How to Use Integration to Reduce SaaS Churn

Are you aware that the churn rate for the majority of startups is 60%?

Churn rate is a crucial factor that your business needs to pay attention to, as retaining customers is key to business growth.

And using integration is a great way to reduce SaaS churn.

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You can integrate to increase engagement and reduce churn risk, improve onboarding, improve workflow productivity, expose the depth and the breadth of your products, increase product visibility, and so on.

Here are the top ways to use integration to reduce SaaS churn:

1. Integrate to increase engagement

Several potential customers come across your interface for the first time every day. Thus, your first screen needs to clearly specify to your users how your product works, motivate them to get started and let them know how to get help.

There are several ways to welcome a new user who signed up for your product for the first time. You can show them around and walk through the process using elements like tutorials, dummy data, a well-maintained knowledge base, and so on.

However, a significant initial step that you can take is to send a welcome message to greet your new signup personally. It will work as a great conversation starter, which in turn will improve conversions.

Here is an example of how Intercom helps you welcome and engage new users:

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If you look at the statistics, welcome messages have more chances to be read, clicked by users, and responded to. The average open rate of welcome emails is reported to be 50%.

Some users may respond with a simple “thank you.” And some of them may ask you different questions. Whatever the case, engaging with your users can encourage them to use your product and retain them effortlessly.

2. Integrate to improve onboarding

To make it easy for new users to use your product and service, you need to take them by hand and show precisely what, when, and how they are supposed to do.

Take Sprout Social, for instance. They improve the onboarding process and go out of their way to retain customers by sending a series of onboarding emails.

Before users begin a free trial, Sprout Social asks users to log in and connect their social media accounts.

Otherwise, users receive an email that walks them through the entire setup process.

They also send emails to help their users in the process of measuring their competitors’ performance against theirs.

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And this doesn’t end here.

They fire more onboarding emails one after another, guiding their users and providing an incredible user experience to new users.

The platform tries to reduce the friction at critical stages of an onboarding flow, for instance, by asking subscribers to take action.

Your goal should also be to create an, or even multiple, onboarding copy that addresses customer queries or expectations, overcomes objections, and gives a step-by-step account of how to use your product. At the same time, the onboarding message should showcase your brand’s unique advantage.

3. Integrate to improve workflow productivity

Your product was created to enhance a specific part of your customer's life or workflow. However, in the end, it's part of the bigger picture.

By integrating with other apps, users can make your product fit into a big picture of achieving tasks and solving issues.

For example, even if you are offering a live chat product, you should also provide native integration to other business tools like CRM services, email marketing services, etc.

This way, your customer wouldn’t have to go back and forth between multiple tools and can make do with a single tool. This naturally leads to a rise in productivity.

When productivity is increased, people will stick to your product and use it, thus reducing customer churn. For instance, Typeform’s native integration with Zapier allows their users to push data to their other services, thereby resulting in an increased number of sign-ups and users upgrading to higher-priced plans. 

Though increased productivity may not necessarily directly affect churn rate, it definitely improves user experience by encouraging users to do more with the available data and resources.

4. Integrate to expose the depth of your products

Integration is a great way to expose the depth of your products as all the features are not immediately apparent to your users. Doing so will give your users an added incentive to open your product and continue using it.

But note that you will have to add something that will benefit your users and add value to their lives.

Unless the integration fits your target market and is a natural extension, the users won’t stick to your product.

For instance, for Kevy platform users, its integration with Magento gives them an opportunity to scale their business online.

Magento is a well-known platform that supports e-commerce companies. Kevy, on the other hand, is a platform that helps an e-commerce business engage with customers while personalizing online marketing. These two platforms integrate seamlessly as they are both designed for e-commerce customers.

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Or your business can integrate with a platform that lets you create message schedules to steadily promote certain features. Once you have gained insight into your user base, you will know which secondary features make users happy and when they’re useful. Your task now is to communicate timely. You can send emails, automated push, and in-app messages, and so on to your users based on their individual behavior.

API Fuse, an embedded integration platform for SaaS, is another excellent platform to speed up your product roadmap with the integrations your customers expect.

5. Integrate to increase product visibility

By integrating with more renowned products, you will be able to enjoy the benefit of an expanded market of potential users. When you integrate with a well-known product, your product can benefit from the distribution channel of the larger product.

If you look at the Growbot platform, it was built to take advantage of Slack's massive user base (more than 4 million users, to be precise). Growbot wasn’t a prominent name on the market initially, but its integration with Slack made it a familiar name in the market.

The Growbot tool lets team members support one another with “cheers” for doing a good job. It tallies the points that each team member gets for each cheer. The affirmations are communicated and tallied on Slack. It benefits from Slack features such as the ability to @ mention a teammate.

However, Growbot is an individual tool with its own value proposition. The tool adds extra value to Slack users but was designed to capitalize on the visibility and distribution of a partner product with high traffic and engagement.

Wrap Up

As you can see, integration can help your business to reduce churn by increasing productivity and making complex tasks easier for your users.

It can engage users from the beginning of their journey with your product, improve onboarding, improve workflow productivity, expose the depth of your products, and increase product visibility.

Follow all these different strategies mentioned in this article to use integration to reduce SaaS churn.