Most marketers know the 4 P’s of marketing — product, price, promotion, and place — but more often than not, there’s one of them that they isolate from the rest of the list. Joel York, author of the popular blog Chaotic Flow, understands the struggle. That’s why he’s providing five ways to build effective marketing into your product design. For a even more tips, be sure to download his new eBook, SaaS Growth Strategy: A Customer Lifecycle Approach.
5 Ways to Let Your Product Do the Marketing
 | 1) Design for Discovery
Designing for discovery is the secret to driving upsell. Great SaaS products cater to their users over time: For novice users, they provide stepping-stones to new features and essential tasks. For expert users, they can be customized to fit each customer’s unique business need. Achieving satisfaction across user levels requires your product to be easily accessible, flexible, and well defined.
While it may seem like a daunting task, designing for discovery is sure to keep your users engaged, therefore, reducing your churn rate.
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 | 2) Unleash Upsells
Allowing your users to explore new capabilities, as seen above, is one part of fueling upsell. The other key is making the purchase run smoothly. Enable e-commerce throughout the buying process — in pricing, trial account conversion, payment, invoicing, and billing. You’re a SaaS company, after all. Why wouldn’t you enable e-commerce?
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 | 3) Tantalize With Teasers
You’re product allows customers to discover essential features, but what about those needs they haven’t even considered? That’s where cross-selling plays in.
Design your product to cross-sell by taking advantage of the customer login page. Incorporate teasers into your customer’s homepage urging them to trial a new feature relevant to their needs. After logout, send your customers alerts encouraging them to make a purchase decision.
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 | 4) Make Friends Through Feedback
The secret to viral growth is an engaged customer community. Encouraging feedback will help improve your product and keep your customers invested in your product.
Ensure the feedback process to be as convenient as possible. Don’t make your customers jump through loops when they encounter a problem. Allow them to easily request new features, report a bug, check their account billing status, and contact you directly.
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 | 5) Streamline Sharing
This goes hand-in-hand with making friends through feedback. If you’ve nurtured an engaged customer community, you can expect your customers to start selling to their friends. Streamline sharing by providing your customers something useful to share, like business documents or analyses. In addition, encourage your customers to share something valuable that will lead prospects into a trial.
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(from: http://labs.openviewpartners.com/let-your-product-do-the-marketing/?utm_source=Feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+openviewlabs+%28OpenView+Labs%29)
