6 Ways to Optimize Revenue Streams in 2025
Service. This single word is often skimmed over in discussions about software-as-a-service (SaaS). But focusing on service—on the process of providing support throughout the customer lifecycle—is essential for optimizing SaaS offerings, strengthening customer retention, and optimizing revenue streams.
Without appropriate software usage data and a comprehensive understanding of the entire software monetization landscape, meeting customers’ needs and your own annual recurring revenue (ARR) goals is challenging.
Fortunately, better practices are possible to help optimize revenue streams in 2025.
Growing SaaS Popularity Demands Revenue Optimization
SaaS is more in demand each year. Today, SaaS is the most widely used software deployment model, as detailed in the Revenera Monetization Monitor: Software Monetization Models and Strategies 2025 Outlook report.
Drawing on more than 400 survey responses, this report looks at software producers’ business models, pricing, usage, and transparency, including the following:
- Where SaaS is the most popular deployment model, the most popular monetization (pricing) model is subscription/term. But this is in the context of growing reliance on hybrid deployment models, where software producers are offering multiple deployment models, often still including on-premises deployments, which are showing staying power.
- Today, 86% use SaaS at least moderately, and 27% use it extensively.
- In the coming year and a half, SaaS is expected to grow as a percentage of overall software license revenue for 61% of respondents, putting it in the lead, tied with private cloud deployments.
- 85% of respondents have transitioned or are transitioning software products from on-premises to SaaS deployments.
- Nearly 3⁄4 of respondents transitioned not just one but multiple products to SaaS.
Software producers and IoT device manufacturers aren’t only rolling out SaaS. They’re facing new pressures, like how to incorporate and monetize their artificial intelligence (AI) offerings, how to monitor surging cloud costs, how to introduce new monetization models (such as elastic licensing), and how to do all of this in a hybrid environment, with a mix of deployment and/or monetization/licensing models. It’s complicated.
Optimizing revenue requires clarity into how the software is being used. Without it, producers face significant challenges in understanding what customers want, how they use products, and how to meet their needs. Effective approaches to software usage data collection and analysis can aid initiatives related to aligning price and value, speeding time-to-market for products, and meeting revenue goals.
Leverage Tech to Optimize Revenue in These 6 Ways
Some effective tools can help CTOs and their teams streamline and optimize their initiatives. Each of these is in the service of doing right by your customers and improving their experiences with your product.
- Know what you’re up against: Overcoming barriers to revenue growth requires clarity into impediments. Getting a product or feature to market efficiently is the top hurdle. Once it’s launched, issues related to the customer experience (which can slow customer acquisition or accelerate customer churn) can play a big role. And users’ reliance on unlicensed software (through privacy, overuse, and misuse) may be a sign that entitlement management initiatives need to be strengthened in order to prevent these forms of revenue leakage.
- Recognize and remedy customer churn: A third (33%) of respondents cite customer churn as a barrier to growing ARR, but only about 1 in 5 (21%) monitor support tickets to spot churn risk. Because SaaS is commonly monetized through subscription models, software producers must ensure that customers are engaged with products throughout the subscription term in order to renew. This requires a focus on engagement and quality customer service throughout the lifecycle.
- Gain accurate insights into how customers use your products: Determining engagement with your SaaS through the customer lifecycle requires software usage data. What products are they using? What features do they use regularly? Where are common dropoff points in customers’ usage of your product? Have they upgraded from their trial or freemium access?
Automating the collection of entitlement management data, usage data, and engagement data is essential. Use—and take action on—automated notifications, such as those triggered by low customer engagement/activity.
- Align price and value: A good way to lose a customer—and revenue from them—is to charge a price that doesn’t align with its perceived value. Ensuring this alignment requires pricing strategies that include analyzing and acting on data about user personas and their priorities, eliminating the silos and disparate systems that impede a single view of the customers, monetizing the most valuable features of your products, and ensuring that you’re offering the monetization models your customers want.
- Guard against subscription fatigue: Users are becoming reluctant to add an additional recurring payment to their budgets. If your organization faces the impact of subscription fatigue on SaaS, it’s time to evaluate a more flexible path to software monetization.
In addition to subscription monetization, explore how to offer pay-per-use access, either with metered access to features or prepaid flexible credits (sometimes called metered tokens or consumptive tokens), which can give general access to an entire portfolio. This enables customers to have cross-portfolio access, allowing them to use your products as they need, such as for seasonal or project-based demands, to try a new feature or product, or when adjusting to fluctuating usage needs.
Supporting this usage-based approach provides customers with the desired access to your software. It also allows a producer to augment their existing sales strategy by identifying cross-sell and upsell opportunities; it can also support entry into new markets by offering easy points of entry to your software.
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Use Technology to Prioritize Your Service as Much as Your Software
Consider the diverse needs and values of your customers. What one customer prioritizes may not be important to another. The only way to get accurate insights is through accurate software usage data.
Now’s the time to prioritize your software usage analytics initiatives in order to optimize your revenue in the new year and beyond.
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