There are only a few marketing channels that can compete with email marketing in terms of ROI. Emails deliver exceptional results for every dollar spent, thus making them a highly profitable way to promote your SaaS business. Unlocking the power of email marketing is a key strategy to boost your SaaS revenue and grow your business. Care to learn how? Read on to discover how to use SaaS email marketing to drive more sales. But before anything, what exactly is SaaS email marketing?
What Is SaaS Email Marketing?
SaaS email marketing is about creating and sending email campaigns to promote SaaS products to recipients. Any SaaS business can leverage an email marketing strategy to target both existing and potential customers since it could serve different purposes, from onboarding to retention. At first glance, SaaS email marketing is about convincing people to buy your software. However, a one-and-done sale won’t cut it for making the most out of your overall marketing strategy.
And that’s where email marketing comes in. With such a powerful tool, limiting your efforts to drive conversions is like leaving money on the table. After all, SaaS email marketing bears fruits even after a company decides to convert into a customer. It’s the right time to onboard team members and provide them with the most valuable resources that will help them meet their marketing goals. And that’s a far more complex process than convincing them to buy. To help you through this challenging task, let’s find out the most effective ways to boost your SaaS revenue with emails.
What’s great about email marketing is that it enables SaaS businesses to establish regular communication with their recipients, build trusting relationships, and increase the chances of recurring revenue. But first, you need to invest in the right SaaS email marketing strategies to nurture your subscribers throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
1. Pick the Right Email Marketing Software
In email marketing, everything starts with the right tool. As a SaaS business, you need to pick an email marketing platform that offers segmentation and personalization features that help you target the right audience at the right time. A solid ESP gives you the tools to create compelling email campaigns, tailor their content to fit each recipient’s interests and aspirations, track the results based on your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and further optimize the process for future efforts.
But even more importantly, you need to ensure that the email marketing software of your choosing provides automation options to craft and dispatch automated emails based on specific actions. Solid email automation software reduces the workload since you only have to set up your automated emails in advance.
These sequences will be triggered by specific user behavior, for instance, when someone registers for a free trial. You can even use automated emails for customer support-related issues. When a customer raises a ticket, all you need to do is automate the first interaction and offer access to the corresponding resources, such as an FAQ, saving your customer service representatives time.
With this type of software, you can build your automation workflow from scratch based on the conditional steps that best serve your business objectives. Otherwise, you may use any pre-built automation recipe, either taking it as it comes or editing it according to your needs. Then, once a user takes a specific action, they will receive a corresponding email without you moving a finger. And trust us when we say that customers love immediate responses, especially when doing business with SaaS companies.
2. Personalize Your Email Content
When it comes to recipient engagement, nothing beats personalized content. Personalization has evolved from a tried and tested strategy to an absolute prerequisite for any type of marketing email. Email personalization entails leveraging customer data to create targeted messages that match your readers' preferences. Unlike the common belief, personalization still works wonders for your email marketing, allowing you to incorporate the email components that best suit your target demographic.
But for email personalization to hit its mark, you first need to know and understand your audience. Until quite recently, using a subscriber’s name in the email subject line would do the trick. But things have changed; nowadays, you should collect as much information as you can about your customers and manage the data gathered to craft relevant messages. Here are some examples of the data you can use to personalize your email campaigns:
- Demographic data like their geolocation, gender, or age
- Behavioral data, such as their browsing or purchasing history
- Special dates like their birthday or anniversary is your client
- Psychographic information like their interests or pain points
The sky is the limit when customizing your email content for each subscriber. The more specific you get, the better the chances of turning recipients into loyal customers. Use the data at your disposal to dispatch personalized campaigns such as cart abandonment or product recommendation emails. Especially for product recommendations, though, try to limit the options to a couple of products you think are relevant to your reader’s needs and showcase how these products will help them address their challenges. Overwhelming them with choices will most likely drive them away instead of engaging them.
Example – Grammarly's Email to iOS Users
3. Invest in User Onboarding
Dispatching an onboarding sequence to new users is the first step to retaining them. A poor onboarding process is among the main reasons why users might abandon a SaaS product and switch to a competitive one. On the other hand, smooth user onboarding educates users throughout the entire customer journey, which, in its turn, makes them trust your solution. Your onboarding process may range depending on the nature of your software, but the objective remains the same: removing any friction point that could lead new users to abandon it.
When the average consumer starts using new software, they need all the help they can get to understand how it works and the benefits that come with it. So, make the process of getting familiarized with your software as clear and straightforward as possible to remove the frustration that they will more or less experience. How can you do that? For example, once a new subscriber completes the registration process, consider sending a first email including a step-by-step guide to help them navigate through your SaaS product.
After that, it’s time to put your trust in customer data once more. Use behavioral data like the features they have already used to get them from step A to step B and make the most out of your software capabilities. Customer onboarding is also a great way to highlight the pain points associated with a certain business or industry and present your SaaS product as the solution. Last but not least, this type of onboarding email series relieves your customer support representatives from answering tons of onboarding questions.
Example – Slack's Onboarding Email
4. Demonstrate Your Product’s Value
You would be surprised to know how many marketers fail in highlighting their product’s value. They tend to go on and on about the product but forget the most important part of any SaaS email marketing strategy: showing value. Keeping recipients informed about the benefits of using your product and joining your email list is key to customer retention.
And benefits mean offering solutions to specific pain points, not just highlighting features you think are great. By presenting readers with tangible benefits, you convince them that the monthly subscription they pay for your SaaS solution is worthwhile. If you want to take it one step further, you could take advantage of social proof to show measurable results on how other brands reached success by using your product.
Many SaaS companies fall into the mistake of focusing on the price when promoting their product. However, the price might be a secondary consideration for many consumers who are willing to pay more for software that meets their requirements. An effective way to eliminate any doubts in their minds is offering a free trial and letting them check out your service’s effectiveness in solving their pain points for themselves.
Example – Trello's Holiday Email
5. Ask for Feedback
Asking for customer feedback is a bulletproof way to optimize your product without doing market research. Your users are a valuable resource for identifying current issues with your software and figuring out the best tactics to improve it. But asking for this type of feedback can turn into a challenging task. You readers are busy individuals that have a lot on their plates, so they might be reluctant to waste time on this process.
That’s why it’s preferable to request feedback after your recipients have taken the time to explore your product’s capabilities and you have already established a relationship with them. To motivate them to participate, make sure to highlight the importance of their insights toward creating a better solution for every user. You could even throw in some type of incentive like a small discount or an entry to a draw for all recipients that submit their feedback.
Example – Dropbox's Feedback Request Email
Final Thoughts
The SaaS industry is a highly competitive environment where you have to find the right way to stand out from the competition. SaaS email marketing provides you with all the necessary tools to create and send relevant email campaigns, thus establishing trusting and long-term relationships with your recipients. But for that to happen, you have to invest in the most effective tactics.
The 5 tactics shared above, along with the corresponding examples from successful brands, will help you target recipients with engaging and valuable content. By implementing them, you get to create personalized email messages, highlight your product’s value, and gather useful insights on how to optimize it. And the best part is that you get to save valuable time and effort for other crucial marketing tasks.
Credits: All email samples are sourced from Really Good Emails.
