In this week’s Five on Friday, Tech.co shares three tips for launching a SaaS business, Media Post’s Oded Napchi says poor ad quality and ad fraud are responsible for the growth of ad blocking, Conversocial explains how bad it is for company’s not to respond to customer requests on social media, Fosina Marketing announces a merger, and Meredith experiments with new products and services including a wine club and a membership program.   

3 Tips for Launching Your Own SaaS Business 

As the software-as-a-service grows, it is becoming more attractive to entrepreneurs as a viable business model. But how do you start your own SaaS company? Andrew Klubnikin shared his ideas in ‘5 Tips You’ll Need to Kickstart Your Own Successful Business’ on Tech.co last week. We’re sharing three of Klubnikin’s tips here:

• Testing your idea. Klubnikin points out that 42 percent of startups fail because there isn’t enough interest in their product. That means your idea needs to be a good one, and it needs to solve a problem customers are willing to pay money to fix. Build your product and test market it, making tweaks and adaptations along the week.
• Developing a way to monetize your product. Companies like Spotify and Dropbox work with a freemium model, which offers customers a free version of the product. To get premium features though, they must subscribe. Determine the right model for your product, whether it is a freemium product, subscription product or a hybrid of different strategies.
• Marketing. It doesn’t matter how great your product it is if you don’t market it the right way to the right people at the right time. Klubnikin suggests a good landing page, explainer videos, and  AdWords and Facebook campaigns, among other marketing tools.

Read more about launching a successful SaaS startup in the original article, ‘5 Tips You’ll Need to Kickstart Your Own Successful Business’ on Tech.co.

Poor Ad Quality and Ad Fraud Contribute to the Growth of Ad Blocking 

As PageFair’s February 2017 report shows, ad blocking continues to grow. In December 2016, 615 million global devices were blocking ads, and there were 236 million desktops with ad blocking software installed. This year alone U.S. publishers will lose $15.8 billion from ad blocking. Why? In a recent editorial by Oded Napchi, Media Post said ad quality is the ‘elephant in the room’ that everyone is ignoring.

‘The problem with digital is surprisingly simple: the poor technical quality of the ads we’re exposed to,’ Napchi wrote. ‘While we, as an industry, are focused on being cutting-edge, algorithm-driven, data-targeted, and machine-learning-powered, we forgot our bread and butter, the basic and fundamental agreement between advertiser and viewer: being considerate and not ruining his or her experience.’

Part of the problem, Napchi said, is that the majority of ads don’t play smoothly. Twenty percent play ads, even when the sound is muted, and 1 to 3 percent of ads include adware. There are often technical bugs and other challenges like arbitrage fraud. How do we fix the problem? Napchi believes that publishers really need to acknowledge that ad quality is a big problem, and they need to do more to improve the ad experience and to reduce ad fraud. Read Napchi’s full commentary here.

Social Care: Respond or Else! 

If your subscription brand is on social media, your customers are watching…and they’re expecting to get customer service – sometimes called social care – via your social media channels, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or another social media platform. What happens if you aren’t paying attention? According to Seleah Gardiner for Conversocial, no response is your worst possible response.

Gardiner shares the following statistics from Statista:

• 81 percent of Americans use social media.
• They spend between 30 minutes and 2.4 hours on social media daily.
• More than 70 percent of consumers user social for customer service.
• Two-thirds of adults feel a response time above an hour is unacceptable.

Conversocial’s research shows that when customers don’t get a response on social, they will leave.

• 52 percent of customers will switch companies.
• 78 percent will ditch a current transaction or planned purchase.
• $1.6 billion is lost worldwide because of unresolved complaints.

‘So, when considering whether your brand should dabble or dive into the world of social media support, remember that there is no wrong answer. There is only responding and not responding, the latter of which is truly the worst response,’ wrote Seleah Gardiner.

Read the full article, ‘With social care, no response is the worst response,’ on Conversocial here.

Fosina Merges with Agency212 and iFuel Interactive 

On Wednesday, Jim Fosina, a Subscription Insider contributor and industry expert, announced that his agency Fosina Marketing Group, a digital marketing services agency, was merging with Agency212, a marketing and advertising firm, and iFuel Interactive, a digital marketing and technology company. By merging, the three firms will be able to offer their clients a wider range of services from brand discovery all the way through re-purchase communications.

“Combined, we will navigate our clients through the rapidly changing complexities of multi-channel and technological points of sale with brand messaging that will create long term customer relationships,” said Jim Fosina, President and CEO of Fosina Marketing Group, in a press release.

“As an advertising agency providing broadcast, print, and digital campaigns to big name clients for decades, we are excited to bring our traditional branding and creative expertise to a whole new level of result-driven campaigns,” said Kristina Tucker, EVP of Account Management at Agency212.

“iFuel and our sister company, Agency212, have worked for years to develop the intersection where Madison Avenue meets Silicon Valley,” said Tom Di Domenico, Managing Partner at iFuel Interactive. “Adding Fosina Marketing Group into the mix brings a new dimension of ROI driven solutions that will complete the merge of emotional advertising and transactional marketing, resulting in long lasting and mutually profitable brand relationships.”

Jim Fosina, Kristina Tucker and Tom Di Domenico have respectively been named CEO, President and Chief Strategy Officer of the newly merged entity, which will be headquartered in NYC. 

Meredith Launches BH&G Insider Member Program and Wine Club 

Earlier this week Meredith Corp. launched ‘BH&G Insider,’ a membership program that offers unlimited access to Better Homes & Garden content, including 95+ years of archives and access to three new editorial sections, an ad-free experience, downloads of popular BH&G e-books, along with discounts and special offers from brands including Overstock, Houzz and Havenly. To kick off the membership program, members will get a $199 credit from Havenly, an online interior design firm. A BH&G Insider membership is $6 a month if paid annually, or $8 a month if paid quarterly. Members can sign-up now at an introductory price of $5 a month.

In addition, Meredith has partnered with Direct Wines, Inc. to create the Better Homes & Gardens Wine Club. The program will expand to Allrecipes readers next month. The club’s introductory offer includes a shipment of 12 wines plus three bonus bottles of a 95-point Argentine Reserve. Members can sign up for $69.99 plus $19.99 shipping in tax.