A Quick Guide To Email Marketing For SaaS Companies

Time and time again, email marketing has proven itself to be one of the most effective digital marketing channels for SaaS companies.

It’s a relatively low-cost way of staying in touch with existing customers and reaching out to potential new ones, all while building your brand. What’s more, it is the most used business-to-business (B2B) communication channel today.

However, SaaS email marketing is not as simple as just sending out an email blast. You need to be strategic with your email campaigns and focus on providing valuable content that resonates with your target audience.

So let’s go through a quick overview of what email marketing for SaaS companies looks like.

What Types Of Emails Can You Use?

When it comes to a SaaS email marketing strategy, there are several types of emails that you can use. Let’s talk about a few of them:

Welcome Email

As its name suggests, a welcome email is designed to welcome the email recipient to something.

And in the grand scheme of the SaaS email marketing process, that “something” could be many things. You could be welcoming a new subscriber to your email list, or a new user to a free trial, or a new customer.

In any case, your email should be warm, friendly, and engaging. It should also provide an overview of the product, newsletter, or whatever it is they just signed up for, as well as any other relevant information.

Email Newsletters

When it comes to email marketing, it’s hard not to talk about email newsletters. These are emails you send to a subscriber list that contain valuable content, such as blog posts, news, success stories, and more.

Email newsletters are primarily for customer acquisition, as they allow you to reach out to potential customers and build your relationships with them until they buy your SaaS product.

Promotional Emails

Promotional emails are a great way of informing your email list about any sales or special offers that you may have going on in your SaaS company.

This is a great opportunity for you to highlight the value of your product and encourage people to take advantage of your current promo.

Sales Email

A sales email is an email sent by your sales team that you send to prospective customers when they express interest in your SaaS product.

The goal of this email sequence is to educate potential customers about your product, schedule product demos, and nurture your leads until they become paying customers.

These emails should be personalized to each individual prospect and focus on the value you can offer them.

Transactional Emails

Transactional emails are one-off email messages that are sent out to customers or prospects when they take a certain action. For example, these could be billing confirmation emails or welcome emails after signing up for a free trial.

These emails are important as they help build relationships with existing customers, confirm transactions, and keep customers informed.

Onboarding Email

An onboarding email sequence is a series of emails sent out to new customers, usually within the first week or two after signing up. The goal of these emails is to ensure that your new customers are set up for success with your SaaS product.

These emails should provide helpful tips and resources on how to use your product, as well as explain what users can do if they have any questions.

Customer Retention Email

Customer retention email sequences are emails you send to existing customers in an effort to maintain their loyalty and keep them engaged with your product.

This email series should focus on providing relevant content that is helpful to customers and reinforcing the value of your product.

SaaS Email Marketing Best Practices

With all the different types of emails you can use in your SaaS email marketing campaign, how do you know which email will be the most effective?

Here are a few email marketing best practices to keep in mind:

Map Out Your SaaS Customer Journey

The customer journey is the path your customer takes from becoming aware of their pain points to purchasing your SaaS product, and even on to becoming an advocate of your SaaS solution.

To ensure you are emailing to the right people at the right times, it’s important to map out this journey and map email touchpoints along the way.

For example, you may want to send out email newsletters to your leads in the consideration stage, with your emails containing case studies or product comparisons.

As for existing customers, you might want to send customer retention or customer success emails to maintain your engagement with them.

Write Personalized Emails

According to Campaign Monitor, personalized emails get up to 6 times more engagement than generic emails do.

Think about ways you can personalize your email content based on user behavior or characteristics, such as their name, purchase history, or where they are in the SaaS customer journey.

Keeping your email copy personal and specific will help make your email feel more relatable and increase the chances that customers will click through to take action.

Maximize Email Marketing Automation Tools

With email marketing automation, you can set up drip campaigns, which are pre-written email sequences being sent out at predetermined times.

You may also set up triggered email campaigns, which are triggered by certain user behaviors or events.

These email automation tools can save your team a lot of time and effort while still achieving great results.

Essential Email Marketing Metrics To Track

To measure the success of your email campaign, you need to track various metrics that can tell you how well various aspects of your emails are doing.

Below are some essential email marketing metrics you need to track:

Open Rate

This is simply the percentage of email recipients that open your email.

A high open rate might mean that you have an effective email subject line and/or preview text. It may also mean that you are sending your emails to the right people at the right time.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Your click-through rate (CTR) measures how many of your email recipients actually click on a link within your email.

The higher the CTR, the more engaged your email list is with what you’re sending out. That could be a reflection of the quality of your email content.

Unsubscribe Rate

The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of people who choose to opt out of your email list after receiving your email.

It is important to keep an eye on this metric as it can tell you whether or not your customers find your emails relevant and engaging.

If the unsubscribe rate is too high, then it may be a sign that your emails are not relevant to them. What’s more, sending emails too often may also annoy some subscribers and cause them to hit the unsubscribe button.

Spam Complaints

Spam complaints is an email metric that tells you how many email recipients mark your email as spam.

The higher the rate, the more likely it is that email service providers like Gmail or Outlook will start to flag your emails as spam and send them directly to the “spam” folder.

To keep your spam complaints to a minimum, you need to ensure that your emails have the right target audience, contain high-quality content, and are being sent out at reasonable intervals (once or twice a week should be fine).

Final Thoughts About Email Marketing For SaaS Companies

Email marketing is a powerful tool for SaaS businesses to build relationships with their customers, drive more sales, and maintain engagement with existing customers.

Still, email marketing for SaaS companies can be a complex beast. You can use it for almost any part of the customer journey and there are a lot of things to consider.

The key is to take it one email campaign at a time, A/B test them if you can, and optimize your email strategy based on that data.

With some hard work and patience, you should be able to see great email marketing results in no time.

Want to learn more? Check out our complete guide to SaaS email marketing or visit our blog site here.