3 Ways to Build Value into Your Software Offering -

Retaining customers is crucial to your long-term success. So what steps can you take to increase software usage and loyalty — and ultimately boost retention and growth of your business?

Since we partner with many software companies, I thought I’d share some of the ways they build value into their software offering … ideas you might incorporate into your own customer retention strategy.

Have a tip of your own? Share it below.

1. User Conferences

Many software companies run user conferences — an event where attendees (users of the software product) gather to increase their knowledge of the software, share best practices and learn about new features and capabilities they may not have been aware of.

Hosting user conferences is a great way to increase adoption and use of your software — and help strengthen retention.

One of our partners, Harris Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), hosts a user conference for their Innoprise product suite. The 2-day event includes over 20 breakout sessions, networking opportunities, round table discussions and technical sessions.

Check out their event page for ideas on what you might include in your own user conference.

Fun Fact: Heard of Dreamforce? Dreamforce is a user conference hosted by Salesforce.com, a web-based CRM solution. They kicked off their first user conference in 2003 with a little over 1,000 attendees. Now the event boasts well over 100,000 attendees from all over the world!

2. Integrated Payment Processing Solutions

Every business wants to get paid — and get paid fast. If your software includes point of sale and/or embedded payment capabilities, you’ll want to consider working with a provider to integrate payment processing solutions into your software. Doing so can make processes much easier and faster for your customers — all while building value into your offering.

Integrating with a provider like Constellation Payments — who is Level One PCI-compliant — can also reduce or even eliminate PCI compliance needs, while ensuring customers’ sensitive payment information is safe and secure. Instead of storing sensitive customer payment data in the software, the provider securely saves the customers’ credit card number on their server.

Visit our partner page for a list of integrated payment processing solutions, including EMV payment terminals that can be enhanced to interface directly with your software product.

3. Blogging

Blogging is a great way to educate customers on your software product to increase usage and support retention efforts.

Consider this: most blog material could be created by your team — marketing, sales, support — meaning you don’t have to pay to publish content on your site … plus, you likely have helpful articles or how-tos already written that could be easily repurposed and published on the blog.

Just make sure that if you blog, you blog on a regular basis, set a schedule and stick to it to keep readers engaged.

Also don’t overly promote your product. It’s fine to talk about the features and show the practical applications of what the software has done for other companies, but you don’t want push your software in blog posts. No one wants to read a sales pitch.

Another partner of ours, Member Solutions, runs a Business Building Blog for Martial Arts and Fitness businesses. They publish a new article every other week that includes tips and strategies on how to build and manage a successful membership-based business. Content on software is included where it relates to the article topic such as in this post on Summer events and marketing strategies.

I hope you’ve found this article helpful and would love to hear from you!

Let us know what retention-building tactics work for your software business. Share your tips below.

Kristen Campbell is a Marketing Specialist with Constellation Payments.

Images courtesy of Pixabay.