Today I’m talking with Ed Frame who runs Exemplify – helping SaaS and ecommerce businesses retain more customers and turn them into brand advocates. Ed spent a decade helping businesses implement customer retention strategies. It is by far, one of the easiest methods of unlocking more profits in your business, yet not many businesses take it seriously.
Ed is on a mission to change this!
If you have a subscription business, then you’d want to tune into the show as Ed Frame breaks down his exact strategy that he uses to help SaaS businesses retain customers and become profitable.
How do you find out if your business is losing customers?
Ask yourself this question:
How many customers did you have in one year and how many of those have actually returned to buy from you again?
To find out, you can check your online purchase history or set up a CRM to help you find out. If the cost acquisition is too high, then your business may not be as profitable as it should be.
The marketing landscape is always changing, and so it’s important to invest in a CRM system to be able to learn more about your customers’ buying habits. A CRM that helps you with marketing automation will simplify your customer journey and help you build long term relationships with your customers, which will future-proof your marketing efforts and set up your business for the future.
How do you turn free trial users into customers?
Ed Frame shares his ideas on how to do this easily using the Tinder app as an example. Another interesting example shared here is how Facebook grew their business in the early stages. The biggest user retention metric for Facebook was that their users used their real name and how many friends they added to the platform. HINT: They didn’t focus on revenue.
A good customer retention strategy is the key to unlocking profitability in your business, not just today but for a lifetime.
How can we use automation to hyper personalize customer communication?
Ed says that every B2B business will have multiple sales reps who will perform better than others. There is always going to be a high performer in your sales team. If we use marketing automation to automate our sales process, we can replicate the high performing sales person for example, when they are closing a deal, and how they do this process using automation.
We can use automation to amplify the best sales processes in your business. Equally, if you don’t have a great sales process, then you could also amplify a bad sales process.
You can use automation to stay front of mind with your customers and platform users.
Ed reminds us that one of the easiest ways to lose a customer is to go silent. If you’re selling subscription services, you need to be front of mind with your customers every 2 weeks minimum.
Which CRM is a good choice for your SaaS businesses?
Ed recommends Hubspot as it can complete your whole customer journey, and help you gauge each user’s interests which is fairly important for a SaaS business. And for SaaS platforms, Hubspot offers an open API that helps you integrate easily with your app. In the interview, Ed shares the Peloton app as an example of how to use Hubspot to help you segment and automate your sales and marketing. Once you start to capture data about your users, you can feed your data in Hubspot and tailor your emails specifically to your customer’s interests giving your customers a much better experience as they will enjoy receiving emails from you, especially as it peaks their interest.
A big educational piece for my clients was that “Customers Come For Solutions, But Stay Because Of The Experience” – Meaning it’s more important to provide a great service as much as just solving problems – Ed Frame
You can follow Ed on LinkedIn here.
If you’re looking to learn how to create your own customer journey map to help you visualise your customer retention process, you can tune into our previous episode – A Simple customer journey map for your business.
Jovana Vujnic
Head Honcho | Marketing Automation Expert | Evil Twin Sister
Jovana is the Founder of Bumper Leads - a marketing automation agency that helps businesses simplify and automate their sales and marketing systems to help them save time and money.
She is a former body builder turned fast food junkie turned automation geek.
When she is not watching Cobra Kai on Netflix, she shares interesting marketing advice on our podcast called Marketing Automation Made Simple. This is where she helps overwhelmed business owners build smart marketing growth systems so they feel excited and in control of growing their businesses.
You can always follow her on social media to see what she's up to.