One of the biggest blockers to SaaS product development is scaling integrations. Yet, without relevant and popular integrations no SaaS business can struggle to close more deals. SaaS integrations can play a major role in accelerating data exchange and improving customer and employee experience leading to business growth. SaaS integrations facilitate scalability and even has the potential to add more revenue.
What are SaaS integrations?
Let’s dive straight into what integrations are. As a developer, there are several software functionalities that you may want to offer. You can incorporate such functionalities within your application via ‘INTEGRATIONS’.
Integrations connect different applications via their API or Application Programming Interface. This enables the applications to exchange data and communicate. Thus, integrations can help you provide a holistic technology solution for your customers. Here, everything works as a unified interface. For instance, if you have a SaaS solution for employee engagement, you can use an integration to help your customers directly capture key engagement data into a CRM they are using.
Importance of integrations for SaaS businesses
When it comes to developers, especially for SaaS businesses, integrations are important. There are several benefits of integrations for technical readiness and business impact, including:
1. Product enhancement with customer intel with integration use
When you use different integrations, you receive important data about your customers. You may not be able to capture the same without the said integration.
For instance, if you have a chatbot integration and you see your customers spending a great amount of time engaging with the same, you may want to add this software functionality to your core offering. This will help you enhance the value of your product for your customer. You will be able to achieve better experience and stickiness.
2. Better customer experience: Leading to faster acquisition and retention
Customers today no longer wish to toggle from one platform to another. They don’t want to manually carry their data. Integrations have a tangible impact on customer experience. They allow customers to address all their requirements from a unified platform. Thus, all their important data has one melting point.
Such a unified interface will help you keep your existing customers, and also help you get new ones. This will help you achieve higher market penetration at a lower cost.
3. Increased engagement/ greater use time with users
When you have many integrations, chances are higher that your customers will engage with your application more than if you have no integrations. Having integration with trigger notification reduces the need to switch apps and makes customers spend more time on your tool.
This increased time spent by customers can be vital for you to gauge consumer behavior. With this, you can create new functionalities to improve the user interface and user experience for your customers.
4. New source of revenue: Upgrade potential
Adding more integrations can help you create new business models and unlock new sources of revenue.
While you can offer some integrations in your base pricing model, there can be others which you can offer in a tiered pricing strategy. Here, your customers will need to upgrade their package or subscription to the next tier. This will enable you to get more revenue for the integrations you are offering.
Furthermore, if you have integrations that need in-app purchases or payments that you can route through your app, creating another revenue opportunity for you. If you are facilitating sales for any integrated application/ software, you are eligible for commissions. This is another business model worth exploring, besides generating revenue for your application.
API integrations Vs No-code/ workflow tools for integrations
API integrations
API integrations are integrations which are built in-house to provide for data exchange with other third party softwares.
Pros of API integrations
- Own a part of the code for the integration
- Make customizations as and when needed
- Ensure all working parts of different applications work well for you
When to use API integrations?
Choose API integrations if you:
- Want to keep a part of the code for your control
- Have a robust team of developers in-house
- Need customizations for a better customer experience.
No-code/ workflow tools
No-code or workflow tools are less resource and effort intensive and cost effective. They are becoming sought after by citizen developers.
Pros and cons of no-code/workflow tools
- Get a drag and drop solution for integrations
- No need to work on the backend codebase
- Add integrations at lower developmental costs
When to use no-code/workflow tools?
Choose no-code/workflow tools is you:
- Have limited technical capabilities with many priorities in the product development roadmap
- Don’t want to invest in maintenance and other efforts
- Wish to only focus on your product functionalities
- Want to add integrations to your solution and go to market within days.
Challenges to SaaS integrations
Integrations seem to be one of the most important prerequisites for businesses today. But, many SaaS companies struggle with the following challenges when it comes to integrations:
1. Effort of doing integrations in-house
First, achieving SaaS integrations in-house can be expensive, time consuming and resource heavy. There are strategies like ETL (extract, transform, and load) for SaaS integrations. But, they need high levels of training and technical expertise.
Second, in-house integrations also need optimized data transformation. This helps ensure data communication between applications is at the right place at the right time. Achieving this level of accuracy is time and cost intensive.
Finally, implementation of integrations in-house comes with its set of security challenges. Multi-layer security controls are also important, which may be difficult to ensure in-house.
To understand the ROI and compare the cost of building and managing integrations in-house vs using an API aggregator like Knit, read our in-depth guide on Build vs Buy
2. Maintenance cost and effort of integrations
As a developer, you would agree that technology is changing at a fast pace. Thus, integration deployment is an ongoing process. With technology and business priorities changing, you may need new integrations frequently. At the same time, the maintenance costs of integrations can be quite high. This is to ensure they run smoothly and are bug free.
Besides building new integrations, some existing ones might need to be re-implemented. You may also need to change some integrations with other products in the same segment.
Wrapping up: TL DR
To sum it up, it is evident that integrations can help a SaaS business in many ways. Here are some of the top reasons why you should consider integrations from a technology lens:
- Close more deals
- Greater innovation with customer insights from third party applications
- Reduction in errors which may result due to manual communication of data
Integrations can help you deliver the best products to your customers. This comes without extra burden on new code development on you or your IT team. You can use dedicated integration platforms (iPaaS) to facilitate the following —
- Shorter development cycle leading to faster time to market
- Lower costs of achieving goals in product development roadmap
- Easier codebase focusing only on product core functionalities
- Increase in development productivity and efficiency
