7 SaaS Marketing Mistakes You Should Avoid In Your SaaS LTD Campaigns
Did you know that around 92% of all SaaS startups go bankrupt within three years after they have launched?
According to Lighter Capital, such a high percentage of SaaS businesses fail despite having plenty of funding. And as a fledgling SaaS company, you want to make it to that 8% that do make it.
One of the ways you can give your launch a boost is through offering SaaS lifetime deals (LTD). To put it simply, LTDs perpetual licenses that you offer for a short time.
Take note that offering LTDs has its risks.
Sure, if you do it right, you will have an influx of cash at first. But remember that you’re giving out lifetime licenses. That means providing customer support and server allocation, which are still expenses, as long as they are using your product.
If you fail to get subscription-based users after your LTD campaign, you’re at risk of getting a negative cash flow in the long run.
That’s why you shouldn’t just use LTDs for the sole purpose of raising funds. It should be a means to hype up your product and grow your brand awareness. After the LTD campaign is over, you can leverage that brand awareness to secure subscription-based customers.
One of the key factors that can make or break your LTD campaign is your marketing. With so many new SaaS startups entering the market, it can be hard to stand out or even just get noticed.
If you want to ramp up your marketing efforts, there are a lot of articles in our marketing blog to help you do that.
For this article, we will talk about common SaaS marketing mistakes, focusing on LTD campaigns.
Let’s dive in.
1. Setting The Price Too High Or Too Low
When you’re setting the price for your LTD campaign, it’s important to find the sweet spot. If you set it too high, people may not be interested in buying it. If you set it too low, you may not be making enough money to cover your costs.
There are three ways you can find the right pricing strategy for your SaaS LTD:
Cost-plus Pricing
Cost-plus pricing is simply adding a profit margin to the cost of producing or acquiring a product.
This is not usually popular among SaaS businesses because SaaS products are not tangible and can be accessed by countless customers. It’s not that simple to put a price per unit.
What’s more, SaaS products generally bring in recurring revenue, not one-time deals.
Except for LTDs. In the case of these deals, it is a one-time payment.
If you’re going to use a cost-plus pricing strategy, consider the different expenses it takes to launch your product. That includes development costs, customer acquisition costs, and support costs down the road.
Competitor-based Pricing
This pricing method looks at how much your competitors are charging for their products. This can help you find the right price point without having to do too much guesswork.
The challenge in doing this method is that you have to find direct competitors that have offered LTDs at some point. And I want to emphasize the word “direct”. You need to look into competitors that offer essentially the same product as yours.
But remember that this is their pricing strategy. You don’t have to mimic them exactly. After all, no matter how similar your products are, you still offer a unique value proposition.
If you’re going to use competitor-based pricing for your LTD, just use it as a reference point. Did their prices attract customers? Did it contribute to their long-term growth?
Value-based Pricing
This is one of the best ways to price your SaaS solution. It’s setting a price that your potential customers are willing to pay.
But it’s not as easy as it sounds. Actually knowing what your prospective customers are willing to pay takes a lot of research. And research takes time, effort, and resources.
Getting a value-based price in itself needs some investment. But the return could be worth it. With it, you can be confident that your price attracts customers without unnecessarily sacrificing your revenue.
2. Targeting A Broad/Wrong Audience
Your target audience is one of the most important factors in determining the success or failure of your LTD campaign.
The problem is that if you try to hit too broad an audience, no one will care about what you offer.
On the other hand, targeting a narrow group means limiting your reach and exposure. For example, if you try to sell a B2B product to consumers, it will not go well.
That’s why it’s important to clarify your target buyer persona for your LTD campaign. Which of your buyer personas would benefit the most from lifetime access to your product? Whose pain points are directly addressed by the features you are offering?
3. Unclear Messaging
If your audience can’t easily understand what your product is and what it does, they’re not going to buy it.
Your messaging needs to be clear, concise, and on-brand. It should explain what your product does and how it solves the potential customer’s problem.
Specifically for your LTD campaign, the terms need to be clear as well. You need to make sure that these things are clearly communicated:
Rules
What do participants need to do to join the LTD campaign?
Which platform should they use? How many winners will there be?
If you don’t want your LTD campaign to flop, the rules should be clear and easy to follow.
Campaign Period
Scarcity has always been an effective marketing strategy. You can take advantage of it when it comes to laying out the duration of your LTD campaign.
Don’t just communicate it. Overcommunicate it.
One of the proven ways to amplify the feeling of scarcity is a countdown timer. Put one on your website, on your ads, your social media posts, and every material you use for the campaign.
If your potential customers can count the time left, they would feel more of the urgency to participate.
Included Features
You need to clarify exactly what your customers will get if they buy a lifetime license to your product. Do they get the full package? Or do they only get some of the tools? What kind of customer support will you provide for them down the line?
4. Using Boring Content
Boring, low-quality content can kill your LTD campaign.
You need to make sure that the content you’re sharing is engaging and of high quality. I’m not just talking about hyping up your campaign. I’m talking about great content that’s worthy of sharing.
If you do it right, your target audience will share your content even if it’s not a part of your contest.
For your marketing, make sure you take advantage of these:
Copy
Copy is the written content that you use to sell your product or promote your LTD campaign. It has to be engaging.
Whether it’s an email, an ad, or a social media post, you need to give them a reason to not scroll past it.
Your copy needs to be clear as well. Your audience should know what you are talking about.
But don’t give it all away in one go. Sometimes, an air of mystery really gets them curious and leads them to click your ad or link.
One more thing, never overpromise. Making promises you can’t keep is a sure way to lose customers.
If you’re offering only a set of features, make it clear. If you’re only offering email support, make sure your customers know that.
Graphics
Graphics is one of the most important elements in making your marketing material engaging. After all, human eyes are more stimulated by visuals rather than plain old text.
Still, your graphics have to work with your copy in order to catch your audience’s attention and pique their interest. Use memes if you have to. But don’t overuse it. Remember that memes are supposed to be funny. So make memes only when you’re that it will make your audience LOL.
Videos
Video is one of the most powerful marketing tools today. It can be used to explain your product, show how it works, or even just as a way to entertain your audience.
In promoting your LTD campaigns, you can make videos about it. You can upload an explainer video on how to buy your product.
If you have a contest, have the video explain everything. The mechanics, how long it will run, and the prizes they can win.
Just make sure that the video you’re creating is high quality. If it looks cheap and low-budget, it will reflect badly on your branding.
5. Relying On Just One Marketing Channel
You might be surprised at how many business owners rely on just one marketing channel to promote their products.
Sure, some marketing channels are more effective than others. But you have to make sure that you are covering your bases.
If there is a platform or marketing channel that has worked for you in the past, don’t be afraid of using it again. But don’t limit yourself to it.
Here are some marketing channels that you can use for your LTD campaign:
Email is a classic when it comes to marketing channels, especially in B2B spaces. It’s straight to the point and can be addressed directly to the people who can make the buying decisions.
Don’t make the mistake of sending them a dull email blast, though. You want to make sure that the content you’re sharing in your campaigns is interesting enough for people to read and share.
Social Media
Social media is a great way to connect with your target audience. If you have built up your Facebook and Instagram following, it’s easier to promote your LTDs on these platforms.
You can even find groups and communities who are actively looking for LTDs. In fact, we have our very own Facebook group called Ken Moo’s SaaS Lifetime Deals (LTDs) Group.
Another great thing about social media is that you can also hold your contests on it.
One popular example is those promos where you have to like their Instagram posts and tag as many friends as you could. It can be a good strategy to make your product or LTD campaign more viral.
Paid Ads
Paid ads can be a great way to reach your market quickly. What’s more, you can optmize these ads to your target buyer persona.
However, unlike email and social media, ads aren’t free. It’s more of an investment. But then again, if you do it right, the returns could be worth it.
6. Starting From Scratch (Again)
Offering LTDs for the first time can take a lot of guesswork. But if it’s not your first rodeo, you don’t have to start from scratch again.
Instead of guessing what’s going to work, you can look at what worked in the past. I’m talking about performance metrics.
Data about your previous LTDs or usual marketing campaigns will tell you what captures your audience. It also tells you what types of content they respond to and what marketing channels work best with them.
In the same way, you’re going to need the data from yoru current LTD campaign as a reference for your future promotions. So make sure to track these metrics in your LTD campaign:
Open Rates
Open rates are usually measured in percentage points. It lets you know how many people have opened your email. For example, you send 100 emails and 50 got opened. That’s a 50% open rate.
This metric is not just exclusive to email marketing. You can also use this to refer to how many people are reading your blog posts or viewing your social media posts. In these cases, they are called “impressions” rather than “opens.”
Click-Through Rates
A click-through rate (CTR) measures the percentage of users who clicked on a link contained in an email.
Let’s take our example from earlier. For this scenario, let’s say that out of the 50 opened emails, 25 of them got clicks. That’s a 50% CTR.
Like open rates, CTR is not exclusive to email marketing. It can also be used to measure how many clicks you got out of the number impressions ads and social media posts have made.
Click-through rates are important because they tell you which links are enticing enough for readers to follow. They also show whether or not your copy actually works.
Conversion Rate
A conversion rate is the percentage of people who took a specific action after clicking your call-to-action (CTA).
Let’s take our previous example again. Let’s say that out of the 25 people who clicked on your link, only 5 signed up for an LTD. That gives you a 20% conversion rate.
The conversion rate is important because it tells you whether your CTA needs to be reworked or if the messaging isn’t clear enough yet.
For instance, if consumers aren’t willing to join your LTD campaign even after seeing your email several times, you’ll know that you have to change the CTA.
Revenue
Revenue is the most straightforward metric for your SaaS marketing efforts. It’s literally the amount of money that it brings in.
Revenue can help you determine which products or LTDs are selling well and how much profit they’re earning. It can also tell you whether or not your product is cost-effective in the long run.
Correlating Performance Factors
There are many different factors that can affect these performance metrics. One ad may have high conversion rates due to its persuasive copy. Or maybe the geographical targeting of the ad. Or both.
To get detailed insight into what works and what doesn’t, you need to correlate these data. What marketing channels bring the most leads? What types of content get the most engagements? What CTAs get the most conversions?
7. Neglecting Customer Support
You may have the best SaaS product ever. It may be super easy to use and has amazing features.
However, if you don’t help your customers in using these features, it doesn’t matter how useful your product is. You will lose them.
Customer support is important because it helps you build rapport with your customers. Even with lifetime licenses, providing customer support is still your responsibility as a SaaS provider.
So make sure you are ready with these services:
Customer Onboarding
It’s not enough to just give an LTD customer their lifetime access to your product. You also need to help them understand how it works and how they can use it to their advantage.
This is where customer onboarding comes in. It’s a process that helps new users get started with your product as quickly and easily as possible. With effective customer onboarding, you can make sure that your users know how to use your product from day one.
Customer Support
Even after the customer has been onboarded, there may be times when they need help using your product.
Make sure you have a team of customer success agents who are available 24/7 to answer any questions or solve any problems your customers may have.
Still, you can modify the extent of support you provide to your lifetime license holders. You may choose to limit their support access to just the knowledge base or just through email. Just make sure that they know this when they sign up for the LTD.
Just a fair warning. If you’re going to limit their access to customer support, it may have consequences.
Having a customer success team is important for your customer retention. If you’re unable to help them, they might switch to a different product and ask for a refund.
That brings us to our next point.
Refunds
I know. I know. This is the last thing you want to hear when you’re offering LTDs. But it’s a reality that happens in a lot of SaaS LTDs.
And it won’t always be because your product is bad. Maybe you sold it to the wrong buyer persona. Maybe they didn’t need it after all.
In any case, you need to be prepared for refunds.
But what if you put a no-refund policy in place?
You could do that. But it may end up being the reason why your target audience doesn’t buy your product.
A refund guarantee sends a strong message that your product is high-quality and that you genuinely want your SaaS solution to benefit them.
The best thing to do is have a standard operating procedure (SOP) for refunds. When you receive a refund request, do everything that you can to win them back. If they still want to back out, at least find out what went wrong for them.
You can use that information to optimize your marketing efforts later on.
Final Thoughts
Offering a lifetime license can be a great way to improve brand awareness, increase your sales, and get more customers. But if you’re not careful, you can make some SaaS marketing mistakes that will hurt your business.
I hope that this article helps you avoid these pitfalls and launch a successful LTD campaign.
For more tips on SaaS marketing, check out our blog here.
