Growing a SaaS product isn’t easy. First, you need a new and interesting concept, then the programming needs to be airtight, and finally, there’s the marketing and sales to worry about.
With all this to consider, it’s tempting to push product integrations to a later stage of development. After all, they divert developers from core features and cost thousands to build, which can slow down product development.
All of this is true. But integrations are crucial for the growth of your app. The sooner you include them, the faster your product will grow and take over new markets.
Keep reading to discover why product integrations convince new customers to subscribe, retain your customers for the long term, and increase revenue overall.
None of your potential customers come to you in a vacuum. They’ve already strung together complicated workflows with different apps for marketing, payment processing, account management, and more.
If your app doesn’t play well with their existing tech stack? Rather than spending time and money to create a new workflow, they’ll move to the next product that meets their needs.
“Customers don’t want individual products,” says Jeff Reekers, CEO of Champion. “They want ecosystems that make their workflows work.”
A recent survey from Paragon showed that integrations factor into sales deals 60% of the time. And 84% of respondents said that integrations were very important for their customers.
Many SaaS businesses focus on getting the right features first, but Francois Grenier, Head of Platform Partnerships at Thoropass, says that integrations capture customers’ interest from the beginning. “If you don’t have integrations with the platform that customer has,” he says, “you kill that opportunity at stage one.”
To give your app a chance to stand at the starting line, make sure you’re planning for crucial integrations from the start.
Every user who installs one of your integrations drops clues about your customer avatar.
Your integration analytics give you an inside look at what apps they use, what they might be interested in, and how they run their business. With this information in hand, you can discover new targeting options for marketing campaigns.
Maybe you’ll discover that users of a certain partner app are a perfect fit for your solution. Or you might discover a new customer profile that you haven’t tapped into yet.
When Grenier was at Typeform, he noticed an uptick in installs for an ecommerce integration. At the time, Typeform didn’t have an ecommerce buyer persona, but they realized “it was a huge piece of our customer profile” they could tap into.
Follow the clues to have your next marketing and sales strategy handed to you.
Integrations are a two-way street. An integration that benefits you will also benefit the partner you’ve integrated with, and here’s how you can make the most of it.
In a survey of SaaS companies, we found that larger businesses tend to have more integrations built by partners instead of in-house. That means there’s great potential for getting your integration featured on a larger company’s app marketplace, winning you new reach and downloads.
In fact, one Series B SaaS we worked with had its integration featured in a larger integration marketplace, which helped launch their app to new users.
The key to getting your integration adopted is in the quality of the programming. Drag-and-drop integrations won’t cut it. Integrations should be custom-coded, versatile solutions that run natively inside your app.
Your integration data can help you pitch new partnerships or co-marketing campaigns with existing partners. If you can prove that your user base has an affinity for a partner app, they might be open to working together to reach new leads.
Featuring a public integration gallery on your website is a great way to showcase your integrations and get initial buy-in.
Once you’ve got customer acquisition down, it’s time to tackle the issue of retention. Luckily, integrations fight against retention in two key ways.
First, integrations instantly increase the value of your app for users. Instead of solving a single problem, it becomes part of a custom-built workflow that makes their work possible.
Second, once your customers integrate your app into their workflow, it becomes embedded into their daily processes. They’ve spent time and effort putting this together. Removing your app and reworking the tech stack is often more work than it’s worth, which means they’ll stick with you for the long term.
Pandium customer ShipBob found that customers who integrated with more than two systems demonstrated lower churn rates and higher satisfaction overall.
We’ve also seen that customers who use integrations are 58% less likely to churn on average. It’s an easy win and achievable by implementing a few key integrations your customers can’t live without.
Since integrations increase the value of your app to users, it makes sense to offer them as part of a higher-tier plan. Many SaaS businesses place integrations on a higher tier or limit the number of integrations or automations available on lower tiers.
Loop Returns offers integrations as part of their mid-tier plan, for example. And while ClickUp offers a generous Forever Free plan to encourage new users to try the app, they must upgrade to a paid plan to use integrations at all.
Having an app marketplace inside your app makes it easy to promote this upsell, by showing your users all the possible integrations they can access by upgrading to the next plan.
Integrations are a key driver of new customer acquisition, retention, and revenue. But creating them isn’t easy.
Most businesses spend months developing integrations, not to mention as much as multiple six figures just to create a single connection.
Others try low-code or pre-built integration platforms that promise to connect apps quickly and easily. But the problem comes later, when an influx of users breaks the integration, or when a handful of edge cases can’t be accommodated.
As developers ourselves, we’ve faced the same issue, pushing up against the lack of options for creating sustainable and high-quality integrations on a budget. That’s why we came together to build Pandium, the only code-first integration platform that makes it easy to create 100% custom-coded integrations in a matter of weeks (and at a fraction of the cost).
We combine a customized SDK, pre-formatted templates and tools to slash development time, more than 250+ pre-built connectors, and an in-house team that can create solutions for you if you lack the resources in-house.
In short, we’re here to make your integrations the best they can be without draining developer resources or budget.
Ready to see how our platform can make integrations easy? Set up a demo to get started.
