How to find the right Knowledge base for your SaaS product

The key to having happy customers is to provide them with credible and actionable information on using your product and extracting maximum value from it. This train of thought also applies to the act of resolving any doubts or queries that your clients face while using your offerings.

To facilitate and offer help in this regard, organizations compose data repositories to aid their clients in more ways than one. Such a service enhances the customer experience and lays the foundation for long-term customer lifetime value (CLV) and loyalty.

Creating a knowledge base is an excellent start to such an ambitious initiative. Let’s take a look at everything that it entails, its importance, and how to pick the best knowledge base software.

What is a Knowledge Base?

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A knowledge base is a collection of documentation that contains crucial information such as answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs), step-by-step guides, video tutorials, process or feature introductions, how-to guides, tips and tricks, glossary, and troubleshooting help.

It acts as the primary source of information that is readily available to the users. They can refer to these inputs either to use the product or to gain more value from it. Businesses employ knowledge base software to collect, manage, update, and publish this information to their readers. And knowledge management is the act of curating such a database.

Importance of Knowledge Bases for SaaS Products

If you have a business FAQ page, you may think that you are all set on the knowledge base front. However, that is less than the bare minimum expected from you in this customer-centric age.

A knowledge base is particularly vital for SaaS products where the learning curve can be quite steep. Similarly, based on the application, the skill and expertise required to operate the SaaS product may also vary. Hence, merely resorting to the standard FAQs may not make the cut if you wish to position your business as “user friendly.”

Here are a few solid reasons for developing a strong knowledge base for your SaaS product:

1. It Supports Success Stories

Naturally, your customer’s success with the SaaS product primarily depends on how effectively they can utilize it. And knowledge base acts as the foundational pillar to this success story. An insightful knowledge base offers beyond basic guidance – it unlocks efficient ways to carry out the intended task and deliver spectacular results.

2. It Reduces Customer Churn

In case it isn’t obvious enough, an unhappy customer is bad for business. And a user’s sense of frustration aggravates when they find themselves at a loss of using the product you offer.

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Resolving their issues right at the earliest stage can nip this problem right in the bud. And the best way to ensure that they remain hooked to your product is by offering upfront value through query resolution. Once they notice that they are deriving continuous value and benefit directly from the product or through its use, they will be more open to renewing or expanding the subscription.

3. It Cuts Down the Load on Customer Service Executives

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In an age when organizations are trying to cut down labor costs and reduce manual intervention, having a knowledge base comes as a boon. The self-servicing capacity of the knowledge base can reduce the load on your customer service or technical support team. As a result, only high-level escalations will require their attention, improving their service quality.

4. It Positions Your Brand as a Domain Expert

Given that you are the creator of the SaaS product, you should also develop a repute as a reliable source of information on everything related to it. Having an enlightening knowledge base can establish your stand as a domain expert and an industry leader. Once you stake a claim as an informational authority, you can gradually develop your product as a formidable brand that needs no introduction – essentially, it is marketing at no extra cost!

5. It Attracts Traffic

Interestingly, your knowledge base can earn you organic traffic in several ways.

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For starters, it can act as a hotspot where you can add keywords and use them to rank on search engines. Secondly, since it resolves customer issues or offers solutions to their queries, you will gain credibility through relevance, further skyrocketing your rankings. Finally, your domain expertise can also translate to improved ranking and greater visibility.

Knowledge Base Checklist for Start-Ups

If you are checking out a knowledge base software to host your SaaS product details, here is a quick checklist of questions and considerations that you should deliberate upon before making your pick:

Where does your current knowledge reside? How does one access it?
Where do you stand in terms of documenting all the available knowledge?
When was the last time you updated your knowledge base?
How often would you like to update this information?
Are there any restrictions while granting access to the knowledge?
Does the knowledge base software offer search functionality?
Who shall be accessing and using the knowledge that you make available?
Do you require multi-lingual support?
Can readers, staff, and customer service executives collaborate on articles or discussions to improve the information quality?
Can you disable comments, reviews, and ratings on certain products or posts?
Who is the competent authority to review the knowledge base? How often should it undergo review?
Does your knowledge base software collect any vital statistics and reports regarding its usage?
Do you offer subscription services wherein the readers can sign up to stay up-to-date on all discussions?
Does the knowledge base software offer Cloud support with adequate backup?
What are the security parameters available to maintain data protection and confidentiality?
Does the knowledge base software possess enough room for branding and customization?
How easy is it to navigate through the knowledge base?
What is the information density ratio for the knowledge base?

Fortunately, most knowledge base software solutions come equipped with features and functionalities listed as considerations above. They can enrich your customer experience and cultivate brand loyalty.

Concluding Thoughts

An information-rich knowledge base could be the “it” factor that propels your business as customer-centric. It also makes your product worth the investment as users can derive immediate results. However, to make it happen, you would require an equally competent knowledge base software to help staff and users alike. So choose wisely, as it will indirectly affect your bottom line!

Learn More About Kovai Limited

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5 Ways to Measure the Conversion Intent of Your SaaS Audience

Is your SaaS business struggling to convert? Optimizing the conversion intent of your SaaS audience can be a great way to increase conversions.

Marketers believe that a reasonable SaaS conversion rate usually falls between 3-5%. Anything above 8% is considered a strong conversion rate.

However, instead of focusing on the benchmark, act smart, and find out what your conversion rates are doing and what you need to do to reach your goals.

In this article, we will be discussing conversion intent, how focusing on intent can lead to better conversion rates, and the five ways to measure conversion intent.

What is conversion intent?

Conversion intent is the measure of a prospect’s desire to complete a transaction on your SaaS site. It could be obtaining a SaaS product or availing a service you offer on your site.

Your prospects can either have high conversion intent or low conversion intent. When your potential buyers have high conversion intent, they are willing to overcome all types of issues, as they have a strong desire to purchase your product or service. No matter what challenges and obstacles they encounter while using your sites, such as slow loading site speed or complex navigation, they’ll still make the purchase.

Conversely, a prospect with low conversion intent will leave your site if they encounter the same challenges. In order to convert buyers with low conversion intent, you need to maintain a highly optimized site.

A great Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) strategy is to match conversion intent with user behavior at the right place in your conversion funnel.

How is it different from the conversion rate?

While conversion intent measures a prospect’s desire to complete a transaction on your SaaS site, the conversion rate is all about converting a prospect into a paid consumer.

To get the SaaS conversion rate, you divide the number of conversions by the total number of visitors or inquiries of your product or service. The metric will differ from business to business as every business has varying goals and implements different tracking metrics.

How focusing on intent can lead to better conversion rates?

An intent marketing strategy will help your SaaS business target consumers with high purchase intent, thus increasing the quality and quantity of lead generation and maximizing conversions and the Life-Time Value of your uses.

For instance, you can use high-intent keywords to improve conversion rates. They usually generate 4 to 10 times higher conversion rates as compared to low-intent keywords.

You can also leverage mobile. More people prefer to use mobile over desktop these days. One of the most significant advantages that mobile offers over a desktop is the call function. And many statistics suggest that inbound calls bring 10%-40% better conversion rates as compared to web leads. Adding a click-to-call button on your SaaS website will cost you nothing but increase mobile conversion by leaps.

Also, Google prioritizes mobile-first websites and ranks half of the pages on your website by their mobile versions.

Here are the three main types of intent you can consider:

Navigational intent: Here, users’ queries are straightforward as they are searching for a specific website or page. You can’t do much to capture users’ attention here.

Informational intent: Informational queries occur when a user is searching for more information to learn something. They may be searching for information on your industry or your products. Remember that they don’t necessarily have high purchase intentions.

You can thus create relevant informational topics that educate your visitors. It will lead them down the sales funnel.

Transactional intent: Queries are made with transactional intent when a user is searching to make a purchase. You can seize the opportunity and help them in the process of converting them.

Offering comprehensive product information, optimizing and simplifying the checkout process, and solving issues users might face are all great strategies to covert.

When crafting content for transactional queries, you should:

address the pain points
offer comprehensive content addressing the solutions

You can use these practical intent-based content tips while creating content:

Convert long-tail keywords into the content: Try to find out the keywords or search terms that people use when trying to find you. When you aren’t sure whether the query is transactional or informational, you can enter the query into Google and observe results. In case the top results are informative, there is a likelihood that the question is too.

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Sometimes, users will make queries with multiple intentions. So, ascertain the intent behind the questions to craft relevant content. Teaming up with SEO consultants is a great idea.

When you are done with this, you can convert these long-tail keywords into dynamic content to bring more traffic to your company’s blog.

Turn FAQs into the content: Frequently asked customer questions can be turned into content. If you are just starting out and don’t have enough customers, you can check out what types of questions people were asking about competitors and create helpful and informative content around those questions.

5 ways to measure conversion intent

Now, let’s look at the 5 ways to measure conversion intent:

Keyword volume research

Keyword search volume implies the number of searches made for a specific keyword in a given timeframe. It will provide you with a general idea of a keyword’s competitiveness and overall volume.

Seasonality has a vital role to play in keyword search volume. Though shoppers who want to make a good bargain may search for “Halloween Costumes” in May, but most people will wait until September to conduct such searches.

Search volume is crucial as search engines are a great way for websites to attract new visitors and traffic. You should thus target keywords in your content with accurate search volume.

But note that only targeting keywords with very high search volume is a bad idea. This way, you will be competing with more significant sites making it difficult to get your content ranking. You should arm yourself with all the practical SEO tips to rank your business.

Use predictive analytics

Using advanced predictive analytics, you can predict future events. It applies several techniques, including data mining, modeling, machine learning, statistics, and AI, to analyze current data and predict how your business will fare in the future. Predictive analytics can also be used to measure conversion intent.

Using data mining, text analytics, and statistics, you can create predictive intelligence. It can reveal patterns and relationships in both structured as well as unstructured data.

Structured data such as age, gender, marital status, income, etc., are readily available for analysis. Unstructured data, on the other hand, are textual data that you find in social content or other open text. You will have to extract the data from the text along with the sentiment.

Analyzing re-engagement rate visitors

Analyzing your website re-engagement is another way to measure the conversion intent of your web visitors. Tools like Google Analytics will help you to see which audience segments are spending more time on your site, allowing you to adjust what visitors perceive when they first land on your website.

Use Google Analytics’ traffic source feature as a start to analyze site visitor engagement. From this report, you can tell where your traffic is coming from and also the amount of traffic from different traffic sources. The report also shows you engagement metrics and the results of all of that engagement, such as bounce rate, pages per session, and average session duration.

You can also analyze your visitor’s engagement by landing page and by device category in Google Analytics. Once you get the results, you can come up with strategies to build a more engaged conversion channel or increase conversions.

Determining exit pages

Finding out why people leave your site or specific pages can help you make one more effort to convert visitors with the intention of leaving.

Exit-intent popups work well in this regard and can stop visitors from abandoning your page. It can detect when a visitor is about to leave, giving you a chance to show the visitor one last message at that crucial moment. A study shows that you can recover 53% of abandoning visitors by using exit-intent popups.

You can personalize your exit-intent popups by using your visitor’s name, as done in the example below, to see more conversions.

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Understanding the needs of trial users

One great strategy that SaaS service providers often implement to entice customers is offering free trials.

There are basically three types of free trials:

Free Trials that don’t need a credit card: Here, users sign up to sample the SaaS product or service and find out whether it will meet their needs.

Free Trials that require credit card registration: SaaS product or service providers like this by offering their credit card information, users are taking a baby step towards purchasing their product or services. It will only work when there is absolute transparency. You should also offer numerous options to users to opt-out of the trial period at any time.

Freemiums: Freemium services are a trend, particularly for app-driven SaaS subscription models. Here, customers have the option to remain a free-trial user for a lifetime by paying only for advanced features. Companies such as Dropbox have earned billions out of this model though it is considered by many as a wrong way to do business.

Understanding the needs of the trial users can improve your SaaS conversion rate. But it will depend on customer experience. So, create high-quality products that offer value, make it easy for users to use your product, know your most valuable feature so that you can make it your USP and offer competition, and provide stellar customer support.

Wrapping-Up

Finding out the conversion intent of your SaaS audience and optimizing it can dramatically increase your conversions. Every SaaS business should focus on the intent of consumers and target those with high purchase intent. Web visitors with low-intent can also be converted by offering valuable content. You can use the five ways mentioned in this article to measure conversion intent.

3 Key Automations to Accelerate Your SaaS Company’s Growth

Today’s SaaS apps are easy to acquire and use without IT and operations’ assistance. Due to that convenience, departments and teams tend to seek out best-of-breed cloud applications, streamlining foundational and specialized functions through automation.

However, trouble arises when your company ends up with a SaaS sprawl – the overall amount of adopted applications overwhelms your tech stack. Data becomes siloed in disparate SaaS apps, fragmenting the business processes that run your organization. That’s why integration needs to be a key part of your automation strategy.

All high-growth SaaS companies tend to share one thing in common: They automate critical business processes and mend fragmented ones early on to succeed. From our experience providing integrations to thousands of customers, here are the three key business process automations to help your growing company scale faster:

1. Quote-to-Cash

Managing the Quote-to-Cash process can be complex, since it covers the entire sales cycle, software licensing fulfillment, and revenue recognition, and it’s typically spread across many applications. That’s why this is the single most critical process that should be integrated and automated in any growing company

Through every sales cycle, there’s a need to share information from sales, accounting, customer success, and other teams. Without automation, companies find themselves dependent on manual data entry, quote creation, uploading and downloading data, and other resource-intensive, error-prone tasks.

Fast, accurate processing is crucial to close deals sooner, drive positive customer experiences, improve cash management and visibility, and increase operational efficiency.

2. Customer 360

As your company matures, your customer success, sales, and product teams need accurate data to gain a more holistic view of your customers. The Customer 360 concept helps you create more complete customer profiles by aggregating and analyzing data from across your organization. With this unified knowledge, you can personalize interactions, proactively reduce churn, and enable upselling opportunities.

The problem is that customer data exists across multiple applications and databases, including your CRM, ERP, reporting and analytics, and customer support. Without automation, your teams would have to spend time manually collecting data – duplicates and discrepancies would be unavoidable.

Integration brings together data trapped in various systems to help you understand how customers use your products, improve engagement, and increase net retention.

3. Employee Hiring and Onboarding

Finally, part of growing fast is being able to hire and onboard fast. That’s why your HR team is crucial to your success. However, one potential obstacle is repetitive data entry and other low-value duties. A typical HR system features numerous specialized applications that are detached from each other, which can make coordinating and streamlining workflows between them quite challenging.

Integration connects these applications to ensure that employee information is automatically synced when and where you need it. Automating administrative tasks enables your team to focus more on the employee experience and company culture.

By reducing bureaucracy, HR can lead strategic initiatives including change management and organizational effectiveness. – Read more

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