Explore the whole Retention & Revenue series:
Part I: Why mastering the onboarding experience still provides the best results
Part II: How segmentation and personalized support can drive long-term loyalty
Part III: Why video libraries are a must-have for your customer-facing teams
Listen to this article:
Area: Annual Revenue Per User (ARPU)
Goal: Increasing APRU and retaining high-valued accounts (increase and build loyalty)
User Cohorts: Enterprise accounts or approx. top 10% of paying customers
This is not necessarily a ‘genius’ strategy, but it’s something that is more important than ever that businesses need to be focusing on given the current economic climate. Your biggest accounts are your lowest-hanging fruit opportunities to unlock more revenue.
With customers really honing into their costs when it comes SaaS tools (and more VC/investor pressure on SaaS startups themselves), you can’t afford to lose your highest-paying customers, as that can have cascading effects around budgets with other departments and growth initiatives you want to be focusing on.
To give you an example of why this strategy matters, I have a client that was paying quite a bit of money for a pretty expensive platform, which wasn’t crucial to their business, but was important, and they hadn’t heard from anyone at the company for more six months. Not a single personalized email… nothing—just radio silence.
Even when a problem arose, and they needed support for something, it took a couple of weeks to get the assistance we needed. It seems crazy to think that in today’s economic climate, this is something they experienced.
If you have high-paying customers, you need to ensure you look after them because nothing is a sure thing.
So, one of the more effective strategies as a business is to provide some sort of “exclusive” access to your most-valued accounts to ensure they feel ‘loved’. A great way to do this is by providing early access to new features and content before other cohorts.
How does exclusivity play a role in helping increase the retention of high-value accounts?
Build a loyal relationship
Providing an ‘exclusive’ and personalized relationship, it helps ensure these users and big accounts feel they’re getting the best service possible. While these accounts perceive value primarily from the tool that they’re paying for, they also want to know they’re getting the best customer service.
Receive true product feedback that matters
As these are your highest revenue accounts, getting their honest feedback is crucial. It may only be a small segment, but it’s your most important segment to develop a relationship and get real, honest feedback. In many ways, you’re achieving two objectives at once - building a great relationship and getting insights and feedback from your top customers.
Mistakes to avoid (and recommendations)
Don’t make it too obvious that you provide this service for every high-valued account. Focus on communicating a personalized ‘one-to-one’ service with that account, using dynamic content in all of your comms, to ensure they really feel they’re getting insights and access that no other users are seeing.
Experiments and optimizations to consider trying
Luckily, this is simple to implement, by simply segmenting high-valued accounts based on feature usage and account activity.
Tailor custom messaging when reaching out based on product metrics and data, and prioritize which accounts make sense to offer beta access to test new features. This also allows you to kill two birds with one stone, as you can then ask these customers to provide quotes when you officially launch the feature. Make sure you dedicate internal resources to ensure they are across each of these top-tier accounts in detail.
Final word
If you're not taking every opportunity to retain your highest-value accounts, you're missing out on a huge opportunity and increasing the possibility of churn. Segmentation is easy to implement, and there's no excuse not to start doing it today if you're not already.
