As a SaaS business, you need a logical flow of campaigns that nurture, educate, and promote. SaaS email marketing can be one of the most effective ways to reach your goals. However, SaaS email is complex.
People often find it overwhelming because there’s a lot to factor in. Therefore, we’ve created this guide with the definition, benefits, a step-by-step strategy, examples, and tips to help you.
Let’s dive right in!
What Is Email Marketing for SaaS?
SaaS email marketing is a specific type of email marketing. Companies selling software as a service (SaaS) use it to nurture leads, convert them into paying customers, and retain them.
While other businesses also use beginner email marketing for these purposes, it’s a bit more complex for SaaS companies. These companies often offer a free trial to users so they can get a feel for it before buying it. People using these trials are not really customers.
SaaS companies use email drip campaigns to convert subscribers and users into paying customers. The goal is to use email sequences that nurture, educate, and promote. These sequences often include campaigns like welcome emails, lead nurturing campaigns, newsletters, educational demos, and new feature introductions.
With SaaS marketing, you can’t judge each campaign individually because they work together to achieve multiple goals. For example, promotional emails without educational ones might not bring the desired results.
5 Reasons Why SaaS Businesses Should Focus on Email Marketing
Because email marketing is harder for SaaS businesses, there is no reason to ignore this powerful tool. After all, it can potentially return $36 per dollar you spend. But that’s true for all types of email marketing, so what makes SaaS emails so important?
- Widespread availability: Email is widespread. Everyone, from individuals to companies, uses it daily. People are comfortable subscribing to SaaS companies if they find the features interesting. In fact, they expect SaaS companies to educate them about their offerings through email. All you have to do is attract the right people.
- Complements content marketing: Content marketing is another important type of marketing for SaaS businesses. Demo videos, how-to articles, and step-by-step guides all work towards building trust and ultimately driving conversions. You can easily embed these things in your emails to make them more interesting and increase their effectiveness.
- Focus on customer journey: It allows you to create email marketing campaigns that align with customer journeys. For example, a new customer will get a welcome email. Similarly, instructional emails will work best for free trial users. Getting such relevant marketing keeps you on top of your customers’ minds and eventually results in customer loyalty.
- Targeted marketing: To continue the previous point, aligning emails to specific points in customer journeys promotes targeted marketing. Customers get the content they need to move on to the next step. This type of marketing improves conversion rates and brings unmatched results.
- Better customer retention: In the SaaS business model, getting more customers doesn’t translate to better business. Instead, success depends on retaining customers and promoting them to advanced subscriptions. Again, email marketing is the best way to achieve this.
Follow These 5 Steps To Create the Perfect SaaS Email Marketing Strategy
Since the beginning of this discussion, we’ve been hinting at the complexity of SaaS emails. But then, why do SaaS companies still use it? Well, it all depends on your strategy. If you have the correct information, nothing can stop you from nailing email marketing.
It all starts with setting goals and objectives for your marketing campaigns. That much is common in all email strategies, so we won’t spend too much time discussing it. The same goes for using proper methods to build email lists, conducting market research, and analyzing competitors.
What comes after these steps is different for SaaS companies. So, that’s what we’re going to focus on. With that said, here are the five steps to create the perfect SaaS email marketing strategy.
1. Treat Customers Like People, Not Numbers
As mentioned earlier, SaaS businesses might have a lot of trial users who haven’t converted into customers yet. Since every business is about making money, having such users isn’t a measure of success. That’s why you must treat your customers like people, not numbers, when creating an email marketing strategy.
This means looking deeply into your target audience. Pay attention to their demographics, behaviors, and interests. This will help you create better segments for your strategy.
Moreover, don’t forget that many of your customers will be other companies. Therefore, you must also pay attention to businesses as a whole.
For example, what a company’s owner does in their personal life doesn’t matter. However, how they make decisions for their company and how those decisions involve your software make all the difference.
So, look at individual users and companies and create segments based on their position in the customer journey.
2. Align Campaigns to Customer Journey
Once you’ve created the segments, decide what types of emails you’ll send to which segment. For SaaS businesses, these emails usually fall within three categories: marketing emails, lifecycle emails, and transactional emails.
It’s pretty obvious what marketing emails are and what they do. You simply promote your offerings using these emails. Some people think of this as the most important category. However, the truth is that SaaS businesses should send these emails later in the customer journey.
On the other hand, lifecycle emails focus on nurturing your leads. They include onboarding emails, educational emails, win-back emails, and feedback collection emails. These can fit anywhere in the customer journey.
For example, onboarding and welcome emails should go as the first email. Feedback collection emails should go after the customer has used your software for some time.
Lastly, transactional emails are notifications that you’ll send based on user action. These include password reset emails, verification emails, payment renewals, etc.
3. Create the Content for Your Marketing Campaigns
The next step is to create the content for your marketing campaigns. This step overlaps with those of SaaS emails and other businesses. Still, it’s important to review the best practices to avoid any issues.
So, firstly, email marketing campaigns work best when you personalize the content. The previous steps will help with this since you’ll align the content to where the customer stands. However, you can use specific customer data to make the emails more relevant to the particular customer.
For example, you can use the customer’s name, talk about their history with you, and give personal recommendations.
Secondly, design your emails to keep your customers’ interest. Huge walls of text never fascinate anyone. If you want your customers to read the whole email, add white space between paragraphs and use bullet points.
Moreover, use images, videos, links, and colors in your content. Align the design with your branding.
Thirdly, maintain a balance between a professional and friendly tone. We’ll discuss the copywriting part later in this article, but remember to keep things clear and to the point.
If there’s any business that truly understands the value of automation, it’s a SaaS business. Automated emails allow you to reduce redundant tasks and focus on things that matter. Plus, they take away chances of errors, giving you peace of mind.
Besides, it’s easy for customer inquiries and other messages to slip your eye occasionally. But with email automation, you can keep them engaged with automatic responses.
You can even use an email marketing platform to create the content. These tools often have easy-to-use editors where you simply have to enter the content. Some even go as far as helping you with insightful tips. So, choose a platform that fits your needs and schedule your emails.
Now, there are two ways to do this. You can either create email workflows based on customer actions or behaviors. For instance, if a customer needs to update their software, email them asking if they need help. This is the perfect example of a behavioral trigger. Or you can send an automated invoice when a customer buys your software.
On the other hand, you can create a fixed schedule and determine the sequence of emails. Here, the email won’t depend on customer actions but on their journeys. Both will make your life easier while always reaching your customers on time.
5. Track Your Results and Improvise Consistently
The last step in any email marketing should be tracking and measurement. The same goes for SaaS businesses.
Measuring your mass email marketing efforts brings you actionable insights that help you improve your strategies and bring better results.
For example, if you find that you’re getting lower open rates than average, you can work on your subject lines. Making them more interesting will increase your open rates.
If you don’t measure these things, you might not know what’s wrong. Continuing things that don’t work for you is the worst approach to any type of marketing.
So, decide how you’ll track your campaigns. For this, you’ll have to choose some email marketing metrics. Most companies measure things like open rates, conversion rates, click-through rates (CTRs), share rates, etc.
However, each campaign has a different goal, so you’ll have to choose metrics for each campaign and your overall goals.
SaaS Email Marketing Examples: Campaigns That Bring You Results
Since this discussion began, we’ve emphasized the importance of aligning your campaigns to customer journeys. Now, it’s time to put things into perspective by looking at some SaaS email marketing examples.
- Welcome emails: Welcome emails set the stage for future campaigns and make a great first impression. So, send a warm and friendly welcome email when a customer signs up. Tell them what they can expect with your emails. Shopify does a great job of congratulating customers for starting a new business when they first sign up.
- Visual recommendations: These email campaigns combine two of the most effective tactics: visual appeal and personalization. The best example of this campaign is Canva. It sends multiple template examples in various sizes and orientations that motivate customers to try them.
- Onboarding emails: People often combine welcome emails and onboarding emails, thinking they’re the same thing. That’s not the best route since you’ll have to cram everything into one email. So, keep your welcome emails separate and focus on acquisition through onboarding emails like Monday.com does. It sends separate onboarding emails, linking to a demo video to pique customer interest.
- Upgrade opportunity emails: Another important campaign for an SaaS business is an upgrade opportunity email. Take Basecamp, for instance. It notifies users through email when their trial expires. It also uses this opportunity to state the paid plan’s benefits. Follow in its footsteps if you want to convert trial users.
3 Tips and Best Practices That Make Your SaaS Email Marketing More Successful
Did you know that the average CTR for SaaS emails is 16.05%? That’s a lot when compared to other businesses. However, not all SaaS businesses get such numbers, and there’s a reason.
A lot can go wrong if you ignore your SaaS email marketing campaigns. Even the smallest mistake can drastically sabotage your results.
So, now that you’ve explored the steps to build a strategy and some examples, it’s time to learn some tips. These tips will help you avoid email marketing mistakes and make your campaigns more successful.
1. Give People a Reason To Subscribe
SaaS emails aren’t just about what goes into the email content. You could write the best content and still get poor results. One of the reasons for this is building a weak email list or buying one!
If people aren’t interested in your content, they won’t buy your software, no matter how good it is. So, you must use proper ways to build an email list. Give people a reason to subscribe, like an exclusive trial, special discounts and offers, early access, etc.
Moreover, give value to your customers. Tell them what they’ll get out of your email marketing campaigns. Make everything about them instead of praising your software. This will give you genuinely interested people who are to convert later on.
2. Showcase User Success Stories
The best way to convince people to buy your software is to showcase how it has helped others. Since you can include rich content in emails, it’s one of the best mediums to showcase success stories.
So, use these in your emails to build trust and ultimately convert customers. For this, you’ll have to focus on the pain points your customers usually face. That warrants a scan of the market to see what problems people face. Then, demonstrate how other customers solved those problems through your software.
It doesn’t make sense to create exceptional strategies only to get hasty when writing the content. Your words matter as much as your offer. In fact, using the wrong words means you won’t be able to get the point across. The best solution is to use proven copywriting formulas.
- Problem, agitate, solve (PAS): This involves setting a problem, intensifying its impact, and presenting a solution.
- Before-after-bridge (BAB): Here, you identify the problem, discuss the improved situation, and present a solution to bridge the two.
- Features, benefits, advantages (FBA): This discusses the software features, why it stands out from the competition, and how it benefits customers.
Frequently Asked Questions About SaaS Email Marketing
What tone should I use for Saas emails?
Effective SaaS emails usually balance a professional and friendly tone. One thing that helps here is using your own brand’s voice. For example, if your branding is playful, you can add humor to your emails.
However, an email should never be strictly professional. It’s not like you’re writing a legal document. So, make sure your customers feel welcome when they read your emails.
Does email marketing work for SaaS?
Yes, email marketing works wonders for SaaS businesses. It helps them nurture leads, upsell, and cross-sell by building connections.
However, it all depends on how much you help your customers throughout their journeys. You can’t expect amazing results by only focusing on promotional emails.
What are the characteristics of a good subject line?
A good subject is short, relevant, and to the point. It tells customers exactly what they can expect in the email while being interesting enough. Moreover, it gives customers that “push” to open the email.
One criterion marketers use to judge their subject lines is CURVE. It stands for curiosity, urgency, relevancy, value, and emotion. If your subject line has at least two of these characteristics, it’s good to go.
Personalize Your SaaS Marketing Through Emails
SaaS email marketing is a powerful, cost-effective tool to convert users into customers. You can nurture leads and build meaningful relationships with your customers. When you’re at the forefront of their email inboxes presenting relevant content, they become loyal customers. But for that, you must pay attention to your strategy.
If you don’t align your content to the customer journey, you might not experience the true potential. To build your SaaS email marketing strategy, try Beambox.
Beambox leverages its marketing platform’s powerful features, such as targeted email campaigns, personalized landing pages, and automated lead nurturing.
Get your free trial here!
