3 Quick & Dirty SaaS Revenue Sources You're Probably Overlooking

A few years ago, I used to run a growth marketing agency for tech startups in London.

We had a rule:

Whenever we worked with a new client, we wanted to pay for ourselves within the first 3 months. 

Partly because we wanted to get our clients a positive ROI as quickly as possible

Partly because we wanted to prove that we could actually deliver (many agencies can't and don't)

But mostly because we needed buy-in from the founder. 

See, building a really effective growth engine often takes time. And the only way we were going to get that commitment from founders is if we delivered some quick wins first.

After a while we developed a playbook: tactics that worked for most SaaS businesses and could generate some meaningful revenue quickly.

Here are 3 sources of quick & dirty revenue you're probably overlooking

1 - Squeeze more juice out of your email list

The money is in the list, as they say - but most SaaS businesses are NOT getting as much value from their email list as they could be. 

We used a modified version of Frank Kern's "4-Day Cash Machine" email sequence to do this. In a nutshell you offer a flash sale and promote it over 4 days to your email list.

Reach out to current and lapsed trialists with a discounted offer for the first 3 months to get them to over the hump and actually convert into a paying customer.

Target people who cancelled within the past 12 months with a "win-back" campaign - telling them about all your new features.

Bonus points if you collected data on what features were missing and can tailor your email campaign to the specific reason why they churned!

Often customers churn because you lack certain features or because your software is buggy; but you've likely improved things a lot after 12 months.

Sweeten the deal with a discount/special offer if you want, but the main focus is on addressing the likely reason why they churned in the first place.

2 - Sell them something other than your software

Ask yourself this - what else does my audience need besides my software? Maybe a course? Maybe a template pack? Maybe some consulting? Maybe a done-for-you/done-with-you service?

All of these can bring in a significant amount of cash quickly and be a great complement to the recurring revenue you receive from your software.

Hell, you can even sell someone else's course/software/services! This is often much easier and faster.

Sign up for a few affiliate programs and promote their offers to your audience. And if that course/product/service/software is complementary to your own, even better!

3 - Lead Magnets, Exit Popups & Content Upgrades

It always amazes me how many SaaS founders invest heavily into content marketing to get more traffic, but then don't put any effort into converting those visitors into email subscribers via a lead magnet.

Sure, exit popups are annoying. But they are also effective. In fact, adding an exit popup with a compelling lead magnet can increase email signups by 10-15%.

Additionally, you can add content upgrade boxes to your content pages. Basically, these are yellow (or some other bright, contrasting colour) boxes with an offer to download a lead magnet added right in the middle of your blog posts.

Content upgrade boxes can increase your email signup rate by 20-30%. 

So - you can convert 30-45% more visitors to email subscribers simply by creating a kickass lead magnet and promoting it on your site via an exit popup and content upgrade boxes.

...And then you can hit them with a flash sale or course/services/affiliate offer as well!