email marketing

So you want to onboard enterprise SaaS users without losing your sanity? Do this

By Bhaskar Sarma 1 Comment

If you are a SaaS company already selling to individual customers and SMBs how different would it be if you had to sell to enterprises?

Will you be able to fit into the enterprise IT stack, deliver the same results that you have demonstrated for your smaller users with the same basic featureset?

Or is it a fool’s errand?

Let’s find out.

To understand how different small businesses are from enterprises think about a NASCAR and an F1 race.

According to Top Gear,

F1 cars are made in labs by white coated mad scientists. NASCARs are knocked up in medieval foundries by men with mallets…NASCAR has hammers and spanners, an F1 driver can tune his car on the go…When an F1 driver brakes…his body is tormented by a force of 5g. Brake discs are made by firing carbon atoms at a cobweb of rayon…Over in NASCAR they make do with slabs of cast iron….if NASCAR is the Big Bang F1 is particle physics.

At its most fundamental level selling a SaaS product is the same whether to an individual or to an enterprise. You have to identify your ideal customer, demonstrate that you product has value, remove risk, and make it easy to use.

But when you get down to brass tacks the differences are akin to a NASCAR vs.F1 race.

Here’s what I see the difference is between them (H/t to Steli Efti for his insightful Quora answer) [Read more…] about So you want to onboard enterprise SaaS users without losing your sanity? Do this

10 little known factors that make mobile users trash your emails

By Bhaskar Sarma 1 Comment

Two quick questions:

Do you often use your smartphone to check email? And do you delete many of them because they are plain ugly and unreadable?

I won’t be surprised if you said yes to both.

Let’s look at some numbers

Morgan Stanley predicts that mobile devices will globally outsell desktops and laptops by the end of 2012.
Ericsson states that by 2017 there will be 9 billion mobile devices– more than the number of people on earth.
According to research by Tricom B2B and University of Dayton School of Business Administration 59% of US B2B decision makers used a smartphone to gather information.
See this data from a Google survey called “Think B2B: Connecting with the Customer”:

Properly done, email marketing is still one of the best ways to reach out cheaply and effectively to decision makers, especially in B2B.

But there are still a lot of marketers out there who are making mobile users want to poke their eyes out by sending them emails designed for viewing on larger laptop and desktop screens.

That’s like melting a candle, pouring the wax into your car’s gas tank and expecting to hear the engine start when you turn the key.

email marketing

DTC and eCom brands are going to have to pivot from paid social heavy customer acquisition strategy and focus on email. Some ideas and playbooks on building a high quality and engaged email list