Internet users spend more digital time on online videos than other forms of digital content.  A global survey conducted by Statista suggests that respondents watch an average of 17 hours of online video content per week in 2024.

The surge in online video consumption creates opportunities for marketers to boost digital marketing campaigns by publishing various forms of videos. Webinars or web seminars belong to that category of marketing videos that promote brands by educating and engaging the target audience.

The live interaction component of webinars helps brands build authority and create relationships. While making marketing strategies, you can achieve the desired marketing goals by hosting many types of webinars.

Why Should Your Business Leverage Webinars as a Marketing Tool in 2024?

Many bloggers describe webinars as a conventional form of marketing videos. However, 85% of marketers currently use webinars as a powerful marketing tool to generate high-quality leads and keep them engaged.

Also, 57% of marketers host more than 50 webinars every year for marketing and promotion purposes. Hence, your company or startup can achieve several marketing goals by hosting webinars regularly in 2023.

Brand Awareness           

Like other online videos, webinars help your brand reach out to a wider audience. Hence, more consumers will know about your brand. You can enhance brand awareness and beat the competition by hosting various forms of webinars regularly. Also, you can make the audience know your brand deeply by asking various questions.

Brand Credibility

In addition to creating brand awareness, webinars help your brand gain credibility and establish authority. Your brand’s credibility will increase consistently when industry influencers and practitioners join the web conferences. Guests’ reputations and networks will make many bloggers, media people, and digital platforms share your webinars.

Audience Engagement

Unlike other marketing videos, webinars create opportunities for your brand to foster real-time audience engagement. Once you embed the webinar in your blog or post it on social networks, consumers will post comments and ask questions. You can interact with existing and potential customers in real time by responding to their comments and appreciating their feedback.

Lead Generation

You can create video content easily by recording webinars. You can distribute and promote the recorded webinars to get more organic traffic to the website from search engines and social media. The increase in website traffic will help you generate high-quality leads. Also, you can use webinars as a marketing tool to nurture and convert leads by building email marketing lists.

Content Repurposing

You can leverage many marketing benefits by hosting webinars. At the same time, you can boost various marketing campaigns by repurposing the webinar. For instance, you can boost search engine marketing campaigns by repurposing the webinar into articles and blogs. Likewise, you can repurpose the webinar into marketing and promotional videos.

What Types of Webinars Should Your Business Host in 2024?

While exploring webinar marketing ideas for 2024, you must focus on deciding the format and form of webinars. You should decide on the form of the webinar according to specific marketing goals. Likewise, you should choose a webinar format that keeps the target audience engaged.

Formats of Webinars

Webinar creates opportunities for you to present information and discuss topics in multiple ways. For instance, you can opt for the panel discussion format to make multiple industry experts discuss a specific topic and share their perspectives.

Likewise, you can make an industry expert share insightful and inside information related to specific topics and trends by choosing the question-and-answer interview style. At the same time, you can discuss a topic with an industry expert in a less formal way by choosing the chat show or talk show format.

Forms of Webinars

You can use multiple marketing goals by hosting webinars regularly and successfully. However, you must not try to accomplish multiple marketing goals by hosting a single webinar. It is always important to decide the type or form of webinar according to specific marketing goals.

Product Webinars

This type of webinar allows you to demo new products as well as highlight new features added to an existing product. You can host product webinars to influence customers by showcasing the key features, major use cases, and prominent benefits of a product/service. The information delivered through these webinars helps your business influence potential customers and convert them into buyers.

Panel Webinars

Panel webinars create opportunities for you to boost audience engagement. While planning panel webinars, you have to focus on choosing the most relevant topic and discussing the topic with reputable industry experts/industry influencers/industry practitioners. The insightful discussions will enhance your brand’s reputation and credibility.

Educational Webinars

Educational webinars help businesses highlight expertise and nurture leads. Instead of promoting a product or service, this form of the webinar focuses on solving customers’ problems and pain points. You can host educational webinars successfully only by identifying the existing and potential problems faced by customers and solving them by sharing expertise.

Q&A Webinars

Consumers these days ask a variety of questions about a product, service, or business while conducting pre-purchase research. You can increase sales conversions by answering the questions asked by existing and potential customers. Question-and-answer (QA) webinars help you engage and influence the target audience by getting their questions answered by industry experts and influencers.

Networking Webinars

Networking webinars create opportunities for you to form connections and foster relationships with the target audience. While hosting networking webinars, you should focus on discussing the latest changes, groundbreaking innovations, and recent developments in the industry.

Thought Leadership Webinars

This type of webinar helps entrepreneurs showcase their expertise or leadership in the industry. Entrepreneurs project themselves as thought leaders by discussing industry development and trends. You can host thought leadership webinars to connect with new audiences and generate high-quality leads.

How Can You Plan and Run Webinar Marketing Campaigns Successfully in 2024?

The outcome of webinar marketing campaigns depends on two major factors. Firstly, you have to make the online event a success by increasing the webinar attendance rate. Secondly, you have to promote the recorded webinar and follow up with the audience to achieve various marketing goals. Hence, you should adopt many ideas and best practices to make webinar marketing campaigns successful.

Webinar Topic

You cannot increase the webinar attendance rate without picking a topic that is exciting and captivating. While considering webinar topics, you should focus on the hottest trends or the latest developments in the industry. Also, you can use social media and search engines to find topics that your target audiences are interested in.

Webinar Structure

The right structure or outline will make the webinar successful by keeping the target audience engaged. You can boost audience engagement by dividing the webinar topics into multiple sections – introduction, presentation, and discussion. Each section will cover a specific aspect of the topic. However, you must explore ways to promote the relevant product or service before the webinar ends. Likewise, you should focus on converting attendees into leads and customers by giving special offers and discounts.

Webinar Length

It is always important to decide the length of a webinar according to its topic. But you should remember that 44% of attendees prefer webinars that run less than 45 minutes. Most brands set the webinar length between 45 minutes to 60 minutes. You should set the webinar length at 60 minutes while including adequate time for answering questions at the end of the live event.

Day and Time

Most brands find it convenient to host webinars during weekends. However, several studies suggest that they can increase the webinar attendance rate to 52% by hosting the online event on Wednesday or Thursday. Likewise, brands can increase the webinar attendance rate by scheduling the web conference at 10 AM. Hence, you should focus on hosting the webinar at the right time and on the right day.

Right Webinar Platform

You can host online conferences effortlessly using many webinar platforms. Widely used webinar platforms provide features required to facilitate session recording, audience collaboration, and data analytics. But you can focus on choosing webinar software that enables you to focus only on content and audience. It is always advisable to evaluate the platforms in real time by requesting a demo and reading reviews posted by existing users.

Webinar Landing Page

You can make it easier for the target audience to sign up for the webinar by creating a dedicated landing page. But you must focus on keeping the visitors engaged by making the landing page stand out from the crowd. It is always important to keep the content compelling and the call-to-action direct. Also, you should optimize the landing page for search engines to increase the number of visitors. Hence, you should consider several ad landing page strategy optimization strategies while creating the webinar landing page.

A Thank You Page

You must complement the webinar landing page with a thank you page. A visitor will be redirected to the thank you page after signing up for the webinar successfully. The page must appreciate her decision to sign up for the online event. However, the page should increase the webinar attendance rate by requesting her to attend the online event with friends or coworkers. Also, you must request her the share information about the online event using the right call-to-action and showing your brand’s social media details.

Confirmation and Reminder Emails

You need to ensure that a confirmation email is sent to every attendee as soon as she signs up for the webinar. The email must convey the date and time of the virtual conference clearly. However, you must ensure that a person attends your webinar after signing up for the online event by sending reminder emails.

Owned Channel Marketing

This marketing strategy focuses on promoting the webinar using your own digital assets. For instance, you can promote the webinar by showing information on the home page of your website. Likewise, you can use the pin option to display the webinar at the top of your social media profile or page.

Earned Channel Marketing

Earned channels create opportunities for you to get free publicity for a webinar or online event. You can promote an upcoming webinar through earned channels by distributing press releases, creating alerts for the event, or mentioning the webinars in podcasts and webcasts.

Paid Event Marketing

This approach requires you to promote the webinar by investing in paid advertisement options provided by search engines and social media. However, you can promote the webinar conventionally by publishing ads in various industry publications.

Post-Event Marketing

You can achieve several marketing goals by converting the webinar into promotional videos. After hosting the event, you should allow the interested audience to access and watch your webinar on demand. Also, you can post the sections of the webinar that were edited to reduce length. The post-event marketing is essential to keep the webinar relevant after the live event.

Follow-up Emails

You must thank the audience after sending follow-up emails after the webinar. In addition to appreciating them for attending the online event, your emails should remind them to leverage the special offer or discount included in the webinar. You can use follow-up emails as a marketing tool to generate leads and drive sales.

Limited-Time Replay

Many people will not attend your webinar after signing up. You can impress such an audience by allowing them to re-watch the webinar for a limited period. You can share the replay link with the audience who can watch the recorded webinar within 48 to 72 hours. The option will help you make more people watch the webinar.

Webinar Series

Leading brands these days get higher returns by planning webinar series. They leverage the success of individual webinars to keep the audience engaged by hosting more seminars. You can host a series of webinars by choosing interrelated topics or various industry trends. The webinar series will help you showcase your brand as an industry leader.

Conclusion

In 2024, your business can use webinars as a tried-and-trusted marketing strategy to achieve multiple marketing goals – create brand awareness, generate high-quality leads, and increase conversion rates. But you cannot accomplish predefined marketing goals only by hosting more webinars.

Your content marketing strategy must focus on hosting the right webinar at the right time and in the right way. It is always advisable to host different types of webinars according to specific marketing goals. Also, you get better results by hosting webinars at regular intervals.

But you must look for innovative webinar marketing ideas in 2024 to reach a wider audience. At the same time, you must understand what is working and what is not by measuring the performance of each webinar using the appropriate metrics and KPIs.

Eminent researchers believe that the world economy is headed for a recession in 2023. The global recession will decline the valuation of startups. Also, the huge funding crunch will make it challenging for startups to sustain business growth. Entrepreneurs and founders can overcome the funding crunch only by achieving profitability.

They will try to survive the funding crunch by accelerating customer acquisition and increasing sales revenue consistently. Likewise, they will try to maintain a positive cash flow by curtailing upfront and ongoing costs. Hence, startups will explore ways to promote and sell their products/services aggressively without escalating marketing costs.

While making a startup marketing strategy in 2023, you should focus on interacting with existing and potential customers using multiple channels and touchpoints.  But your digital marketing strategy for startups must curtail costs and increase returns by combining a slew of low-cost and budget-friendly marketing tactics.

15 Tactics to Consider While Making a Startup Marketing Strategy for 2023

1. Website Optimization

You can divert visitors to the start-up’s website using many digital marketing tactics. But the digital marketing strategies cannot convert visitors into leads and customers if the website does not deliver an optimal user experience. You need to ensure that users can access the startup’s website seamlessly on desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets.

At the same time, your strategy should focus on improving the key factors affecting the website’s user experience – speed, usability, content, security, and credibility. Also, you have to implement the latest search engine guidelines to increase search engine traffic to the website organically. Hence, your startup marketing strategy must make user experience optimization an ongoing process.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is one of the digital marketing tactics that help businesses reduce customer acquisition costs significantly. In addition to reaching out to a wider audience, SEO tactics boost a website’s online reputation and credibility. Your startup marketing strategy must boost the website’s search visibility using on-page, off-page, and technical SEO techniques.

However, you must remember that Google and Bing these days update their search algorithms frequently to boost search experiences. Hence, you must keep the SEO strategy flexible enough to accommodate the changes required to boost customer acquisition. In addition to using different forms of content, you must optimize the content for textual search, image search, voice search, and video search.

3. Social Media Promotion

The average time spent by internet users on various social networking platforms has increased to 2 hours and 29 minutes in 2022. Hence, your startup marketing strategy must include an organic social media plan. You can promote the startup on social networks organically by posting and sharing a variety of content – posts, stories, memes, photos, and videos.

However, your strategy must focus on posting the right type of content on the right social networking platform at the right time. In addition to posting content regularly, you need to optimize the content and engage with the target audience. Audience engagement is essential to enhance your brand recognition and visibility and produce user-generated content.

4. Influencer Marketing

Many individuals and enterprises have become social media influencers by establishing reputation and credibility in a specific sector. They help businesses promote their products and services on social media through posts, mentions, and endorsements. Your startup marketing strategy must consider this distinct form of social media marketing to promote products/services to a wider audience.

You can leverage this marketing tactic fully by long-term partnering with the right influencers. The partnership will result in the publication of authentic influencer content according to your marketing strategy. However, you must allow creative freedom to enable the influencer to create content that keeps the audience engaged and deliver your marketing message.

5. Content Marketing

In addition to connecting startups with the target audience in a cost-efficient way, content marketing boosts the performance of SEO and social media marketing campaigns. Your marketing strategy for 2023 must make the creation, distribution, and promotion of multi-form content an ongoing process.

But the startup can win customers’ trust and build long-term relationships with them only by producing relevant, valuable, and consistent content. Hence, this marketing tactic requires startups to produce high-quality content by deploying seasoned content creators. Your strategy must leverage real-time data to produce content that the target audience wants and prefers.

You must publish and promote the content strategically to ensure that the target audience can consume the content using their preferred channel and devices. At the same time, you should identify the high-performing content and focus on optimizing the underperforming content by monitoring the performance of each form of content.

6. Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the tried and tested digital marketing strategies. Over 87% of marketers distribute various forms of content organically using email marketing. In addition to connecting with the target audience, email marketing helps startups keep recipients engaged and influence their purchase decisions.

While making a startup marketing strategy, you should opt for email marketing as a low-budget marketing budget to build, nurture, and sustain customer relationships. But your email marketing strategy must focus on sending the right message to the customers at the right time. Also, you can get better results by combining email marketing and SEO.

7. Video Marketing

This marketing strategy requires startups to incur video costs. Also, startups have to spend more to improve video quality. But you must remember that 54% of consumers want brands to publish video content regularly. Hence, a startup cannot meet the expectations of consumers without investing in video marketing.

However, your marketing strategy for startups must focus on controlling video marketing costs by adopting best practices like keeping videos short, producing videos in-house, procuring economical equipment, and spending time on pre-production. At the same time, you must increase ROI by implementing a slew of video marketing strategies.

8. User-Generated Content

Consumers find user-generated content more authentic and impactful than brand-generated content. Your startup marketing strategy can influence the purchase decision of consumers by using brand-specific content created by consumers in various marketing campaigns.

You can boost brand loyalty and brand growth in a cost-efficient way by posting positive reviews on websites, social networks, and online forums. However, your strategy must make it easier for consumers to create brand-specific content by providing clear instructions.

9. Hashtag Campaigns

Hashtag marketing is a form of social media marketing. As the name suggests, this marketing tactic enhances the visibility of content on social media by embedding hashtags. Your startup marketing strategy should consider hashtag campaigns to create brand awareness, build communities, and promote products/services.

But you can make the hashtag marketing strategy impactful only by selecting the appropriate hashtag for a campaign and posting content featuring the hashtag. You also have the option to use multiple hashtags according to precise marketing goals. At the same time, you need to ensure that the target audience can interact with the hashtag seamlessly.

10. Referral Programs

This marketing strategy drives customer acquisition and sales conversion by encouraging and incentivizing existing customers to recommend products/services. While making referral programs for startups, you should focus on converting happy and loyal customers into brand advocates.

The existing customers will help the startup acquire new customers by recommending products/services to their friends, coworkers, and family. But the startup can persuade existing customers to recommend only by giving incentives like a surprise gift, option to upgrade, or attractive discounts.

11. Cross-Promotion

This marketing tactic emphasizes brands promoting each other’s products/services by marketing partnership. A startup can promote its product/service in a cost-efficient way by forming marketing partnerships with similar or relevant businesses.

The strategy will make another business promote the startup’s product/service to its customer base. But the startup has to promote the product/service of the partner to its customer base in return. Hence, cross-promotion creates a win-win situation for both partners without escalating marketing costs.

12. Business Awards

Many governmental and non-governmental organizations these days recognize the outstanding achievements of startups by giving awards. These awards enhance the reputation and credibility of winners in a short amount of time.

A startup can use the award as a cost-efficient marketing tool to attract new customers and retain existing customers. It can impress and influence visitors by displaying the awards on its website. But a startup can leverage this marketing tactic only after winning business awards.

13. Network Events

In addition to enhancing brand awareness, network events create opportunities for entrepreneurs to make connections in the industry. Startup founders can leverage this low-cost marketing tactic by organizing local events as well as attending network events.

While attending business networking events, entrepreneurs should showcase their expertise by participating in genuine discussions. At the same time, they must build business connections by sharing their contact information and staying in touch with other participants.

14. Personal Branding

Many entrepreneurs and founders have become celebrities in a short amount of time thanks to Social networking platforms and business reality TV shows. Likewise, many founders enhance brand recognition and customer acquisition through personal branding.

While making marketing strategies for startups, you focus on branding both founders and startups. Your personal branding strategy for entrepreneurs should focus on highlighting their struggles, past experiences, success stories, failures, and future plans.

At the same time, you should enhance the founder’s personal brand by distributing a variety of digital content – articles, blogs, videos, podcasts, case studies, and infographics – across customer communication channels and touchpoints.

15. Low-Budget PPC Campaigns

PPC is not one of the low-budget digital marketing strategies for startups. But no startup can garner instant results without running paid advertisement campaigns. While making a startup marketing strategy, you should focus on controlling costs by running low-budget PPC campaigns.

Leading search engines and social media enable you to control PPC campaign costs in a variety of ways. For instance, you can control PPC marketing costs by targeting the best keywords, opting for manual bidding, and targeting limited locations. However, you must monitor and refine the PPC campaign performance regularly to get better results.

Final Thought

While making a startup marketing strategy in 2023, you can overcome budgetary constraints by combining a slew of low-budget digital marketing techniques. But your strategy can increase ROI only by focusing on two important factors – digital marketing automation and digital marketing performance measurement.

Digital Marketing Performance Monitoring

Your digital marketing strategy for 2023 must define the metrics or KPIs for monitoring digital marketing performance. The KPIs will show the performance and outcome of digital marketing campaigns in numbers. Hence, it becomes easier for you to know which digital marketing techniques are working and which are not.

You can make the strategy more effective by increasing budgetary allocation for high-performing digital marketing campaigns. Also, you can achieve predefined marketing goals by improving the performance of underperforming digital marketing campaigns by making data-driven decisions.

Digital Marketing Automation

You curtail the manpower and resources required to run multichannel digital marketing campaigns only through automation. The digital marketing tool will help you control staffing costs by automating routine communication and marketing activities. Also, you can use the tool to generate, nurture, and retarget leads more efficiently.

At the same time, the software will provide you with actionable insights by analyzing large volumes of customer and marketing data collected from various sources. You can generate automated reports to boost digital marketing performance by making the right decision at the right time. Hence, you can power up the startup marketing strategy for 2023 by investing in the right digital marketing tool.

In addition to being intangible, Software as a Service (SaaS) products are being updated by the provider frequently. Also, potential buyers perform elaborate research by analyzing the information gathered from diverse online sources. Leading businesses these days promote their cloud-based software solutions by sending quality and targeted content to leads throughout the buying cycle.

In addition to answering questions asked by leads, the targeted content influences their purchase decision gradually during the decision-making process. Leading cloud service providers these days deliver the right content to the lead at the right time through multiple SaaS marketing channels. Also, they drive customer acquisition and retention by launching various SaaS marketing campaigns.

Hence, entrepreneurs, managers, and other decision-makers need to measure the performance of their marketing campaigns and activities using a slew of SaaS marketing metrics. The widely used SaaS marketing metrics can be divided into three broad categories – acquisition metrics, funnel metrics, and monetization metrics.

• Acquisition metrics help decision-makers to identify and compare the channels through which leads find the SaaS product and become subscribers. Marketers use a slew of acquisition metrics to monitor and understand the activities of website visitors before they become leads or contacts.
• The decision-makers use funnel metrics to assess lead nurturing activities and monitor the lead’s journey in various stages in the sales funnel. These SaaS marketing metrics help marketers to influence leads by delivering informative, personalized, and targeted content about the SaaS product.
• Monetization metrics help decision-makers to measure customer lifetime value and decide how to sustain profitable growth by increasing customer lifetime value consistently. Many entrepreneurs use monetization metrics to measure ROI on SaaS marketing expenditure and differentiate marketing efforts based on ROI.

Decision-makers can measure the performance of SaaS marketing campaigns and activities only by combining the appropriate acquisition, funnel, and monetization metrics. The combination of varying metrics helps them boost SaaS marketing campaigns by taking informed decisions by analyzing real-time data collected from various channels.

Identifying 21 Crucial SaaS Marketing Metrics for Entrepreneurs and Marketers

Here are the most important acquisition metrics, funnel metrics, and monetization metrics for SaaS marketers.

Crucial Acquisition Metrics for SaaS Marketers

1) Website Visitors/Website Traffic

The success and performance of SaaS marketing campaigns directly depend on the number of website visitors or the size of website traffic. A SaaS provider can generate more leads and increase the conversion rate only more and more people visit the website. This acquisition metric helps an entrepreneur know how many visitors or how much traffic the website gets over a certain period. Most entrepreneurs use the metric to measure an increase or decrease in monthly website traffic.

2) Source/Medium of Website Traffic

As mentioned earlier, marketers these days divert traffic to the SaaS product website through various marketing channels – organic search, paid search, social media, emails, and website referral. But the number of website visitors varies across the source or medium of website traffic. Marketers can make informed decisions only by knowing the amount of traffic diverted to the website by each source. This acquisition metric helps them to compare various web traffic sources based on the amount of traffic driven by it. 

3) Time on the Website

Most SaaS marketing campaigns influence the target audience by posting and sending relevant and informative content. SaaS marketers must know if the content is effective in driving lead generation and lead conversion by keeping the readers engaged. This acquisition metric helps marketers to assess the effectiveness of the content based on the amount of time visitors spend on the website. Visitors spend more time on the website when the content keeps them engaged by providing actionable and insightful information.

4) Bounce Rate

This SaaS marketing metric helps marketers to calculate the percentage of visitors that leave the website or bounce back to the referral website without taking any action – clicking on a link, filling in forms, or visiting other web pages. No business can run successful SaaS marketing campaigns without reducing the bounce rate. Marketers have to implement specific strategies to maintain a low bounce rate. They also need to revamp the landing page to ensure that every visitor gets the expected value.

5) Behavior Flow

This acquisition metric helps SaaS marketers to understand the behavior of website visitors based on the way they interact with the website. Widely used web analytics services like Google Analytics helps marketers to calculate this SaaS marketing metric by generating behavior flow reports.

According to Google Analytics Help,

“The Behavior Flow report visualizes the paths users traveled from one screen, page or event to the next. This report can help you discover what content keeps users engaged with your site. The Behavior Flow report can also help identify potential content or usability issues.”

6) Visitor to Lead Conversion Rate

SaaS businesses embed a slew of options in their product website to convert website visitors into leads. Some businesses request visitors to become newsletter subscribers by sharing their email ids. At the same time, many businesses require website visitors to share their contact information to download digital content like ebooks. That is why; SaaS marketers need to measure the percentage of website visitors that become leads using this acquisition metric.

7) Trial/Demo to Customer Conversion Rate

As the name suggests, this metric measures the percentage of leads who become customers by making payments after using the SaaS product on a trial basis or receiving a demo. A high trial/demo-to-customer conversion rate depicts that the SaaS products meet both needs and expectations of free trial users. On the other hand, a lower percentage makes it essential for the business to optimize the cloud-based software and ensure that marketing messages are aligned to the SaaS product.

Crucial Funnel Metrics for SaaS Marketers

8) Email Subscribers

Many people these days access the website with the sole intention to gather information. They are not interested in buying a SaaS product. But they want to access information shared by the business through newsletters and emails. They share their email ids with the intention to receive informative emails and newsletters. The decision-makers can use this funnel metric to differentiate email subscribers from leads or potential customers.

9) Leads

This SaaS metric helps marketers to identify the website visitors who are interested in the SaaS product offered by the business. In addition to becoming email subscribers, this category of website visitors shows their interest in the SaaS product by filling in the form posted on the website’s product or Contact Us page. Marketers can convert the leads into customers by implementing lead nurturing strategies.

10) Marketing Qualified Leads

SaaS businesses these days distribute informative and promotional content through multiple digital channels. Hence, leads engage with the content through specific communication channels. The SaaS marketing metric helps marketers to understand how leads engage with the content distributed by the business. Also, marketers can use the SaaS marketing metric to identify and differentiate qualified leads based on the pages visited by them and the content downloaded by them.

11) Sales Qualified Leads

As the name suggests, this funnel metric helps marketers to identify the leads who want to buy the SaaS product.  The sales qualified leads to convey their intention to buy the SaaS product in a variety of ways – requesting a free trial, booking a product demo, and downloading product information. Marketers should focus on converting these sales-qualified leads into subscribers.

12) Sales Opportunities

The customers do not negotiate with companies offering B2C SaaS products or low-cost B2B SaaS products. But they start conversations and negotiations with the sales team after receiving a quote and before buying a high-value SaaS product. This funnel metric helps SaaS marketers to identify opportunities in the sales funnel to convert sales-qualified leads into customers or subscribers.

13) Customers

Businesses offering premium SaaS products can use this funnel metric to calculate the number or percentage of leads who have subscribed to or signed up for the cloud-based software or service. But businesses offering freemium SaaS products have to use the metric to differentiate customers who have made payments to access premium features from customers who are accessing only complementary features.

14) Conversion Rate

The leads become customers at various stages in the sales funnel. This important SaaS marketing metric helps decision-makers to know the number or percentage of leads converting into customers at every stage in the sales funnel. The information helps marketers to identify the factors that drive conversion at various stages in the sales funnel. Also, they can leverage the actionable information to improve conversion rate in every stage of the sales funnel.

15) Free Trial/Demo Requests

Most SaaS companies these days allow leads to use and evaluate the cloud-based software or service by requesting demos or free trials. Seasoned marketers know that most customers these days try and evaluate multiple SaaS products before making a payment. Hence, they need to check if the free trials and demos are effective as a SaaS marketing strategy to drive sales conversion and sustain revenue growth.

Crucial Monetization Metrics for SaaS Marketers

16) Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

SaaS businesses have to spend money on running multiple marketing campaigns. Hence, they calculate the ROI on marketing expenditure based on the cost of generating a lead or the cost of converting a lead. This monetization metric can be calculated for a specific period by dividing the overall marketing expenditure by the number of leads generated/converted.

17) Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

SaaS businesses can sustain profitable growth only by reducing customer acquisition costs and increasing customer lifetime value (CLV). Marketers determine the lifetime value of a SaaS customer based on the value of her relationship with the company or business. The lifetime value of individual customers differs. But marketers can calculate CLV accurately only after calculating the average revenue per customer and the customer churn rate.

18) Customer Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost Ratio (CLV: CAC)

This important SaaS marketing metric helps decision-makers to compare the cost incurred to acquire a customer to the lifetime value of the customer. Entrepreneurs use this single metric to measure and compare the performance of SaaS marketing campaigns based on two important metrics – CAC and CLV. The metrics help them to differentiate high-performing marketing campaigns from poor-performing marketing campaigns. At the same time, marketers can track this metric to identify the marketing campaigns that need to be finetuned or optimized. 

19) Customer Churn Rate

Often customers cancel subscriptions and switch SaaS providers due to a variety of reasons. The entrepreneurs can retain customers and drive revenue growth only by tracking the percentage of customers who cancel their subscription to particular SaaS products over a specific period – month, quarter, or year. Entrepreneurs and marketers can boost lead generation and conversion activities consistently only by keeping the customer churn rate low.

20) Revenue Churn Rate

The monthly recurring revenue (MRR) of a SaaS provider reduces each time a customer cancels or downgrades her subscription plan. Entrepreneurs can increase recurring revenue by making informed decisions only by keeping the revenue churn rate. Also, they need to divide revenue churn into multiple categories based on specific reasons –  cancellation, downgrades, bankruptcy, and competition. But marketers often consider revenue churn rates due to cancellations and downgrades.

21) Net Promotion Score

Many marketers these days use the net promotion score (NPS) as an additional SaaS marketing metric to measure customer satisfaction rate. They calculate NPS by asking customers a simple question – how likely will you recommend our SaaS product to others? A large percentage of customers are likely to recommend the SaaS product to others if the NPS stands between 9 and 10. On the other hand, marketers have to find answers to the question – of why customers do not recommend the SaaS product to others – if the NPS is between 0 and 6.

Every cloud service provider these days promotes SaaS products by launching multiple digital marketing campaigns and through multiple marketing channels. Hence, the decision-makers can measure and boost marketing activities only by combining three different types of SaaS marketing metrics. However, it is always important for entrepreneurs, managers, and marketers to combine the right metrics to measure all important aspects of SaaS marketing campaigns.