If you’re looking for ways how to increase MRR, customer feedback is a great way to reduce churn and improve your bottom line. I know this from personal experience.
A few years ago, I was running a small software company and we were struggling to keep our MRR up. We had good products, but our churn rate was high and we weren’t sure why. Then someone suggested that we start gathering customer feedback on a regular basis. It was the best decision we ever made. Not only did it help us reduce our churn rate, but it also helped us make improvements to our products that resulted in more customers signing up (and staying with us).
Here are 7 tips on how to increase MRR for good.
How to Increase Monthly Recurring Revenue
Tracking your monthly recurring revenue can be a helpful way to see exactly how much money your software is bringing in. This can help you plan for the future and make decisions for your business.
As a small business owner, you know that your Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is one of your most important metrics. Understanding your revenue can help you make important decisions about your company.
Types of MRR
By looking at your different sources of recurring revenue and determining which ones are growing and which ones aren’t, you can better understand how your revenue stream is changing and what you can do to improve it.
New MRR
New MRR is monthly recurring revenue that is generated from new customers. This calculation will help you understand whether the cost of bringing in a new customer is worth the investment.
If you want to know whether you’re spending too much on acquiring customers, compare the monthly recurring revenue (MRR) to the new MRR. This will tell you whether your customer acquisition efforts are paying off or disrupting profits.
Tracking your New MRR also allows you to see if your marketing and sales efforts are working. If your New MRR is going up, then that means your sales team is doing a good job of acquiring new customers.
Expansion MRR
Expansion MRR happens when a customer upgrades or purchases an additional product from you. By monitoring this metric, you can determine when to tweak your sales strategies.
It makes more sense to earn Expansion MRR than acquire new customers, so you should be monitoring how well your sales team can up-sell or cross-sell to current customers.
Churn MRR
Churn MRR is the revenue you lose from customers canceling or downgrading their subscription. To keep your business growing, it’s important to track your Churn MRR against your New and Expansion MRRs.
For example, if your business sees a $2,000 increase in sales, that’s great news.
But if you don’t account for a $1,000 Churn MRR, you’re losing out on a lot of money. Although your total revenue has grown, you’re actually still in the red if you don’t include your $1,000 ARR.
How to Calculate MRR?
First, determine the average revenue per account (ARPA). This is simply the total revenue divided by the number of accounts. Then, take that number and multiply it by the total number of customers.
So, if you have 100 customers and each one spends $100 per month, your MRR is $1,000.
How to Increase MRR for Good
If you’ve seen other articles on improving monthly recurring revenue, then you probably saw a lot of the same advice such as raising prices, don’t offer freemium services, and creating feature-based tiered pricing.
These tips are all well and good, but they won’t always work for every business. And, over time, they might stop working altogether.
After all, you can only charge customers so much money before they decide to not buy at all.
In this section, we’ll go over some strategies that you can follow to grow your MRR continuously over time.
This tip can be used for all online businesses regardless of their pricing.
1. Display Social Proof Notifications
Social proof notifications are a common way to increase sales for online stores. But they’re extremely effective for software as a service (SaaS) companies, too.
Social proof notifications work because they create a sense of FOMO — fear of missing out.
FOMO affects all consumers who shop online, even those who are buying software as a service.
When others enjoy certain experiences, services, or products, then we want to experience those same things.
Now you may be asking, “How do sales increase with social proof notifications?”
These notifications are a great way to boost engagement for any CTA you have. That means getting more people to sign up for a trial of your product or service or your paid subscription.
Social proof notifications have been shown to increase conversion rates by up to 15%.
With a variety of campaigns, you can leverage different marketing tactics at different stages of your company.
2. Grow Your Mailing List
Many startup founders make the mistake of not building their email list from Day 1.
For a lot of businesses, email marketing campaigns are the most difficult thing to get right.
But, it’s also the most profitable.
Once you have a well-maintained list of email subscribers, your MRR will grow every month.
Because you can guide your leads to become customers through automated emails.
You can send a series of articles on autopilot, so you can spend your time on other aspects of boosting your revenue.
3. Advertise Your Special Offers
Another way that software as a service (SaaS) companies can miss opportunities is by forgetting to advertise their special promotions.
These could be things such as discounts, referral offers, or recommendations for affiliates and partners.
All of these metrics contribute to your earnings. Improving in any of these areas will increase your MRR.
4. Leverage Push Notifications
We talked about how important it is to grow your email list, as this will boost your revenue.
Since this process takes some time, you should begin immediately.
And for faster results, you should include push notifications in your marketing and sales strategies.
Push notifications are short messages that can be sent to your subscriber even when they are not currently visiting your site.
This gives you instant access to your target customers.
But how does this method work better than building a list of email subscribers?
Push notifications are a great way to grow your mailing list without requiring visitors to hand over their contact information. All they need to do is click the Allow button when they land on your website.
Since push notifications are sent directly to the user’s phone, you tend to get more opt-ins than you would for email.
Using push notifications, you can redirect users to a landing page that has a high conversion rate. This can help you grow your list more quickly.
Setting up push notifications is incredibly easy. All you’ll need to do is add in your message, who you want to send it to, and your parameters. Then, you’re good to go!
Then, you can immediately start contacting your subscribers to increase sales whenever you like.
5. Build Landing Pages for Features
If you’re a new company, you probably have a basic website up.
The list may contain the usual suspects, such as:
- Homepage
- About Us
- Blog
- Pricing
Or a combination of the pages that almost every SaaS site has.
If you want more subscribers for your product or service, you need a dedicated landing page for each of your product’s key features.
Landing pages have been shown to increase conversion rates.
A landing page is a single web page that focuses your user’s attention on one specific call to action. It can also help you to rank your webpage on search engine results.
That results in more traffic to your website and a higher conversion rate.
Landing pages also allow you to show your prospects what your product or service can do.
By focusing on certain features of your product, you can show your audience why those features are right for them.
If you want to convert the most amount of people, then make sure your landing pages are loaded up with tons of high-quality images and video demos. This will let your prospects know that you have a product that will help them solve their issue.
Instead of struggling to build a landing page from scratch, you can select from 100+ original templates that will save you hours. Then, to make modifications, you can use the drag and drop visual editor – making the entire process simple and straightforward.
A typical landing page will include:
- CTA buttons
- Images
- Video
- Email opt-in forms
- Dividers
- Spacers
This will allow you to improve the overall look and feel of your landing page, making it more user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing.
6. Add Customer Testimonials and Product Reviews
Earlier we explained how you can use social proof notifications to increase your MRR.
But you should also use other kinds of social proof.
Including testimonials from satisfied customers on your landing pages can help convince potential customers that your product is worth the investment.
But, of course, this raises the question, “How do you get even more reviews and testimonials?”.
Here are three easy ways to do that:
- Reach out to your best customers via email
- Look for where people are talking about you on social media
- Take snapshots of 5-star reviews across 3rd-party sites
Collect as much positive social proof as you possibly can. If you do, we’re sure that you’ll start to see more sales and increase your monthly recurring revenue.
7. Gather Customer Feedback to Reduce Churn
Part of increasing monthly recurring revenue is learning how to make more money.
But the other part is learning how to keep your current clients.
When customers stop paying for your service, it is referred to as “churn.” This is a major factor when it comes to maintaining your MRR.
Asking customers for their feedback is important for several reasons. It allows you to:
- Gather social proof from your happy customers
- Address any problems that show up for unhappy customers
That last point is especially important.
By understanding what your customers don’t like about your product, you can make changes to optimize customer experience and reduce attrition.
As a direct consequence of implementing these tips, you will see perpetual growth in your MRR.
Conclusion
That’s it! These are 7 tips on how to increase MRR for good. By following these steps, you’ll be able to reduce churn and increase your monthly recurring revenue!
