit. Lavender is an AI email writing assistant that helps personalize emails efficiently, and maximizes messaging resonance with recipients. In his presentation, Allred shares that by including personalized 1:1 messaging in cold emails, average reply rates are increased from 2% to over 20%. Additionally, by segmenting the messaging to the initiatives of the buyers, marketers and salespeople can foster growth in the pipeline and turn a simple reply into a qualified lead.
Paid Ads and Automation for Targeted Funnel Progression
Paid advertising and automation are two powerful tools that marketers can use to target potential customers and drive them through a funnel progression. By combining these tools, marketers can create highly effective campaigns that deliver targeted messages to the right people at the right time, increasing the chances of converting them into paying customers.
Paid ads, such as pay-per-click (PPC) ads, display ads, and social media ads, are a quick way to get your message in front of your target audience. With paid ads, you can target specific keywords, demographics, interests, and behaviors to reach people who are most likely to be interested in your product or service.
Automation, on the other hand, involves using software tools to automate repetitive tasks such as lead generation, email marketing, and customer segmentation. By automating these tasks, marketers can save time and resources while ensuring that each lead is receiving the right message at the right time in their journey through the sales funnel.
At the RevTech Summit, Danny Read of Metadata shared insights into using their platform to automate targeted ad campaigns. Companies employing paid ads understand that it is an iterative process that needs to be optimized regularly to ensure that the funds allocated to paid ads are being used in the most effective way – however constantly updating ads based on performance is very time consuming. He shared that “marketing teams are being asked to do a lot more with less. Less resourcing, but your goals remain the same. Metadata is a platform that helps automate non-value manual workflow tasks and helps you achieve much more success, while decreasing your actual time spent.
Julianne Martin, CMO of Above The Fold, echoed Read’s sentiment in her presentation at the RevTech Summit. She shared that “programmatic targeting solutions can accomplish highly localized planning, execution, and attribution across devices. We can build a media plan based on targeting across location, demographics, and behaviors.” Martin shared insights for automation with Above the Fold, and expanded that by using different targeted channels, you can help foster the upper funnel and then use retargeting ads to help customers through the funnel. Finally, she shared insights into creating custom user journeys based on your customer’s persona using the Signals platform.
By combining paid ads and automation, marketers can create highly effective campaigns that drive targeted traffic through a well-defined funnel progression. This not only saves time and resources but also ensures that each lead is receiving personalized messaging that increases the chances of converting them into paying customers.
Ready to Keep Learning?
The RevTech Summit is a live, virtual webinar that took place on February 15th, 2023. Speakers at the Summit included leaders in Marketing, Sales, and Operations. Insights were shared on automating marketing and sales funnels, capitalizing on dark social, optimizing revenue analytics, sales automation tactics, marketing automation through AI, and more. Signals presents the RevTech Summit playbook, which shares deeper insights into the presentations covered in this blog, and 20 additional presentations! Click here to download the playbook!