Go-To-Market for Self Serve

Effective strategies for low CAC

When you launch a product that you intend on selling to larger customers, you can be pretty targeted with your outreach and the likelihood is that you’ll find a percentage of people who are ‘in market’ (ie in a position where they are ready to buy). And although that in itself doesn’t mean it’s easy, you at least have a starting point.

But what about when your product has a lower price point and the TAM (Total Addressable Market) is large and broad? Especially when you don’t have much money.

My own experience from when we launched our SaaS product, ScreenCloud, was exactly this. Our price point was $20/screen/month, we had limited funds and we had a TAM that was huge and ranged from churches through to quick-serve restaurants. It wasn’t as if we could just reach out to a handful of people on LinkedIn. And, given that on average, people spent about $50/month (2.5 screens) at the time, that gave us an Average Annual Contract Value (ACV) of $600. Which meant that ultimately, the unit metrics would only work if we could keep our Customer Acquisition Cost low.

We did a few things that worked well for us, which I’ll talk about here, as well as some other things that I would recommend for anyone in a similar situation.

Getting Discovered

This was huge for us, but it will be different for every business. At the time, we were the only digital signage solution that was hardware agnostic (other than a few open source options that didn’t function particularly well). You could run our service on consumer hardware such as Amazon FireTV Sticks. This meant that we had to build apps for the different systems. And guess what: as we were the only ones really doing it, when people searched for a digital signage solution on, say, the Amazon FireTV app store, we were the only result.

It turned out a lot of people had the same thought as us: ‘surely I can just use the same media device I have at home on my screens in the office’. And so they did a bit of research and stumbled upon us. We had this advantage for around 12-18 months and it worked really well.

The strategy here is to be where your customers hang out. It’s not necessarily obvious, but if you are solving a specific problem, then is there a place where people might go to try and solve that problem? And if so, how do you show up there?

Content Marketing

I accredit content marketing with a lot of our early success. Thanks in no small part to the brilliant Beth Gladstone. We worked out that, although being ranked for ‘digital signage’ was all well and good, most of our customers hadn’t used digital signage before. And so, they weren’t necessarily searching for ‘digital signage’ per se. Instead they were searching for things like “How do I show social media feeds on my screen using a FireTV stick?”.

So we ended up writing posts specifically about the problem they were looking to solve: “How to use an Amazon FireTV Stick to show student artwork on a screen.”

You may be wondering whether AI is going to make any of this redundant in the future? As an experiment I asked ChatGPT, “How can I show my social media feeds on my smart tv screen?”. This was suggestion number 4:

Of course, “content” is more that just blog posts. We created ‘how to’ videos, ran webinars, properly produced testimonials from happy customers etc.

Paid Advertising

In the early days we didn’t have a lot of budget to spend on paid media, but we experimented with what we could. I analysed as much as I could from this small sample sector and worked out what elements delivered the best results. We found messages that resonated the most, but also the type of imagery that we used.

Retargeting worked especially well here.

The nice thing about paid media is that it’s instant, whereas content takes a while to take hold, several months in fact. With paid media, you can test what works instantly and use that data to inform the content you create.

Free Trials and Freemium

I remember watching a talk by Ben Chestnut from Mailchimp who had a graph that showed the inflection point on growth when they introduced a freemium version. Part of the reason it did so well is that for anyone using the freemium version, their emails carried a ‘powered by Mailchimp’ message at the bottom. Talk about hanging out where your potential customers are… the Mailchimp logo was suddenly being placed in front of hundreds of millions of prospects. All for the cost of letting someone use their service in a limited way, for free.

Go To Market, isn’t just about sales and marketing, it’s also about the offer, positioning, onboarding and analytics. So whether or not you introduce a free trial is very much part of your GTM strategy.

When it comes to free trials, it’s not just about “should we offer one or not?”, but what you then do with it to drive the business forward.

For us, a free trial was a critical part of our product-led growth strategy. At an ACV of $600/year, we had to keep things light touch (even if to start with, it made sense from a learning perspective to try and speak with every customer).

We made the free trial easy to start (no credit card needed) and if anyone wanted to extend it, we did it no questions asked. In fact we even offered an extension as their trial was coming to an end.

A really important part of the free trial process was the drip-campaign that followed. And this is the opportunity that free trials give you: the permission to keep checking in and providing value along the way. If someone is engaged enough to trial your product, they will probably be open to useful relevant information around the challenges they are trying to solve along the way.

This is very much ‘bottom of the funnel’ stuff: best practice suggestions; examples of others in your sector using the software successfully; how to sell the product internally; ROI calculations etc.

Free trials also give you a shedload of data that you wouldn’t otherwise have had. You suddenly have more people using your product, even if they don’t ultimately convert. What is being used the most? Which questions/issues get raised the most? What are the most common reasons for people not converting? Absolute gold dust.

Community Building

We didn’t so much of this in the early days, but it’s clearly an effective tactic if you can make it work.

Does it make sense for you to host a user community? Are your customers bonded by a shared challenge that your product serves? Where would it live? It could be a Facebook Group, or Discord. It could be regular seminars. It could even be a physical meet-up if geographically your customers are clustered enough. It could just be that you regularly get stuck into discussions on LinkedIn with people who already have some established credibility in your sector.

Customer Advisory Boards can also work well, but possibly not so much if you have very low ACVs. If you were paying $50/month for a product, how inclined would you be to spend time helping the vendor improve and promote it? But if the product plays a pretty central part in their business, you may find people who want to work with you. If they get some kudos from being invited and if their company benefits from getting a better deal or having influence on the product roadmap, then it may make sense to them.

From 2010 to 2012, I was on the BBC’s Digital Advisory Board. What did I get out of it? Basically, the right to tell people that I was on the BBC’s Digital Advisory Board. That was enough for me to donate my time.

Virality and Referrals

An obvious virality technique is to encourage customers to add colleagues. This both gets the product in front of more people and helps protect against the account churning when people switch jobs. There’s nothing worse than seeing churn because nobody knows who has admin access in your customer’s company, to update the credit card.

But there are other ways to encourage this behaviour. Dropbox, the cloud storage and file-sharing service, famously came up with referral programme where they could offer something of significant perceived value that didn’t cost them much to deliver: extra storage. If customers recommended the service to a friend, both the customer and the friend would qualify for extra storage.

Was it a successful strategy? They introduced it in 2010 when they had 100k registered users. Fifteen months later, they had 4 million registered users.

Products like Notion allow users to share public links. This makes it easy for customers to get the most from the product (by removing any barriers such as forcing people to create their own accounts) and puts the product in front of potential customers.

At ScreenCloud, we noticed a correlation between number of users added during a free trial (in addition to the person who signed up in the first place) and conversion to paid. Which leads me neatly onto….

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

As I mentioned before, a benefit of selling lower value subscriptions is that you have more of them. If you are offering a free trial or freemium offering then you have even more people using your product. All of this use creates data. And the more data you have, the more you can find ways to optimize what you have to your advantage.

Experimenting with landing pages, Calls to Action, price-packaging, in-product prompts etc etc. A/B testing can be done with tools like Optimizely, Crazy Egg, or Google Optimize.

One bug bear of mine is when people click through to sign-up for a free trial and they are met with silence: just a box to complete. This is a prime opportunity to remind people what they will get from the trial and why they should start one.

Check out Tableau and how engaging their free trial sign-up page is. It lists why you should start the trial and what you can expect once you’ve submitted your details.

Partnerships and Integrations

Finally, partnerships and integrations are effective ways of getting exposure without the need for a significant up-front investment.

Partnering with influencers, whose audience, authenticity and credibility you can ‘borrow’ to promote your own product. Canva partners with influential graphic designers and basks in the reflected glory.

Affiliate marketing might also work for your business. If it makes sense to pay people for sending others your way, then let them be an extension of your marketing department.

Integrations with the tools that customers are using eliminate reasons not to try you. Small businesses especially often don’t have the time or the inclination (or even the ability) to try and tie things together themselves. If your tool can’t do everything they need, at least make sure it plays nicely with the tools that plug those gaps. And connecting seamlessly to the tools that are integral to their business such as Xero, Hubspot, Tableau etc - are all going to make you more compelling.