Mapping the SaaS Customer Journey
As a SaaS business, happy customers can be one of your biggest marketing tools as well as your biggest revenue drivers – think how persuasive a 5-star TrustPilot score, in-depth case study, or word-of-mouth recommendations from industry colleagues can be!
How do you arrive at this ideal double win? Ultimately, it’s all about understanding the SaaS customer journey, and how to map and optimize it.
The SaaS customer journey is the road each of your customers takes from their initial consideration of your product to becoming its biggest champions – get it right, and your business will see huge benefits at each stage of the process.
Mapping your customer journey allows you to identify what your customers love about your product, where they experience friction, and where they offboard, so that you can optimize for maximum customer retention and advocacy.
Firstly, we’ll delve into what the SaaS customer journey looks like – then we’ll share some practical advice for mapping it accurately and making improvements.
The 5 stages of the SaaS customer journey
1. Awareness and acquisition
Your customer finds your product and decides it offers a solution to a problem they have been facing.
What you need to do
- Make sure potential customers see your product via highly targeted online advertising campaigns using PPC platforms like Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads.
- Convince potential customers that they need your solution not your competitors’ – focus on your USPs.
What you need to be aware of
Keep an eye on your CAC (customer acquisition cost) and don’t let it spiral. The payback period for new customers might not be instant, and if you let your CAC creep too high it could start eating quite a lot of your working capital – especially for early stage startups.
2. Trial and/or onboarding
You attract your customer, often with a free trial or demo, and begin the onboarding process.
What you need to do
- Guide your potential customer through the onboarding process with easy-to-follow tutorials and quick access to key features.
What you need to be aware of
From a UX perspective, a frustrating onboarding experience will scupper your chances of ever retaining free trial users as long-term paying customers. Spend time making sure everything associated with your product’s sign-up process runs as smoothly as possible
3. Purchase and engagement
This is where your customers commit to a purchase decision, and you can demonstrate the real value of your product. Build early-stage engagement to maximize your chances of long-term success.
What you need to do
- Demonstrate the value your software offers with email newsletters, new feature announcements, and webinars.
What you need to be aware of
All too often, SaaS businesses neglect customers immediately post purchase, with the result that customers churn before generating much revenue. Don’t assume that free trial completion = customer for life – look for ways to constantly engage customers with your product.
4. Retention
This stage is all about identifying opportunities to strengthen relationships with customers, upsell where appropriate, and reduce churn as a result.
What you need to do
- Ask for feedback – this shows your willingness to listen to customers and make longer-term improvements.
- Look for opportunities to upsell new features and expanded usage.
What you need to be aware of
In the era of AI chat agents and online self-help centers, quality customer support can be a real dealmaker for keeping customers long term. Investing resources in this area can pay off, big time.
5. Advocacy
Congrats – your customers love your product and can’t say enough nice things about it. Harness this as your business’s most powerful marketing tool.
What you need to do
- Encourage your customers to share their thoughts on review sites.
- Put together testimonials and case studies based on your customers’ experiences.
- Incentivize referrals with loyalty schemes and referral bonuses.
What you need to be aware of
Don’t wait for your customers to share their experiences of their own accord. Reach out to them directly for reviews and testimonials.
What is customer journey mapping and why is it so important for SaaS businesses?
Think of a customer journey map as your cheat sheet for understanding how users interact with your product – and by extension your business more widely.
By mapping out your customer journey visually, complete with friction points, you can get a sense of what’s going well, what isn’t and where you can make improvements.
SaaS businesses work on a subscription model – you might bill your clients monthly, quarterly, or annually, based on a flat user/month fee, or by usage. In other words, the longer your clients stay with you, the more revenue they generate.
That’s why it’s so important to know exactly where and why your customer journey creates obstacles for customers, so you can pinpoint the changes you need to make to keep them onboard. For example, a well-designed onboarding flow can reduce churn.
Your customer journey map also acts as a useful point of alignment for all of your internal teams that shape the customer journey – for example sales, marketing, tech, and customer support.
For example:
- Sales and marketing teams can plan campaigns to target specific customer needs.
- Tech teams can use customer journey map insights to plan in-demand features, or rework user flows that aren’t quite hitting.
- Customer support teams can use the map to identify pain points and prioritize resources around addressing these.
Mapping the SaaS customer journey: how to get started
Mapping your entire customer journey can feel like a huge task – use the table below to break it down into smaller, more manageable workloads.
| Stage | What you need to do |
|---|---|
| Data gathering | Collect info from multiple sources – e.g., analytics, surveys, support tickets – for informed insights into customer behavior patterns |
| Build user personas | Use your data to create different personas for each of your customer types, based on their behavior. Use these as a touchpoint for marketing campaigns and feature improvements. |
| Map out points of interaction | Create a flow diagram of every touchpoint between your customers and your product and brand. Include everything from initial marketing campaigns to ongoing customer support. |
| Identify points of pain/delight | Pinpoint where customers struggle or offboard, and where they most enjoy using your product. This allows you to plan both fixes and enhancements to your customer journey. |
How to improve your SaaS customer journey?
You’ve mapped out your customer journey. You know what customers love about your product, where they struggle, and where they ultimately jump off. How do you use this info to make improvements to your product and – ultimately – turn customers into loyal, long-term customers that shout about your product to all who will listen?
Firstly, you need to measure the right things. With the right metrics in place, you can track the impact of any changes you make so that you know they’re making a positive impact, rather than simply making an educated guess.
Secondly, you need to understand what each of these metrics suggests about your product, and how to use them to pinpoint areas for improvement.
| Stage | Metrics | How to improve |
|---|---|---|
| Awareness/consideration | Lead scoring/quality, traffic sources, ad and landing page conversion rates | Combine long-term strategies (content marketing, organic SEO) with immediate-impact targeted advertising (Google Ads works great for SaaS) to attract higher quality leads quickly. |
| Free trial onboarding | Time-to-first-value, onboarding completion | Offer free demos, guides, and webinars so that you can be sure customers are getting the most out of your free trial. Use analytics to track drop-off points in key software flows, and make improvements in the UX accordingly. |
| Purchase | CAC, trial to paid conversions | Refine your targeting and audience segmentation so that you’re directing resources to the customers most likely to make a purchase. Begin building relationships with customers during the free trial period; ask for feedback and proactively check in to make sure they’re getting the most from your product |
| Retention | Churn rate, LTV, feature usage frequency, NPS/CSAT scores | Be proactive in offering support. Don’t wait until your customer is dissatisfied – check in regularly for feedback and improvements. |
| Advocacy | Ratings on review sites, NPS score, total referrals, conversion from referral rate | Be proactive – actively reach out to satisfied users for reviews and testimonials Offer loyalty schemes, feature previews and beta tests, and advanced user training to promote the value of your product in the long term. |
Attract the right leads with Velocity’s expert SaaS PPC services
There’s a whole lot more to customer journey mapping than the acquisition stage – but making sure you’re hitting the right audiences with the right messaging is fundamental to starting your SaaS customer journey map on the right foot.
With years of experience and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of successful campaign spend behind them, our team at Velocity are hyper-focused on optimizing your paid search campaigns for quality leads, maximum conversions, and minimal acquisition costs.