Are you ready to scale your SaaS to millions of users?
To scale your SaaS business to millions of users you have to prepare for it. You need to have a bunch of things done by now. You found your product market fit, you learned how to sell to strangers, you fixed your user retention rates, you streamlined your customer support and also probably built library of educational assets.
Ideally, you also successfully implemented the user referral program and also you are somewhere in between 500 to 1,000 paying users by now. You need most of the things from this list to profitably spend money on ads and affiliates. Only now you are ready for the next steps to really scale your SaaS business.
In This Article:
Selling SaaS and software is hard
By now you know that selling software is hard. People and businesses don’t switch from one CRM to another in just one day. These decisions might take weeks and sometimes months depending on the company size and the cost of mistakes. Also, there should be kind of opportunity window that opens up maybe once a year during the budget planning period. Also, in digital marketing, it’s a well known fact that someone needs to be exposed to your ad at least eight times before they are likely to take notice and consider signing up for your trial.
Your CAC (Customer acquisition costs) will go over the roof to get the trial signup and unfortunately, in most cases, the signup will not convert to a paid subscription. So what to do don’t sell software, sell something that is much easier to sell. Build a proper sales funnel that will sell it and only then upsell your software.
What is the proper sales funnel for a SaaS product?
The easiest and cheapest way to sell your SaaS is not to sell it directly. Instead, you sell something preliminary, easy to sell educational product, and only then you upsell your software or bundle it with your education.
While working on our product with my partner Ethan, we put together a 60 minutes video masterclass that shows people how to run effective Facebook ads. We built a sales funnel to promote this course and drove paid traffic to it using Facebook ads. And then as we went through our masterclass, we kept emphasizing how my software can help students achieve their goals faster by automating social media marketing, and it worked like magic for us.
Another example, Brian from Canada, focuses on marketing his coaching services to construction agency owners. He then upsells his software BuildWise, a finance management tool designed to help these agencies increase their profitability, and it also works perfectly fine for him.
Another, Zak Muro, and his wife, who own a beauty salon network in the US, promote courses to stylists. They subsequently upsell forward forms, a SaaS product that my team built for them. Also popular digital marketer Naive Patel sells courses for SEO professionals and upsells his Ubersuggest and Answer The Public software which I personally use. And I really love them.
Vidiq, a leading YouTube analytics SaaS company, sells and markets its video academy educational program before upselling its software video to its audience.
Finally, Russell Brunson promotes his book.com secrets and then upsells clickfunnels, a software that enables users to build sales funnels.
And your educational product does not need to be overly complex. A simple 1 hour masterclass or maybe a white paper with valuable insights can be incredibly effective. The key is to understand your customer pain points and offer advice to help them solve these pain points.
By selling this advice, you can then upsell your software as a way to accelerate these results. Now, when it comes to designing a specific sales funnel, there are many different possible combinations. One popular approach is the free book plus pay for shipping only funnel, which I know has been used effectively by tons of SaaS businesses.
For example, Russell Brunson’s Traffic Secrets book funnel is a great example of how this works. In this funnel, you will typically see the software upsell as the second or third step after purchasing the book. You also will be added to kind of email follower apps where you will receive reminders, menu reminders about clickfunnels and other related products.
Similarly, you can do the same with your software. Take the valuable educational assets you collected from your previous SaaS growth hacking stage and assemble them into useful educational product or maybe surveys for your audience.
How do you run profitable paid ads for a SaaS product?
Once you have your educational product created, once you build your sales funnel to sell this product and then upsell your software, now you are ready to start your paid ad campaigns.
Regardless of the platform you are going to use, Facebook, Instagram, Google Search, etcetera, the algorithm is pretty similar. Set the goal for your campaign. For example trial registrations set the audience. This is the most important factor. Describe your offer in text. Prepare your ad copy.
In other words, add some catchy creative and run it until you get 1000 impressions. Then analyze the results and adjust the above steps accordingly. This is the very basic outline, but if you really want to understand how to analyze your ad performance and make it all work for your SaaS product, comment below the word ads and I will share with you the SaaS paid ads formula I am using for my products and client software. And finally, don’t forget to set up retargeting ads for those who visited your landing before.
How to execute proper affiliate marketing for SaaS and software?
The second big way to turbocharge your SaaS growth hacking and scale it to thousands of users is affiliate marketing. And by affiliate marketing I’m talking about joint ventures, affiliates, influence marketing, integrations with other SaaS products, and so on and on.
It’s all about partnering with well known folks in your niche and kind of asking them to promote your product. And in return you give them a slice of pie, whether it’s a percentage of sales or maybe a flat fee per promotion. And the key here is the same as with paid ads for SaaS.
You don’t sell your software directly. Instead you promote an online course, mastermind or coaching program that solves a specific pain point for your audience and only then you upsell your software. We did this with our product, we didn’t promote our software directly.
Instead we offered a 1 hour masterclass called flawless ads formula and it worked pretty well for us, we did affiliate marketing first before running paid ads. Why? Because we had a solid network of influencers at that time and it was kind of low hanging fruit for us.
If I didn’t have that advantageous, I would usually recommend starting with paid ads. They are fast and can get you traffic quickly. On the other side, partnerships take time to build and also the results can be kind of unpredictable.
So I would start with paid ads, get them working, and only then start working on affiliate marketing. Now how do you organize affiliate marketing? Well, I would recommend reading Russell Brunson’s book Traffic Secrets. We followed this framework word by word and it made magic for us.
Summarize
Now let’s summarize. If you want to grow beyond 1000 SaaS users, you need to create educational product for your audience, build a proper SaaS sales funnel to sell it and only then upsell your software.
When you do affiliate marketing, you do the same sell education or info product and then upsell or bundle your software with it. And if you follow my advice from this post, I guarantee you will start adding thousands of customers pretty soon.