Is Your B2B SaaS Strategy More Like Crazy Egg’s or CoSchedule’s?
Along with the rest of the Secret Council of SaaS Illuminati, Crazy Egg and CoSchedule work together to set the industry standards. While their respective audiences and tactics often converge, their key shared goal is global domination. Or, at least that’s how it seems.
Both of these platforms are considered successful with more than 10K users (though Crazy Egg has significantly more). Nearly everyone in the digital marketing world has heard of them. And, they leverage novel strategies to promote their products.
You want to rule the world too, don’t you? Let’s look at what CoSchedule and Crazy Egg have in common, how their tactics differ, and what wisdom you can take from each aspect of their strategies to apply to your SaaS business.
First, What is Crazy Egg?
Crazy Egg is a B2B SaaS platform founded by Neil Patel — one of modern marketing’s greatest influencers. The software provides heatmaps, scroll maps, and A/B testing tools for website conversion optimization.
How Many Users Does Crazy Egg Have?
As of today (early 2020), Crazy Egg has over 300,000 business users. High-profile tech brands like Dell, Mint by Intuit, Optimizely, and Yahoo are among them.
How Much Does Crazy Egg Cost?
Crazy Egg pricing ranges from $24 per month to $249 per month, paid annually. Custom pricing is available for enterprise accounts with unlimited usage.
Crazy Egg offers a 30-Day free trial. In the case of cancellation during a free trial period, the platform pops-up a 14-day extension offer for a total of 44 days of free use. A credit card is required to access the platform, so be sure to cancel before your trial ends if you don’t want to be charged for the annual subscription cost.
And, What is CoSchedule?
CoSchedule is a B2B SaaS platform co-founded by Garrett Moon and Justin Walsh that delivers a marketing suite for content creators. The most popular feature is their editorial calendar for blog posts. In 2016, according to Emerging Prairie, the North Dakota-based business reached the $2 million annual recurring revenue mark.
How Many Users Does CoSchedule Have?
According to the brand’s website, CoSchedule now has more than 10,000 business users in 100 countries. Microsoft, Whole Foods, and Johnson & Johnson are a few of their enterprise business users.
How Much Does CoSchedule Cost?
CoSchedule’s editorial calendar costs $20 to $50 per month. The full marketing suite costs between $150 to $1,050 per month and individual features can be used at discounted prices.
CoSchedule offers a 14-day, no-risk free trial. No credit card is required for the trial.
Next, Which Shared Content Tactics Do Crazy Egg and CoSchedule Use?
In addition to free software trials, Crazy Egg and CoSchedule have several other shared promotional tactics. Learn more about a couple of them so you can hopefully spark ideas to power your B2B SaaS business strategy.
1. Both Crazy Egg and CoSchedule Implement Outside-the-Box Lead Generation Assets
The reason that these two platforms were chosen for this piece is that their lead generation strategies have impressed me from the jump. So, let’s take a look at the unique lead assets these brands leverage.
How Neil Patel Uses Ubersuggest to Attract Leads for his Products & Services
In a nutshell, the story of Ubersuggest goes a little something like this: Neil Patel came across a piece of paid software and thought he could make it better. So, in 2017, he reached out to the owner and cut a deal to buy the platform. He purchased the API, made a few tweaks to how the platform works, transferred it to his website, neilpatel.com, then gave it away for free.
Now, Ubersuggest is a completely free SEO suite. Features include domain overview, top SEO pages, keyword suggestions, content ideas, and backlink data. The best part for Neil is that it connects users to his marketing agency website.
But, what does this have to do with Crazy Egg? Neil doesn’t directly promote his paid platform through the free platform. Instead, he links to Crazy Egg’s website over 300 times from his agency blog. So, Ubersuggest’s users are eventually led through the lead funnel to the Crazy Egg website. More immediately, they might hire Neil’s team to run their marketing campaigns.
Where most investors would have purchased a full-suite tool like this to leverage backlinks or profit from monthly SaaS subscriptions, Neil instead took a forward-thinking risk. He leveraged the platform as a lead generation asset. Traffic is strategically funneled from the free tool, Ubersuggest, to the paid SaaS platform, Crazy Egg.
Used in a Similar Way, CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer, Email Subject Line Tester, and Social Message Optimizer are Powerful Lead-Gen Tools
In addition to their paid platform and features, CoSchedule offers three free tools.
- Headline Analyzer – Helps article writers compose catchier headlines.
- Email Subject Line Tester – Helps email writers craft open-worthy subject lines.
- Social Message Optimizer – Helps social media marketers optimize posts for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
These tools provide extreme value for content creators who write marketing articles, emails, and social media posts (CoSchedules’ target audience). As with Ubersuggest, it’s remarkable that they are free for anyone to use.
So, what CoSchedule does with each tool is to allow the first content analysis with no strings attached. Immediately, the user realizes that the tool can help them optimize conversions. Then, when they try to analyze a second headline, email subject line, or social media message, they see that the tool is now gated.
At this point, if they want to continue to use the tool, they must enter their email address and subscribe to CoSchedule’s newsletter. From there, users receive a nurture sequence in hopes that they will try the editorial calendar or marketing suite.
The traffic flow from CoSchedule’s lead generation assets are pretty similar to most competitors’ funnels: Lead generation asset > email nurture sequence > free trial. Yet, the assets themselves — the free and highly valuable content creation tools — are what make this lead flow stand out.
Key Takeaway #1
Every B2B SaaS brand has an eBook, whitepapers, and case studies, but what efforts do you invest to make your lead generation assets shine brighter than your competitors? How can you take your efforts a step further? Think creatively and present a brilliant and extremely helpful lead generation asset to attract more paid SaaS subscribers.
2. CoSchedule & Crazy Egg Offer Extensive Product Training
Even with the simplest tools on the market, at least some amount of SaaS subscriber churn is caused by a lack of software understanding. For no additional cost, to optimize retention, CoSchedule and Crazy Egg present comprehensive platform training to their business users. Here’s what this looks like in each case.
CoSchedule Guides Users at Every Stage of the Product Use Journey
Well-organized and easy-to-navigate, CoSchedule’s product training help center includes everything under the Sun that a user needs to fully understand the platform. And, they guide users along their journey to product knowledge in a friendly way.
‘Above the fold,’ on the part of the page that visitors first see upon arrival, users have a couple of easy choices:
- Type what they’re looking for into the search box for easy discovery.
- Choose what user stage they are in and select content based on that.
A beginner, for example, might be more interested in getting started or team collaboration. And, a long-time user might want to elevate their social media promotion tactics. The help center organizes some of the guidance videos in a way that appeals to these user stages.
And, if a user doesn’t find what they’re interested in and continues to scroll, they come to a video library. The library contains several video series.
- CoSchedule Quick Course
- ReQueue Quick Course
- CoSchedule for Agencies
- How-To
- Getting the Most Out of Analytics
Each series includes at least three videos and is enough to teach anyone how to use the platform. Yet, it doesn’t stop there. Near the bottom of the page, platform education is broken down into topics. If you’re interested in learning more about a specific issue like project management, assets, or billing and accounting, this is the place to discover resources.
You’ll find knowledgebase articles that solve nearly any CoSchedule-specific problem you could possibly run into.
Crazy Egg’s Guides & Walkthroughs Educate Users About Platform Features
Upon arrival to the Guides and Walkthroughs page, Crazy Egg introduces their platform above the fold. The content seems to assume that page visitors are prospects, not users. The reader is invited to see their heatmap or learn more about software features through an opening video.
Then, as they scroll, users discover four more sections:
- Website Teardowns
- Webinar Recordings
- Crazy Egg Training
- Quick Hits CRO Tips
Each section is packed with videos that educate users from start to finish. They do an excellent job explaining platform features, teaching how to decipher analyses, and suggesting action steps to improve website conversion optimization.
In addition, Crazy Egg has separate help and FAQ pages filled with important information about their product. The brand’s website is basically an encyclopedia about the heatmaps and scroll maps.
Key Takeaway #2
Do you offer product training on your B2B SaaS website? If so, how comprehensive is it? One of the secrets to subscriber retention is to make sure that, without question, anyone in your target market can learn how to use your software. Naturally, product education is an effective way to make this happen.
So, What Do CoSchedule and Crazy Egg Do Differently?
While both brands are doing well, they aren’t doing everything the same. Nobody wants to be a copycat. But, if you want to borrow some ideas to make improvements to your strategy, you may find some below.
1. Crazy Egg Uses Minimal Website Copy While CoSchedule Uses an Average Amount of Words on their Landing Pages
Let’s take a peek at the word count alone for three core landing pages on the CoSchedule and Crazy Egg websites.
- CoSchedule.com:
- Home Page = 260 Words
- About Page = 536 Words
- Contact Page = 84 Words
- CrazyEgg.com:
- Home Page = 41 Words
- About Page = 212 Words
- Contact Page = 13 Words
On these three core pages, Crazy Egg’s website uses about ⅓ of the text that CoSchedule uses. So, how do you think the marketing team decided to make this choice?
The answer is A/B testing. Neil Patel is known for conversion optimization. The Crazy Egg platform in itself is a testament to his drive to continually optimize his websites and those of his clients. So, the minimalist approach to word-use on this site is no accident. One might conclude that the fewer words on a landing page, the better.
But, Garret Moon and Justin Walsh are no strangers to CRO. So, why did they choose to use more than three times the words on CoSchedule’s landing pages than Crazy Egg? The answer to this question is the same as the last: A/B testing.
Key Takeaway #3
Conduct A/B testing. Period. You can only find out what works best for your audience when you monitor and analyze their behavior. Even the amount of words on your page should be tested.
2. CoSchedule Writes in Mixed Language While Crazy Egg Uses a Goal-Directed Tone on Every Key Landing Page
As a copywriter, language style is one B2B SaaS website aspect I invariably notice. And, what I see here is that Crazy Egg and CoSchedule use fundamentally different language styles on their websites. And, I’m not talking about brand voice.
What I’m referring to here is the actionability of the language. I call Crazy Egg’s style “goal-directed.” To me, this means that every statement is a call to action. And, I find this to be an effective style.
3. CoSchedule’s Team Sees the Value of a Brand Podcast and Crazy Egg Doesn’t Have One Anymore
You don’t see every B2B SaaS company broadcasting their brand message on iTunes yet. But, here again, CoSchedule is ahead of the curve. Here’s a summary of the company’s podcast.
CoSchedule’s Actionable Marketing Podcast features interviews with leaders of some of the most well-known contemporary marketing companies. For example, Brian Dean from Backlinko explains how to drive 10X more website traffic with an SEO trick.
Followers can subscribe on iTunes, which potentially serves as an external traffic source. Smart? I think so.
On the other hand, Crazy Egg doesn’t have a podcast. So, it makes you wonder if audio is even worth it. Well, what do you think?
Summary of Key Takeaway Actions
- Create lead generation assets that truly go the extra mile to help your target audience solve everyday problems.
- Publish to educate SaaS users from newbie to platform master.
- A/B test to find the right amount of words to use on landing pages.
- Hone your landing page and article copy with a ‘language matters’ attitude.
- Consider the value in alternative edutaining content like podcasts and videos.
Final Thoughts
So, are you Crazy Egg or CoSchedule? The truth is, you’re neither — you have your individual brand with its distinctive set of intricacies. Dance to your own beat, pave a new path and create a unique B2B SaaS strategy that blows your competition out of the water. I can’t promise that someone in a black cloak and horned mask will appear and induct you into the Secret Council of SaaS Illuminati. However, you will continue to scale year after year as long as you follow this advice.
Do you need help with your B2B SaaS content strategy or copywriting? Leverage expert articles, landing pages, and emails. Check out CopyNoise’s copywriting services today.