As a SaaS business owner, you’re always looking for more feedback about your product and how your users interact. No tool is more essential in understanding your customer than the SaaS customer journey. With this resource, you can drive customer conversions, reduce churn, and improve your user’s experiences.
This guide will walk through each stage of the SaaS customer journey and show how it can help your business optimize acquisition, retention, and expansion of your customer base. Within this article, we’ll discuss each stage of the journey—awareness, consideration, activation, retention, and advocacy—and explain how this information can change the way you approach your customers.
What is the SAAS customer journey?
Basically, the SaaS customer journey tracks a user’s lifecycle from the initial discovery of a product or service to long-term engagement with it. Most industries and businesses follow some form of customer journey, but SaaS customer journeys differ as they’re more predictable and linear than in other industries’ customer journeys. They also differ from traditional sales journeys as subscription-based models lend themselves to longer lifecycles and require continuous engagement with the product. This guarantees you full control over tracking and analyzing your users’ interactions.
What is customer journey mapping for SAAS?
This next section will discuss customer journey mapping for SAAS businesses. This map visualizes the SAAS customer journey and every touchpoint (experiences like ads, emails, demos, SEO, in-app experiences, etc.) that a customer has with a service from their first interaction to retention and advocacy for the product.
What is customer journey mapping?
A SaaS business can identify flaws in its current customer experience through this map, gain insights into customer motivations, and enhance the customer’s overall experience. A SaaS customer journey map works by identifying and examining the key interactions, pain points, and opportunities for growth and using that data to improve user engagement with a product. After analyzing the map, product teams can help align marketing, sales, and success strategies to build a seamless experience that addresses possible issues.
Key components of a customer journey map
To create a customer journey map, you need to follow the customer journey stages with individual users. We’ll discuss each of these stages in detail, but for now, the five stages of the journey are awareness, consideration, activation, retention, and advocacy.
As they each represent a different period and set of interactions, each of these five stages has its own accompanying customer goals and pain points. By examining the individual experiences during touchpoints, you’ll have opportunities to optimize and bridge the gaps between your services and what the user needs and wants.
Why is customer journey mapping important for SAAS?
Compared to other types of businesses, SaaS customer journey mapping is particularly helpful as no interaction with a person is needed to use the product. The user will likely take advantage of a demo or have their own experiences with the product before interacting with the person behind it.
Through meticulous examination of each stage, customer journey mapping equips SaaS businesses with crucial info about their audience.. Here are a few benefits for your business that can emerge from this data:
- Improves Customer Acquisition – A customer journey map will pinpoint where potential customers are coming from (organic search, referrals, pay-per-click), and with that information, you’ll be able to refine your marketing strategy to target the most likely customers.
- Enhances User Experience & Reduces Churn – When you map the customer journey, you’ll be able to uncover friction points that cause drop-offs in users. With SaaS companies, one of those main issues can be onboarding and user flow with the product.
- Increases Retention & Revenue – Based on user behavior analytics, you will be able to personalize your subsequent marketing. This information can serve to support the possibility of upselling and cross-selling different tools to users who need more features.
- SEO Research – The customer journey map also assists in informing SEO strategies as the SEO needs to align with the specific needs of the user. Some users may be looking for blog posts in the awareness stage while others may be looking for case studies within the consideration stage. Catering the content to the right audience is the best way to convert them.
How to create a customer journey map for SAAS
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In this next section, we’ll discuss how you can create your own SaaS customer journey map.
Define Your User Personas
To better personalize your product for your customers, you need to define the different personas of your users and your target audience. This division of your target audience is known as segmentation and will allow you to tailor your marketing and onboarding experiences to a specific user.
To identify these personas, you must look for similarities between users and how they interact with your product. Are users from a startup or established business having more or less difficulty with your product? When you map out the experiences of these groups, you’ll be able to parse the underlying reasons why the user dropped off.
Identify Key Touchpoints & Channels
Mapping the SaaS customer journey will require you to identify the key touchpoints within each stage of the journey. As previously mentioned, each stage has its own accompanying set of touchpoints based on where the user is in their lifecycle with the product.
- Awareness – During the awareness stage, a user becomes aware of your product through marketing campaigns, organic search results & SEO-optimized content from services like Ranq.
- Consideration – Once the user discovers the product, they’ll look up reviews, compare alternatives, and evaluate the product. Common touchpoints during this stage include the product’s website and landing pages.
- Activation – During the activation stage, the user tries a free trial or demo of the product and goes through onboarding. A customer journey will examine each of these interactions to determine whether the product is intuitive.
- Retention – If a user likes the product, they adopt it through purchase after the end of trial and they are then targeted for upselling or cross-selling. Customer support and feature updates are the touchpoints for this stage.
- Advocacy – After the user shows brand loyalty, you want them to tell others. The best way to do this is with referral programs and testimonials that offer incentives to these users. By examining those touchpoints, you’ll see how the user advocates for and presents your product to others.
Track pain points & make data-driven decisions
Once you have identified and mapped out the different stages, you can track the pain points and make data-driven decisions about how to refine the messaging at each stage. By pinpointing where users get stuck or disengage from the product, your business will be able to correct their approach and help improve conversion rates.
There are a few methods to find these friction points, but one common method is looking at churn data and support tickets to find if there are common friction points for users. Once those friction points are mapped, SaaS businesses can implement improvements at those coordinates to improve user conversions.
Sometimes, those changes may come in the form of adjusting onboarding with customer tours or increased tooltips. Other times, the customer journey map can dictate how to personalize email and content marketing for users.
Your SAAS customer journey starts here!
With effective and accurate customer journey mapping, you can help your SaaS business optimize its user experience, boost user retention, and improve conversion rates. By following these five stages and defining your segmentation goals as a business, you’ll be closer to providing your users with the perfect experience and bringing in new customers.
Even if you’re doing everything right, getting noticed’s not always easy. If you want to improve your SaaS business’ visibility and conversion rates, look to the SEO experts at Ranq. Ranq specializes in SEO strategies that drive qualified traffic and maximize user engagement. Learn how we can help today!