Email marketing, being widely recognized as one of the most powerful marketing tools there is, can offer a myriad of benefits to just about any type of business, with some little tweaks along the way to keep it relevant. 

SaaS companies are no different – email marketing could provide you with the boost you’re looking for, but you need to make sure that the techniques you use are tried and tested for SaaS. You and your business have specific needs, and one of the beautiful features of email marketing is that these can be accommodated with minimal fuss and effort.

Why are SaaS companies in need of a different marketing approach?

SaaS companies face a unique set of struggles when it comes to email marketing. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the relative difficulty in using certain types of offers to encourage customers to convert, as you don’t have a tangible, physical product to sell at a knockdown introductory price. 

The good news is, these are easily addressed and, with the implementation of some high-quality SaaS email marketing strategies, you will soon see the benefit. The world of email marketing can be confusing when you first try to navigate the key features and terms such as open rates, conversion rates, and call to action. 

We’re here today to show you just how easy it is to get great returns from marketing emails. All you need to do is invest a little time and effort into learning how best to market your SaaS company and follow these top tips.

7 Steps Towards Effective Email Marketing for SAAS

1. Know Your Marketing Persona

One of the key points to take away from an expert guide to email marketing is that much of your success depends on your ability to build a strong relationship with your customers. Knowing that your customers are interested in your SaaS is not enough – you also need to understand the needs they are likely to have at a given moment in time, and how best to engage them. One of the common, and often catastrophic, mistakes made by email marketers is talking at their customers rather than to them. Another one is failing to make email marketing campaigns consistent.

Before you send a single email, identify your marketing persona, and pledge to stick with it. This persona should be reflected in the design and tone of every email you send, giving you an air of familiarity. Ideally, you want your SaaS company to be instantly recognizable when an email lands. 

Tip #1 for great SaaS email marketing campaigns, at any stage of the customer journey or sales cycle, involves:

• Understanding your SaaS company values 
• Creating a marketing strategy to reflect your company values
• Direct your emails to your marketing persona each time

2. Create a Customer Journey

“Customer journey” is one of those marketing terms that seem to be everywhere, and there’s a very good reason for that. A great email marketing campaign recognizes where each email subscriber is in the customer journey and tailors content towards it. Some of the email types which directly tie in with the customer journey are:

• Welcome emails (did you know these generate up to 320% more revenue?)
• Account activation emails
• Abandoned cart reminders
• Thank you emails after a purchase is made
• Discounts to encourage lapsed customers, or free trial users, to renew or upgrade

With some excellent email marketing automation software, you can trigger emails based on customer’s behavior, ensuring that the content you send is always relevant.

3. Set Clear Goals

As Bill Copeland once said, “The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score.” This may seem relevant on the football field, but why are we mentioning it when talking about your SaaS company’s email campaigns? Well, because it’s just as relevant here. If you don’t know what you want to achieve, you can’t achieve it. Simple as that. The sweet spot in email marketing is writing content which appeals to your customers’ goals and helps you achieve yours. Again, you need to define those goals first. You’re sure to have your own goals in mind but, aside from the perhaps obvious boosts to open rate, conversion rate, and bottom line, you may wish to:

• Promote a new feature offered by your SaaS company
• Encourage customers who abandon their online carts to come back and close the deal
• Alert email subscribers to an upcoming sale or event
• Send a personalized discount to some loyal customers

The list goes on. As a bonus tip, if you find yourself writing an email that seems to make more than one point, take the time to break it down. Three emails containing one relevant point or call to action each are likely to be far more successful than one email containing three points. No matter how good you are, nobody is really reading by point three.

4. Design a Brand Language or Tone of Voice

Consistency is key when it comes to building up trust and, therefore, rewarding customer relationships. Your brand’s tone of voice can be pretty much as formal or informal as you want it to be. The important part is that you are consistent. You want your SaaS email marketing to set you apart as the first option to come to mind when your customers and email subscribers are ready to make a purchase. How to do this? Consistency.

Take a look at these emails from Invision that really do a great job at achieving this consistency.

5. Personalize by Segmenting Leads

When you read any good guide to email marketing, you will notice a focus on segmentation. While it may seem like an unnecessary hassle to segment your mailing list, it’s easy to do and can definitely pay dividends. For example, if you have an offer on one specific SaaS feature, it may not be relevant to 99% of your audience, but an almost guaranteed sale to the other 1%. Sending emails only to those who are likely to be interested is imperative. Irrelevant emails lead to the unsubscribe button being clicked, or your emails being relegated to spam. Trust us, you do not want either of these to happen. Instead, take a look at your mailing list and try some segmentation by attributes such as:

• Age, location, and other demographic factors
• Past purchasing history or other onsite behavior
• Opening and clicking through on certain earlier emails

Once you’ve created your segments, you’ll need to carry out some A/B testing to identify what really works for each group. Dynamic segmentation updates these groups automatically, meaning you need to put even less time and effort into it going forward.

6. Create Automated Workflows Using Marketing Automation

This is where your SaaS email marketing can start to seem daunting but, luckily, also where email marketing automation really comes into its own.

Once you have your mailing list segmented into different groups of customers, your marketing automation software can be set up to send certain emails based on onsite triggers (such as visiting a page on your website), your customers’ behavior across various channels, and factors such as navigating away from your website before completing a purchase. Excellent marketing automation software means it is now incredibly easy to set these triggers and let your SaaS email marketing work hard on your behalf, while you get on with what you’re really good at.

7. Test and Optimize (and Repeat If Required…)

Always remember that, although you have now used marketing automation software and knowledge of how your customers behave to create your SaaS email marketing campaigns, the only people who decide if you’ve got it right are your customers. Using that same marketing automation software, you can carry out a series of A/B testing, for example, using the resulting analytics to tweak your emails for maximum impact.

If you’re new to email marketing for SaaS, you may not get this right first time, so you’re free to test and repeat as much as you like until you’re happy that you have optimized your techniques. When there are three types of A/B testing available, you can very easily work out which content to keep, and which to scrap.

To sum up, through utilizing great email marketing automation software, and making the most of the features, you can get on with your work whilst safe in the knowledge that your email campaigns are working for you. While SaaS email marketing may differ from that needed by other industries, the core commandments remain the same – know your customers, personalize your content, and remain consistent. Combining this with your excellent SaaS means you can soon see those trial users become paying customers.

 

Read more: 

5 Examples for Transactional Emails Your Business Needs

4 Steps to Creating an Effective Email Autoresponder

3 Strategies to Elevate Your Events Through Email Marketing