l Marketing for SaaS: A Complete Guide For 2023

SaaS businesses offer complex customer journeys. Marketing professionals seek to reduce the time it takes to move leads down the funnel.

SaaS email marketing is a great way to get in touch with customers. Email marketing can be a game-changer for SaaS companies. Marketing specialists will resort to email campaigns and communications at various times.

This guide will provide more information on SaaS email marketing including:

• Email marketing strategies: The benefits
• These are the four main email categories that SaaS users should be aware of
• How to make your email marketing campaign more efficient
• Examples of email from top brands

Let’s begin!

What is SaaS Email Marketing?

It’s basically the act of sending emails to prospects and customers to promote your SaaS company. This will help you grow your business. Email marketing can be a powerful channel for increasing sales, brand awareness and ROI.

Specialists can also use this platform to communicate with clients and prospects, including account verification and password change.

Email Marketing for SaaS: Benefits

Let’s first look at the main purpose of this guide:

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Increases Website Traffic

Your website conversion rate will increase if your target audience interacts more with it. You can create top-quality email campaigns to direct people who are already interested in your brand to your site and nurture them with great content.

The call to action buttons can redirect. These buttons stand out from other email text and have a unique design that encourages readers to click. It can lead to conversion if the action is appealing, interesting, and relevant to your subscribers’ needs.

To avoid any confusion, optimize your website to get the best results.

Increases Your ROI

Software businesses are not always able to sustain a positive ROI. If you are able to nurture prospects at the decision stage, your revenue can continue rising.

This process can be greatly aided by email. It can make a big difference to send timely emails to prospects who are ready for purchase. Make sure that your content is appropriate for this stage and offer incentives.

You can invite them to a webinar, to show your latest features, or to inform them about the free trial. You can decide what your buyers want most.

Increase Authority in Your Industry

Consistent email outreach can be used to educate and promote your service, and help you stand out among the rest. Your subscribers will support you as long as the content is authentic.

It’s important to have your own resources such as checklists, surveys, and infographics in order to stay ahead of the curve. This will show customers that you are willing to help them every step of the way.

Furthermore, this information can be used to improve your customer service and offer a powerful SaaS tool for your customers.

Enables A Personalized Marketing Approach

Email marketing, unlike other digital marketing tools such as SEO and social media, allows you to share personal content with customers through dedicated features like custom fields. You can include the recipient’s name in the subject line, and the email introduction.

Email segmentation and marketing automation allow you to deliver targeted messages to your subscribers and encourage them to take action faster. This topic will be discussed in the SaaS email strategy section.

Main Email Categories For SaaS Companies

SaaS businesses face many challenges. These challenges can be decoded to help you approach customers in the best way possible and achieve your long-term goals.

There are four major categories of email marketing that you should consider in order to help your business goals. Let’s take a look at them!

1. Product

We’ve included product-related newsletters in this category that will help your customers digest your product and make it more useful. These newsletters can help you retain customers and improve your SaaS product.

• Updates Inform your subscribers about new features and how they will benefit.
• Surveys on NPS:Learn from customers what they think about your product to improve the product/services.
• Company announcements Share your most important news with your audience to make them feel like part of your team.
• Onboarding: Describe your product to new customers with a dedicated sequence – this is an example from Moosend

2. Marketing

How can your marketing team nurture people in different stages of the funnel via emails? This will help build trust and authority within your industry. Here are some examples.

• Content newsletter Share top-of-the-mind resources with subscribers such as whitepapers and blog posts.
• Promotional email: Tell your customers about your recent marketing activities to gain greater traction. Check out this Designmodo example regarding their Black Friday initiative.

3. Sales

You sometimes need to go above and beyond to increase conversions, especially when you offer premium plans. These are SaaS email campaigns that you can plan for in this instance:

• Offers Give incentives for leads that you want to move down the marketing channel, such as gift cards and discounts.
• Winback Campaigns:Plan Re-engagement Emails to Motivate Churned Customers to Purchase Your Service Again – Here’s what Asana did:

4. Transactional

These emails are follow up messages that are meant to reassure prospects and customers that they have completed a particular action. Here are some examples.

• Your first email to your customers when they sign up for your mailing list.
• Confirmation Email: Follow up emails to confirm that the requested action (e.g. payment, purchase, or card expiration) is completed.
• Receipts – Share billing information with paying customers. Take a look at Rydoo’s example:

How to Start a SaaS Email Marketing Strategy with Success

Are you ready to create an email marketing strategy that will help your SaaS business succeed? Let’s get to the fun part, after you have learned the most important emails for increasing lead generation, conversion rates and sales.

1. Set your goals

Email campaigns can be used for different purposes, as we have already discussed. It is important to set clear goals before you create email campaigns. This will allow you to create more effective campaigns to attract new and existing customers. These are some ideas to help you decide where to focus your attention each time.

• Sales/Conversions
• Brand Awareness
• Customer success/retention
• Upsell/cross-sell

Although these goals might overlap, they will allow you to track your email performance more accurately by setting clear objectives. You can also set goals to improve your email marketing metrics over the course of time. For example, cleaning out your email lists and tweaking your subject lines in order to increase your open rates.

To create an omnichannel marketing experience, you should align your email marketing goals and other promotional tactics like social media or content. This will help to nurture outstanding results.

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2. Choose Your Email Marketing Software

SaaS companies often use digital solutions to manage their daily operations. Marketing teams may choose to use CRM software like Hubspot or Salesforce to store all customer data. These data allow them to better understand their buyers and create more detailed customer journey maps in order to increase conversions.

It is essential to use a scalable email service such as Moosend and Campaign Monitor, which has full capabilities. This will ensure your email outreach remains competitive. These are the top email features you should be looking for:

• Pre-made email templates and an intuitive editor
• Email deliverability
• Segmentation and marketing automation
• Mobile responsiveness
• A/B Testing
• Flexible pricing
• Analytics and reporting
• Behavioral tracking

You need an easy-to use solution that can help you manage your email marketing campaigns and work with your other marketing tools. Register for a Moosend Account to Get a 30-Day Free Trial!

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3. Expand Your Email List

Email marketing for SaaS or other eCommerce businesses requires that you get the opt in of your audience. You should not send email campaigns to customers or leads who haven’t consented to you. This can increase spam rates and slowly build a negative reputation for your brand. For subscribers who want to unsubscribe, you should also include an unsubscribe link.

How can you get your subscribers’ email addresses? These are some ways to do it:

• Content upgrades As a bonus, share free resources like whitepapers or case studies with your prospects in return for their email addresses.
• Purchases – Add an opt in box to your purchase stage to increase your email list.
• Landing Pages: Create dynamic landing pages with exceptional CTAs.
• Giveaways – Ask for email addresses from contestants in a social media contest.
• Sign up forms: Incorporate static or pop-up forms on your website or blog in order to increase your subscriptions.

Here’s an example of the recruitment software Greenhouse.

It is crucial to regularly clean and remove inactive subscribers and churning subscribers from your lists to ensure they remain healthy and productive. This will ensure that you maintain a high deliverability and reduce spam and bounce rates.

4. Create Different Segments

Personalized emails are a major asset in any email marketer’s arsenal. These emails give customers and prospects a more personal touch and help them feel more comfortable with your brand. Personalized campaigns also have higher open and click through rates.

Customer segmentation is an option. You can add your subscriber’s name in the subject line, and include their email intro using dedicated personalization tags. Segmentation is a way to create sub-lists based on the shared characteristics of prospects and customers.

What are the top segmentation criteria for SaaS companies? Let’s look at them:

• Firmographic — e.g. company size or industry
• Demographic – e.g. age and gender
• Geographic – e.g. country, city
• Technographic – e.g. Android vs. iOS users
• Psychographic (e.g. values, interests)
• Behavioral — e.g. feature use, lifecycle stage

You may only have limited access to some data on certain email marketing platforms. To go that extra mile, you can also collect data from your CRM and analytics tool. You can also conduct customer surveys to gather the data you need for your email marketing strategies.

5. Send interesting email content

You should share relevant and meaningful content to make your subscribers love your email campaigns. You should use your brand guidelines and voice to create captivating storytelling.

The subject line is the most important part of an email. Write compelling copy that highlights your main points. First, it will make your email stand out among other campaigns in your subscriber’s mailbox every day. People who are interested in your email campaign will click more often than those who don’t convert.

Keep your email copy the same tone. To make your readers fall in love with you and increase conversion rates, write simple, creative, and welcoming messages.

These principles also apply to email design. You can modify a template to suit your needs. Your reader will be more satisfied if you add beautiful images and relevant GIFs. To find the best email content for your audience, you can try different types of emails.

This campaign is from Atlassian and it ticks all the boxes.

Subject line How do you sync and collaborate using Git

6. Automated Sequences

Emails that nurture leads are crucial in moving them down the funnel and converting them. You can set up automated email sequences (also known as drip campaign) to help you reach your goals.

Imagine that you are the owner of a recruitment software company. A person downloads an infographic on the latest trends in recruiting. It is possible to create an automation sequence and then send two follow-up emails within the next few days. The first email could be about applicant tracking systems and the second one can offer a free trial for anyone who opens the first campaign.

You can also find an additional automation example below to help nurture people who have just signed up for your mailing list.

You can use email automation to create a consistent outreach strategy that will boost lead generation and conversions at various customer journey stage.

7. Analyze your email performance

You need to monitor important metrics in your email marketing campaigns to ensure they are successful and your profits exceed your costs. Let’s combine them with some benchmark data.

• Open rates: 22.7%
• Click-through rates – 2 %
• Unsubscribe – 0.2%
• Conversion rates
• Rates of bounce

There will be some trial and error at first to ensure that these metrics are stable and strong. It is essential to get to know your audience in depth, emphasizing their needs and habits, in order for you to achieve great results.

To keep track of these metrics, make sure you choose an email marketing platform that offers top analytics and reporting. It can be integrated with Google Analytics, which will allow you to store all of your marketing data in one location.

7 Top SaaS Email Marketing Examples

Here are top campaigns to inspire you if you’re looking to enter the world of email marketing in SaaS companies.

1. Miro’s Email Campaign for Welcome

Subject line: Hello Miro. Let’s collaborate.

How it works: When someone finds your content and product interesting, they might subscribe to your list. It’s important to create a welcome campaign that shows appreciation and gives a glimpse of what you have to offer.

This Miro example is a great starting point. The subject line begins with a welcome message and a call to action for collaboration. Email content is the same, with the same tone. It invites new subscribers to learn more about the product and join our community using clever copy and high quality images.

According to a recent report, a welcome email has high open and click-through rate. Make sure it contains all the necessary information and leaves a lasting impression on your readers.

2. Monthly Content Newsletter from Moosend

Subject Line: New blog post alert

Why it works If you want to build authority in your field and educate your customers about key topics that will help them create a better business strategy for their company, share your content marketing resources regularly with them.

Moosend provides monthly blog digests that include the most recent resources and seasonal content campaigns. This helps customers succeed in their email marketing strategies. A similar format can be used to share your most proud content achievements with your audience.

3. Shopify’s Onboarding Email

Subject Line: Start Marketing Operations with a guided Tour of Shopify

How it works: It is essential to create an onboarding email sequence in order to help customers get started and decrease churn. These emails are designed to help new users learn how to use your platform to achieve their goals.

Shopify welcomes new users to their service. It also offers a free course to those who wish to be successful in marketing operations. It also contains links to allow new users to download additional apps, which will enhance their user experience.

Businesses that have chosen the free plan can also use onboarding emails. A positive experience might encourage them to continue with their plans.

4. GoDaddy’s Winback Email

Subject line There’s still time to save 30%

Why it works Losing loyal customers can be difficult, since acquisition costs more than retention. It’s normal for some customers to lose loyalty to their company, but it is worth your time to try to win them back by offering incentives.

GoDaddy offers a 30% discount in this win-back email to try and regain customers who have lapsed. They have also included the terms and conditions in the email footer for anyone who has questions or concerns regarding the offer. Give them an incentive that’s attractive enough to get them to act quickly.

5. Squarespace’s Expiration Trial Campaign

Subject line Retention email design from Squarespace

How it works: If your SaaS company offers free trials to prospects it is essential to set up a trial expiration campaign which will automatically trigger one day before the trial ends. This will allow you to nudge prospects while they are still warm.

This Squarespace campaign shows that the header title informs readers when their trial is ending. To encourage readers to act quickly, the button for upgrading is clearly visible in the text. To avoid distractions to trial users, you can use the same format.

6. Figma Updated Feature

Subject line: Move work forward

How it works:Want your customers and qualified leads to be informed about the latest product developments? Create a campaign that highlights the benefits each product offers.

Figma has added two CTA buttons to Figma . One that allows users to claim the new features quickly and one that allows them to do further research. To attract people to the features, they also added a short description.

7. Dropbox Customer Survey Email

Subject line: Support: Tell us how you did

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How it works: Your customers know your product’s strengths and weaknesses better than you. It is vital to collect feedback from customers about different business operations in order to keep your SaaS company profitable.

Make your survey as concrete as DropBox to ensure your subscribers complete it. To speed up the process, they asked subscribers to rate their service using a scale of one to five. They also added a privacy note to address GDPR-related concerns.

The Takeaways

It can be difficult to create an email marketing strategy and funnel for your SaaS company. But the results will pay off. To keep the engine running, start with smart goal setting and continue with a SWOT Analysis.

Remember, creating captivating email campaigns can bring you closer with your prospects and customers as well as help you to showcase your brand to the rest of the world. It’s a creative process and your marketing team can have a lot of fun creating them.

Are you ready to get on board the SaaS email marketing train with us? Register for a free Moosend account and start using our SaaS-friendly features to entice your subscribers!

The post Email Marketing for SaaS: A Complete Guide For 2023 was first published on Email Marketing Automation Platform to Thriving Businesses.

Author: Alexandra Marinaki