5 SaaS email strategies to grow your business

What is a SaaS email strategy?

Put simply, a SaaS email strategy is a specific approach you take when marketing your SaaS by email. A strategy may relate to the planning stage or how you execute marketing emails.

Examples of SaaS email strategies include automated email marketing, audience segmentation, and using power words in subject lines. What strategies will work for you will depend on the current scale of your SaaS and the type of leads/customers you’re trying to reach.

The best SaaS emails strategies

1. Make clear email marketing goals

In the words of former New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra, “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.”

You must plan with concrete goals to make the most of a SaaS email marketing campaign. And you can try breaking these goals down based on the following:

The audience - Think about the ways to reach your audience most effectively. Audience segmentation (more on that later) is one way to achieve this. Here, you send different emails to different cohorts (e.g., users currently on a free trial or long-term subscribers). If you take this approach, you want to dedicate enough time planning out how you’ll differentiate your emails for each cohort. As part of the planning phase, you may wish to send out a survey to find out more about your leads/customers.
What your email needs to include - Expanding on the points above, you need to draft and redraft what your email(s) will include. You must ensure your email hooks the reader, conveys a message, and has a call-to-action.
Call-to-action (CTA) - You need to include a CTA button toward the end of your email so that the reader can take ‘the desired action’. For instance, this may mean that the reader clicks on a button allowing them to sign up for your SaaS as a paying subscriber.
Key performance indicators or KPIs- Determine what metrics matter most to your business. Once you do, it’s time to set realistic goals. For instance, Growfusely claims that, overall, SaaS emails convert one in five visitors to paying subscribers (i.e., 20% of follow-up emails tend to succeed).

2. Automate your email marketing

Preparations can only go so far. After all, with a busy schedule, you and your team will only have so many hours in the day to manage your email marketing campaigns. That’s where marketing automation can make a huge difference.

In the context of email marketing, this means using a service that sends an email or several emails once a subscriber takes a certain action as part of the customer lifecycle. For example, an automated email service may send out an email when someone first becomes a paid member or if they are suddenly among the most active users of your SaaS.

Even if you run a small SaaS, email marketing automation can prove very useful for your business. Not only that, but as you grow, such a service can make it easier to scale your SaaS effectively.

Some of my favorite email automation tools include:

Drip
Constant Contact
RafflePress
Sendinblue
Active Campaign

Aside from creating useful automated emails, email marketing automation generally offers list segmentation. This means that it can separate leads/customers into many categories based on a variety of factors. Some tools can also resend emails to those who don’t open the initial email.

3. Planning life cycle segments

You also need to determine at what points in the customer lifecycle you want to send out emails. An onboarding email is the obvious one. However, many SaaS fail to consider future lifecycle segments.

Other lifecycle segments include:

Converting free trial users to paying subscribers.
Upselling to higher payment plans.
Getting in touch with dormant users.
Sharing referral links and promotional codes through automated emails at the right times.
Customer cancellation surveys to reduce churn.
Automated dunning emails (i.e., contacting customers when a payment fails).

By setting up a whole host of automated lifecycle emails, you will likely increase various KPIs. For instance, converting free trial users can increase your conversion rate, while upselling to higher payment plans can mean more revenue and a better customer lifetime value (CLV).

4. SaaS emails for teams, companies and individuals

Since your service will likely serve plenty of teams (perhaps more so than individuals), you must consider this when drafting up future emails.

With the right automated tool, you can categorize companies, teams and individuals separately so that they receive unique emails. Similar to planning a customer lifecycle, you need to prepare for a company lifecycle. This may include account onboarding, promoting advanced features, and sharing pro tips. Of course, though, it will depend on what email automation service you use. Make sure to do your research so you can choose the right tool for you.

5. Analyze your email data frequently

Reviewing your email metrics is critical to success. These figures will allow you to see how your campaign is performing and whether you are meeting your goals. If any of your KPIs fall below expectations, you can then take appropriate steps to increase them by adjusting your campaign accordingly.

To analyze your email data, I recommend tools such as:

RightInbox
EmailAnalytics
Saleshandy
Mailtrack
LeadBoxer
Yesware

As for KPIs, these are the ones you really want to focus on:

Delivery rate
Open rate
Click-through rate (CTR)
Unsubscribe rate
Bounce rate
List growth rate
Conversion rate
Total return on investment (ROI)

As part of the SaaS camp, you can learn far more about how to generate sustainable cash flow by analyzing your metrics. I cover this on week seven out of eight of the accelerator camp. Of course, this will cover KPI analysis for your entire SaaS and not simply email campaigns.