If you get 100 SaaS marketers in a room and ask them about the most effective lead-generation practices, you’ll get at least 1000 responses.
We’re willing to bet that 600-700 of those will revolve around automation.
Why? Because, unlike a dedicated promotional campaign, a SaaS automation strategy is adaptable. It can seamlessly respond to unforeseen changes in marketing trends, and help lay the foundation for your advertising and sales efforts.
In this article, we’ll cover how you can use automation to boost your SaaS business. We’ll go over key aspects to consider, tools you can use, and some general tips and best practices.
Let’s get down to it.
Why should you consider automating your SaaS marketing and sales strategy?
There’s a common misconception that automation can magically help generate new leads or boost overall sales.
That’s simply not true. What it does is take care of the grunt work for your marketing and sales efforts.
For example, instead of manually organizing data, you could use software to clean your lead lists and export them to your in-house system. Then, it’s just a matter of deploying cold emails to those prospects.
It’s similar to how business coaching works. SaaS automation gives you the guidance and tools you need to succeed. From there, you have to put in the time and effort. But if you follow through, you’ll be able to:
- Discover and qualify potential leads significantly faster
- Build a streamlined prospect outreach program
- Seamlessly raise product awareness on digital channels
- Conduct targeted user research
All of this may sound like we’re overreaching. However, a 2024 study found that 65% of the surveyed SaaS companies automate their marketing and sales efforts. And they only do so because it helps them invest their internal resources better.
5 tips and tools to streamline your SaaS automation strategy
Automating SaaS marketing and sales strategies involves multiple different aspects.
To keep things streamlined and actionable, we’ve exclusively focused on a few areas. This includes lead discovery, marketing outreach, prospect nurturing, product awareness, and user research.
Below, you’ll find tips on each of those elements, along with software options that can help you in the process.
Simplify the collection of lead intelligence
Lead intelligence is all about gathering critical details about prospects or potential customers. This process covers a wide range of information, including business verticals, email addresses, company-allocated budgets, and more.
Now, there are two ways to do this effectively.
The first method involves using a tool like BuiltWith to discover qualified organizations based on their tech stack.
So, let’s say you’re marketing an app that integrates with Klaviyo on Shopify.
With BuiltWith, you can search for Shopify partners that use Klaviyo in their workflow. You can also filter businesses based on how much they spend on supportive software integrations, average usage duration, or company financials.
The second way leverages LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator. This is primarily for marketers who already have access to a prospect pool but struggle to organize the information.
To get around this, you can use a scraper to export a lead list from LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
Simply download a Chrome extension and let the scraper pull data from your saved searches or account lists. Then, run that list through the internal algorithm to clean it. Once you have all the details, export them to an Excel file.
This is also helpful if you’re concerned about GDPR regulations. Since scraping tools extract data in real-time, they exclusively focus on self-volunteered information.
Build an effective outreach program
Once you have a lead list, the next step is conceptualizing a solid outreach program.
And outbound email marketing will be your best bet here.
However, it’s important not to mistake this for traditional cold emailing. You aren’t messaging random leads at scale here. Instead, your goal should be to strategically target a defined prospect pool based on the list you’ve already built.
One platform that can help you do this would be Mailshake, which allows you to upload a lead list to your account database. From there, you can use the app to:
- Create and send cold outreach messages and emails at scale
- Build personalized templates for specific prospect groups
- Automate and schedule follow-up efforts at critical touchpoints
- Conduct A/B testing for your outbound email campaigns
While you’re at this, you should also work on improving your cold email deliverability. Now, Mailshake already offers built-in tools to help you do this.
For instance, the software has integrations to validate addresses, check domain configurations, and set up DNS records to improve overall deliverability rates.
Still, if you don’t want to opt in, you can use GlockApps to run straightforward deliverability and sender reputation tests. There’s also Warmbots, a free warm-up tool that can help you improve your email domain reputation.
Refocus your lead nurturing efforts
Most prospects who click on an email CTA won’t immediately buy into your product.
Instead, they’ll evaluate what’s on offer. This is where you have to nurture leads to get them invested in your SaaS platform.
Fortunately, several tools can help you with this.
Userlist is one such example. It’s specifically designed for SaaS businesses and offers built-in features to broadcast critical announcements, send in-app conversion messages, trigger emails for user activation, and more.
Whatever you choose, ensure that you only pursue and nurture prospects that qualify under your lead scoring program.
This way, you’ll be able to focus your efforts on businesses that are more likely to convert. As an added benefit, you’ll also reduce the risk of a deal falling through in the final stages of the sales and marketing cycle.
Leverage your social media channels
While not typically considered under SaaS automation strategies, streamlined social media management goes a long way in advertising your offerings.
The idea is to create a digital promotional plan that seamlessly builds product awareness. And, once again, you can turn to automated software to accomplish this.
For instance, MeetEdgar is a dedicated social media tool that lets you create and schedule content for Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. The app also offers a feature that automatically optimizes and reshares old posts across all your social channels.
That said, if you want to focus exclusively on running ads, you can look into Facebook lead automation.
This would require you to set up a third-party integration with your Facebook lead ads and in-house marketing or CRM software. Then, use that connection to transfer prospect information from the networking site to your internal system.
When that’s done, segment your leads based on their behavior, interests, or interaction data.
From there, you can create personalized email campaigns to showcase your product to prospects or build custom audience profiles to streamline the buyer journey.
Prioritize user behavior research
Your current users are a goldmine when it comes to customer research.
Since they’ve already subscribed to your SaaS platform, they hold critical insights about what aspects of your marketing and sales strategy work best.
A platform like Refiner can be helpful in this instance. Designed as an in-product survey tool, Refiner lets you send targeted micro-surveys to specific user groups.
You can use this to gather feedback for your current promotional campaigns or pricing plans. The collected information can also enable you to optimize conversion forms or implement adjustments to your customer satisfaction efforts.
Now, if you want to examine user behavior independent of your existing clients, you can track your website engagement.
For example, you can analyze which pages have the highest click rates. Then, place your most important CTAs there. Data analytics consultants can direct you further in this process.
If you don’t want to opt for that, you could turn to a platform such as Hotjar. This is a behavior analytics software program that offers page heatmaps, user screen recording, and funnel insights and reporting to help you improve your landing pages and overall site.
The best way, though, would be to combine both. Use an app like Hotjar to collect the initial data and then pair it with the guidance of a consultant.
How will you build your SaaS automation strategy in 2024?
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to advertising SaaS products. However, the tips in this guide can serve as a foundation for building your promotional campaigns.
In short, simplify lead data collection, build a strong outreach program, and consistently nurture qualified prospects through the funnel stages.
Then, prioritize raising product awareness on digital channels while gathering feedback from your current customers.
If you follow these steps methodically, you’ll be able to create a SaaS automation strategy that’s not only effective but also adaptable to any future changes.
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