Top 10 Strategies for Your SaaS Growth Hacking

Let’s face it: growth is vital for any business. Companies that don’t grow disappear slowly and never come back. Sure, traditional marketing will help you with product distribution, but to grow ridiculously fast, you’ll need more than that. That’s why so many Software as a Service (SaaS) companies choose growth hacking. It’s a combination of both SaaS marketing and coding that can boost your company’s growth.

Want to know more about the best SaaS growth hacks? Read on to discover the top 10 strategies to use in your SaaS marketing plan.

Encourage Referrals

What comes to your mind first when you think of SaaS growth hacks? Referrals! No doubt, it’s the number one growth hacking strategy. Referrals have proven their efficiency with Dropbox’s, PayPal’s, and Payoneer’s success stories. In fact, Dropbox increased its signups by 60% using referrals. How’s did that happen? Unlike advertising, referrals are trusted. You may not believe an ad, but you will believe your friend’s recommendation. To grow fast, you need to encourage people in referring your SaaS application by offering some perks for every share and recommendation. For instance, Dropbox gave away additional free space for both the user and their invited friend.

Give a Bite for Free

Another popular growth hacking strategy is to give users some part of the product for free. It may sound silly, but, in fact, it’s a very effective strategy. If your service is really good, people will come back asking for more. Free trials and limited product versions are a great way to put this growth hack to use for your SaaS. Just make sure that the bite you’re offering is of premium quality, because it’s the quality of your product that will bring your customers back, time and time again.

Build an Email List and Use It

To build relationships with potential and existing users, it would be really nice to have their email addresses. Exit pop-ups, sticky widgets, and bonuses are just a few examples of how to collect those. But what’s really important is how you use the emails from your list through email outreach. Odds are that custom emails to users will result in user acquisition and long-lasting serious relationships.

Educate Your Users

Want to know a secret? When you teach, you establish a connection. In fact, if you share useful information on the product or the related field, people will trust you more. That is why so many companies have blogs, make how-to videos, hold webinars, and have Q&A sections on their websites. They know that by educating others, they both drive more traffic to their pages and turn their users into dedicated fans.

Collaborate with Bloggers and Influencers

If you want to grow fast, you need to get as much coverage as possible. Apart from press releases and release notes no one actually reads, you have to consider collaboration with bloggers and influencers. Start by finding the bloggers that write about your niche and already have the exact audience you need. Offer them a free premium version of your product in exchange for a review. You do the same with the influencers in the industry in exchange for spreading the word-of-mouth about your SaaS application. The result will be the rapid growth of traffic to your products.

Spy on Your Competitors

Don’t get us wrong, there’s no need to spy on every competitor’s move. You also don’t have to copy everything they do. But if you want to acquire an audience quickly, you can find it gathering around a similar SaaS application. The trick is to jump right in and steer potential customers your way. To do that, you can use many different growth hacks, such as creating a comparison page to show how your products differ and, of course, why your product is superior to your competitor’s.

Partner with Other Services

Another growth hacking strategy is to collaborate with other companies. If your product complements some other popular services, you can use that to build the user base. This is exactly what Spotify did with Facebook to get things going by encouraging app users to share their music playlists on Facebook. Even better, every time app users played a song with Spotify, it appeared as a status update on their Facebook page.

Make the Most out of Your Website

If you want to consider growth hacking your SaaS application, take a look at your website. Is it easy to use? Believe it or not, driving more traffic to your pages won’t help if the visitors can’t navigate through your website. FAQ sections, easy sign-ups and user-friendly product pages are simple – and effective – growth hacks that will boost user conversions. Using a homepage as a landing page is a great example of a shortcut for visitors to your website.

Create Exclusivity

Every marketer knows that when something is exclusive and secret, it becomes popular. To advertise your SaaS application, you need to make it appear exclusive. How do you do that? Try waiting lists and limited product access as SaaS growth hacks. Gmail and LinkedIn, for example, both used invites-only access, creating the feeling of an exclusive circle. Naturally, everyone wanted to be a part of it.

Gamify the User Experience

Gamification means applying game elements in a non-game context. To gamify the user experience, you need to turn your SaaS application into a game. What makes that so special? By adding points, badges and leaderboards, you make your service more fun to use. Game elements increase both user acquisition and retention. For instance, Foursquare used this strategy in its early days and grew to 10 million users.

All in all, growth hacking is not a regular SaaS marketing strategy. Today, to ensure your service’s growth, you need to be both a marketer and a coder. So, no matter which SaaS growth hacks you choose, be sure to have a strong team of professionals to help you implement them. Drop us a line!

READ ALSO