How did a SaaS player get incremental $1.5mn profits?

Authored by – Ramakrishnan M – SaaS Maven and Associate Director at Absolutdata and Lavanya Ramanan – SME Analytics & Products at Absolutdata

Let’s get candid. There is an elephant amongst subscription businesses, and it goes by the name of “low conversion rate”. Now that we have acknowledged it, so what? While acknowledging is half the problem, we still need to address it. Here is a story of how Absolutdata’s Navik Converter solved the problem for a global SaaS player in the cloud-based synch & storage business. It was an epic journey, with a healthy dose of excitement, fear, adversity before we reached exhilaration. Ready?

The beginning …The SaaS firm was witnessing a few disturbing trends amongst its users. 1. While the number of new signups (or free users) was fairly healthy, they were unable to sustain a healthy user funnel in terms of

converting these free users into paid subscribers2. They faced a reduction in paid customers base

It was increasingly obvious that each level of the customer journey funnel needed intervention, to ensure a healthy subscriber base without compromising on the user experience.

The climb, with no lack of adversitiesThe first step of implementing Navik Converter, was to get an in-depth understanding of the client’s existing systems and processes.

Due to the complex ecosystem of the client’s database – user activities, user profiles and marketing activities all housed separately, the solutions they had previously implemented were fairly one-dimensional. They were unable to account for the dependencies between the different databases; hence, the insights and solutions fell short of delivering what was promised. Additionally, the insights were delivered much later than required, making them difficult to use and implement.

The core task in our Conversion Optimization exercise was to configure Navik Converter; i.e. to fine-tune and finalize the relevant models. To achieve this, we sought to answer 3 key questions:3. What: What would motivate a free user to convert into a paid customer?4. Who: Who should I encourage to convert?5. How: How do I encourage them to convert?

The what, who and how were all answered through a comprehensive Decision Engineering based approach made possible by integrating all their databases. This provided us a comprehensive view of their current user base. Predictive models based on the integrated database helped us determine what drove conversion, who should be nudged using marketing stimuli to convert based on their lead scores and how do we effect this conversion – which channel, what message etc. Once the above questions were addressed, the next step was to embed these insights in actual work-flow of the client. This involved integrating Navik Converter with client’s existing systems, databases and marketing automation tools. This was the most challenging part of the journey.

This enabled the following:6. Generating scores for users when and however often desired and for new additions to the system – the Predictive Lead Scoring7. The ability to prioritize users or user groups to target through marketing stimuli – Target Selection8. Ability to choose the marketing stimuli they would like to apply to selected user/user groups – the Decision Options9. A real-time indicator of what each selected marketing stimuli meant, in terms of conversion, and therefore revenue

Our solution went beyond delivering mere diagnostic measures and dashboards. The SaaS firm was able to monitor the pulse of their system in real-time.

The exhilaration at the topWhat did all of this mean to our SaaS client? 10. Generated revenue - an additional US$1.5MM (with no additional marketing cost)11. Increased influx of users into their ecosystem - an additional 15,000 new subscribers annually12. Accelerated overall conversion rate - increased by 35%

Want a similar success story for your organization? Visit www.absolutdata.com/navik