Happy St. Patrick’s Day and thanks for checking out Five on Friday, our curated list of subscription-related “must reads.” In this week’s edition of Five on Friday, you’ll find:
- 7 SaaS KPIs to Track in 2017
- HootSuite’s 7 Tips for Creating Effective Facebook Ads
- More Countries Are Adopting Cross-Border Taxes on Digital Services
- 7 Emotional Triggers to Hook Subscribers in Your Next Email Campaign
- Webinar: How to Reduce Subscriber Churn in 14 Days
We hope you find these articles helpful, and we’d love to hear your feedback and get input on topics you’d like to learn more about.
Thanks for reading!
7 SaaS KPIs to Track in 2017
The prevalence of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) continues to grow, as does the competition. To continue to grow your company’s SaaS, it can be helpful to track your marketing. Hubspot recommends these seven key performance indicators (KPI) to determine if what you are doing is working:
1) Identify qualified marketing traffic. You’ll need to be able to differentiate returning traffic as well as new, qualified marketing traffic.
2) Know what stage of the lifecycle your leads are in. Break your leads down into marketing qualified leads (MQL) and sales qualified leads (SQL) to identify where your prospects are in their research to find the right SaaS to fit their needs.
3) Determine your lead-to-customer rate. Take the total number of customers for a given time period and divide by the total number of leads and multiple that total by 100. If you closed 10 customers in a month out of 100 leads, your lead-to-customer rate is 10 percent.
4) Know your churn rate. Knowing and understanding your churn rate can help you identify trouble spots. Do you see any patterns?
5) What is your customer lifetime value (CLV)? Your CLV is the average amount of money your customers will pay during their relationship with your company. Click here for the formula.
6) What is your customer acquisition cost (CAC)? It is important to know how much it costs to acquire each new customer as well as the value they bring to your SaaS company. To determine your CAC, divide the total sales and marketing costs, including staffing costs, for a given time period and divide that by the total number of new customers during that same period.
7) Know your CLV-to-CAC ratio. This ratio can help you determine if your marketing program is working or needs refinement.
To learn more about these 7 KPIs, read the full article on Hubspot here.
HootSuite’s 7 Tips for Creating Effective Facebook Ads
This is a continuation from last week’s Five on Friday where we shared three Facebook advertising best practices from HootSuite. In this snippet, HootSuite shares 7 simple steps to advertising on Facebook.
- Create a business page on Facebook.
- Create SMART goals for your ads. (S – specific, M – measurable, A – attainable, R – relevant, T – time-bound).
- Select an objective for your ad campaign – increase page or video views, increase attendance at an event, convert more customers, etc.
- Select your target audience and set your budget. As we stated last week, be as specific as possible when defining your audience. Use demographics, geography, key words, interests, etc. to find the audience that’s most likely to have interest in your subscription product or service.
- Design the ad. Do you want one image or multiple images or perhaps different images in multiple ads? You also need to identify where the ad will appear – desktop News Feed, mobile News Feed, right hand column or audience network.
- Submit your order to Facebook for review.
- Set up a Facebook ads report.
We’d take this one step further. In addition to creating a report, make sure you review your ad insights (and report) daily. This will tell you what’s working and what isn’t, so you can make immediate corrections. For more detail on creating a Facebook ad, including screenshots and using HootSuite’s new AdEspresso feature, read the original article on the HootSuite blog.
More Countries Are Adopting Cross-Border Taxes on Digital Services
In a recent blog post, Recurly quotes a CardNotPresent study that shows predicted growth of global, cross-border e-commerce. In 2015, it was $300 billion. It will grow to $900 billion in 2020. While that means growth for global subscription companies, it also means that companies must understand the international tax laws that will affect their sales, including the so-called Netflix tax.
This is a growing issue in the United States as cities and states including Chicago, Pennsylvania and Alabama impose taxes on digital services like Netflix and Hulu. The idea of the tax is to replace revenue lost when subscribers purchase services outside their “home” jurisdiction. Recurly reports that Australia passed its own cross-border tax last May. The new law will go into effect on July 1, 2017.
Whether you’re doing business in the United States, internationally or both, make sure you follow all applicable tax laws. Read Recurly’s full post here.
7 Emotional Triggers to Hook Your Subscribers in Your Next Email Campaign
According to Janice Kersh for Convince and Convert, emotional triggers are the secret to successful email campaigns. She recommends first identifying your goal for the campaign – delivering high quality content, driving traffic to your website, growing and retaining scribers on a list, increasing your conversion rate, segmenting your email database, qualifying leads, etc.
Next, decide which of the following emotional triggers will help you convert readers into subscribers.
- Belonging: making the reader feel like they’re a part of something bigger than themselves
- Hope: creating a sense of hope toward a certain outcome or goal
- Guilt: helping the reader understand they can make something right
- Vanity: flattering the reader
- Fear: informing the reader of an unpleasant consequence if they fail to act
- Lust: dangling the carrot of desire in front of them
- Greed: appealing to a reader’s desire for wealth or power
Armed with your email goal and the emotional trigger you want to use, formulate your email with personalized details, a physical problem, an emotional trigger, a solution, and finally, a call to action. Read Kersh’s article for additional details on how to use emotional triggers to attract and retain subscribers.
Just Announced: How to Reduce Subscriber Churn in 14 Days Online Webinar
Did you know that one-half of subscription revenue growth comes from retaining existing customers? Therefore, it is critical that subscription companies follow best practices to improve their retention rates. That’s where we come in with our next online seminar on Wednesday, April 19 (1 PM EST): How to Reduce Subscriber Churn in 14 Days. In this free webinar, we will
- Reveal what growing subscription companies do to increase engagement
- Tell you how to build an emotional connection with members
- Explain how to grow a vibrant tribe
Space is limited, so claim your spot today!