.svg)
SaaS companies have been on the rise these past few years; all credit goes to simplicity or ease of use. All you need is the internet and a monthly subscription. In fact, SaaS has become the norm for software companies and most startups. But the downside to this has led to cut-throat competition and even saturation across some industries. With so many companies, people are looking for not just a product but an experience.
This has led to SaaS companies coming up with innovative GTM strategies, with community becoming a frontrunner in terms of sustainable growth strategies. With community-led growth, SaaS communities give their users an immersive community experience that makes them feel like members of a group and not just customers. Communities are proving to become significant revenue streams and have tremendously improved metrics like acquisition, retention, and success.
Community teams are scaling SaaS communities but engagement, management, and even communication can become exponentially challenging with it.
Being a part of a SaaS community is more than just about understanding and using the product better, it’s about learning to execute ideas and working on collaborative projects. As a community builder, you have to constantly bring innovation and value to the table through events, rewards, ambassador programs, and more. But before all that, you have to ensure that your community is engaged and interactive and stay on top of your community at all times without having any manual dependencies.
We’ve built Threado to address all the critical community-building problems and tailor a solution that gives community builders complete control and helps them build thriving communities to boost their growth engine altogether.
SaaS brands that are using Threado have seen groundbreaking results across various aspects of community-building. Not only have they been able to offer more value, but have improved how they manage their community overall.
Threado’s automation lets you create elaborate workflows and automate everyday tasks that take up a lot of your time otherwise. You can automate everything from community onboarding and activation to engagement and even conducting surveys. What’s more, you can make the workflows to be extremely personalized and targeted to tailor how you communicate value in your community.
Speaking of onboarding, the first touch is the perfect opportunity for you to give the new members a taste of what the community is about. Most members either join out of curiosity or are looking for answers, so it becomes essential to give them a guiding hand as soon as they join. If you have a hundred members joining your community every day, you can’t spend all your time individually sending DMs to them. That’s not a very great use of your time.
Let’s see how you can automate everyday tasks.
A great example of onboarding can be something like this -
Let’s setup your first workflow -
How is this workflow setup?
You can create more elaborate workflows to extend the onboarding process over a period of time to keep the member more engaged.
The above onboarding workflow has been setup similarly to the previous one but this is more elaborate as the member receives 3 messages over 2 days, each for sharing relevant resources, asking for feedback on the product, or even nudging product demos and webinars.
You can design workflows to include custom cohorts of members and send them personalized messages. For example - if a member has been active in the community since they joined, you should send them a quick appreciation note to keep their morals. Small nudges can really help keep engagement high.
Here’s what a simple workflow will look like -
How is this workflow setup?
Threado’s automations have been designed for building communities so you create dynamic and intricate workflows based on conditions. This way, you can send more personalized messages ensuring more value and therefore more engagement from members.
The condition essentially allows you to check if a member has posted a message/reaction or not. You can apply this condition after an initial nudge to see if that member has taken any action in the community. If they have, engage them with messages that can offer more value and if they haven’t, nudge them again to try and interact in the community. This way, you can split the same workflow to incorporate more personalized messages.
How is this workflow setup?
Get to know how’s it going for your community using surveys. A simple yet effective way is to get their feedback over a period of time and based on that feedback, tailor how you communicate or strategize your community-building efforts.
A good use case of this is to conduct a feedback survey a month after they join to see if they’re finding the community helpful in terms of using the product or even learning from insights.
How is this workflow setup?
Feedback can be open-ended too i.e. don’t use buttons but rather just get a regular understanding of how your community is doing. Some of the SaaS communities use 30,60, and 90-day feedback that helps them keep a pulse on their community and take decisions accordingly.
How is this workflow setup?
In a SaaS community, not everyone who joins would be looking for the same thing. Some might be there to need help with the product, some are just there to network and draw insights, while others might be looking for collaborations. The point is, you should be able to identify your members properly and personalize the interactions to offer the most value.
A great use case is to create a workflow using a survey to ask members what they’re interested in from this community. You can also simply use the ‘Understand member interests’ template and customize the message for your community.
How is this workflow setup?
When you’re running a community, you need to find ways to create advocacy and build a self-sustaining flywheel by empowering the people in it. This can mean having an ambassador or superuser program for your most valued or top members. Rolling out such a program can be quite tedious but automation can tremendously help bring down the effort that goes into communication.
The perfect way to identify ambassadors is through tags. Tag all members as ambassadors and use this filter to setup an automation or share relevant information at scale.
How is this workflow setup?
There are various workflows that you can setup with a combination of filters. The filters tracking activity levels can be a great way to target members who’ve become inactive in the community and activate them to start engaging again.
How is this workflow setup?
Improve community engagement with Outreach
Outreach by Threado enables you as a community builder to reach out to members through email campaigns and engage with members wherever they are. So, you’re not just restricted to communications within a single platform but instead, have a multi-channel operating system for your community that ensures better reach and in turn better engagement.
What can you do with the new Outreach feature -
One of the most helpful use cases using outreach would be sending product updates or even a monthly product newsletter.
1. In the outreach, create a new email outreach or use an existing email template. In the first step - add sender details, use filters to define custom recipients, and give a good subject line.
2. Next, continue to add the content for your outreach. If you’ve selected a template, you can edit/customize the existing content.
3. Finally, review the outreach and you can also send test emails to make sure everything’s good to go. Send/schedule your email outreach.
Similar to the product updates, you can do a community update as a roundup of all things that happened in the community that week. A lot of the members won’t be actively going through the community every day. So an email outreach is an excellent way to summarize the biggest highlights of the community in the last week.
You can also do a weekly community update in Slack or Discord channels using Outreach.
1. Simply use the templates of the same name “Community weekly updates”.
2. Setup the sender details and select how you want to send the message - as a DM or post in channel(s). If you’re posting it in channel, from the drop-down select the channel or make multiple selections if you want to post it in more than one channel.
3. Edit the content, review the outreach, and send/schedule the message.
Threado’s token-based scoring system gives you the option to gamify your community and reward members. Members get rewarded with tokens based on their level of activity, these tokens determine an aggregate score for them, and the score can be customized to categorize members in varying levels of activity. There are levels 1, 2, and 3 and you can personalize the score required to move to the next level.
This a great way to know who are top contributors in your community, the champions, the average users, and finally the inactive or less active users. Use level as a filter to target members accordingly and reward members with the highest scores.
Here’s how you can customize and use the scoring system.
1. On the Members dashboard, you can Configure Levels for your community.
2. You can define the number of tokens to be awarded for actions. On the other tab, you can segment users based on their scores.
3. On the main dashboard, you’ll see the scores - Help, Engage, Encourage, and Total - for each member along with their Level of activity
You can access all the messages from the community in a single place from the Activities dashboard.
Not just that, reply to messages directly from the dashboard without having to go back to your community platform.
Filter based on platform, status of the message i.e. questions, messages with no replies, etc., and specific channels in the community. Threado uses an ML-based identifier to categorize messages that are questions or have been posed as questions to give you accurate data. Use these features to always stay on top of your community and never miss a message.
People who are a part of your community will al interact differently. Hence, it makes sense to have a way for you to identify them based on behavior or engagement to create custom cohorts and take action accordingly.
Threado allows you to use a combination of filters to offer flexibility in customizing member cohorts based on various parameters. For example - filter members who were active in the last month but became inactive in the last week. These are recent dormant users who you can activate by sending personalized DMs.
.svg)
the command center for community builders
© 2023 Threado Inc