Updated on by Hayley Brown
How do integrations tie into a business growth strategy?
Integrations are not only an acquisition channel but a lasting benefit for existing and prospective customers. Keep customers closer and provide value-add services. Put your app at the heart of their data ecosystem. In short, you should be incorporating them into your business growth strategy sooner rather than later.
Through using integrations you’ll increase customer satisfaction and gain a competitive advantage in the market. This can result in an increase in paying customers and customer lifetime value.
Let’s see how integrations can affect key SaaS metrics and why using an embedded iPaaS for your integrations can be a growth lever for 2023.
Integration and Revenue Growth
“Does your application connect to ‘X’?” – is a common question in any sales process. You want the answer to either be ‘yes’ or ‘it can do in short order’. Like it or not prospects and customers want your app to be part of a wider ecosystem and, if it doesn’t play nicely, it can be a barrier to sale.
Without an Embedded iPaaS like Cyclr then the sales integration request will most likely be added to your developer backlog. It is then prioritised in amongst every other integration and product development request. Only you know how long your backlog is or your sprint processes – however every day you don’t have the integration is a day you don’t have a paying SaaS customer.
The faster you can connect, build and deploy integrations the quicker you’ll be able to sign up customers, grow your sales pipeline, close sales and expand your business.
Revenue
Integration and Churn Rate
We don’t need to tell you about the importance of churn management. Growth in 2023 comes not only from new customer wins but also making sure that the existing customer base is stable.
Integrations can be a mitigant to churn. By binding your application into your customer’s wider data landscape – as well as offering value-add automation and processes, you are going to lock your app in tighter with that customer.
The more connections and integration functionality your product has the longer customer should stick with you.
Customer Churn
Integration and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the measure of how much you spend and the effectiveness of sales and marketing to acquire new customers. The time it takes you to create new integrations to win new customers is arguably a contributor to the overall CAC.
An Embedded iPaaS can help reduce your CAC by making your team more efficient and more responsive. A reduced CAC means more capital available and sales and marketing budgets can be stretched further.
Integration and Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Your net promoter score (NPS) is a measure of your customer experience with your product and can predict business growth.
Integrations can have an impact on your NPS if they are insufficient. This insufficiency could be the length of time it takes to satisfy integration requests or the customer having to make data connections themselves. For instance, if an integration causes your customer to find a manual workaround or third-party solution to solve their goals.
An integration marketplace can help your NPS score by guiding your users with solutions that already exist in your product. An integration marketplace can have integration templates for popular platforms such as HubSpot, Shopify, Trello etc. where users simply click through an install.
In this way, your integration marketplace adds value to your product and ultimately adds value to your customer.
Net Promoter Score
Integration and Time to Value
Time to value is considered a critical metric that measures the amount of time it takes a new customer to get value from your product. It can also be a measure of your onboarding and implementation process.
Manually delivered integrations can be complicated and slow. This can have a direct impact on your customer’s time to value. Therefore, a way to reduce this is to effectively deploy integrations that are simple to set up and align with your customer’s needs.
As a result, the integrations can contribute to improved implementation. Not only does this reduce their time to value but can also reduce the risk of a customer churning.
Why should you bring an embedded iPaaS into your tech stack?
Don’t replace your existing integrations, whether you’ve built your own or use tools like Zapier. Instead, we suggest that you expand upon them and use them alongside an embedded integration platform.
We’ve spoken about this before and called it the 80:20 rule, “own the integration solution for 80% of your client’s integration needs and outsource for 20% of your client’s integration needs.”
Types of integration solutions available:
- Outsource: deploy a ring-fenced solution that achieves the customer’s integration off-platform e.g. Zapier
- Build: start from scratch and write code to achieve each integration
- Design: design integrations using an iPaaS platform, such as Cyclr, that is embedded within your platform
An embedded integration platform can expand your integration capabilities because the APIs you need are already built, with template integrations you can copy your popular use cases and repeat them.
As a result, you’ll improve efficiency and meet customer requests more quickly. As well as this you can build integrations at speed with low-code tools. This means that integrations can be achieved by anyone who knows where the data needs to be and deployed natively.
The embedded iPaaS can simply slot into your existing tech stack, integrate with your existing applications and become a lever for growth.
Talk to us at Cyclr about expanding your integration strategy and encouraging growth across your organisation.
