How to choose the best Azure Marketplace listing type for your SaaS offer?

As an ISV, there are several Azure marketplace listing types you can choose from before publishing your offer. Depending on whether you want to give your customers a feel of what’s in store or not, whether you want them to transact directly or go through your sales process, you can make the right choice. Furthermore, you can explore a combination of Azure marketplace listing types as well based on your SaaS solution and customer expectations. Through this article, we will discuss the various types of listing available and a few best practices to ensure your Azure marketplace listing ranks well. This will help you better reap the benefits of Azure marketplace.

When you publish a listing in Azure marketplace, you will have four major options to choose from. The listing type you choose will determine the type of button or option that will be visible to your customers when they reach your offer in the Azure marketplace. The four options include Free Trial, Test Drive, Get it Now, and Contact Me. Let’s understand the meaning and use cases for each one in detail to help you make an informed choice.

What is a Free Trial?

As a Azure marketplace listing type, free trial enables you to offer your customers an option to try out the offer before monetarily committing to it. A free trial on the Azure marketplace can help customers give your solution a go in their business environment to gauge whether or not the solution makes sense for them. It is an effective way to build credibility and trust for your brand in the Azure marketplace. You can offer a free trial for a duration between 30 days to six months. In case your offer has more than one plan, the customers have the option to switch plans during the trial period, without resetting the duration clock. Using a free trial can entice more customers to try your solution and eventually become a loyal customer.

What is a Test Drive?

Similar to a free trial, test drive in the Azure marketplace listing type, enables you to provide exclusive and free access to your SaaS offer to your customers. The major difference lies in the business environment that customers use your solution. Contrary to free trial, users who select the test drive listing type don’t have to download or configure your SaaS offer. Rather, they get access to use a pre-configured business environment, much like a sandbox environment. The preconfigured environment generally lasts for a few hours and also provides a guided tour of your solution. For both Free Trial and Test Drive Azure marketplace listing types, once the pre-decided duration is over, you can engage with your customers to sign proper contracts with pricing and billing terms.

What is a Contact Me Offer?

As the name suggests, this Azure marketplace listing type enables your customers to get in touch with you to know more about the solutions. This is one of the most simple listing types available in Azure marketplace. All you need to do is publish your offer and select this option. A Contact Me option will be available on your listing. Once the customers click on this button, their important information including their name, organization, need, etc. will be captured and will be shared with you. Once you receive the information, you can follow your sales process to follow up and close the deals.

What is a Get it Now Offer?

Finally, in the last Azure marketplace listing type, your customers can directly start using your offer from the Azure marketplace once they agree to the terms and conditions. The offer can be Get it Now (free), in case your solution comes at a cost of $0.00. Transactable offers also form a part of this subsection of Azure marketplace listing. This allows your customers to pay through the marketplace directly, without elongating the sales cycle where they might need to connect with you before transacting the offer. Using the Get it Now option will prevent you from losing out on the sales from customers who might want to use the offer instantaneously, but the waiting period might act as a deterrent. When it comes to Azure marketplace listing fee, Microsoft reduced the transaction from from 20% to only 3% making transactable offers attractive for both customers and ISVs.

In some of the previous resources, we have talked about different marketing and other best practices that you can leverage as an ISV to reach your target audience in the most effective manner. This following section will help you ensure that your listing stands out in the Azure marketplace, improving its discoverability and impact.

• Make sure that your offer name includes the top keywords that your target customers might be searching for. This will ensure that your offer organically appears in their search.
• Provide a crisp and clear description of your solution. Instead of talking in detail about your product specifically, you should also focus on the user persona or target audience your solution seeks to serve. Furthermore, talk about the pain points or the challenges that your solution seeks to address.
• Have a fair mix of industry keywords and nomenclature along with your features terms. Simply focusing on features might dilute the value as some customers might have a limited understanding of the features and may have difficulty in associating them in their vocabulary.
• Have a clear high resolution logo. Optimize the same once the partner center calibrates it for use.
• Add some screenshots to help your customers get an instant look at the UI and the aesthetics and clear design of your solution.
• Incorporate a few knowledge resources to help your customers learn more about the solution. There will be limited content that you will be able to cover as a part of your solution description. For anything more that you want to share with your customer, you can add whitepapers, brochures, pitch decks, etc. Make sure all your documents are in PDF format and can be added as a URL to your Azure marketplace listing.
• Finally, make your Azure marketplace listing attractive by adding one featured video about the solution. It is best to keep the video 60-90 seconds long. Instead of focusing purely on the product or the service, focus on how it benefits the customers, the challenges it addresses, and what it can achieve overall. You can also supplement your efforts with other videos on how to use your product, customer testimonials etc. which can help the customer make an informed choice.

As an ISV, you may need help in choosing the right offer type for your Azure marketplace listing. Furthermore, you might want to convert your Contact Me offer to Get it Now offer to make it transactable. Here, SaaSify can help you with all the support you need, including:

• Publishing offers within a week with the right listing type
• Converting your contact me offer to transactable offer
• Creating a transactable offer in the Azure marketplace from scratch

You can get these and a lot more benefits for your Azure marketplace listing to make it highly effective for your ISV business with SaaSify. Book a demo today to learn everything that awaits you in the Azure marketplace.