10 top tools for subscription and SaaS businesses and how to choose the right ones for your business

10 of the best subscription business tools for SaaS companies

We’ve curated a list of 10 industry-leading subscription business tools to tackle recurring issues and streamline your subscription business. With tools like these at your disposal, you’ll be more informed, more efficient, and more successful in your efforts:

1. Intercom

Almost half (49%) of American consumers switched companies in 2019 due to poor customer service. Nobody likes to be kept waiting or to feel like their problems aren’t being heard; being available to answer questions and help customers is vital to your success.

Intercom tackles this issue head-on. As a conversational relationship platform, Intercom helps you build relationships with your customers through personalized, messenger-based experiences. The tool helps you add chatbots to every page, so you can make sales, help customers, and answer questions. Intercom also has an integrated help desk that allows you to automatically qualify, route, and convert leads. You can send targeted email, in-app, and push messages to customers, all to maintain an open line of communication at all times.

2. Userlane

Subscription businesses do a lot of onboarding, especially if they’re a SaaS business. Smooth onboarding processes are beneficial for customers because they decrease friction. Customers can learn your products faster, thanks to effective onboarding. Similarly, efficient employee onboarding saves time and capital resources.

Userlane is designed to help people understand any software, boasting a reduced time-to-value for consumers, along with increased retention and user engagement. From an internal standpoint, the software is a valuable training tool. More than 60% of companies find their own e-training ineffective, and Userlane states that it lowers training costs by up to 90%, boosting productivity in your company.

3. Paddle

As you grow and introduce different SaaS go-to-market motions, your payments and billing become increasingly complicated. You need to not only figure out how to take payments from customers around the world, and manage recurring billing, but you also have the administrative hassle of sales tax compliance across borders, fraud management, revenue reconciliation, and more. You can build a system and team in-house to solve all of this as you grow, or you can use Paddle.

The Paddle platform provides an all-in-one solution built specifically for SaaS businesses. Get instance access to an established network of global gateways and acquiring banks, manage flexible subscriptions, and issue invoices all from one tool. As a merchant of record, SaaS businesses that partner with Paddle don't have to deal with the hassle of chargebacks, fraud, or sales tax liability. Paddle also has a team responsible for answering any payment or billing queries from your customers.

4. Rewardful

Buyers rely on word of mouth between four to five times more than paid media, and in general, 92% of consumers trust referrals from people they know. This places affiliate marketers in a unique position to connect your products with more customers. However, setting up an affiliate program for your products can be a complex undertaking when done manually.

Rewardful is a referral platform designed to bridge the gap between affiliate marketers and buyers. The tool is fully integrated with Stripe, it takes mere minutes to set up, and it connects your company to a wide network of affiliate marketers interested in spreading the good word about your products.

5. ProfitWell Retain

Churn is the biggest threat to great SaaS products, particularly with subscription offerings. Up to 20%- 40% of churn is caused by failed payments, meaning customers who are trying to buy your products are being discouraged by technical problems and searching elsewhere.

So, how do you defend against this? With ProfitWell Retain, by Paddle, you can easily spot churn before it starts, target it, and retain your customers. Our Retain tool has a 77% recovery rate, and because you only need to pay for customers who we successfully recover, we guarantee at least 100% ROI.

6. Calendly

One of the potential points of failure for any company is scheduling. If you miss appointments with customers, clients, or potential partners due to software failure or human error, your business suffers. But this kind of failure is entirely avoidable with the correct tools.

Calendly helps you set up appointments with customers or clients with automated scheduling, seamless time-zone detection, and integration with other apps and calendar tools. Scheduling is yet another area that can be automated to great benefit, as Calendly’s five million monthly users would no doubt attest.

7. ProfitWell Metrics

Analytics data is the lifeblood of any subscription marketing campaign. To sell the same products to the same customers over an extended period, you need to know everything there is to know about those customers — what they want, what they need, their interests, their lifestyle, and their responsiveness to your various offers. Subscription marketing is essentially like having a conversation with your customers, and you need to be a good listener for that to work.

ProfitWell Metrics is designed with that concept in mind. The tool gives you a number of useful features that go above and beyond regular analytics. Our engagement metrics offer insight into how a customer is reacting to variations in your product offering, and this allows you to test and optimize your pricing strategy. It also features customer segmentation and acquisition tracking, allowing you to monitor which demographics are interested in your products and what the lifetime value of each customer is, so you can focus on valuable customers in particular.

8. Hotjar

Have you ever wondered exactly how customers react when they visit your website? Hotjar offers another way to gain access to the minds of your customers. The analytics this tool offers lets you see which part of your webpages customers are hovering their cursors over or clicking on the most, giving you more granular information on what draws their attention.

This information allows you to fine-tune your landing pages — testing different aesthetics, offers, and then monitoring the reaction, even if a visitor doesn’t buy anything. You can also see recordings of user behavior in real time for the same reason. The tool includes feedback polls, surveys, and a variety of analytics tools that can help you optimize your pages for better performance.

9. Zapier

Companies using several different tools can find that integration becomes a problem. When the tools you’ve set up to save time and money become cumbersome to navigate, things are not exactly going according to plan. Enter Zapier, a tool that automatically connects apps like Slack, Mailchimp, and Gmail to streamline your internal workflow.

The tool allows you to automate repetitive tasks without needing to write your own custom code or use up software developer resources, keeping everything running smoothly for your business.

10. Pendo

Creating the best software experience is imperative for long-term growth and success. Unlike FMCG and other industries, businesses in SaaS have the opportunity to constantly tap into how their customers interact with and use their products through the use of product analytics tools, and Pendo's platform is a first-class option.

Champions of product-led growth, Pendo provides insights and tools to make your products better and your customers happier. Track user behavior, collect feedback, and enable adoption through the use of tooltips and other in-app experience boosters.

Don’t know which subscription tools you need?

Maybe you’ve read through our list of recommended tools, and you’re not sure how to proceed. That’s okay. Here are some ways you can identify which kinds of tools you need to level up your subscription business.

Highlight your biggest problems

What would you say the more challenging aspect of your business is right now? Maybe you’re having major problems with churn or customer support or both. Take the time to evaluate the current strengths and weaknesses of your business—we recommend simply sitting down with a pen and paper and making a list. With this new perspective on your unique pain points, consider which of the tools mentioned above might help solve the problems you’re facing.

See where you have room to grow

Are you doing well but don’t have enough team members to answer support tickets? This would be a fantastic time to implement live chat. Are you seeing strong engagement but high rates of shopping cart abandonment? Equipping your business to fight credit card denial or making use of advanced analytics to evaluate the problem may help.

Ask different teams about pain points

Many heads are better than one. Ask your support, design, sales, and other teams what they would love in a tool. This is best done in a group brainstorming session where your team can talk together as a group, sharing and developing ideas. You may find that between everyone, your team knows exactly what tools are necessary to scale your business.

Try before you buy

With many options on the market, it’s understandable that you might hesitate to commit to making a purchase. Of course, purchasing these tools upfront isn’t always necessary. If there is a trial version of the product, try first to see if it works with your existing tech stack. Decide upon a fixed time frame, such as a month, to evaluate the performance of your business with the free version, and consider whether the paid version is worth the investment.

Look for integrations

Integrations are incredibly important in the subscription field. The beauty of these tools is that they can often play off of each other’s strengths and be all the more effective when used together. When making your decision, ensure that your tools have integrations with your site, your payment processor, and, ideally, with the other tools you’re considering.

Unlock your subscription potential today

ProfitWell is all about enhancing and augmenting the performance of subscription businesses. We’re here to make life easier, more efficient, and more profitable for you with our best-in-class subscription tools. We recommend trying the free version of our metrics software as an excellent entry point to subscription tools. You can also get in touch through our website for more information.

Work with the best

Whichever tools you decide to work with, the main thing is that you recognize the importance of getting started. Subscription business tools can be highly effective, and the results you’ll see from using the right tools in the right way might really astonish you! Take the time to weigh your options, and then choose the best tools to fit your needs and scale your business on your own terms.