Nurturing your waitlist audience

So we’ve already talked about building a waitlist for your SaaS audience, the how, what and why – now it’s time to share some useful hints, tips and tricks for how to nurture your waitlist once you’ve got people signing up. 

What is nurturing your waitlist?

Lead nurturing is the ongoing development of your connection to your potential customers, as you take them through your SaaS product’s journey to launch. As you capture details from your potential buyers from a waitlist landing page or paid advertising campaign, you want to keep them in your sales funnel. 

People can drop out at any stage of your journey, and that’s fine, but your nurturing efforts will increase the chances of a waitlist audience converting into paying users once your product is live and then hopefully stay with you for the long term.

Email marketing

The general go to for nurturing your waitlist is through email marketing. Why? As there is so much you can do here. You may be thinking ‘Everyone’s already saturated with marketing emails and spam, why would they want to receive mine?!’ Well – like we’ve said before – it’s all about getting your ideal audience onside here. This is your big chance to communicate with them directly.

Tips for emails to nurture your potential leads:

• High-value product updates; including graphics, screengrabs and videos
• Engaging content; questions, links to blogs, social media, downloads
• Newsletter style updates

What not to send to your waitlist:

You should have a clear structure behind the content you’re going to send to your waitlist. It would be detrimental to think of nurturing your audience as a tick box exercise… ‘Ah I’ve sent them an email every now and then, so that’s fine.’ – should not be your approach. 

Putting it simply, if you haven’t got content worthy of communicating, don’t send anything. Instead plan your emails around high-value content and communications the audience can learn, stay warm and engaged from.

Automations

Setting up an automated journey is a great way to ensure you have content regularly firing out to your waitlist. Tools like Mailchimp, HubSpot and the like offer you a means of planning out and setting live content to communicate with your users without having to send manual updates. 

While a combination of both standalone emails and automated communication is recommendable, it’s important to make sure the emails follow a pattern that makes sense to your waitlist and doesn’t overload them with information they won’t be interested in.

Questionnaires

Nurturing your audience by asking for their input is a great means of getting them onside and keeping them engaged. Picture this, you’ve been busy with developing how certain areas of your SaaS product are going to look but it’s not quite ready yet or you’re at a stumbling block for making a change… so why not ask your waitlist what they think?

Questionnaires are an ideal means of extracting information from your potential buyers. It can help give you a clearer indication of things like; how much they’re willing to spend on a monthly subscription, whether they’d like to pay monthly or annually, specific features they’d like to see and so on.

Social Channels

Inviting users to head over to, like and follow your social channels is a good idea when you’re at the waitlist nurturing stage of your SaaS journey. Why? Not only will you be building up your online presence for the long-term, you’ll get people to stick around and be a part of your SaaS product’s life span – people love to be first. 

In case you missed it: Answering SaaS founder FAQs

You can get stuck in yourself in the early stages, giving your audience the chance to speak with you frequently in a relatively informal way. Asking them questions and being involved in threads will help to heighten their buy-in to you and your product, which in turn may provide them with brand affinity. 

Having your audience across your social presence will help you in the long run, as they’ll be reliably informed on your product from the off, so when new users appear and want to know more or need help, there’s a chance your community can start to take care of itself, with support, opinions and updates.

One-to-one calls

Depending on your resources, you could offer a certain number of opportunities for your waitlist to speak with you or your team directly. Anyone who is willing to spend their time on a quick 15-minute one-to-one call is obviously interested in the product you’re bringing to market.

You may find that you’ll have more content to share with your audience by simply spending some time speaking with people directly from your waitlist… ‘we’ve spoken with ‘x’ amount of users in the waitlist about how ‘x’ SaaS product is going to help them.’ – this can help to create excitement and add some realism to your communications with the rest of the audience. It will also create FOMO (fear of missing out) for those that didn’t take you up on the chance to speak on a one-to-one basis.

Final thoughts

As with everything, plan plan plan – nurturing your waitlist is an important stage of your SaaS product’s journey, so you need to get it right.