Even if your SaaS product has a short sales cycle, convincing prospects to open your emails can be challenging. Your leads, hot prospects, and customers are all in various stages of the sales funnel. Delivering the right message, at the right time, to the right person is difficult. Not to mention the delicate balance you must strike to find the right cadence and timing for your various email campaigns.
To address these challenges, let’s review three proven SaaS email marketing strategies that will convince your audience to love (and share) your emails.
Keep Delivering Emails Even After the Deal is Closed
Don’t think that because you’ve closed a sale you are done. The majority of your customers actually want to continue to hear from you, according to a study by MarketingSherpa.
Some of those customers are loyal brand promoters who can’t wait to share your messages. In SaaS, customer retention is key to profitability, so keep providing value to existing customers with well-positioned emails.
Put the SaaS Spin on List Segmentation
As a SaaS email marketer, you have a varied audience to think about. Depending on your model, you may have (among others):
- Inactive or active prospects in the middle of a free trial
- Inactive or active prospects who didn’t convert after a free trial
- Inactive or active freemium users whom you want to upsell
- Existing customers whom you want to upsell or cross-sell.
- Former customers whom you can win back
Each of your audiences as described in the bulleted points above and customize your message. Sending focused, highly targeted emails have a better chance to stand out, enabling you to cut through the inbox clutter. By segmenting customers, you can lift email revenue by 50 percent, according to MarketingSherpa.
Based on how you segment your customers, you’ll want to put a unique spin on the emails you send out. For example, you wouldn’t want to send customers who are already locked in for a year a promotional email that offers them a sign-up discount.
Moreover, if you have multiple buyer personas that work in different industries and have different job titles, segmenting your lists allows you to address your customers more directly and craft a more specific message.
Even with the same product, the benefits you highlight in your email should change if, for example, some of your customers are in the healthcare industry while others are in education.
Think carefully about who your audience is and how they’ve interacted with your brand so far. Then, write the appropriate email to that audience.
Get Emotional in Your Emails
With every email, you want to evoke an emotional response from your readers.
Whether it’s the subject line, the body, or a call to action, look for ways to speak directly to your customers’ pain, especially when it comes to prospects who are top of the funnel.
For existing customers, however, you can speak less to their pain and more to their triumphs. Grammarly provides a great example of this strategy in action.
Grammarly is a freemium-based, online proofreading tool. For existing customers, they send weekly emails that deliver reports congratulating their users on how many words they typed that week, how accurate they were, and more.
And at the end of those emails, they provide insights into users’ most common writing mistakes. This provides practical value and entertainment value to Grammarly users, helping to strengthen Grammarly’s brand in the mind of their customers.
Conclusion
SaaS marketing, whether it’s through email, your website or social media, is a challenge for everyone. With the right mindset, and the ability to understand and speak to a variety of audiences effectively, you can rise above the rest. And SaaS email marketing is a great place to do it.
Most of your success with SaaS email marketing will depend not on your ability to get everything right the first time. Rather, it will depend on your ability to try, learn, and optimize. Consider that just 23 percent of marketers say their company has integrated their website and email so they can understand what happens after a click.
With such a great opportunity to tailor your message to the right audience, don’t let it go to waste. Get in touch with experienced SaaS marketers who will help your brand stay top of mind. The right partnership can lead to more emails being opened, clicked on, and shared, resulting in more loyal SaaS customers.
