Email marketing is still the best digital marketing channel for SaaS companies seeking to get new users and nurture the ones already acquired. However, things change quickly in the world of SaaS, and most SaaS businesses find it challenging to stay on top.
This comprehensive tutorial breaks down email marketing for SaaS companies. It explains what SaaS email marketing is, its major features, its importance, and actionable tips for SaaS companies to run effective email campaigns.
What is SaaS Email Marketing?
Email is being used as a channel to market SaaS products and services to customers, known as SaaS email marketing. It informs users of new features, promotions, surveys, and so on.
The goal is to engage both potential and existing users who have subscribed to receive a company’s offers. Common SaaS email marketing campaigns include:
- Lead-nurturing sequences to convert subscribers
- Regular newsletters with curated content
- Promotional emails highlighting deals and offers
- Product or service update announcements
- Customer surveys to gather feedback
One of the greatest advantages of email marketing from email SaaS providers is the capability to segment subscribers based on different attributes such as demographics, user behavior, etc. This enables one to send hyper-targeted content that has the greatest impact on a user segment.
Moreover, using tools for automating email marketing allows communicating with a greater number of people without much effort and tracking campaign performance through analysis.
Key Features of SaaS Email Marketing
SaaS products have their specific nuances, and while basic email marketing principles apply in almost all cases, there are some things to consider for such types of products:
Personalization
SaaS marketing emails statistics show that personalizing your email increases transaction rates up to 6 times! Using personal data to craft emails helps in increasing open and click-through rates.
Personalizing subject lines and messages with data points such as the user’s location, age, recent site activities, past purchases, etc., will make it more relevant for the users. Some examples are sending out recommendations in terms of recent cart items or creating CTAs that are in line with the funnel stage.
Even small personalization cues pay off, such as the recipient’s name. More personalization ideas can be provided by AI writing assistants.
Customer Education
User onboarding and user retention are important for customer education. If onboarded properly, 86% of users will stay loyal, while 75% will switch due to confusing onboarding.
SaaS companies should educate subscribers throughout the customer lifecycle via:
- Dedicated onboarding sequences
- In-app guides and tooltips
- Contextual help notifications
- Newsletter tutorials
- Blogs and help centers
Further, SaaS emails can highlight common pain points and position your product as the solution. For instance, an email can showcase how your SaaS application integrates with reliable data scraping tools to help businesses automate data collection.
Customer Success Stories
Storytelling makes facts 22 times more memorable. Emails with customer success cases can convince the prospects by painting real-life stories where the SaaS solved their problems.
Such emails may contain:
- High-level summaries of how the SaaS helped clients
- Detailed standalone case studies
- User-specific success story emails
An annual recap email with visual highlights of a customer’s journey and a celebration of their achievements, but also social proof of the SaaS value, may be suggested as an example.
Incentivized Referrals
Referred users have 30% higher conversion rates and 16% more lifetime value. Promoting exciting referral perks in emails can thus accelerate growth. Offers may include:
- Free service credits
- Discounts on subscription plans
- Cash rewards or gift cards
- Entries into prize draws
Incentives vary by type and size based on factors such as industry, customer LTV, cost per acquisition, etc. You can flaunt those referral perks, but the principle remains.
Product Updates
Emails delivering product feature updates or new product features display the ongoing value of your SaaS. This further entrenches the product into their workflow. Similar behavior also leads to better engagement and retention for SaaS vendors.
Update emails may announce:
- Major product launches
- New feature additions
- Improved or updated UI/UX
- Expanded third-party integrations
- Bug fixes and performance improvements
- Sneak peeks at upcoming changes
Overall, position updates are progress towards helping users overcome their business challenges better.
Account Activation Reminders
Reminder emails can help you recover users who signed up but did not activate their accounts or those who became inactive over time. Start with looking into falloffs – is your onboarding flow confusing?
Otherwise, if you are not running win-back campaigns with account activation links and perks like discounted plans for early renewals, then you can run win-back campaigns with account activation links. The game of the best email marketing SaaS is to keep users engaged.
Free Trial Reminder Emails
The users will not always move to paid plans after using SaaS free trials. That is why you keep reminding users about expiring trials so they can see your SaaS value firsthand.
Carefully crafted emails tactfully highlight the SaaS, showcasing its key features and alleviating their pains. This motivates continuing product usage post-trial.
Why Email Marketing Matters For SaaS Companies
Now that we’ve considered real-life SaaS email marketing examples, let’s discuss why it’s fundamental:
Proven Results
Campaign Monitor reckons that email marketing has the highest ROI of all the digital channels, with more than 3600% ROI! Productivity apps such as Mail Merge help in scaling out outreach by simply having lower costs than paid ads or direct mail.
Driving Conversions
SaaS lead generation stats show that if you send email to your lead subscribers, then they have 2x more social shares, 138% higher spending, and are more likely to convert. Personalized content and offers help nurture subscribers through content and increase conversions.
Customer Intelligence
The recorded metrics on the campaign dashboard can help track open and click-through rates and unsubscribe metrics, thereby giving you actionable data on customer engagement and preferences. It helps SaaS email marketing strategies to be improved continuously.
Building Relationships
Email communication is regular and valuable; it builds trust and nourishes the audience. This keeps the brand a bit more in their heads and also seems less stereotypical. This boosts customer lifetime value.
While advantages abound, there are a few limitations such as:
- Demanding strategies with extensive testing and optimization
- Time-intensive initial setup with delayed ROI
- Low reach for ultra-niche personas
But with a methodical approach, the pros far outweigh the cons for most email marketing SaaS companies.
How To Do Email Marketing For SaaS Products
Successful SaaS email marketing requires continuous analysis and iteration. But following a structured game plan helps maximize results:
Step 1: Strategize campaigns
Define your goal – is it user acquisition or engagement? Personalize or batch target? What sequences and frequencies work best?
Outlining these strategic factors allows us to pick a suitable saas email marketing platform
accordingly.
Step 2: Collect subscriber data
Ethically collect user data like email addresses to build your subscriber list. Lead magnets like exclusive tools or content upgrades in exchange for emails work great.
Apply validation through email verification tools to remove misidentified or inactive email addresses that could cause bad deliverability.
Step 3: Create and send campaigns
Create draft, personalized, valuable email content for user segments. Use different formats such as promotions, educational sequences, surveys, and more.
Email editor tools help build attractive filters and reduce flow stress for a campaign. Then test and iterate.
Step 4: Analyze performance
Analyzing track open rate, clicks, unsubscribes, conversions, and other metrics is the only way to gauge the performance of the campaign. Run A/B tests with subject lines, content, etc., to optimize further.
The key is continuously improving based on data insights to maximize SaaS email success.
Conclusion
Email is a must for SaaS brands to reach their customers throughout the lifecycle, from acquisition to retention. Funnels can be moved pieces and require strategy, but you can keep playing them on an analytical level to continually optimize them.
The guide contains everything that SaaS marketers need to know to grow their business through effective email campaigns, the use of SaaS email types and their importance, as well as execution tips. All you have to do is follow the iterative methodology of improvement.
These are great personalization opportunities and highly proven ROI, which make SaaS email marketing strategy a major channel for SaaS products. This guide will serve as a SaaS email blueprint to set the stage for starting to build a relationship with your subscribers, one that eventually leads to business growth.
