Customer expansion is a superhero strategy: it helps increase customer retention, boost revenue, maximize Customer Lifetime Value, and much more.
Did you know that it’s 4 times cheaper to upsell existing customers than acquire new ones? Yes, client expansion is a great way to provide your customers with the ultimate experience and turn them into long-term, loyal customers.
Luckily there are some very simple methods that you can implement directly inside your product to drive customer expansion. This article is a complete guide to creating a solid customer expansion strategy for your SaaS, including:
- What is Customer Expansion?
- What are the Types of Customer Expansion?
- How to Drive Customer Expansion?
- Use In-App Notifications to Drive Expansion
Let’s dive in!
What is Customer Expansion?
Customer expansion is a strategy used to provide more value to customers by encouraging them to purchase more.
This is an excellent option for any business for the following reasons:
- Increases customer retention
- Reduces the need for customer acquisition
- Boosts additional revenue
- Maximizes customer’s experience of your product
Having a good customer expansion strategy is key to maximizing the above benefits. This may include discovering the right type of customer expansion to go for, how to find the right opportunities to market these additional purchases, and who’s the right kind of customer to target.
What are the Types of Customer Expansion?
There are 3 main ways you can get users to purchase more from your product or service. Let’s look at them in detail.
- Cross-selling: Cross-selling is where you offer customers a related product or service to what they already have. For example, Hubspot cross-sells its marketing hub product with its sales hub or CMS hub.
- Upselling: Upselling focuses on upgrading a customer’s existing account. For example, upgrading from a freemium to a paid account or upgrading from a basic to a premium account.
- Add-ons: This is the most specific type of expansion and encourages customers to pay for specific add-ons that will help fulfill their unique needs. For example, paying for an additional feature or service within the product.
Ok, so you know the different types of customer expansion you can use, but how can you ensure you market them effectively? Let’s find out!
How to Drive Customer Expansion?
There are some key aspects of your strategy you can really focus on that will get your expansion success numbers sky-high.
- Customer segmentation: This is an absolute must. By segmenting your customers into different user groups based on various factors (such as revenue, account type, feature use, and more), you can personalize expansion opportunities to each group to maximize conversion rates.
- Data-driven decisions: Data matters and it’s a sure way to determine whether your strategy is going to work. Use key customer insights like their most used features, product needs, and more to determine what type of expansion would suit their needs best.
- Customer success team: Your customer success team will be the one implementing customer expansion, so make sure they are well-trained to interact with customers and optimize the overall process.
Use In-App Notifications to Drive Expansion
In-app messages are another feature within your product that you can use as a tool to drive customer expansion. Let’s explore this feature in more detail.
What are In-App Notifications?
In-app notifications are messages delivered inside your product that are triggered by different actions your users are taking. They are a form of real-time communication directly with your customers.
Benefits of In-App Notifications
In-app notifications are a great way to:
- Personalize communication. Adapting your messages to what a specific user is currently experiencing shows that you care and want to help them.
- Increase user engagement. Relevant, timely, and personalized messages = major user engagement.
- Drive users to certain actions in your tool. In-app notifications are a fantastic opportunity to encourage users to take certain actions in your product to maximize the benefits for both of you.
- Maximize conversions. All of the above help users fulfill your desired action for them!
FROGED Auto Messages and Product Flows
FROGED is an all-in-one customer success platform that allows you to use in-app notifications and more to maximize customer expansion! Here are just some of the features FROGED’s retention solution includes:
- Product Flows: FROGED’s Product Flows feature allows you to create sequences of content such as hotspots, modals, and tooltips inside your product. With this, you can determine the type of customer expansion type is most suitable for them and exactly where and when you can offer them the expansion opportunity.
- Auto Messages: FROGED’s Automessages feature means you can trigger personalized messages based on a user’s actions. With this, you can trigger customer expansion opportunities based on their interactions with your product!
How to use In-App Notifications to Drive Customer Expansion
Having a good customer expansion strategy can completely transform how many paying customers you have for your business. And, it’s a mutually beneficial process! Your customers get more value from your product, while you boost your revenue – win, win!
Remember, the key to a good strategy is understanding how your customers use your product, and where they can find more value. That way, you can opt for the right type of expansion technique, using data and customer segmentation to really optimize those chances of conversion.
Looking to level up your customer expansion strategy? Use a platform like FROGED to accurately monitor your user’s exact product engagement and needs and create custom in-app notifications to drive expansion like nothing else! Book a demo today to try it out for yourself!