Grow Saas Customer Retention with a Giving Mindset

In short, you need to provide your customer with equal parts value and gratitude.

Your product may have gotten you in the door, but customers won’t evangelize your brand if they don’t feel appreciated and part of a community. As Theodore Roosevelt said, “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.”

And, just like any committed relationship, words (read: thank you emails) aren’t always enough to express your gratefulness. It takes altruistic action.

Here’s a few ways ChurnZero shows our customers we 😍them.

After a customer completes onboarding, their Customer Success Manager sends a care package with our coveted “Fight Churn” flag for the team to proudly hang in their office. The package also contains other branded goodies such as our Churn Monster cards, stickers, and notebooks. And as a thoughtful touch, we include a personal handwritten note from their new Customer Success Manager welcoming them to the family.

We also have an ongoing user-generated content (UGC) campaign where if new customers snap a team picture with their flag and post it on social media, we’ll send them a cookie gift basket to “sweeten the relationship”. These photos are a fun way to create authentic content that genuinely excites our customers. What I love most about our flags and what makes them share-worthy is that they unite our customers and us under a common cause: fight churn. The flag represents their daily hustle and shared end goal of increasing customer retention—not promoting our brand name or product. Virality is about relatability; always make it about the customer.

Using ChurnZero’s continuous Plays (automated messaging and tasks), every time a customer gives us a positive Net Promoter Score rating, we send them an automated email and in-app message with a request to review us on a software review site. After the customer publishes a review, we send them an Amazon gift card to thank them for being a loyal customer and sharing their experience. We also give gift cards for customer referrals and references to encourage and incentivize worth-of-mouth marketing.

Gifting your unique expertise and connections to customers provides a different kind of enrichment—one that’s loaded in value yet priceless. Surprise-and-delight strategies don’t have to be limited to money-saving coupons and free upgrades. Reward your customers with unexpected insights and analysis. For example, you can configure a strategic report to give extra context to their out-of-the-box analytics or share hyper-relevant industry news that would be of interest to them.

You can also offer up your connections. Do you have a current customer that has an opening on their team, and know of someone in your network that could be a good fit? Then set up that introduction! You strengthen your customer’s team, provide a referral for someone in your network, and build trust with all involved. It’s a win-win for everyone.

Any time you provide proactive Customer Success, where you anticipate your customers’ future needs, you, in turn, give them additional value that they didn’t even have to search or request. Customer Success Managers find opportunities to make things better, take things further, and use their account and product mastery to prepare customers for the next phase of their business growth.

Look for ways to think outside of the box (literally) and give other contributions like; the gift of knowledge, the gift of encouragement, and the gift of community.

As a client to other SaaS companies, we’ve been lucky enough to receive a few memorable vendor gifts ourselves. Here are a few of our recent favorites.

SaaS companies rely on monthly and annual recurring revenue, so they can’t (successfully) operate using a set-it-and-forget-it customer mentality once a sale closes. Thriving in the subscription economy takes an ongoing commitment to not only invest in and improve upon your product, but also your customers. If most of your customer interactions involve you soliciting something from them, then you’re in a one-sided relationship. Your customer will eventually wise up and realize that there’s someone else out there who will treat them better. Lasting customer relationships give more than they take. That’s how you win subscribers for life.

Want to learn more ways to build customer retention through sending? Check out our eBook below for fun and creative ideas to engage your customers.