20 SaaS Growth Hacking Strategies to Scale Your Business (with Examples)

As a SaaS founder or marketer, you understand the critical need to scale your business with a promising product. The pressure to achieve rapid growth is intense. With a limited budget, traditional marketing methods can be out of reach for your SaaS business.   

Growth hacking is a powerful approach that employs innovative, cost-effective strategies to attract customers and quickly scale your business. These strategies can drive revenue growth and help you outpace competitors in niche markets.

This blog will dive into 20 tried-and-trusted SaaS growth hacks that provide a practical roadmap for achieving sustainable growth without breaking the bank. 

What is Growth Hacking?

Growth hacking is growing your business using cost-effective, high-impact strategies. It begins by setting clear goals, developing new techniques, testing them, and discovering which works best for your business. These growth hacks allow you to attract and retain customers quickly with a low budget. 

What is the Difference Between Growth Hacking and Traditional Marketing?

Growth hacking and traditional marketing seem similar because both aim to attract and retain customers. But they are different based on various aspects, including:

Top 20 Growth Hacking Strategies for SaaS Companies

A SaaS growth hacking strategy is an effective practice to attract, engage, and retain paying customers. But how do you know where to focus your marketing and sales efforts?

That’s where the AAARRR  funnel (Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Referral) comes in. This 6-step marketing funnel helps growth hackers, and businesses map strategies to the customer journey.

Following this funnel, you can identify where to optimize your marketing and sales efforts to maximize the SaaS growth. Let’s dive into how you can use growth hacks at each stage. 

Stage 1: Awareness

This is the initial stage where you attract the target audience’s attention and introduce them to your SaaS. Here are some growth hacking strategies to create product awareness and drive more customers. 

1. Pre-launch marketing

The first SaaS growth hacking strategy involves introducing your product in exclusive groups where your ideal customers gather. These closed groups or specialized forums are easy to find on Reddit Groups and Product Hunt, where individuals actively seek solutions. With these closed spaces, you can educate customers about your product’s features and benefits while creating a buzz around its launch.

These closed groups can help you attract a target audience, highlight your product's strength and value, and gather valuable feedback for improvements. They can also help you discover whether your product solves the pain points of the ICPs. Once you identify your product as the solution your target audience seeks, use that insight to communicate your value proposition and drive more qualified leads.

2. Targeted social media

When marketing your SaaS, social media is a powerful channel where your target audience actively interacts with products like yours. The key is to choose the proper social media channels, like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, where your audience is most active and engaged.  

These social media channels are perfect for building niche networks and promoting your SaaS offerings through targeted ad campaigns. To engage and build strong connections, you can create shareable content that encourages interaction and effectively communicate your value proposition to raise awareness among the right audience.

Additionally, consider adding links to your social media accounts on your website. They will serve as social proof, enhancing credibility and engaging more customers. 

Example:

Slack uses Twitter and LinkedIn to share content and customer success stories to engage with the target audience, build trust, and create a strong community on these channels.

3. Co-marketing partnerships

Co-marketing, or collaborative marketing, allows two or more businesses to promote their products or services together. This strategy is a win-win for both parties, allowing them to share the marketing costs and workloads.

With this effective growth hack, your SaaS business can tap into an existing market with a pool of qualified leads. You can start by partnering with a business that serves a similar customer base but offers a non-competing product.

For instance, if your SaaS product is focused on project management, collaborating with a time-tracking tool company allows both parties to cross-promote to a shared target audience.

Businesses can collaborate on joint content creation, webinars, co-branded eBooks, podcasts, or social media campaigns to expand market reach. Each business promotes collaboration through its channels, increasing exposure with minimal effort and cost. This significantly boosts the likelihood of capturing new leads, as the shared trust translates into credibility for your product.

4. Content marketing

Content marketing is an effective growth hacking strategy that educates, informs, and entertains your audience. It's ideal for SaaS startups and early-stage companies with limited budgets, helping them build trust and boost lead generation.

Through content marketing strategy, you can create content that resonates well with your customer’s pain points and allows them to comprehend your product’s value without costing you anything.

Focus on delivering valuable and informative content such as blog posts, videos, infographics, and podcasts that drive targeted traffic and attract new audiences.

Example: 

Besides marketing tools, Hubspot is known for its unique content marketing strategy. They provide content, from educational blogs to videos to ebooks, for their buyer personas, making them a go-to place for marketers.

Stage 2:  Acquisition

After gaining awareness, your audience will be familiar with the product, and some will be interested in your offerings. To acquire interested customers and convert them into new users, you need to guide them through the next steps and encourage them to take action. 

Here are effective growth hacking strategies that will help you turn interested website visitors into loyal users: 

5. Personalized email marketing 

For SaaS companies where the target audience is professionals and growth-minded individuals, email marketing provides a direct and personal way to communicate with them. It helps you express your value proposition clearly while leading them through the buyer's journey.

It enables personalized engagement with a broader audience at minimal expenses.

To maximize the impact of this growth hacking, segment your target audience and build specific email lists for each category. It enables you to create targeted emails based on user behaviour, industry, or demographics to deliver personalized messages that drive engagement. 

Add customers who have signed up for a free trial but have not converted to a separate mailing list. Meanwhile, create another list for long-term loyal customers to email about upsell opportunities or new feature announcements. This growth hack allows you to provide relevant content to encourage deeper engagement and drive conversions.

Example:

Dropbox sends personalized onboarding emails for free trial users to increase engagement. These emails are designed for user interactions and provide relevant tips and resources, highlighting the benefits of upgrading to a paid plan.

6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often overlooked because it can be complex and time-consuming progress that requires ongoing effort and expertise. Yet, it stands out as the most significant Return on Investment (ROI) driver. Therefore, SEO is the best practice for any SaaS startup with a tight marketing budget to enhance its online visibility, attract more traffic, and acquire qualified leads.

Improve customer acquisition through SEO, enhance site speed, utilize structured data for rich snippets, and implement CDNs for efficient content delivery. Conduct thorough keyword research, secure authoritative backlinks, and refine on-page elements like titles and meta descriptions to boost visibility and engagement, ultimately driving more qualified leads to your business.

Focus on delivering high-quality content that addresses user intent, outranks competitors on search result pages, and acquires new customers without breaking the bank.

7. Niche influencers

In your niche, Influencers are already talking about SaaS products or services to your target audience, discussing SaaS products, and addressing pain points. These influencers act as trusted advisors for your potential customers. Partnering with niche influencers helps you reach new audiences and expand your customer base.

Collaborate with your niche influencers and gain authentic insights into what matters to them and their followers. This approach builds good relationships with influencers and their followers, enhancing your credibility and expanding your audience reach.

8. Free trial model

Trying a new product before buying is the tried-and-true method. Many SaaS companies offer free trials to make a good impression and attract new users. This SaaS growth hack works like a lead magnet because it can effortlessly lead customers to get a taste of your product and quickly convince them to sign up or update to a paid version.

Sometimes, new users using your free product version feel content and see no need to upgrade. So, make sure to design a free trial strategy that ensures the premium features provide enough value to encourage more new audiences to convert.

Example:

Evernote, a simple note-making and organizing software, made it to the Billion-Dollar Club with its freemium model. Their most significant achievement is converting freemium users into paid customers.

Stage 3: Activation

Now that your target audience is interested, it’s time to turn their curiosity into engagement. In this stage, you have to convince and engage your potential customers to take the next step - using your product. 

Here are SaaS growth hacking tactics to enhance customer onboarding and activate more customers: 

9. Frictionless sign-ups

The first step in activation is the sign-up process. A complicated and time-consuming sign-up process can create friction and turn users away before they start. The hack is to provide smooth and frictionless signups, which require only essential information to onboard users. 

To simplify the signup process, reduce the number of required fields and provide clear instructions that significantly boost customer engagement and activation rates.

Example:

According to Techcrunch, Dropbox, for instance, gained a million users in just seven months by simplifying its sign-up process. They only requested essential details like a name and password, making it easy for users to get started without delay or frustration.

10. Gamification in onboarding

To encourage users to know about your product and experience smooth onboarding, gamify your onboarding process.

Gamification is the practice of incorporating game-like elements such as progress checklists, achievement badges, celebratory animations, and rewards for hitting milestones that transform customer onboarding into an engaging journey.

Fun or game-like elements motivate users to explore your product and its features and keep them excited to continue using your product or service, increasing user engagement and customer loyalty.

11. Build in-app community

Creating an in-app community where users can connect, share tips, and support each other.  This type of community enhances customer engagement, builds trust and loyalty and improves conversion rates.

An active in-app community promotes a sense of belonging and encourages new users to get involved, helping them overcome challenges faster. Additionally, it provides a space where existing users guide newcomers, further improving product adoption without requiring additional support or resources from the company.

Example:

Platforms like Notion have successfully created in-app communities where users share templates, ideas, and best practices, driving organic product adoption and activation.

This community-driven interaction often results in higher activation rates, reduced churn, and increased customer loyalty.

Stage 4: Retention

At this stage, your goal is to ensure your hard-earned customers stay loyal and continue using your product. Let’s explore  growth hacking strategies that help in retaining more customers and  nurturing qualified leads:

12. Email drip campaigns 

Email drip campaigns are highly effective in retaining customers and nurturing leads. These automated, pre-written emails are sent to subscribers or potential customers at specific intervals, ensuring your product stays on their minds without constant manual effort.

Drip campaigns are designed to deliver relevant content such as product updates, guides, demos, or case studies to maximize the value of your product or service. This strategic growth hack keeps your users informed, engaged, and nurtured while highly cost-effective.

You can use email marketing tools like Mailchimp to automate these campaigns and reduce workload while maintaining user interaction. It saves your time sending personalized campaigns that nurture and convert more leads into long-term customers with less effort.

13. Usage-based pricing

Usage-based pricing, the pay-as-you-go model, offers flexibility in choosing SaaS pricing that aligns with customers’ needs and usage patterns. Rather than making customers commit to a fixed monthly payment, it allows them to pay based on their actual product consumption.

This equitable and flexible pricing model prevents customers from feeling they’re overpaying or spending on unused features. This growth hack attracts new users who value flexibility and fairness, significantly improves your retention, and drives sustainable growth.

Example:

SendGrid, an email delivery service, charges its customers based on the number of emails sent. This flexible pricing model eliminates the sense of being tied to a fixed cost and makes customers feel satisfied in paying for what they use.

14. Exit intent pop-ups

Seeing your customers abandon your product after signing up or leaving the site reduces brand value and growth. Exit-intent pop-ups can solve this problem by offering a compelling last-minute opportunity and encouraging them to stay or take action. 

When users intend to leave your site, these pop-ups appear and present them with an irresistible offer like a discount, ebook, or exclusive content. This small hack helps you change your users’ minds and convert their exits into action.

15. Implement live chat assistance

Adequate customer support helps you retain and target users seeking your solutions. Live chat, in particular, stands out as a preferred method to provide exceptional customer support. According to Kayako, 41% of customers prefer live chat over other support channels, and 52% are likely to stay with companies offering live chat support.

Live chat offers real-time assistance that enhances user experience and builds trust with a SaaS company. It provides immediate resolution of issues without waiting for responses through emails or phone calls. 

This customer-centric growth hack allows a SaaS website to provide positive user interaction and encourages long-term engagement, ultimately increasing customer retention. 

Stage 5: Referral

Once your customers have had positive experiences with your product, the next step is to get them to act as your brand advocates. Their word-of-mouth referrals can exponentially increase revenue and scale your SaaS growth with minimal expenses. 

When you encourage your existing customers to spread the word, you tap into a whole new network of potential customers waiting to discover your product. Here are a few SaaS growth hacking tactics to encourage great referrals and make them talk about your product: 

16. Viral loops 

Every business wants to go viral, and SaaS businesses are no exception.

Viral loops are effective referral programs that help you go viral on social media or marketing channels. It allows each user to be a promoter, creating a cycle inviting others to join. When customers are happy with a product or service, they’re more likely to share it with their friends or colleagues. 

Offering mutual benefits, such as rewards or free trials to the inviter and invitee, helps you sustain the cycle and encourages users to spread the word like fire. This strategy works without a large marketing budget and enables you to build a strong community while attracting new prospects.

Example:

Dropbox implemented this viral loop with its referral program. It offered extra storage to users who referred friends, quickly expanding its customer base. This approach helped Dropbox attract new prospects and fuel long-term revenue growth.

17. User Generated Content (UGC)

UGC enables you to tap into the power of authentic customer experiences. It turns your happy customers into content creators, sharing their experiences and journeys with your product through reviews, social media posts, and video testimonials. 

UGC is a powerful growth hack as it acts as social proof.  When people see real people praising a product, it builds trust and brand credibility. This highly impactful approach encourages others to try your product and reduces your content production by allowing your existing customers to create content on their behalf.

Example:

Canva uses User-Generated Content (UGC) for referral marketing to reach a broader audience. It encourages existing users to share their content and designs, amplifies brand exposure, drives organic growth, and expands its customer base.

Stage 6: Revenue

After carefully guiding your users through the AAARR stages, you’re now pinned to focus on one of the most important SaaS goals: Revenue. By this stage, you’ve attracted engaged users, built trust, and turned them into brand advocates. The time has come to ask one question:  How to monetize these relationships and convert activated users into paying customers?

To answer your questions, we offer you a few revenue-generating growth hacks for your SaaS business:

18. Conduct A/B testing for landing and product pages

When you’ve limited marketing budgets but high growth expectations,  A/B testing is one of the effective growth hacks to optimize conversion rates. This method involves comparing two variations of a webpage, product feature, or marketing element (like a CTA or pricing structure) to determine which performs better.

A/B testing also helps you discover what changes work best for your websites, like optimized content, images, CTA buttons, and colours, and improve the web pages based on user behaviour, engagement, and metrics. While performing A/B testing for landing and product pages, fine-tune the elements that drive users to act, whether signing up or purchasing a premium plan.

Example:

Hubspot released 3 variants - A, B, and C- for A/B testing of their HubSpot Academy landing pages. They wanted to test how CTAs, clear messaging, colours, and images improved conversion rates and revenue growth. The result was variant B outperformed by 6% and variant C underperformed by 1%. From these numbers, they can find that they can attract 375 sign-ups each month.

19. Upselling and cross-selling

For a SaaS business, every opportunity to increase revenue and drive steady growth is important. Upselling and cross-selling are innovative growth hacks that can enhance revenue growth.

Upselling is a method of encouraging existing users to purchase additional features or upgrade the product. On the other hand, cross-selling involves suggesting complementary products or services that enhance the value of your customer’s initial purchase.

Both of these methods are proven growth hacks for increasing customer lifetime value and annual revenue for a SaaS business. Upselling and cross-selling focus on not just introducing your customers to newly added features but also offering them valuable solutions that solve their problems and meet their needs.

Example:

Grammarly uses upselling to move users from the basic plan to its premium version to discover valuable, advanced features. Meanwhile, HubSpot uses cross-selling to offer additional tools like email automation alongside its CRM software, making it easier for customers to get more out of their purchases.

20. Targeted retargeting ads

Sometimes, customers try your freemium version of your product or visit your website but leave before purchasing. To re-engage such customers, run retargeting ads that attract them with special offers, discounts, or free trials.

Retargeting, or remarketing ads,  allows you to focus on warm leads or users who are familiar with your product, so you spend less and generate quicker revenue. For SaaS startups, retargeting users through Google Ads or Facebook can remind them why they initially showed interest in your product or service. 

For instance, if you’re an early-stage SaaS company offering free trials,  use retargeting to remind your users about upgrading to premium features. This low-cost growth hack helps you drive conversions and increase revenue.

How to Measure SaaS Growth: Key Metrics You Should Track

SaaS businesses know the importance of adequate data, but it's easy to become overwhelmed by too many metrics. To grow effectively, you need to focus on SaaS metrics, which are vital to determining the effectiveness of your growth hacks and identifying the gaps preventing your business growth. 

Initially, we keep things simple in learning about all the metrics and start by measuring one or two at each stage in the customer journey.

1. Acquisition Stage: CAC and Conversion Rate

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): It is one of SaaS businesses' most important growth metrics. This metric calculates the cost of acquiring new customers (sales and marketing) divided by the number of customers acquired.

You can use this metric to evaluate the performance of growth hacks for customer acquisition. It helps you find the effectiveness of acquisition channels and decide where to spend money and where not. This will save you from overspending on underperforming marketing channels and ensure more efficient investments in your growth efforts.

• Conversion Rate: This metric defines how many visitors take a desired action, like signing up for a free trial or subscribing to your service.

Formula:

Measuring the conversion rate helps you understand how well your SaaS is performing and identify opportunities for attracting more leads. 

If you observe high conversion rates, your website effectively engages the right audience and has clear calls to action (CTAs). They successfully guide users toward taking the next step. Conversely, a low conversion rate may indicate potential issues, such as slow loading times, uninspiring content, or an unclear value proposition.  Try to work on possible issues and resolve them to improve your conversions. 

2. Activation stage: TTV and Activation Rate

• Product Activation Rate: This metric calculates the percentage of users who reach a key milestone, like completing onboarding or using a key feature for the first time. The activation rate is the result of dividing the no. of users who reached the activation ( the AHA moment) point by the number of users who signed up.
• For example, if 500 out of 1,000 new users complete onboarding, your activation rate is 50%. 
• The activation rate helps you identify the effectiveness of the onboarding process, including frictionless sign-ups, gamification, and building community to help users become familiar with your SaaS product.
• When your activation rate is high, it indicates that your onboarding is successful; if it’s low, your users may need better guidance and support. Make sure to implement growth hacks to improve your onboarding process, ultimately enhancing the activation rate.

• Time to First Value(TTFV): This metric measures how long it takes for a user to experience your product for the first time.
• For example, TTFV might be the time it takes to add their first project or login the project management software. 
• The faster users reach the activation point, the more likely they will stay with the business. A longer TTFV signals that users struggle with the onboarding process or usability, which results in higher churn rates. Optimizing TTFV to build trust with your new prospects turns into long-term sustainable growth.

3. Retention: CRR and Churn Rate

• Customer Retention Rate (CRR): This metric refers to the percentage of customers who used your product or service over a specific time.

Formula:

A high CRR indicates strong customer loyalty and satisfaction, reducing the need for constant new customer acquisition. Improving CRR boosts profitability by enhancing Lifetime Value (LTV) and ensuring consistent revenue growth, making it a critical metric for SaaS companies. Use

• Churn Rate: Another retention-related metric that determines whether or not your customers see value in continuously using your SaaS. Churn rates are the percentage of customers who cancel their subscriptions or stop using your product over a certain period.

Formula:

A high churn rate indicates dissatisfaction or unmet expectations, while a low churn rate suggests solid product-market fit and customer satisfaction. Conduct regular A/B testing and optimize the onboarding process, which may reduce churn and boost revenue growth. 

4. Referral: NPS

Net Promoter Score (NPS): This metric measures customer loyalty and satisfaction based on how likely SaaS users are to recommend your product. To calculate the NPS, first, you need to ask one question:

"On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or colleague?"

Responses are as follows:

• Promoters (9–10): Enthusiastic customers will likely promote the product.
• Passives (7–8): Satisfied but unenthusiastic customers.
• Detractors (0–6): Unhappy customers who may spread negative feedback.

Calculate it by using the following formula:

In addition to NPS, you can use other referral metrics, such as Customer Satisfaction Score (CFS) and Customer Effort Score (CES).  

5. Revenue: MRR and CLTV

• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): It measures the revenue earned from customers monthly. As the name suggests, MRR is derived from subscription-based services or products and excludes additional one-time services like consultations, setup fees, and other non-recurring payments.

Formula:

This metric helps SaaS companies understand their steady cash flow, forecast future revenue, and measure growth more accurately over time. It ensures long-term business sustainability and enables you to identify customer retention and acquisition trends.

• Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): This metric calculates how much revenue you’ll make from the average customer over their entire relationship with your product before they churn. It is a key indicator for evaluating the quality and value of customer relationships over time.

Formula:

Estimating total Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) helps businesses refine their marketing budgets, improve customer retention strategies, and predict long-term revenue growth. It can also help companies allocate resources effectively, focus on high-value customers, and plan for exponential revenue growth.

These metrics help you gauge the effectiveness of the SaaS growth hack at each stage of the SaaS user journey. Use them to evaluate the performance and how much they helped your business scale and grow exponentially. 

Expand Your SaaS Business with the Right Growth Hacking Strategy

This comprehensive list of growth hacking strategies offers a roadmap for your SaaS business and startups to achieve exponential growth. Each growth hack is designed to enhance user engagement and create memorable experiences with your product. 

These strategies encourage users to explore and appreciate your offerings and build trust and credibility. You can position your business for growth in an ever-evolving market by laying the groundwork for enduring customer relationships.

Growth hacks sometimes yield the expected results. Therefore, innovate new methods and experiment with them to find what helps your business achieve SaaS growth.

Do you need help boosting your business growth? We can help you plan your growth journey and scale your business to generate more revenue.