The Top 8 Tools for SaaS Companies & Entrepreneurs

SaaS companies & entrepreneurs occupy a unique space in the business world. Instead of a physical product or straight-up service, customers are provided with software as a service.

This means providers must pay attention to each stage of the user experience. That’s a lot of ground to cover.

Whether you’re a lone entrepreneur or the owner of a SaaS company, you know how important the right tools are to your success (and your sanity).

Using other SaaS can streamline the process, especially when they’re designed to help you measure & analyze metrics, optimize your conversion rate, understand user behavior, and track & organize the progress of your work… and more.

Here’s our round-up of 8 of the best tools for SaaS companies & entrepreneurs alike. Use them wisely:

1. Privy

Privy does for e-mail lists what cake does to our waistlines.

While an e-mail address isn’t exactly a lead (yet!), reaching out to prospects and increasing readership for your newsletters are crucial aspects of building your business.

Privy helps you grow your list by making it easy for you to create and bulk deliver coupons to drive growth, target prospective customers who have abandoned their shopping carts, integrate & automate e-mail follow-ups for drip campaigns, do A/B testing to make the best choices, and much more.

You can design your own campaign using Privy’s impressive selection of templates or use the drag and drop designer for more control. The best part: no prior knowledge of coding necessary.

2. Unbounce

Unbounce will help you design landing pages that actually convert.

Having a great website with friendly UX is one thing, but sometimes you need a landing page for special goals: specific sources of traffic, the release of an ebook or report, to commemorate an anniversary, etc.

The Unbounce drag and drop builder lets you create, launch, and test landing pages and website overlays so you can find leads and generate sales for the highest conversion rates.

Other features include fully customizable templates which let you build your own template for your brand, along with easy integration with major CRMs, analytics, and e-mail automation tools for efficiency. Again: no prior knowledge of coding or IT necessary (you’re welcome).

3. Zapier

Zapier is an online automation tool that helps you build efficient workflows with 750+ apps.

Workflow is important. It’s often the main obstacle standing between you and productivity. Create workflows that work best for you.

You can set up Zapier to automatically copy form entries to spreadsheets and alert you of any new entries. You can also pull info from a database, automatically line the data with code, and have it sent to one of your apps. Another feature lets you streamline tasks such as sending new customers an e-mail, entering their info into your CRM, printing out shipping labels, and mailing them a postcard next week. Check, check, check.

4. AskNicely

AskNicely collects customer feedback, so you can measure and improve the user experience.

Constantly collecting customer feedback and reviews is a must for all SaaS businesses. It helps you increase customer satisfaction and identify red flags that can lead to churn.

Using the Net Promoter Score framework, AskNicely tracks real-time customer feedback for your company while its dashboards, alerts, and other features let you respond to customers immediately. A real-time response can make a huge impact, becoming an integral part of your business strategy by driving growth and revenue through increased customer satisfaction, boosting referrals from existing customers, and improving upsell.

Easy integration with other SaaS products like Salesforce, Hubspot, and more, only enriches the data you collect.

5. Automate.io

Automate.io is a leading “no coding required” integration platform that integrates with over 200 apps.

Build simple bots between two or more apps and put your work on auto-pilot. Bots inside Automate.io refresh at regular intervals unless manually paused. So, set up your trigger and action apps, and that’s it!

The intuitive drag and drop interface allows you to create triggers and actions easily between apps. Using Automate.io requires zero development skills or technical know-how because everything is already pre-set inside this integration platform.

6. Appcues

Appcues is an onboarding tool that helps you create a seamless user experience, especially for new users.

Even if your SaaS product is one of the most simple and user-friendly options out there, it’s a good idea to show your customers how to use your software. Make sure they know about your top features and how to get the most out of them.

Appcues lets teams create walkthroughs and in-app messages without any coding knowledge. Build user onboarding experiences, feature announcements, and other in-app messages without the help of developers. Advanced targeting capabilities ensure that the right user receives the right message at the right time.

You can also use Appcues’ improved analytics to analyze and improve the performance of your in-app messages. This means you’ll be able to deliver value to users faster, teach users how to use the product more effectively, and motivate more users to take actions.

7. Heap Analytics

Heap Analytics keeps track of your user activity so you can see the way your customers are using your tool.

No matter how user-friendly you think your SaaS is, it’s a good idea to show your customers how to use it (sound familiar?). Taking that a step further, staying informed of user activity provides you with more transparency. Discover the different paths that users take on your site before finally reaching the end goal of conversion.

Heap automatically tracks all user activity on your website or mobile app, including every click, pageview, tap, swipe, and more. This means that anyone on your team can access data in Heap without relying on engineers to write tracking code. Plus, since everything is tracked automatically, you can look back retroactively without first narrowing down what to track. Product managers, data analysts, marketers, customer success managers, and others use Heap to learn about their users.

8. Hotjar

Hotjar is an all-in-one analytics and customer feedback tool that helps you understand user behavior visually.

Sometimes your customers do exactly what you thought they would. Other times, the exact opposite. Identifying what catches their eye and where they’re lingering on your site can help make their behavior a little more predictable.

Hotjar helps you visualize user behavior so you can pinpoint the areas of your site which are popular. The tool’s heat maps give you a visual representation of user behavior so you can see which areas are ‘hot’ and ‘cold’. Features like recordings, conversion funnels, form analysis, feedback polls and surveys, provide additional insight into other aspects of user behavior as well as collect useful feedback.

BONUS 9: Calendly

Calendly is a fun scheduling tool that makes time management a breeze.

When you’re running a business, a huge chunk of your time gets eaten up by meetings (unavoidable). Part of this goes into just figuring out the logistics of who, where, and when, which is often more complicated than it should be – enter Calendly.

A simple, yet inclusive platform, Calendly helps business professionals save time and control their schedule. The tool connects you and your team with the people you need to meet through its customizable and flexible features. You can also integrate Calendly with external calendars and apps like Salesforce, Zapier and GoToMeeting for an extra smooth experience.

SaaS for SaaS

The 8 SaaS tools above can help any SaaS company or entrepreneur make the most of their time. Some tools help you optimize the quality of your work, while others offer you different insights into customer behavior or they are great marketing workflow software.

All of them, however, boost your efficiency and effectiveness. Use these tools to provide your customers with quality at all stages of the user experience. Without any prior knowledge of coding, you’ll be able to save time and achieve your goals so you can focus on growing your own SaaS.

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