Today we’re crossing industry lines — and bringing SaaS strategy into the audience development world.
Here’s the opportunity:
Audience development is increasingly a SaaS-like discipline. We have users, cohorts, activation curves, and LTV — we just don’t always measure or manage them like SaaS does.
Let’s change that.
🔁 Rethinking Retention: Not Just for Subscribers
In SaaS, retention isn’t just about paid accounts — it’s about product stickiness and daily habit formation.
Media teams should treat email readers, podcast listeners, and app users the same way:
- Are they coming back?
- Are they consuming more over time?
- Are they deepening their relationship (e.g., sharing, referring, subscribing)?
SaaS Tactic to Steal:
Engagement scoring. Assign values to actions:
- Email open = 1 pt
- Click = 2 pts
- Article read = 3 pts
- Comment/post = 5 pts
- Share/referral = 10 pts
Track user scores weekly. Set thresholds for when to intervene (win-back, upsell, thank-you, etc.).
🎯 Treating Onboarding as a Product
SaaS teams obsess over Day 1 and Day 7 experiences.
Why? Because early experience is predictive of long-term value.
Apply that to media:
- Do new newsletter subscribers get a welcome sequence that teaches them what to expect?
- Do you ask for preferences or guide them to best-of content?
- Do you track how many engage in their first 7 days?
The sooner a user feels the value, the longer they’ll stick around.
🧠 Customer Success = Audience Success
SaaS has entire departments focused on helping users get value from the product.
What if media brands treated their audience that way?
Audience Ops Mindset:
- Assign “segment owners” for top audience cohorts
- Create onboarding + nurture + retention flows by persona
- Run quarterly feedback loops to gather NPS, intent, and unmet needs
This mindset transforms your audience team from content publishers to experience designers.
💸 LTV, CAC, and Payback Period for Audience Dev
If you don’t speak in SaaS economics yet, it’s time.
- LTV (Lifetime Value): Revenue generated over a user’s time on file
- CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost): What you spent to get that email address or subscriber
- Payback Period: How long it takes for CAC to be covered by monetization
These aren’t just finance KPIs — they’re how you prioritize strategy.
If CAC is $7 and LTV is $8… you have a problem.
If CAC is $7 and LTV is $45… scale up fast.
📣 SaaS Is Built on Feedback Loops
SaaS teams don’t launch features and walk away. They test, measure, iterate.
Media teams should:
- Run A/B tests on onboarding sequences
- Test subject line tone for each segment
- Track subscriber journey length from email to paid
- Close the loop: every major campaign should include qualitative and quantitative debriefs
SaaS builds systems.
Media too often builds moments.
Final Thought: SaaS Is the Future of Audience Strategy
Media isn’t software. But audience development is now a product — with users, usage, metrics, and ROI.
The teams that win in 2025 will:
- Think in funnels, not campaigns
- Measure engagement like product usage
- Treat audience satisfaction like customer success
This shift is already happening.
The only question is whether your team is managing your audience like a product — or just publishing and hoping for the best.
✉️ Forward this to someone in media who’s SaaS-curious. Or reply and tell me: what SaaS tactic has helped you rethink your audience playbook?