A Salesforce company as of 2021, Slack is part of a massive ecosystem containing some of the world’s most-adopted business systems. Speaking at the 2023 Dreamforce event, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff provided several examples of how (“Slack-first”) AI companies are building their products within Slack itself. This Slack-first strategy capitalizes on Slack’s impressive communications infrastructure but also on the fact that Slack houses an ever growing database of valuable business context for each of its customers. As of 2023, over 200,000 organizations are using Slack, including 80% of Fortune 100s, with 32M monthly active users and 19M daily active users. With such a massive user-base offering both high engagement and rich data context, all SaaS products need to be seriously considering their Slack integration strategy and the opportunity cost of not making this platform a priority.
“Slack is not just a system of engagement, but a system of record.” - Marc Benioff
SaaS businesses looking to capitalize on the “future of work” should be looking to Slack as a critical user engagement hub and go-to-market channel for their products and services. Integrating and building out ways that Slack users can access your technology can be the difference-maker in engagement, retention, and expansion.
To Drive Engagement: Stop making your users leave the party
According to Gartner, enterprise IT leaders report that the piloting of digital workplace tools almost doubled to 82% in 2020 from 44% in 2019. Company-wide collaboration ecosystems like Slack allow businesses to reach their customers directly, and provide an effective way to engage and retain existing users, as well as dramatically increasing the reach and scale of services.
When your product lives in Slack, you have access to all of its tools to create more interaction points with your customers. You’re also removing the friction of switching workflows, enabling people to respond and interact with your services where the work conversations are already happening.
Asana’s Slack integration, for example, has added a “layer of accountability” to Slack conversations between users. Asana provides actionable notifications and contextual features like Slack’s messages shortcuts, enabling users to coordinate all of their efforts in one place, across multiple teams, rather than having to risk context switching away from their primary communication tool.
Engagement can be critical for certain use cases, like incident-response, where real-time action is the difference between crisis and resolution. Building a standalone tool that forcibly migrates customers away from where they’re already working and conversing is no longer practical, which is why Incident.io built their Slack integration. When the goal is to make incidents as low-impact as possible, the optimal solution is to be where everything looks familiar, and where everybody is already talking.
To Craft Stickiness: Put your product in the digital water cooler
Slack provides the unique opportunity to weave your SaaS offering deeply into the social infrastructure of a workplace. Every rich Slack message is another step toward raising your brand profile and awareness for those clients and customers, especially when you deliver a positive experience.
Created in response to a business need for workplace culture in the digital realm, Donut is a Slack-first company designed to boost workplace connection and social integration. When you join a Slack channel, the Donut app automatically introduces teammates in a DM and breaks the ice for you. It also tracks team member milestones, such as birthdays and work anniversaries.
Consistent engagement fosters retention and positive CSAT scores, and makes it easy on your client to keep your product in the budget.
To Land & Expand: Supercharge your freemium approach
There are plenty of Slack Integrations that are available freely to all users within an org. If you’ve used Slack before for work or in your personal life, you’re probably familiar with integrations for Gmail, Calendly, or Zapier, the automation engine that lets you automate custom workflows and processes from over 3,000 different apps.
What you might not know is that new Zapier users who connected Slack on their first day are 150% more likely to become paying customers in the future. And compared to other app integrations, Slack users are 10% more likely to convert to paid users.
And here’s an even less well known growth hack: everyone in SaaS is familiar with the freemium strategy. Embedding your app inside of your customers’ Slack instances provides unique opportunities to deploy freemium techniques by increasing visibility to unpaid users and offering seamless upgrade paths. By offering limited free functionality to all of your customers’ Slack users you can then gate advanced functionality, letting users request access without leaving Slack. This strategy provides invaluable social proof empowering your sales & customer success teams to drive customer expansion.
If you build it, they will come already be there
Slack is the most widely-adopted business productivity platform in the enterprise. No longer simply a messaging tool, Slack has evolved into an entire app development platform and ecosystem for putting useful and delightful SaaS products directly into the hands of business users. For any new or existing SaaS business, when you think about Slack you should be thinking about more than just converting email notifications into messages. A robust, thoughtful Slack App should be one of your highest priorities for expanding your business and driving revenue.
Want help planning your Slack integration approach?
Quorum1 is an official partner of Salesforce and Slack, with hundreds of certifications across our growing team of specialists. Slack is an amazing platform and we are passionate about helping our clients use it to its fullest.
Through the experience of building dozens of Slack apps, the Quorum1 team has amassed a collection of best practices, templates, and workflows that help us streamline every step of the process of building your next Slack integration.
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