Since their invention, emails have become an amazing tool that allows SaaS businesses to welcome their audience, give them updates, educate them and, most importantly, get them one step further down their marketing funnel.
So, when it comes to growing a successful business in a highly competitive marketing arena, emails can be the greatest weapon marketers can use to ensure their survival and growth.
Now, you may wonder why emails have established themselves as the best marketing channel out there.
The answer is simple.
Emails are the most cost-effective and cost-rewarding tools your SaaS business can use to communicate with your target audience, incentivize them to click on your CTAs and turn them into loyal customers who will support you throughout their customer journey.
Table of Contents
The first thing you need when you plan your email marketing strategy is to find a powerful ally to help you create, manage and share your amazing content with your customers.
To create perfect emails, you need to find a great email marketing automation platform that will give you a range of tools to put your creativity and vision on “digital paper”.
Here’s what SaaS businesses of all sizes should look for when they choose an email marketing automation platform:
Having lower costs and greater benefits is something that every business wants when they invest in marketing technology tools.
If you search the market, you’ll find numerous email marketing automation platforms like Moosend or Mailchimp to give you a variety of tools to craft the best email campaigns, automate your emails and distribute them to your subscribers in no time.
Before choosing the right platform you should do any research necessary to compare your selected platforms and find the one that will give you more at a reasonable price.
Especially for SMEs with stricter budgets, finding the right value-for-money platform from the start will help you avoid unnecessary costs and promote your growth a lot faster.
Have you ever come across an awesome looking tool that you instantly bought only to realize that you can’t completely understand or master it?
And even if you did, didn’t the time you wasted online searching for tutorials make you feel like flipping the table?
To avoid losing both your time and temper, you should test your platform’s user-friendliness to see if you can master it within a short amount of time.
Moosend, for example, has an easy to master drag-and-drop feature that allows you to create or edit various newsletter templates easily.
Integrations can help your SaaS business increase its productivity by connecting apps and automating tasks without requiring any technical background whatsoever.
Simplifying time-consuming daily tasks will allow businesses to focus on other tasks and help them make reports easily by bringing resources from one app to another.
Zapier, for example, is a great integration tool to connect your favorite apps by creating trigger-and-action automated tasks called Zaps.
List segmentation is a process that allows you to group your subscribers by collecting data, either from opt-in forms or through the actions they take after turning into leads.
Here’s how Airtable collects data about their users:
With this form, Airtable manages to segment their users into groups according to their workplace, goals, and role.
By capturing their users’ personal information, the company will be able to group them and deliver more personalized messages that would speak better to them.
As the backbone of targeted and personalized email content, customer segmentation is one of the most important email marketing automation tactics that SaaS companies should implement if they want to deliver exceptional emails that will have greater open, CTR and conversion rates.
So, now you’ve built your email marketing list, segmented your subscribers into targeted groups and then started sending them your awesome email campaigns.
As much as you’d like to sit back and enjoy the fruit of your labor, the fear of poor email deliverability still haunts you.
To avoid ending up in spam folders, SaaS companies should review their email list in order to improve list hygiene that will maintain good email deliverability rates that will keep your sender’s reputation intact.
Keeping your list clean requires you to check it regularly in order to remove disengaged subscribers and reduce email bounce.
When you unsubscribe disengaged subscribers, though, make sure to give them a chance to get back by sending what we call a “break-up” email with a re-engaging CTA.
Here’s an example form Sidekick:
If we explore email marketing automation further, we’ll see that the possibilities it can offer are endless.
One of these possibilities is the combination of a series of emails with marketing automation to form drip marketing campaigns.
Drip campaigns give businesses the opportunity to deliver timed emails with powerful onboarding messages that will increase your lead generation.
Here are some must-have email campaigns that every SaaS business should include in their email marketing strategy:
Welcome emails are the equivalent to the brick-and-mortar staff greeting when you enter a store.
Since your customers need to feel valued and appreciated, sending them friendly welcome emails can make a difference in helping them build trust in your SaaS business.
These emails don’t need to be lengthy or complex.
However, they must be clear, concise and include a smart CTA that will engage your new subscribers effectively.
Here is a great welcome email example from Salesforce:
Salesforce’s email is successful because it manages to give their new trial users all the information they need to get started.
Not only does the email gives them a link to take the tours of the product and get them started with the software but Salesforce also gives subscribers a number they can reach for free customer support.
As free trial users who have an amazing experience with your CRM software are more likely to turn into loyal customers, guiding them and giving them full support during their first steps will help you convert them better.
When it comes to getting your customers to re-engage with your software, powerful re-engagement emails can save the day.
Having engaged customers who use your service will give them more reasons to keep paying for it and even upgrade to a better plan with more perks.
For free accounts, sending re-engagement emails is your ally to get these customers to realize the full potential of your product and, when they’re ready, even pay for a better plan.
Here’s an example of a software re-engagement email from Wistia:
Wistia’s email has a minimal design and clear CTA that makes it easier to spot and click on.
By adding the “Need a hand?” section, the company also manages to give their disengaged customers an easy-to-find solution and get them back to upload their first video.
Re-engagement emails are your secret weapon to improve your customer success, so you should make them an integral part of your email marketing strategy for better results and higher engagement.
Educational emails are extremely useful for SaaS businesses since they are powerful lead nurturing tools.
Such emails don’t contain any promotional content and SaaS businesses usually send them to their subscribers for the sole purpose of gaining knowledge about the products or the industry.
Your SaaS business can benefit greatly from these emails since you can use them to share tips, whitepapers, and ebooks that will educate your subscribers and nurture them into sales-ready leads.
Using educational emails can also help you reduce your MRR churn caused by customers that were not nurtured properly and increase your ARR beyond measure.
Here’s an example from Elementor:
Helping your prospects and leads understand the value of your service will help you convert them better and make your customer lifecycle marketing endeavors a little easier.
When you plan your next email marketing campaign, the first thing you have to figure out is what type of content will speak best to your subscribers and incentivize them to take your CTAs.
To make your campaigns successful, you need to employ the power of personalization.
While personalization can differ in sophistication and complexity depending on your company’s tactics, even the simplest personalized element can warm things up and lead to customer retention.
Including your subscriber's name in your emails or sending them emails from a personal account is enough to make a difference since personalized messages can have an average open rate of 18.8% and a click rate of 2.1% compared to non-personalized emails.
Here’s an example from Bonjoro:
While using email personalization can help you get your business to higher heights, it is always better to test various elements in order to find the ones that perform better.
To do so, you can run A/B tests to see whether your original design (control) or variations can engage more people more efficiently.
Subject lines are the first thing your subscribers see when they receive your amazing emails.
Well-crafted subject lines can really make a difference since a great first impression will make people open your email regardless of content.
Keep in mind, though, that subject lines that include spam words are very likely to end up in your subscribers' spam folders whether the email was spam or not.
When your subscribers open your emails it's time to present them with some email copy that will steal their hearts.
Using personalization in your emails will help you achieve greater opens and click-throughs since your content will target your subscriber’s needs.
Creativity, though, can play a major role in how your subscriber will perceive and interact with your email.
Here’s another incredible example from Wistia:
Since SaaS emails can sometimes be boring and repetitive, giving them a nice flair to pique your subscribers’ interest will help you establish yourself as an approachable company that favors creativity and fun.
Mobiles have taken over the world by storm because people can use them to stay connected and interact with their peers without the limitations of space.
Taking into account that people prefer to open emails on mobile devices, neglecting to optimize your emails for mobile can disengage your mobile-loving customers since you’ll frustrate them and fail to give an instant solution to their problem.
To make your emails mobile-friendly you need to favor simplicity, including only the most important information, otherwise, you will overwhelm your mobile users with text that will not only strain their eyes but also annoy them.
Here’s a great mobile-optimized email from Freshsales:
Adjusting your fonts and placing your images in a linear, easy-to-read way are some of the best tricks to make great responsive emails that will please your mobile users and increase your website traffic.
Email marketing is a powerful profit-generating channel to increase your revenue and build relationships that will promote the success of your SaaS business long-term.
To master it, you need to invest in the right tools, understand the needs of your target audience and come up with exceptional content that will engage and convert them efficiently.
With great email marketing automation tactics, come great results!
So next time you plan yours, don’t forget to implement the previous email marketing automation tactics that will help you promote the success and increase the profit of your business.
Now it’s your turn. Which email marketing automation tactics did you like best?
Let us know in the comments below.
Marilia Dimitriou is a Creative Writer working for email marketing software Moosend. Her passion for writing has made her find new ways to combine the art of Creative Writing with SEO Copywriting. When she’s not writing articles, you’ll find her enthusing over marketing tech and automation.
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