A SaaS business without email marketing is unsustainable. As you need to reach out to your customers at every step of their journey to communicate about your tool appropriately.
Though email marketing gives you high ROI, it is challenging for SaaS businesses. Here you’ve to create a demand for a non-physical product and sell it to other businesses already aware of marketing tactics. That’s why you need to be spot-on with your email marketing strategy.
Fortunately, here’s some help for you. This article discusses actionable strategies of email marketing for b2b SaaS businesses’ growth.
7 Best SaaS Email Marketing Strategies
Here are the 7 best SaaS email marketing strategies which will help you bring more revenue.
The strategic placement of email opt-in forms is often overlooked by marketers. An opt-in form is there to bring leads interested in your tool to you. But if they are boring or not prominent, you will be turning down leads yourself. That’s why you should not only rely on the basic pre-built templates for opt-in forms.
For optimizing them first, you should consider if they are placed rightly on your website. The ideal place for opt-in forms is at both header and footer. You can also use it as a popup on all pages. Secondly, you should integrate them with your social accounts.
Also, try to make them more interesting than the standard sign-up-for-newsletter button. For this, you can take inspiration from Blogging Wizard.
They have used the opt-in at the header with crisp copy and a ‘free bonus’ that compels browsers to subscribe. Then they also use an appealing popup too.
It is quite impractical to run a SaaS business without an emailing tool. With the growth of your email list, you would need to automate your SaaS email marketing with a tool. There are numerous paid and free marketing automation tools available now. You can take advantage of them for enjoying the following benefits:
- You can manage a growing email list and automate the emailing process.
- There’s a drag-and-drop editor for designing emails.
- It lets you do the segmentation of your email list.
- You will be able to do drip marketing.
- You will get built-in SaaS email templates.
- It will help you in scaling your SaaS business.
3. Create Campaigns for Entire Customer Lifecycle
Another essential part of SaaS email marketing is to capture the entire journey of your customers. A SaaS customer transitions through various stages from getting to know your product to purchasing it. It mainly includes three stages; acquisition, engagement, and retention. But it further involves a few sub-stages, which are defined here:
For these specified stages, you need numerous campaigns to keep the customer engaged and informed. If you capture all these stages in your campaigns you can certainly reduce your churn rate. That’s why you must design the following SaaS emails.
- Confirmation and onboarding
- Introductory and demo
- Nurture
- Re-engagement
- Trial expiry, upgrade, renewal, etc.
4. Design Impeccable Onboarding Emails
The emails on your onboarding campaign must be impeccable, as these emails have a much higher open rate of 91.43%. Firstly, there should be a confirmation email for each sign-up. Then, send out a warm welcome email introducing your SaaS business and tool to them. Ensure that these use compelling subject lines and CTAs with clear goals.
Moreover, you can build on the welcome email by following up with a demonstration email. Here, use visuals and clearly explain how they can benefit from your tool. Finally, offer them a free trial of your product. Most SaaS businesses offer free trials that they introduce straightaway. However, introducing it at the end will help you in building rapport and gaining customers’ trust first.
5. Develop More Lead Magnets
For deriving more leads and growing conversions, creating lead magnets are one the best strategies. In the SaaS industry, you have plenty of room to create good informative pieces as lead magnets. These can be anything from an ebook to a free template, a white paper, or some tips.
You can offer these lead magnets in exchange for customers’ emails. It will allow you to make a better proposition to add to your opt-in forms. However, for creating lead magnets, you should focus on being helpful to your customers. That’s why sharing valuable content and ensuring it lands in customers’ inboxes instantly via automation.
6. Upsell and Customer Retention
Upselling and retention is another key strategy for SaaS email marketing. Upselling means convincing your regular customers to purchase a more valuable item. For SaaS businesses, the upselling offer might include subscription upgrades or add-on services. It will help you to position your services to your loyal customers without the need to look for new prospects.
Upselling can also be a way for customer retention. Once a customer becomes your buyer, you should be looking for ways they stay with your brand. For this reason, your upselling strategy should be immaculate.
7. Be Sure to Run A/B Tests
Though email marketing gives you the highest ROI, you have to work like a Trojan to get a better open and conversion rate. However, one easy way to achieve that is to run A/B split tests. With the help of the A/B test, you can compare two or more designs for the same email. You can test the design, subject line, email copy, CTA, visuals, and other elements.
A/B testing will allow you to gauge the performance of your emails. With that knowledge, you can design better emails, know how to do segmentation, and measure whether your campaigns are meeting the set goals or not.
Final Thoughts
Email marketing is a necessity for SaaS businesses. Along with giving you a high ROI and quality leads, you can also position your SaaS tool appropriately. That’s why you must have a solid SaaS email marketing strategy to work with.
In a nutshell, for successful implementation, you’d need an automation tool, capture the entire customer journey in campaigns, and run A/B tests to be sure your emails are optimized. Besides, placement of email opt-ins, impeccable onboarding emails, lead magnets, and upselling are also helpful.