SaaS Offer Design 101: Learning From Canva
You might often see a lot of SaaS have similar offer ladder such as free account, professional and enterprise. It looks simple. But can you answer "when" and "how" the professional account should be offered? Do you know how to put a line between the free account and the professional account?
If you understand the root concept which answers those questions, you will easily be able to create good combination of offers on your product/service. In this post, I'll introduce the root concept and how to design offer by refering Canva, which is one of the most famous SaaS.
Review: Canva’s Offer
Canva is the well-known free online graphic tool for promotion creatives. Here is the list of their offer (on November 19).
Canva (free account)
- Value: Basic function to create graphic.
- Timing of offer: We can see it when we access to the top /landing page.
- How to offer: Signup with email or SNS account
Premium Element
- Value: Access to high quality photo and design template
- Timing of offer: We can see it when we are editing graphic after log-in.
- How to offer: One time purchase
Canva for work
- Value: All the core feature for graphic editing and group work
- Timing of offer: We can see "upgrade" button after log-in or pricing page
- How to offer: Credit card application form with 30 day free trial
Canva for enterprise
- Value: Admin control, single sign-on, etc, in addition to Canva for work
- Timing of offer: We can see it when we access to pricing page
- How to offer: Contact form to input detail requirement
The 1st step to understand the root concept of those offers is to know why your audience spend time for your website where you offer your product/service.
1. Temperature to Analyze Audience
When your audience accesses to you websites, the access can be categorized to three temperature, based on their intention.
Those intention which audiences have leads them to different expectations.
This “temperature” concept is common in sales lead qualification and SEO. If your audience is still “Cold”, they are not ready to pay for your product/service. Then, you need to grow them to “Hot” through sales and marketing activity. If they are "Hot", what to do next is to know how "Hot" they are. Because, for example, when they want to use minimum feature without much budget, high price full feature doesn’t make sense. When they want to solve small struggle on the usage of your product, offering next years subscription doesn’t make sense.
2. Temperature to Analyze "Hot" Audience
In order to understand further intention of your "Hot" audience, you can use the following additional temperature.
Based on those intention, we can dig their expectation about how they want your product/service.
Offer Design by Temperature
Going back to the offer structure by Canva, they have 4 offers: "Canva (free account)", "Premium Element", "Canva for work" and "Canva for enterprise". The offers can be split to the three temperature which is already mentioned.
Let's dig deeper those 3 types of offer.
(i) Offer for "Boiling" Audience
"Canva (free account)" is an offer to let audiences not to feel risks. The point of this offer is it should minimize the risks for your audience so that they can accept the offer without much effort. I call this offer, “Bait”.
- Value of "Bait": Trial term, limited access to features, demonstration, etc.
- Timing for "Bait": Should be the first thing to be offered
- How to offer "Bait": The way how audiences can take without feeling much risk
(ii) Offer for "Burning” Audience
In Canva, "Premium Element" and "Canva for Work" are designed for the audience who already has budget and need to do certain quality of work. I call this offer,"Main Offer".
- Value of "Main Offer": Full function, unlock more/enough access, etc.
- Timing for "Main Offer": Should be offered if audience doesn't feel risk. Unless, use "Bait" offer first and follow to "Main Offer".
- How to offer "Main Offer": Just ask them simply. The audience is ready.
In "Canva for work", they start from "Free trial" as "Bait" in order to mitigate the risk for audience. And It's connected to the feature unlock as "Main Offer".
(iii) Offer for “Blazing” Audience
"Canva for Enterprise" is the special offer for the audience who need high standard and scalability. This offer is important requirement for customers in addition to solution itself. I call this, “Premium Service”.
- Value of "Premium Service": Automation, unlock additional access, customer support service, advisory, higher priority on the process etc.
- Timing for "Premium Service": Should be offered when customer understand the value of “Main Offer”.
- How to offer "Premium Service": Should be ready to accept flexibly to further needs such as provide customizable form or inquiry form and just show upgrade path.
Conclusion
"Bait", "Main Offer" and "Premium Service" are the pillar to build ladder of offer, which your audience can take easily.
The key to design offer is always to understand your audience/customers deeply. The more you understand the temperature of "Hot" audience, the more you will be able to find the opportunity to create offer. So that it will leverage the power of your product/service.
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If you want to understand the step to build product-market-fit in order to create the right offer, check also this post about actual validation in Lean Startup.
