5 ways to get more customers without spending anything

Growing your customer base is a hard problem. While it is true that a well marketed, good quality product in a large market would grow well, actually achieving a good growth rate involves building, tweaking and fixing a lot of stuff about your product, marketing and customer interaction.

Here are 5 things from our experience with growing our product GrexIt’s customer base which are sure to help you get more customers:

1. Get your lifecycle emails right during the Trial Period

If your product is a cloud based Software as a Service, you’re certainly offering your users a free trial. Your communication with people who are doing a test run of your product has a huge impact on your conversions.

There are essentially four things you must be using your lifecycle emails to achieve during the trial period:

1. The Welcome email - send a quick primer for getting started with the trial, along with details on how to get back to you for help if they need it. This is best done immediately after signup.
2. Emails offering help if the user has not completed some key actions during the trial.
3. Information about advanced features in the product to users who are already using the product successfully.
4. Information about the end of the trial, instructions for upgrading their account, and an offer to extend the trial if needed.

It is very easy to get into the trap of sending the same emails to all your users irrespective of how they’re using your product. And thats a very bad idea. Its very important to customize (2) and (3) above to get good results from this exercise.

That means you’ll need to write code to figure out what emails to send to which people. You can also consider using customer.io for your lifecycle emails, which can take away some of the pain of setting up lifecycle emails.

Lastly, make sure all emails you send to users can be replied to. That is the easiest way for users to get back to you if they need help, so you must make sure they can do that successfully.

Head over to this post by Patrick Mckenzie to learn more about lifecycle emails.

2. Ask for feedback very proactively

There is nothing that will teach you more about your business and your competition than talking to your users. Some of the most important things you should be asking all your users are:

1. Where did they find you - you might already know some it if you’re using the right analytics tools, but there’s always more information to be had. For example, your analytics tool might not be able to tell you what were they searching for if they came to your site from Google, as Google hides to information for a lot of users. The only way you can know is ask them.
2. Did they find it hard to get started with your product - ask them to rate on a scale of ten, or choose from some options like “It was a breeze”, to “It was very hard”.
3. Ask for feature ideas and any enhancement requests they might have - you will be surprised at how many of your users can give you concrete ideas for features to build into your product.

It would make a lot of sense to make the request for feedback a part of your lifecycle emails. You can also consider using Wufoo or Google Forms to create forms for taking feedback from your users.

User feedback not only helps you improve your product and marketing, it also shows your users that you care. If your product is a business tool, that really goes a long way.

3. Be flexible with your trial period

Trials for business products usually take time and involve multiple people. Also, larger the organization, the longer it would take for it to decide on a purchase. The 30 or 14 day trial period might just not be sufficient in many cases.

We have seen that on proactively offering an extension on the trial period, a lot of trial users opt for it. What is to note is that had they not been offered a trial extension, they would most likely not have asked for it.

Larger businesses which are looking to adopt your product might also want you to build some major or minor features before they can purchase. For example, we have seen a lot of large businesses ask for more powerful admin features, and we have gone ahead and built some of them if we could see the absence of these features as being show-stoppers to the purchase.

It is never a bad idea to build a small feature to get a large business to adopt your product if:

1. The feature would also be useful to a lot of other users
2. Building it does not digress you much from your working on the other features that are part of your already existing release roadmap.

4. Get your pricing right

It is easy to assume that a lower price would get you more customers, but it is a bad assumption to make because:

1. It is an incorrect assumption. A higher price can get your more customers.

2. Even with lesser customers, a higher price might still mean more profits for your business.

Figuring out the correct pricing for a SAAS product is hard. The simple model of calculating your costs and adding a percentage to it to arrive at the selling price does not work because:

1. You need to finance the future development of the product through revenue/profits.
2. You might have taken investments.
3. The competition might be taking a completely different approach to pricing, and you need to react to that.

Some of the tips that worked out for us for figuring out our price are:

1. Start charging as early as possible.
2. When you start charging, your aim is just to prove that people will pay for your product. Starting with a price that you think is low is a good idea.
3. Increase your price later on, but stick to a polite, non-mercenary approach.
4. A/B test your pricing, but do that with caution.

5. Build your presence on app marketplaces

Your presence on application marketplaces like Google Apps Marketplace, Salesforce’s AppExchange or the Android/iOS app stores can be a great customer acquisition channel. While these marketplaces are very competitive for application developers, they also attract a lot of people who are looking for applications catering to specific needs they have.

Building a good app marketplace presence needs a lot of patience and sustained effort. A few things you should be working on:

1. Use the right set of keywords in your listing so that the right people can find you. Also, integrate your marketplace listing with Google Analytics and keep an eye on which keywords are sending you traffic.
2. List in the right category. In the beginning when you don’t have a lot of reviews for your app, you might want to steer clear of the categories which are very competitive, and later list in those when you have a better profile for your app.
3. Work very proactively on getting users to review your app on the marketplace. The number and quality of reviews is a huge influencing factor on people who are looking to try out your app. Here are some tips on how we got 100 reviews for our app on the Google Apps marketplace.

We hope you’ll find these tips to be useful. Some of the other things you should be working on are search engine optimization, connecting with bloggers and the tech media, and writing guest posts. Here’s hoping you land tonnes of customers!

Author Bio - Niraj Rajan Rout is the Founder of GrexIt (http://grexit.com). GrexIt turns Gmail into a powerful collaboration tool by letting you share your Gmail labels. Niraj blogs at http://blog.grexit.com, and can be reached on Twitter at twitter.com/nirajr.