COVID-19 showed many of us that job security is a myth. In fact, the pandemic caused one of the worst employment crises since The Great Depression, with the OECD reporting that, in some countries, employees were working only one-tenth of their pre-pandemic hours.

2020 and 2021 saw a rise in entrepreneurship and innovation worldwide, with an increase due in part to the recent economic downturn. From starting software companies as a way of boosting income to feeling that the time was finally right to launch a Software or SaaS product, there is a range of reasons for this recent increase in startups. But whatever the reason, it’s critical to know the risks.

It’s expensive to develop, deploy, and market software, especially at the early stage of a startup, so securing Startup funding can be critical for survival for SaaS companies.

So how can you go about securing SaaS Startup funding? We took a look at the options.

2 Questions To Consider Before Looking for SaaS Startup Funding

The funding ecosystem is complicated. Knowing who you should get startup SaaS funding from and precisely what funding you need is essential. To make the right choice for your SaaS, you need to do some housekeeping first.

1. At Which Stage Is Your Startup?

The stage at which SaaS companies are operating helps determine the kind of funding they should chase. We briefly outline the stages below:

➡️ Pre-Seed Startup Stage

The pre-seed stage is reserved for the smallest SaaS companies. Early-stage startups looking for this type of funding might want help developing a working prototype or getting their product to market.

According to Profitwell, this will require a small capital of around $1 million or less. Getting pre-seed funding is highly competitive. Investors will be looking for well-developed product ideas and solid founding teams to give them the confidence they need to invest in early-stage startups.

➡️ Seed Startup Stage

The seed stage is commonly seen as the first official equity funding stage, with software and SaaS companies needing to raise between $100,000 and $2 million. You need capital to help meet your product development needs, expand your team, and begin turning a profit at this early stage.

To qualify for funding, your business must have more or less doubled in valuation since the pre-seed round. And, as Investopedia reports, your business should be valued between $3 million and $6 million, though, of course, these are broad guidelines.

➡️ Series A — Revenue Generation

The Series A funding stage becomes an option when your SaaS or Software business has started generating revenue and you’re looking to expand. At this stage, you need capital to optimize existing business processes.

While the scale of this funding varies, businesses raise around $10 million on average. To attract investors, you’ll need to develop your business model further and show evidence that it can withstand future cash flow fluctuations.

➡️ Series B — Equity-based funding

Series B funding is a form of equity-based funding where you sell shares in your company to investors in return for capital. This capital acts as a cash injection to boost your growth.

The Corporate Finance Institute (CFI) notes that SaaS companies looking for Series B funding need strong valuations of about $10 million. To secure funding, your monetization strategy must have succeeded. In addition, you need to demonstrate that your product is profitable and have metrics in place that prove your business can compete at a certain level.

➡️ Series C — Final stage funding

This is the final funding stage. In 2019, Series C Startups raised an average of $103 million, up from $48 million in 2012.

This stage focuses on aggressive expansion. Your SaaS or Software company should be generating sufficient capital for scaling so that investors will get less equity. To qualify for funding, your business must be established enough that the investment risk is low.

2. How Do You Prepare For The Funding Journey?

Once you’ve determined the SaaS Startup funding stage you’re in, it’s time to get prepared for your funding journey. Here are a few tips:

➡️ Budget Your Time

Securing Startup funding takes time and consistent effort. You’re likely to go through multiple pitching rounds and re-working sessions, so plan accordingly.

➡️ Prepare Your Documentation

Being organized goes a long way to securing SaaS Startup funding. Prepare your business plan, pitch decks, and financial projections. It’s also helpful to update any legal documentation like your articles of incorporation — the set of documents you must file with a government body to document the establishment of your company.

➡️ Plan Effectively

You’ll need a detailed business plan of exactly how you’ll use your Startup funding to grow your SaaS company.

➡️ Don’t Neglect Your Business

Make sure your business doesn’t suffer while looking for funding, as any decline in growth could deter future investors.

➡️ Grow Your Business

Try to grow your business as much as possible before hunting for Startup funding.

Ready to start looking for SaaS funding? Explore the complete list of the most popular Startup funding options, and learn how to prepare your SaaS funding strategy successfully on PayPro Global’s blog.

Welcome to the Email Marketing Conference

What if you can't watch online?

Here you can learn more, about how to get record of the conference

Welcome to the Email Marketing Online Conference

What if you can't watch online?

Here you can learn more, about how to get record of summit

In any Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business, customer churn is terrible news. Lowering churn can improve almost everything related to revenue ‒ from your Lifetime Value (LTV) to your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) payback period and your growth rate. Researchers at Bain & Company found that increasing customer retention by just 5% can increase profits by a whopping 25–95%.

But how do you go about reducing customer churn rates efficiently? This article contains all the insider secrets and techniques you will need.

What Is Customer Churn?

In the SaaS business world, customer churn (also sometimes called “attrition rate”) is the number of customers who cancel their subscription to a product or service over a certain period. The rate of customer churn is usually measured as a percentage. This is what the equation looks like:

For example, if your business had 800 customers at the beginning of the quarter, and you lost 40 of them by the end of the quarter, you would have a 5% customer churn rate. Evaluating your customer churn rate is vital to consider when you’re assessing your retention strategy. A high churn rate means it’s time to nurture your existing customers and improve the product, service, or experience you offer.

Why a High Churn Rate Is Risky

A high customer churn rate means your business is losing customers and, therefore, revenue. The high churn can also make it hard for you to cover your CAC and generate a good cash flow. Ultimately, it will hinder your company’s growth.

How Do I Know If My Churn Is Cause for Concern?

A little churn is natural for SaaS businesses operating in a highly competitive environment. About 5–7% is considered within the “healthy” range of monthly churn, though this is quite a general estimate within the industry. If your customer churn rate is within this range, you’re probably able to balance it out by acquiring new customers or expanding your current customer base.

Warning Signs To Look Out For:

A high churn rate can be a sign of something bigger, like underlying problems with your product or service. Customers churn most often because of poor onboarding, a low-quality product, or a lack of access to an effective customer support team. It’s therefore vitally important to keep an eye on this rate.

You may find you have a problem if:

• Your churn is happening faster than you can sign on customers
• Your LTV is shrinking
• Your churn rate is above 10%
• You’re experiencing more downgrades than upgrades from your customers

The 3 Stages of Customer Retention

Many businesses only turn their attention to churn once they’re losing customers. This is a reactive strategy that could cost you dearly. Being proactive against customer churn means starting at the moment of customer acquisition. There are three main stages to the lifecycle of customer retention. Understanding these will help to inform your strategy throughout the customer journey:

1. Early-Stage Retention

Early-stage retention usually refers to the first week a customer is engaging with your SaaS product or service. This stage tends to contain the most significant drop in retention. Here the focus should be on encouraging customers to use the product or service more than once, helping them find the benefits, and ultimately realize the value of what you offer.

2. Mid-Term Retention

Mid-term retention refers to the period of weeks two to four. These few weeks are vital as customers need to develop a usage pattern with the SaaS product or service. Building customer loyalty and engagement are critical at this stage. The more the product is integrated into a customer’s life and becomes a habit, the less likely they’ll churn.

3. Long-Term Retention

Long-term retention runs from week five for the duration of the customer’s time with the business. Here, the focus is on making the product indispensable to the user and ensuring that they continue to receive value from it. Engaging customers in the early stages of retention is most likely to keep them around for the longer term. Making improvements in the later stages will also help you to sustain a good subscriber base over time.

10 Secrets To Quickly Reducing Customer Churn

1. Focus on Your Onboarding Process

Your user onboarding needs to help you shorten time to value and get more customers to experience your product’s core value. The best way to do this is through your onboarding process. For a full breakdown of SaaS onboarding best practices, see our recent blog post.

Key Tips For Improving User Onboarding:

• Speak to your customers’ desires and pain points.
• Welcome new customers to the platform.
• Use quick, simple, and intuitive processes.
• Set achievable tasks.
• Celebrate and reward customer success and progress.
• Keep communication and support open and clear.

2. Strengthen Your Customer Relationships

If you build good relationships with customers and understand them, you’ll be able to continue providing users with a valuable product or service as time goes on. An honest and transparent relationship with a customer builds trust, trust builds loyalty, and loyal customers are far less likely to churn. This relationship-building process can start from the moment a user signs up for your SaaS product or service.

Key Tips For Improving Customer Relationships:

• Be quick to respond to complaints and queries.
• Build a strong online community where users can interact and gain value.
• Interview users for business tips and testimonials, and share these on your website and social media platforms.
• Show your customers that they’re dealing with people and not a cold, faceless organization.

If you build solid relationships and a smooth customer experience, your users are more likely to reach out if there are problems and stick around while you address them. They’ll also be more likely to stay with you for longer periods and through other changes in their lives. And if they do cancel their subscription, you’re more likely to get feedback on why they did it.

3. Identify At-Risk Users and Target Them

Part of being proactive about reducing churn is identifying “unhealthy” or “at-risk” users before they have a chance to cancel their subscriptions. To identify at-risk customers, you need to build a profile of these customers and use micro surveys to collect information to inform your retention strategy.

You can collect information about at-risk users by looking at churn indicators specific to your business. Two examples are your Net Promoter Score (NPS) and your customers’ engagement with your software. Read more about the most critical SaaS metrics here.

Poor customer service will only worsen your churn. However, when you prioritize proactive customer service, then your teams can make personal contact with at-risk customers to prevent customer churn by checking if they’re getting the necessary value from the product. Nothing is more effective at reducing churn than offering stellar customer service.

Also, have a good look at the users that aren’t using your product, those using it far less frequently, and those suddenly not engaging at all. Identifying these users means you can build a specific strategy to reach them and fix the root issue — sometimes before they realize there’s a problem.

Improve customer retention and increase your revenue with the complete list of 10 secret tactics for lowering customer churn in SaaS on PayPro Global’s blog.

So you’ve created a great SaaS product or service, customers have signed up and you are ready and raring to go. Now’s the time to make sure their first experience is as good as your marketing and sales process has promised them.

How do you ensure a seamless user experience as customers start their journey with your business? The answer is to use an excellent customer onboarding system.

Read on to learn more about SaaS customer onboarding best practices and how to use these to drive your business forward.

What Is SaaS User Onboarding?

User or customer onboarding refers to introducing and familiarizing customers with your products or services. A complete SaaS user onboarding will cover the entire journey your customers will take from the moment they sign up until they’re regular, paying customers.

This process includes guidance and support through elements such as videos, documentation, tutorials, and customer service. These all help to move your customers from being novices to experienced users.

However, onboarding flows must consider your new users’ goals — what they want to achieve and what success means for them. Customers care about outcomes and reaching their goals as quickly and efficiently as possible.

SaaS Customer Onboarding: An Example

Let’s use a simple example to explain the concept in greater detail: Think of the SaaS user onboarding as introducing a new habit into a person’s life.

You decide to learn a new language. To achieve this goal, you download an app and sign up for a free trial. You resolve to practice every day and persist with it for a few days. Then life takes over, and work becomes busy.

So, you focus your attention elsewhere and make excuses for why you haven’t logged back on. Eventually, you delete the app and forget about learning French.

Sound familiar? In many ways, this scenario reflects the SaaS user onboarding experience. When someone adds a SaaS product into their daily routine or workflow, they need to develop a habit of using it consistently and effectively.

Making this a habit can be challenging (remember those French lessons?), which is why it’s best to support your customer as much as possible during the first few weeks.

The Importance and Benefits of User Onboarding for SaaS Businesses

The earliest experience your user gets during their onboarding experience is vital, helping to set the tone for all future experiences and interactions. Remember, first impressions last.

According to a PWC report on customer experience, one out of three customers will stop interacting with a brand they love after just one bad experience. This doesn’t leave a lot of margin for error when it comes to customer onboarding.

Customers need to quickly learn how to use your service and understand why it will be valuable.

If they find the initial setup process easy and meaningful, you’re more likely to retain them as a customer. And since many SaaS businesses rely on monthly recurring revenue, keeping them couldn’t be more critical.

If your onboarding experience is comprehensive, you’ll experience less churn (the rate at which you lose customers) and increase your product’s lifetime value. Your first-time customers could very well become loyal, long-term users.

A good SaaS customer onboarding will also keep customers engaged. If they’re learning new things, they’ll remain interested in logging back in and using your software. And, with a bit of luck, they might even become brand advocates.

SaaS businesses often have high marketing and sales bills. If your onboarding isn’t working, you’re essentially pouring money down the drain. On the flip side, improving your onboarding process will lead to more revenue and growth.

If there’s a free trial process, successful onboarding flows are even more critical. You’re aiming for the shortest time to value and only have the duration of the trial period to impress these users.

A good SaaS onboarding will mean you’re more likely to convert trial users to paying customers.

Finally, when you effectively guide customers through a well-thought-out onboarding, you’ll need to do less customer support at a later stage. Again, this can translate into savings.

Fine-tuning your onboarding system can be inexpensive and quick to implement. And you’ll enjoy a quick return on investment. So, this is a great place to start when you’re looking to take your business to the next level.

The 8 Elements of a SaaS Onboarding Process

It goes without saying that your SaaS business will need to develop its own unique onboarding processes. However, most successful onboarding journeys will include the following elements:

1. Sign-Up Process

This is the first step of the onboarding flow, even though your users haven’t quite signed up yet. Here you’ll collect some of their details (it’s crucial to only ask for information that’s absolutely necessary).

You can also add a further step at this stage, where you guide them through the setup process.

2. Welcome Email

This Email is a simple one that pushes potential customers further along the onboarding journey. It can welcome the user, introduce the business or product, or speak to customer pain points or desires.

The message needs to include a strong call-to-action, prompting the potential customer to continue through the process. Focus on the following action you’d like your user to take.

3. First Login

When a user logs in for the first time, they must never be greeted by an empty user state; in other words, they shouldn’t see a screen that contains no information.

This can make them feel lost and leave them unsure of where to go or what to do next. Instead, welcome them and lead them to your self-guided product walkthrough.

4. Product Tutorials

Product tutorials are where users get to know your SaaS product and the value it offers. The product tutorial is a vital step in the onboarding experience because it’s here where new users can become loyal customers.

Make sure this is in the form of an interactive product tour. Keep things simple and only walk the users through the essential features and tools they need to get value from the product.

Consider giving the user a task that can give them practical experience in using the product. They should be able to see its value for themselves.

5. Support Center

Support can come in the form of a customer support center or helpdesk software. You can also create a knowledge base that users can access for information.

Here, customers will get answers to common questions about your product. The knowledge base should, at a minimum, include “Getting Started” and “Frequently Asked Questions” documents.

6. Webinars and Workshops

Webinars are great for visual learners, as some people enjoy watching experts explain different features rather than just reading about them.

They can also work to build connections and a community. This is particularly true if these online sessions are happening live. However, webinars don’t have to be live — you can pre-record them and make them available on-demand.

7. In-App Notifications

Onboarding doesn’t stop when the introductory tour ends. For example, every time you make changes or updates to your product, you’ll have to keep users up-to-date too.

A great way to do this is to use in-app notifications. You can use these notifications to introduce new and unused features, upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and help keep users engaged.

8. Follow-Up

Once a user has signed up, businesses often stop onboarding. However, it’s most effective to check in regularly with your users.

Try to get feedback from them, offer them new products, features, or services, and provide them with unique learning opportunities every so often to help them continue to achieve customer success.

Unlock our 15 pro SaaS user onboarding tips to create a lasting customer impression and drive your company’s business growth on PayPro Global’s blog.

I won't do it myself since I'm working on Apiway full time, but maybe someone’s looking for a niche. 

I recently got a cold email from Funden. It's a startup with a base of investors and their contacts. The idea is simple. You buy a contact list and start sending cold emails. So, I started using it.

It works, you get replies, and they look at your pitch deck. I can see it in the stats. 

But there's a problem.

Fundraising at an early stage is a thankless job. Everybody wants to get away from you. And the worst thing is that you understand it, but you have to move forward. 

There are problems for investors as well. If you're a well-known fund, you get spammed from all sides. Even those who decide to open a "Unique T-shirt store" will send their pitch decks. 

If you're not a well-known fund, you have to look for projects on your own. Because startups don't know anything about you. If you're an angel investor, you also have to dig in the mug to find pearls.

Startups often use the carpet-bombing method and try to contact everyone, because the personal approach is very difficult at this stage. 

When startups and investors get to the call stage, they ask questions about traction like revenue, site traffic, active users, etc. 

To get a full picture, you need to call. Thus, it takes a lot of time. 

So, the biggest problem is filtering out adequate startups by stage niche and traction. And after that giving them as much time as possible. 

This is what Y Combinator does. It sells a base of startups to investors. The startup buys access to investors who are willing to invest. 

The solution exists.

You can make a marketplace where the startup posts its pitch deck and fills out a VERY long and detailed questionnaire. It specifies the industry like B2B, SaaS, or No-code. Marketplace verifies all applications. Investors only come in and look at startups in the category they’re interested in. 

Now comes the fun part. The startup uses an API to connect its bank, Google Analytics, search console, and CRM. You can look at the track chain in real-time. 

Investors can set up some kind of signals like setting up a meeting with someone whose revenue doubled in a month or more than 100 registrations passed in the CRM. 

At the end of the day, startups get emails from investors who understand their type of business, their stage, and their industry. Investors don't need to dig in the trash and only find out on the call stage that there are some crucial problems.

Monetization is simple. 

The startup pays a subscription for placement. The investor pays for access to startups. Or you could have a freemium model, and pay for signals.

Startups now spend time searching, sending emails, paying for mailing apps, etc. But you can do "Netflix for pitch decks."

I'd pay for that...

Satisfying customers' demands and providing them support service is essential for the growth of every business in today's time. Customers adopt various channels to reach out to businesses. One such channel is chatbot customer service.

A chatbot is a conversational AI and ML-powered chatbot that handles customer support services. A conversational chatbot is becoming extremely popular as it is used to answer customer's issues, queries, automate the resolutions, and hand over the conversation to human agents whenever required. In addition, chatbots are used to offer accurate and fast answers to customers.



Different Types of AI Chatbots

It is crucial to differentiate various types of chatbots that are available in the market. These include:

Button/Menu-Based Chatbots

These chatbots offer users the opportunity to choose from the options available in the menu. The structure is quite simple. These bots are used to answer the pre-defined questions and become ineffective in case complex queries are asked. Button chatbots cannot understand the same request when framed differently.

Keyword Based Chatbots

Here, the user types the word or the phrase, and the bot identifies the keyword and matches it with the pre-loaded responses. The bot will only reply with the content that has been manually loaded into the system. It helps to give reasonable business control over your brand's automated messages. But these bots cannot understand the complex queries and contexts.

Conversational Chatbots Using NLP

Conversational artificial intelligence chatbots are the most advanced chatbots. These chatbots understand the meaning behind the word, thus providing an exceptional experience. In addition, AI-enabled chatbots can detect an emotional conversation that hands over the conversation to the agents whenever needed.

How to Design a Good Conversational Chatbots

An excellent conversational AI chatbot helps to give your company an edge over its competitors. However, you need to ensure that the interaction with your bot is qualitative and satisfying for the users.

A Script for Transactional Queries

A chatbot script is used to reply to queries. It is a pre-planned conversational message. The simple FAQ is answered with a one-off response, but the transactional queries will require a script. The bot needs to follow a specific conversational flow. To deliver the message in the best possible way, the script must be clear and informative.

Writing Style

You should ensure that the people must understand the conversational AI chatbot reply. In addition to writing a clear script, you must keep the bot's answer short and precise because the more the readers, the higher the chances of getting confused and distracted. You can break the dialogues up and divide them into smaller chunks.

Personality

You need to decide what kind of personality you want for your conversational chatbots. First, it helps to determine the conversational AI platform's tone of voice, language, and communication style.

Crafting a quality chatbot is not easy, but it helps make chatbots more trustworthy and effective. AI Chatbots are capable of personalized experiences to offer great satisfaction to the users. It can handle 60% repetitive queries and save the time and effort of agents. One of the best AI chatbot service providers in India is Yellow.ai. It enables the businesses to build up a good customer relationship. Their chatbots provide the best resolution and smooth transfer of calls to live agents. The services provided by yellow.ai are trusted by more than 700 global companies, including BYJUS, Pepsi, TATA power, etc. Incorporating these bot services into your business will help your business grow. Contact yellow.ai today for more information!

Any company with a customer base needs to develop a strong customer success strategy. But what exactly is — and how do you — measure customer success?

There are so many different metrics out there that it can feel overwhelming. That’s why we at PayPro Global decided to clear up some of the confusion. This article will provide you with all the metrics you need to measure customer success within your Software as a Service (SaaS) business.



What Is the Definition of Customer Success?

Customer success is a business methodology about anticipating customer needs and challenges, as well as being proactive in terms of offering solutions.

This type of success involves multiple parts of your business. For example, are your customers happy with the way your product works? Are they using its full functionality? Are they satisfied with the value it adds to their lives? Do they understand the full value of your product?

Considering all these questions and more is the key to truly understanding and creating customer success.

The Importance of Measuring Customer Success Metrics in SaaS Businesses

Acquiring new customers can be expensive and time-consuming, with most unlikely to be locked into lengthy contracts with your business. Good relationships with your existing customers are, therefore, critical, and keeping them happy can lead to longevity for your business.

Customer success is the key to your business’s overall success. If your customers “succeed” in using your product, they’ll continue using it. And, if they use your product successfully, your business will continue to grow. Happy customers are likely to convert from a free trial to a subscription, become regular users, and, with some luck, loyal advocates for your business.

To get to this point, you need data in the form of customer success metrics and KPIs. Read on to learn more.

16 Actionable Metrics for Measuring SaaS Customer Success

The metrics outlined below are the most critical when measuring customer success for SaaS and so should form the basis of your success strategy. Track these metrics, and you’ll be able to tell how successful your customers are at using your product.

1. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) represents the total revenue a business can earn from a customer over the lifetime of the relationship. It forms an essential link between customer success and revenue.

If a customer’s lifetime value increases over time, they’re getting value from your product, which means your profits rise. Conversely, if the Customer Lifetime Value is decreasing, you’ll have to work out why the value or benefit of your product lessens over time, as it could hurt your profits.

To calculate customer lifetime value, you need three pieces of data:

➝ Annual Revenue per Customer (ARPC)

➝ Customer relationship (in years)

➝ Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Take your annual revenue per customer, and then multiply that by the number of years your customer has been with you. Finally, subtract the cost it took to acquire the customer, and you’re left with their Customer Lifetime Value.

An efficient customer success team focused on retaining customers will increase your ARPC and the average length of the customer relationship. In turn, these metrics will dramatically increase your CLV.

2. Repeat Purchase Rate (RPR)

Your Repeat Purchase Rate (RPR) refers to if your customers continue to do business with you or not. This rate can include subscription renewals and whether they remain with your company or move to a competitor.

To calculate your RPR, you’ll need to know how many customers made a repeat purchase over a set period of time (let’s say a year) and the total number of customers over that same year.

To increase your RPR, you’ll have to increase the number of repeat purchases being made. Increasing your repeat purchase rate will positively and directly affect your CLV, meaning more revenue for you over time.

3. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Your CAC refers to the cost of acquiring a new customer. This metric typically includes expenses such as research, marketing, and advertising costs. It can also consist of the salaries of your sales and marketing employees.

To calculate your CAC, you must divide the total number of sales and marketing costs of your SaaS product by the number of new customers acquired over a certain period.

CAC is one of the more important SaaS customer success metrics when it comes to predicting growth, helping you determine the long-term health of your business. Also, without looking at this value, you won’t know for sure if your marketing strategy is effective or not. Calculating your CAC helps you to determine the resulting return on interest (ROI) of an acquisition.

4. Customer Retention Rate (CRR)

Customer Retention Rate (CRR) is another one of the critical customer success metrics for businesses that value ongoing relationships, making it an essential value for SaaS businesses like yours.

That is because CRR measures the percentage of customers your business retained over a period of time. In other words, it tells you how many are sticking with you, rather than churning.

To calculate customer retention rates, you’ll need to take the volume of customers you had at the end of a given period and subtract it by the number of new customers you acquired over that time. Take that figure, then divide it by the volume of customers you had at the beginning of that same period, then multiply that by one hundred.

5. Customer Retention Cost (CRC)

Customer Retention Cost (CRC) is the amount your business must invest in keeping a customer. This metric is very effective in helping you understand your customer’s success.

An effective success strategy will grow customer retention at a greater rate than the cost of implementing the plan. It also helps you understand whether your customer retention cost is high enough to justify your customer success and retention spending. Finally, customer success metrics like this will help you figure out whether your efforts to keep your customers on board and spending are working effectively.

To calculate customer retention cost, you need the total number of annual costs spent on customer success and retention initiatives as well as the number of current active customers.

6. Customer Churn Rate (CCR)

Customer Churn Rate (CCR) measures how many customers your business loses over time. The churn rate is calculated either monthly or annually and can refer either to the number of customers lost or the amount of money (revenue churn) the customers would have represented.

To accurately work out your precise customer churn rate, it’s critical to define what a churned customer looks like to your business. First, you’ll have to decide how to count customers and how you define the moment of churn. Then, you have to apply your definition consistently.

To calculate the number of churned customers, you need to know how many customers you had at the beginning of a month and how many were lost (churned) during that same period.

There is no one size fits all answer when it comes to determining what makes a good churn rate. Most in the industry consider a 3–5% monthly to be a typically “good” churn rate for SaaS companies targeting smaller businesses. However, the larger the businesses you work with, the lower your churn rate has to be. This is to account for the fact there is a smaller number of them in the market.

Explore the full guide covering 10 more customer success metrics, and learn how they can help you achieve SaaS business growth on PayPro Global’s blog.

Social media and Internet users create tones of content daily, and many of their posts and tweets contain mentions of brands. This is a good chance for your company to convert them to brand advocates!

Keep reading to find out how to define brand lovers in cluttered social media feeds and use user-generated content like a pro.

When the application is created and launched, it is periodically necessary to import information into its database from files. Of course, the databases will also be replenished automatically - due to information added by users or provided by integrated services. But it is better to add import settings for common CSV, XLS, or XLSX formats in advance - most likely, they will be useful to you and will greatly simplify your work in the future.

Today we will talk about setting up import on the no-code platform AppMaster.io in two versions:

1. Static: when the order of the columns in the loaded tables is constant.
2. Dynamic: when the order of columns in tables is changed.

At the end of the article, there is a video with examples and an explanation of all the configuration steps.

File import setup process

The development of such functionality is not much different from classical programming, but with the help of visual tools, you will do it much faster. To do this, you need to follow 5 simple steps:

1. Prepare test files for import: no matter in which extension, the setup for CSV and Excel formats will look the same.
2. Customize a custom business process using the building blocks provided by the editor - no additional modules need to be downloaded.
3. Create a new endpoint for a business process - to implement the functionality of loading an imported file in a web application.
4. Add a form to the web application page that will upload CSV and Excel files and report a successful import or display an error message.
5. Test the functionality using test files to make sure everything works correctly.

If you already have experience with AppMaster.io or other no-code platforms, then set up is unlikely to take more than an hour, even taking into account watching the tutorial video.

Necessary blocks of business processes

Many of them are analogs of classical programming functions - only in the form of visual tools, with which you will work on the drag & drop principle.

Here is a list of the main blocks for setting up import with their brief description.

* In addition to them, you may also need various auxiliary blocks: if, when processing values from a file, you need to convert data from one format to another, save a variable for further processing, concatenate or split strings.

Static import

In this case, you do not need to specify the names of the columns, but their order must be the same in all loaded files - otherwise, the program will import data incorrectly.

• Start - is a building block that will accept the imported file for reading (after adding the corresponding variable to it).
• Read CSV File, Read XLS File, or Read XLSX File - reads the downloaded file line by line.
• For each loop - a loop that will iterate over all columns in each row for subsequent processing of their values.
• Switch - to split the stream: to configure various parameters for processing the values ​​obtained from the imported file, based on their indices.
• Make and Create blocks from the Model Functions group - for the data model that you will use when creating and saving objects from the imported file; and into which, accordingly, you will add the values ​​obtained in the previous stages.
• End - is a building block that ends a business process after all data has been successfully imported into your application database.

Dynamic import

In this case, the columns in the loaded files can be in any order, but their names must always be the same for the import to be successful.

To set up dynamic import, you need to add analysis blocks for the first row of the table - in order to determine which data is contained in each of the columns of the loaded file.

• Equal -  is a comparison operator that will determine if the processed string is the first one.
• If-Else - which will take a value from Equal and redirect the stream depending on that.
• An additional For each loop block -  is a loop that will only work on the first row (that is, with the column names).
• Append Array - Will save all values ​​obtained from the first line of the file to an array.
• Array Element - Retrieves the values ​​of specific elements from the Append Array along with their indices from the For each loop (the one that processes all the lines).
• You also need to change the Switch block so that it redirects the stream and processes the imported data depending on the values ​​received from the Array Element.

Endpoint creation

When adding an endpoint, select the POST method, write down the URL and specify the created business process - the minimum setup is complete. Additional information on how to define access rights for user groups or from different IPs can be found in the platform documentation (EN and RU versions).

File upload form

For the import form to work correctly, you need to select Create Record when creating it and specify the created endpoint, as well as add a form confirmation button (trigger - onClick, action - Submit form).

Video: Example of Configuring CSV File Import

This video describes in detail all the steps for setting up static and dynamic imports using a CSV file as an example.

VIDEO

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