SaaS Email Marketing: 5 Strategies for Effective Growth and Engagement

(CTN News) – Creating a good SaaS email marketing strategy is hard. Inboxes get more than 100 emails daily, so yours has to stand out. Having trouble getting people’s attention? You’ll learn some simple and effective tactics that will boost your ROI.

Despite what some people say, email isn’t dead. The medium has helped businesses drive leads, boost conversions, and generate revenue for years. Email is among the most effective marketing tools, delivering a $42 ROI per dollar spent.

What is a SaaS Email Marketing Strategy?

You need a SaaS email marketing strategy to grow, manage, and market your email list. You should include things like:

• Build your list with content upgrades, gated content, and lead magnets.

• Email automation for part of the onboarding process

• Make your list more targeted by segmenting it

• Writing compelling subject lines and content that engages

• Optimizing campaigns and testing new strategies

• Using ClickFunnels data to analyze email performance

• Maximizing reach with other marketing channels, like social media

These are just a few of the tactics you can use in your SaaS email marketing strategy (and we’ll cover more soon). These tactics can help you build an engaged and loyal audience that’ll drive growth for your SaaS business.

Why is Email Marketing Important for SaaS Businesses?

I mentioned earlier that an email list represents an audience you own and can market to directly (without gatekeepers). The power of email marketing makes it one of your SaaS business’s most effective tools.

Russell Brunson and many other SaaS entrepreneurs say you can expect to make about $1 per subscriber per month.

You make more money if you have a bigger list.

Your email list gets offers and content whenever you want, and you can track their engagement to see what works (and what doesn’t).

Keep your customers engaged with email. Plus, it’s a major conversion driver (especially for SaaS businesses).

If you want to grow your SaaS business, investing in an email marketing strategy is crucial if you want to see real results.

Why is customer data so important for SaaS email marketing?

Email marketing works with lead data. Data about lead generation is a random collection of attribution tidbits and website behavior – you’re lucky if you have any.

Customer data, on the other hand, can’t be collected until the trial starts. Your customer’s behavior and specific information is in there. Your customer data is rich now that you have a proper business relationship with someone or a company. It’s easy to track what they do (or don’t do) inside your product.

You can do amazing things with sales email automation. It requires advanced technical integration, though.

Make sure you:

1. Get the customer data you need.

2. Start sending data from your product backend to your email tool with the data integration.

3. Create your segments.

4. Then set up the actual campaigns.

You can add a JavaScript snippet quickly. However, front-end integration doesn’t give you actual product data like success metrics, just button clicks and pageviews. You can also get blocked by ad blockers.

In order to get feature usage and other useful data, you’ll need a back-end integration. You send data from your product backend to the tool you want.

No one’s born with these skills.

Even seasoned marketers find it intimidating. You’ll barely scratch the surface of SaaS email marketing without proper behavioral data.

Here are 5 SaaS email marketing strategies

Email marketing is a great tool for SaaS businesses. For brevity, we’ve whittled it down to 5 key SaaS marketing strategies.

Using these strategies can help convert free users into paying customers, encourage them to try new features, and keep them engaged long enough to become customer success stories.

1. Know your goals

It’s important to establish what the goals of your email marketing campaign are before you can start bringing in new customers. Email campaigns are designed around goals, messaging, tools, KPIs, and audiences.

Here are a few common goals with email marketing:

• Awareness of brands

• Sign up for a trial

• Getting conversions

• Educating customers

• Retention

• Upselling and cross-selling revenue

By defining your goal, you can create an email marketing strategy with the right messaging for old and new users. Knowing why will make it easier to figure out how and what to do.

2. Have a solid lead-generation strategy

SaaS businesses can build their mailing list using many lead-generation channels. Websites, landing pages, social media, PPC campaigns, webinars, gated content, and blogging are all good ways to generate leads.

Based on who your target audience is, you’ll find the best lead generation channel. If you want to reach the right people, you should combine a few lead-gen channels instead of relying on one.

Lead generation is the same no matter what channel you use. Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) are people that have subscribed to your mailing list and expressed interest in your brand.

MQLs can then be nurtured into sales-qualified leads (SQLs) before becoming paying customers.

3. Segment your audience

A single email campaign won’t be able to meet the expectations of your entire audience. Segmentation helps here. Audience segments could be based on:

• Which stage of the customer lifecycle they’re at

• They’ve got a job to do (JTBD)

• How they’re doing in the sales funnel

• What channel they came from

Regardless of how you segment leads, you should create detailed user personas. They’ll let you customize email messages based on the segments you’ve identified.

4. Personalize your emails

Make your emails contextual and relevant by personalizing them. Using the same welcome email for multiple segments might work at first, but it gets less effective over time.

You should send personalized emails that specifically target the goals of that segment while also taking existing user behavior into account. You can share relevant content or show off marketing automation that makes sense for their use case.

Personalization isn’t just about your promotional emails, but also about the overarching flows/sequences you plan. For example, you can create drip campaigns for free trial users if your product offers one.

They could include tips on getting the most out of their free trial and content encouraging users to try out the most sticky features. Early customer success efforts will pay off and increase free trial conversions.

It’s exactly what Grammarly’s welcome email is trying to do:

5. Plan the triggers

Another way to make your email automation more contextual is to set up behavioral triggers that send users a specific email once a certain event happens. Especially useful for time-sensitive messages that need a quick response.

You could integrate Userpilot’s webhooks into your product to trigger an email (or an email sequence) when a user clicks a button. Triggers can help with onboarding, educating, and upselling.

As soon as the user creates their account, you can send them an onboarding email. As a result, they’ll have a clear roadmap of what they need to do to use the product (and fix any funnel leaks).

Final Thoughts

A SaaS email marketing strategy is essential for any business looking to increase customer lifetime value.

Your SaaS email marketing campaign will be successful if you use different tactics like abandoned cart emails, nurturing relationships with customers and affiliates, and segmenting subscribers.

It’s not just about pushing sales pitches – it’s about understanding your customers and providing them with useful, interesting content. You’ll get more conversions and more revenue with that approach.