With 2024 slowly emerging on the horizon, now is the perfect time to sit down and revisit your SaaS email marketing strategy.
Tools and technologies constantly evolve. Some practices go out of fashion while others explode in popularity. Consumer preferences and behaviors shift over time. Considering how competitive and fast-paced the landscape of SaaS businesses is, holding onto old habits is a sure way to lose.
This post will help you reassess and fine-tune your strategy and make sure your email efforts are in sync with ever-changing consumers’ needs and expectations. We’ll discuss the latest trends in SaaS email marketing and zoom in on a few best-in-class examples. Stick around until the end to discover a code-free and hassle-free way to create SaaS email campaigns.
Why is email marketing crucial for SaaS companies?
For some SaaS companies, email marketing is just an afterthought. If yours is one of them, here are a few compelling reasons to give your email marketing strategy the attention it deserves:
- Reliability. Unlike social media marketing, email marketing cuts through the noise, providing direct and personalized communication with existing customers and potential leads. You can deliver highly targeted content, product updates, and interesting tidbits about your company, permanently keeping your audience in the loop.
- Cost-effectiveness. SaaS products often involve a longer sales cycle, and email campaigns can guide prospects through the various stages, providing them with the information at each stage. The closest alternative to that would be personalized calls, which are much more expensive, time-consuming, and generally not everyone’s thing. Because of that, email marketing is an especially attractive option for startups and smaller SaaS companies with limited budgets.
- Stronger customer relationships. Email marketing allows you to share success stories and diverse expert content like webinars or blog posts. This is the key to building trust and credibility, essential elements for SaaS products where customers rely on the functionality and security of the software.
- Precision. Automation features in email marketing platforms also enable you to always be right where your users need you. By sending timely and relevant messages based on user behavior, you may seriously boost your conversion rates. For instance, if a user clicks around and leaves your page without taking the desired action, you can send them relevant tips on how to get started.
- Better understanding of customer behavior. Most email platforms offer detailed analytics, allowing you not only to track the performance of your campaigns but also to learn more about your users and their preferences. This helps make informed guesses about the types of content, visual style, and tone of voice your audience prefers.
- Flexibility. Regularly engaging with your user base is crucial, and email allows you to do that without being intrusive or annoying, as you can let your users decide exactly how many weekly campaigns they want to receive from you.
One thing is for sure. Email marketing will remain a powerful tool for SaaS companies in 2024 and beyond, as it is a precise, reliable, and affordable way to engage with users throughout the customer journey. However, how SaaS companies should approach email marketing is a whole ‘nother story.
Best practices for successful SaaS email marketing
The last few years have seriously shaken things up in the world of content creation and marketing. The full aftermath of the AI revolution is yet to be seen, but a few things are already certain.
An average email user receives well over 100 emails per day. They can’t physically pay attention to all the brands they’re remotely interested in. So, they sift through hundreds of promotional emails and only open those that speak to them.
The only way to get noticed in such a noisy crowd is by developing an unmistakably unique voice for your brand. You can leverage the power of AI and user-centric design to create fresh, catchy, and insightful newsletters time after time. The following practices can help you get there.
Adopt a truly user-centric language
Writing in first-person POV may feel alienating to your audience. Make sure your every newsletter or announcement is ultimately about your users. Always highlight the practical value they can get from your new update, feature, sale, product, or piece of content — the point of view of your company should be secondary.
Use progressive profiling to refine your messaging strategy
Instead of bombarding users with extensive forms, try progressive profiling to gradually collect more information over time. This keeps the user experience smooth and avoids overwhelming your audience.
This also allows you to keep your messaging strategy and pace natural and gentle. If you send too much content at once, trying to cover all possible user needs, it’ll just feel rushed and needy at best. By taking it slowly, you demonstrate that you actually care what topics your users want to explore.
Use AI to anticipate user needs and get rid of writer’s block
Coming up with relevant topics and captivating copy daily is no easy task. Thankfully, there are enough specialized AI-powered tools that can help SaaS companies maximize their email marketing efforts and deliver quality content every time.
Here are some examples of tools that can make your messaging more resonant and in alignment with industry trends and customer interests:
- MarketMuse — AI-powered platform for uncovering content gaps and aligning email content with website blog posts;
- Jasper — AI writing assistant for crafting, rewriting, and repurposing full email campaigns;
- Synthesia — AI video creation platform for making engaging, life-like explainers, onboarding videos, how-tos, and demos.
85% of marketers using generative AI for email creation agree that AI helps them personalize content at scale and yield predictably good results. Just make sure to alternate between AI-generated assets and real talking-head videos to remind your users that there’s an actual human team behind your brand.
Mimic your interface design in your SaaS emails
If you want to speed up user adoption and flatten the learning curve, your email campaigns are a good place to start. Let your subscribers experience and get used to your interface design even before they sign up for your service by mirroring it in your email templates.
For example, here’s how Miro subtly integrates its dashboard elements into its email design.
This trick works like a charm. When your recipients decide to become full-time users, they’ll already have a clear idea of what your dashboard looks and feels like. This will help them skip the awkward getting-used-to phase and start enjoying your product right away.
Review your mailing list regularly
The world around us is more volatile and unpredictable than ever, and it’s bound to affect your audience, too. Your mailing list consists of people whose expectations, goals, and preferences are rather fluid, reflecting the economic landscape and zeitgeist. The patterns you uncovered six months ago may not be relevant anymore.
Take up the habit of reviewing your mailing list weekly or bi-weekly to understand where your new subscribers are coming from, what’s driving them to your product, why they sign up for a free trial, and what kinds of pains they’re trying to address with it.
Move away from generic corporate-style illustrations
Both critics and customers have grown wary of the pervasive Corporate Memphis illustration style, whose main trademarks are rubbery long limbs and unnatural skin tones. With the rapid development of generative AI, there’s no excuse not to create more original and refreshing visuals, even if your budget is extremely tight.
Custom imagery can make even the most basic plain-text email memorable and quirky.
Stock images are also about to make an unexpected comeback. For instance, major SaaS companies like Hinge already replaced their Corporate Memphis illustrations with authentic, casual photographs of real people.
The final decision should depend on the nature of your product. However, our previous example from Glitch proves that playful, intentionally hand-drawn illustrations can inject life into any techy email.
Up your user-generated content game
Ditch boring questionnaires and encourage your users to share their experiences with your product in a more natural, conversational way. Consider turning customer success stories into captivating long-reads, video interviews, or podcasts — and feature them in your monthly newsletters.
This will instantly make your email content more convincing and trustworthy because video testimonials, unlike anonymous reviews, are verifiable and much harder to fake. To justify the amount of work your long-term customers will have to put in, you can motivate them with a solid discount or plan upgrade.
Use contests and challenges to keep your users tuned in
Interactivity is one of the hottest trends in content marketing right now, and it’s perfect for engaging a tech-savvy crowd. Interactivity can be implemented in the form of polls, quizzes, games — or contests and challenges.
By organizing niche competitions or challenges, you’ll empower your users to explore the entire functionality of your product, connect with like-minded professionals, and showcase their achievements.
4 examples of SaaS emails you will want to copy
The perfect recipe for a SaaS email campaign doesn’t exist — it takes practice and experimentation to find out what works for your audience. However, there’s no harm in studying someone else’s campaigns for inspiration. Let’s look at the brands that have mastered email marketing for SaaS and consistently stay ahead of the curve.
Feature announcement from Canva
This thrilling announcement is well worth learning from. Canva manages to add just the right amount of tease while keeping the overall tone of the email light and on-brand. The minimalistic illustration contributes to the teaser, implying that something big is about to unfold.
The main CTA here is featured twice, which helps reinforce the message. The email is very to the point and doesn’t contain any other promotions to avoid distracting users from the announcement. You can learn how to create similar product launch emails from our blog.
Personalized tips from Miro
This SaaS email is our personal favorite because it sounds like a piece of advice from a good friend. At the same time, it manages to unpack tons of useful information on how to get started working with Miro.
This is what SaaS emails should strive to be — highly conversational yet packed full of value. The conversational part helps the email stand out and increases the trustworthiness of the tips featured in it. Another great thing about this SaaS email template is how neatly organized it is, with secondary CTAs, previews, and snippets allowing us to get a glimpse of what each section contains.
Promotional email from Coda
This particular SaaS email template works for multiple reasons. Firstly, Coda uses bright safety orange accents to make sure the reader is alert and ready to pay attention. Secondly, we see real-life examples of how Coda can facilitate collaborations online — there’s no need for wordy descriptions.
Finally, this email has a catchy subject line that is guaranteed to pique the interest of a busy user. “This is the end of pointless meetings” is something many dream about, but few dare to implement. And Coda lives up to the expectations, offering clever features like in-doc votes, sentiment sharing, and more.
Event invitation email from Salesforce
There are many ways to announce an eCommerce conference, and Salesforce chose a fun one. In this event invitation email, we see a clear timetable along with a concise description of what Connections is all about. It’s tempting to tune in even if one wasn’t planning on it before.
This email is interactive, too. For those who aren’t convinced yet, there’s an extra incentive to click the link, take a survey, and get a chance to win a pass to the largest AI event in 2023.
Find the right SaaS email template and set up your campaign with SendPulse
Not sure where to start? With SendPulse, you can create welcome messages, onboarding sequences, promotional campaigns, transactional emails, and more. We offer 130+ customizable templates, a drag-and-drop editor, and other tools to help SaaS companies and other businesses optimize their email marketing efforts.
This is all it takes to build a SaaS email campaign — no coding knowledge is necessary:
- Create or log in to your SendPulse account. Open the “Email” tab and click “Create a mailing list.” Here, you can add your contacts.
- Click on “Create campaign.” Select your recipients and proceed to create your template.
- From the template collection, choose the layout that suits your goals. You can sort them by theme or industry. All templates are fully customizable.
- Drag and drop the individual elements of the template to change its structure or leave it as is. You can also add new blocks from the sidebar. Customize the design by adding your images, text, and branding.
- Preview the results and make changes if needed.
- Move on to the campaign settings. Specify the sender name, subject line, and preheader text. Then, schedule your campaign to make sure it goes live at the optimal time.
- Review your campaign settings and click “Send” to launch it.
Our comprehensive knowledge base will help you master the intricacies of email automation, sales tracking, and more.
Ready for the next step?
SendPulse is much more than an email service. It’s a fully-featured marketing and sales automation platform created to help you build stronger relationships with your customers and enable your business growth.
When you sign up, you get 15,000 free emails per month, which you can send to 500 subscribers at absolutely no cost. The free plan also allows you to try out our chatbot builder, CRM, and other tools. Get your free account now to see our all-in-one toolkit in action!
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