SaaS Guide for the Holidays

We all know how the fall-winter holidays play a huge role for retail businesses. But what about SaaS?

Do the holidays present (no pun intended!) a powerful business opportunity for SaaS like they do for retail?

The short answer is that yes, SaaS companies still have powerful business opportunities during the holidays.

Although the opportunity isn’t as prominent as it might be for retail, it’s still there—FastSpring reports software companies see an 11% to 24% increase in average monthly revenue in November, with December being approximately 9% more than average.

So the question then becomes… what can you do to take advantage of that holiday opportunity in your own SaaS business?

In this guide, we’ll walk you through some Do’s and Don’t’s to help guide you through how to get the most success for your SaaS business this holiday season.

First, let’s go through how SMS specifically can help…

How SMS Helps SaaS with the Holidays

Here’s the bottom line: you’re probably not taking full advantage of SMS for your SaaS business.

SMS is an incredibly powerful marketing channel that recipients actually see and engage with. But how often do you actually text your customers and prospects? Likely not enough, if ever.

The good news is that the holidays are one of the best times to start ramping up. The holidays present a powerful opportunity for you to connect with your customers and prospects to help drive up engagement, conversions, and upsells.

Since people don’t usually ignore their texts, you can put messaging right underneath their noses that gives them value and directs them to take the actions you want them to take.

How SaaS Companies Can Use SMS for the Holidays

So how can you actually use SMS for your SaaS business this holiday season?

Here are some ideas…

Holiday Promotions

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are just around the corner. And the great thing about these events for businesses is that consumers actually expect to receive promotional messages around this time.

What a unique opportunity for your business to engage your customers and prospects with SMS blasts—offering a unique Black Friday or holiday promotion to help get them to purchase or upgrade.

Trial Account Engagement

Beyond just holiday promotions, you can use the holidays as a springboard to start texting your trial account users. You can send them SMS messages that walk them through the steps they need to take to get the most out of their trial. (You could even make it fun and festive for the holidays.)

Because if you have more active trial users, they’ll be much more likely to end up purchasing.

Value-Add Content

The holiday months provide an excellent opportunity to create value-add content that will be really useful and interesting to your target audience. The holiday months impact just about everyone—from business owners to stay-at-home parents—so whatever your niche is, there’s sure to be something you can provide that will be useful to them.

Once you have that content created, you can use SMS to help point your audience to that content so that they can benefit from it, thus building a relationship with your brand.

Trigger-Based Upsells

One more way you can start incorporating SMS into your regular workflow this holiday season is by implementing upsell messages based on your users’ activity. For example, at Mobile Text Alerts we send out a text message when an account has reached 75% of their messaging limit, asking if they would like to add more messages. You could implement something similar that aligns with what your SaaS product offers.

You can introduce this SMS approach in conjunction with some kind of holiday promotion to create a really powerful upsell opportunity.

SaaS Holiday Do’s and Don’t’s

Do’s

Plan Ahead – Start implementing efforts for the holiday season now. Plan out your promotions, content efforts, communications, and any other pertinent initiatives. Too often, companies are flying by the seat of their pants and before you know it, Black Friday’s in 2 weeks! The reality is that we all obviously know well in advance when these dates are coming, so we need to plan accordingly.

Combine Email, SMS, and Push Together – When communicating your holiday messaging, use all the channels at your disposal. Omnichannel marketing is the ideal, but if that’s not feasible for you, at the very least try to combine the powers of email, SMS, and push notifications to maximum effect.

Repurpose Your Content – Create some great holiday content. And then repurpose it—use it to help with your email and SMS campaigns, with your sales outreach, with your video strategy, and with social media. You put a lot of effort into your content (or at least you should), so you want to maximize it to the fullest.

Don’t’s

Don’t Bombard Users with Texts – Although SMS is a powerful channel that you should be using for your holiday marketing, don’t go overboard. People won’t be as forgiving about receiving a lot of texts as they are with emails—even if it is the holidays!

Don’t Neglect Opportunities for Personalized Campaigns – If you’re able to collect much data on your users’ activity, take advantage of that knowledge to reach out to them in a way that really speaks to their situation. You can test out personalized marketing journeys to see how they perform compared to generalized journeys—odds are, the personalized journeys will outperform.

Don’t Forget to Have a Post-Holiday Plan – You not only need to have a solid plan for the holiday season, you need to have a plan for the follow-up. As with any industry, and especially, it seems, with SaaS, people need multiple touchpoints before they end up converting. There may be a lot of people who get warmed up to your brand over the holidays but who need some more convincing after the fact.

One Last Thing...

Those are some of the Do’s and Don’t’s for SaaS businesses during the holidays. You don’t want to miss out on the opportunities that the holiday season provides for SaaS.

And above all, don’t neglect the power of focusing on your customers.

It’s so easy to get caught up in our product and profits and acquisition and conversions. But when it comes down to it, our customers are what make or break our businesses. The holidays are a great time to be reminded of that. Let’s live to serve instead of acting like our customers have the “privilege” of using our product. Let’s treat them like we would want to be treated. Let’s genuinely care about them.

If we remember to keep our customers first rather than being too self-focused, the ironic thing is that this holiday season might just be the most profitable yet.

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Interested to see how SMS could help make your holiday events more successful than ever? Get a free consultation here and our SMS experts will walk you through how it works.