5 ways SaaS marketers use DXI for action-ready insights

Gone are the days when “marketing” mainly meant erecting billboards, running radio ads, and making educated guesses about what works and what doesn’t. For SaaS marketers, things are a bit more complex (in a good way).

Unlike more traditional forms of marketing like these, digital marketing is highly measurable—SaaS marketers know exactly when, where, and how potential customers arrive at the top of the purchase funnel. And making good use of marketing data can have huge business impacts. According to a study commissioned by Google, marketers who use five or more tools in their analytics stack are 39% more likely to see overall improvement in the performance of their marketing programs.

Of course, no modern marketing stack is complete without a Digital Experience Intelligence (DXI) solution. While there is plenty of quantitative data to be found in traditional product analytics tools, sophisticated marketing strategies require an equal amount of contextual, qualitative to drive truly valuable insights into campaign performance, conversions, and revenue impact.

We rounded up five ways SaaS marketers use FullStory in day-to-day practices to monitor key metrics, optimize for success, and meet objectives. (We even use these tactics ourselves!) Let’s jump in.

1. Monitor demo request pages and understand form fill behavior

For SaaS companies with sales teams, encouraging potential prospects to schedule a product demo is a major step (or the step) toward creating qualified opportunities. And, as you know, marketers often have goals around generating demo requests through the marketing website and other public-facing channels. In fact, according to Hubspot, nearly 70% of marketers cited converting site visitors to demo requesters as a top priority, and Mashable reports that inbound marketing costs 62% less per lead than outbound marketing.

For these reasons, it’s critical for demand gen marketers to keep a pulse on demo requests. DXI lets you do this at a glance; including standard Metric Cards in Dashboards gives marketers immediate visibility into up-to-the-minute demo requests at any time. And with FullStory alerts, you’ll be notified immediately if a larger issue (like the page going down) is detected.

While we’re on the subject of demo requests, let's take a look at how marketers can use DXI to optimize the request process and problem-solve on the fly. With a DXI tool like FullStory, marketers can not only measure basic trends and directional changes using standard Metric Cards (as mentioned in the previous section), they can also see the context beneath those trends.

Is the form taking too long to load? Is a significant percentage of users dropping off after a particular form field? Answering questions like these enables marketers to quickly solve demo request issues and ensure that minor errors aren’t causing lost conversions.

2. Analyze website copy performance

On average, users spend 5.6 seconds looking at a website’s written content. Compare that to the average 5.9 seconds users spend looking at a website’s main image, and you can see just how important it is to have copy that’s concise and catchy while also conveying important ideas.

In this regard, there are a couple of ways DXI can help marketers optimize website copy. Scroll Maps monitor scroll depth, or how far a user scrolls down a certain page for moving on. This can help marketers understand if users are navigating away before reaching a page’s important content (like a CTA), and then adjust the page layout accordingly.

Marketers can also use DXI insights to understand if landing pages are driving more demo requests than others. Once they identify high-performing pages, they can suss out why those pages are converting at higher rates (hint: It could be the copy!) and replicate that success on other landing pages.

FullStory has an ever-growing network of partner integrations that can help you ramp up your experimentation efforts and understand what resonates with your audience. For example, With the FullStory and Optimizely integration, marketers can run A/B tests on their website and then analyze the results alongside the rest of their DX data in FullStory.

If you're a small marketing team with limited resources and wear a lot of copy and design hats, this same analysis tactic can apply to visual elements too.

3. Inform user persona profiles

For SaaS marketers, knowing what different types of users users are (or aren’t) doing inside their platform can inform marketing efforts and initiatives, and DXI sheds light on how users in different roles behave within the product. For example, you can answer questions like:

• Which personas spend the most (and least) time in the platform?

• Where do different personas spend their time in the platform?

• How does feature usage change by user persona?

Knowing the answers to these questions means you can understand how different accounts are using your platform, identify where and how to improve feature adoption, and make smarter marketing decisions backed by user data. Plus, it’s likely that over time your user personas will evolve and the answers to these questions will shift—and FullStory will ensure you never miss a beat.

4. Track KPIs by customer plan

If your product has multiple tiers (for instance, FullStory offers three plans), DXI can reveal actionable insights about how users from different tiers interact with your product or website through Metric trends and user groups.

For example, a SaaS company might use DXI to see that the majority of visitors to their “help” content are non-paying or free trial customers. (Which makes sense, as those users would have limited or no access to customer support.)

To increase the likelihood that those non-paying customers graduate to paying customers, that marketing team could install a CTA to “Get a Demo” or “Talk to Sales” on the help pages, since prospects are there anyway. Then, the team can monitor the effectiveness of the new CTAs on converting visitors to demo requestors.

5. Monitor impact of product or feature launches

For product marketers in particular, knowing if and how users are interacting with newly launched features is important to understanding the success of adoption efforts. After releasing a new feature, a product marketer might build a dashboard in their DXI platform to monitor the feature and answer questions like:

• Are customers seeing and interacting with in-app announcements related to the feature release?

• Are target users engaging with the new feature?

• Is the content associated with the feature launch (like a user guide or blog post) getting traffic?

If this analysis reveals that users are engaged and having positive experiences with the feature, marketers know they’ve done their job. And conversely, if users are interacting with a feature infrequently or in unexpected ways, marketers can identify the cause. Is the feature somehow difficult or frustrating to use, or do users simply not know that it exists? Then, armed with that knowledge, product marketers can either ramp up adoption efforts or work with the product team to address any issues. FullStory gives marketers insights to initiate valuable cross-team collaboration that drive digital experience improvement and, ultimately, revenue.