8 SaaS Email Marketing Strategies and Best Practices (2024)

Today over 350 billion emails are sent and received daily. So there’s a burning question: ‘How to make your particular email stand out and reach your user?’

SaaS marketing strategy involves building and optimizing email campaigns. This provides abundant opportunities to foster stronger relationships with users, induce them to stay with the brand, and ideally become advocates for a company. 

We’ll start with the basics like what a SaaS email marketing strategy is and guide you through with successful examples, tips, and tools needed to achieve the results you want.

In a nutshell, a SaaS email marketing strategy involves focusing your marketing efforts on emails to promote and expand your SaaS business. These emails accompany users on every step of their customer journey: from discovering your product to turning into a loyal customer.

This being said, SaaS companies use email marketing to achieve different purposes: convert leads, improve onboarding, inform about product updates, or re-engage inactive users. We can single out a few common email campaigns SaaS companies commonly focus on:

• lead generation emails
• welcome emails
• newsletters
• milestone emails
• new features introduction
• product updates
• free trial ending reminder
• promotional emails
• surveys
• retention/reactivation emails

A successful SaaS email marketing strategy usually entails using various automation tools for better customer segmentation and robust analytics. We’ll delve into the top helpful tools further in the article, but we still need to look at some examples of SaaS email marketing strategies. Shall we?

Now let’s take a look at some successful SaaS companies and the way they approach email marketing. We’ve singled out their winning strategies for various purposes of email campaigns, including onboarding improvement, engagement, personalization, etc.

Miro — Onboarding

A welcoming onboarding is crucial for building long-term customer relationships. A step-by-step guide, a quick overview of the top features, and links to free educational videos — this is how prominent SaaS brands like Canva, Zapier, and Miro help to educate their customers. With the help of SaaS onboarding software, it’s easy to craft a smooth onboarding experience.

It’s never too soon to employ personalization, and here’s how Zapier adds a pinch of it at the start of customer relationships. By catering emails to the specific needs of every customer, you’ll benefit from nurturing loyal customers of your brand. 

Netflix — Engagement 

The king of engagement, Netflix, knows a thing or two about successful email marketing. From consistent branding colors to thoroughly curated recommendations based on extensive data analytics — Netflix aims at delivering unique email experience to each user. There are also straight-to-the-point CTA buttons luring users into checking out the recommended content.

Dropbox — Customer Feedback

Here’s a great example of a simple, yet effective way to track your customer satisfaction. By receiving such an email, users feel that their experience and feedback matters. This way Dropbox shows its customer-centric values and readiness to improve.

Wistia — Updates

A video hosting SaaS, Wistia, employs a curious tactic to inform users about their updates. The phrase ‘wanted you to be the first to know’ not only creates the sense of urgency, but it also builds the feeling of loyal deep relationships with a customer. This email sounds like a secret that can only be known to a few chosen ones.

Spotify — Celebrating Customer Milestones

Spotify uses personalized emails to celebrate customer milestones. This is a great approach for improving retention and strengthening loyalty. This email appeals to a nostalgic feeling and helps to build a deeper connection with a user. 

Shopify — Free Trial Ended Re-engagement

Another excellent opportunity you don’t want to miss is using emails for re-engaging with customers whose free trial ended or is about to end. Shopify notifies its users with straight-to-the-point emails and smoothly encourages them to upgrade. In addition, they have another way to re-engage their users. That is by offering to extend a free trial for a few more days so that users have more to get the hang of the app. The thing that cannot go unnoticed is a link to leave feedback if a user isn’t going to continue their free trial.

And here’s the way Slack re-engages with the users after their Standard plan has ended. It’s not pushy. There’s a clear CTA for upgrading, but most importantly, they offer assistance from the SaaS helpdesk, showing that they care about their customer struggles.

Webflow — Event Promotion

Emails serve as a great tool for promoting events. Various conferences and events have become an indispensable part of the SaaS market. Companies create events for promoting new features/products, leveraging networking, and keeping up with the latest trends. Here’s an example of a promotional email from SaaS company Webflow. One of their event marketing tactics is to employ feedback from previous attendees. Plus, there’s a clear CTA making it easy to register for a conference.

Canva — Personalization

Customers want to be pampered with personalized offers and recommendations. According McKinsey survey, customers expect brands to provide them with recommendations they wouldn’t have thought about themselves. And here’s how Canva employs this tactic. Based on the user’s activity, Canva picks templates a user might enjoy. Personalized emails help to build loyal and trustworthy customer relationships.

Flock – Special offers

Email marketing works great for promotional campaigns like sending discounts, special offers, and coupon codes. A great tactic used by Flock, a communication and collaboration platform,  is a countdown timer for a special offer — such a simple but effective way to incentivize users to buy a plan within a limited period.

Another great example of promotional email for SaaS is that of Canva. In the email below, Canva promotes its new features in a guide-like manner. This email showcases the features with eye-catching visuals and includes tons of persuasive CTAs.

Customerly — Product Updates

Customerly’s email introduces its new Banners and Notifications feature, using clear visuals and CTAs to show how businesses can engage users with targeted messages like fullscreen notifications, banners, and pop-ups. A standout strategy is the case study at the end, which showcases real-world success and has been driving more and more AI Customer Service tool activations. The email emphasizes boosting engagement and includes a tutorial link to help users get started with the new tool.

So what should a SaaS company do to reap the benefits of email marketing? There’s no magic pill for an effective strategy. However, some indispensable elements can guide you towards success. We’ve singled out the basics needed for an email marketing strategy to be strong.

Personalization

According to Hubspot’s last year report, personalized customer experience significantly increases sales, as well as the likelihood of customers returning. For this reason, don’t hesitate to personalize email recommendations and CTAs. Automation helps to use a customer’s recent action and tailor an individual email message for them.

Customer education

Smooth onboarding is crucial for users to stay with your SaaS product. So don’t hesitate to include customer education into your email marketing strategy. When newly subscribed customers are getting to know your software, you don’t want them to get confused with some SaaS terms or feel lost. Emails are a great means to be there for your users and help them get the hang of features. In the long run, it will affect your customers’ loyalty. 

Besides onboarding, you can then combine promotional and educational emails. While promoting new features, or encouraging them to upgrade the plan, educate your users on how they can get the most out of your product.

Creating a customer marketing funnel

When building your email marketing strategy, always keep in mind a funnel of four steps: awareness, interest, conversion, and loyalty. Your emails should delicately guide your users at every step of their customer journey. This being said, the content will differ depending on where your user is in the funnel. At some touchpoints, you need to be more pushy, while at some points aggressive marketing might scare users away. For example, newsletters work great for newly subscribed. Whereas, tailored recommendations, new feature updates, and surveys will help to build loyalty and encourage repeat purchases.

Simple campaigns first and micro-conversions

If you’ve just started your journey with SaaS email marketing, take it slow. Focus on small steps and create simple campaigns for micro-conversions like email forwards, freemium sign-ups, template downloads, blog visits, webinar sign-ups, etc. Define micro-conversions for your brand that will help pave the way for the big goal.

A/B testing

Practice makes perfect and this is the key to building an email strategy that works for your SaaS brand. Let A/B testing help you find which approach drives results. You can test two versions of an email with different images, CTAs, and structures. You can experiment with the order of emails in an email sequence as well as research the perfect message frequency. Optimize your marketing efforts with testing, testing, and testing again.

Avoid spamming

Users want to receive relevant emails without feeling bombarded with this and that. For this reason, think of enabling customers to choose which emails they would like to receive. Some would be happy to get every email from your brand, while others might enjoy selecting a category like only newsletters, or only educational emails. 

This way you won’t lose subscribers who may get overwhelmed and just unsubscribe to all of your emails. Still, the unsubscribe button is also a must, as not only does it comply with laws like CAN-SPAM, for instance. But it also shows that you care about your user’s choice.

Branding 

Prominent SaaS companies like Shopify, Canva, Netflix, etc., always use brand colors and brand signatures in their emails. It improves brand awareness, recall, and engagement. The moment customers open your email, they should instantly associate this message with your brand.

Branding is important for promotional emails, as it will help create a sense of familiarity and as a result, improve engagement. 

Automated behavioral triggers

This approach is vital for a successful SaaS email marketing strategy, as it helps to deliver a personalized experience with the right content at the right time. So define various behavioral triggers like subscription, purchase, cart abandonment,opt-ins, watched videos, etc. Then design emails that will correspond to the needs of your users depending on a particular trigger.

Incentivized referrals

Your existing customers can help you grow your audience. Eighty-four percent of people trust recommendations from people they know. That is why referral marketing can do wonders for your email strategy. Think of what you can offer both for your referring users and referrals. It might be some discounts, coupons, access to premium features, etc.

Email marketing isn’t a quick-win approach. It will take some time and effort. However, in the long run, it presents several undisputed benefits, including:

Better engagement 

Even though on average users are now getting more emails than ever, the open rate seems to be increasing from 26,8% to 39,64%. This means that brands are leveraging emails to deliver relevant and personalized content. As a result, users are more likely to engage with such emails.

Cost-efficient

Compared to paid advertising, email marketing can be more affordable. It can also deliver higher ROI than other digital marketing channels. It’s been reported that email marketing can help generate $36 for every $1 spent.

More sales 

With the help of email marketing, SaaS companies can boost their upselling and cross-selling strategies. Having the right marketing software tools, it’s easier to create segments and automate delivering tailored offers to existing customers. From promoting additional features to smoothly guiding users to upgrade a plan — emails are great for increasing revenue.

Fostering strong customer relationships

Another undeniable benefit of email marketing is the opportunity to build lasting relationships with your customers. SaaS companies can then enjoy having loyal customers who are likely to refer to the brand and become brand advocates.

Data-driven decision making

Last but not least is data analytics which can do wonders for SaaS email marketing. By examining various metrics like click-through rates, open rates, bounce rates, spam complaint rates, etc., you can better understand your users. You can make better decisions by knowing the patterns of customers’ behavior and preferences.

Here are some basic steps you’d like to consider to create an effective SaaS email marketing strategy. Whether you’re a beginner or want to improve your marketing efforts, you’ll find this guide helpful for planning and adjusting your SaaS email marketing tactics.

Define your goals

First and foremost, you need to specify your goals. SaaS goals may differ depending on the industry, audience, and company’s size. Say, is it crucial for you to boost awareness or you’re looking for improved engagement of the existing customers? Are you planning to create a complex email marketing campaign or you’d like a simple campaign focusing on one goal at a time? Think through what your short-term and long-term objectives are, as well as how you’re going to measure the results.

Create your ICP (ideal customer persona)

The next step involves researching and building your ideal customer persona (ICP), also known as buyer persona. This is a semi-invented vision of your ideal customer based on data about their demographics, purchasing behaviors, preferences, motivation, etc. For example, is it individuals, small business owners, medium-sized or large companies? Is your ICP looking for long-term support or one-time problem-solution assistance? Is your buyer persona a non-developer company? Dive deep into understanding your ICP, so you can tailor your messaging to meet their needs.

Examine your previous efforts

Consider examining your previous email campaigns: what worked and what didn’t. How was the engagement? Which subject lines worked better? Were your emails with images more efficient than those without pictures? Did you notice any pattern behind spam complaints if any? So basically, look for emails your subscribers responded well to and employ these tactics in your new campaign.

Dig into your competitors’ strategy

Another effective practice is to examine your competitors and their tactics. Especially, if your target audience is similar. By examining the rights and wrongs of their email marketing, you can single out some techniques for your strategy. However, keep in mind that this method is great for inspiration. Don’t blind-copy your competitors’ approach.

Run A/B testing

Test your emails to see what works better. For instance, create 2 versions of emails with different CTAs and compare which version performs better. You can test subject lines, links, pre-headers, or email bodies — in essence, experiment with any part of your email to detect what works best for your campaign.

Analyze the results and make adjustments 

The key to a successful email marketing strategy also lies in a quick understanding of the results and making fast data-driven decisions. With the right SaaS analytics software, you can easily track essential metrics like open rate, click-through rate, reply rate, bounce rate, ROI, etc. This way you can make adjustments based on data insights. And as a result, create a better marketing funnel that will bring more leads and retain existing customers.

Automate successful campaigns 

The moment you find your holy grail emails, don’t hesitate to automate such a campaign. For example, if you see that some email strategy helps with re-engaging inactive users, why don’t you automate your marketing efforts? Using the right tools will help you make your campaign more effective as well as spare you time to focus on how to grow your brand further. As for the tools to leverage your email marketing, we’re almost there and we’ll discuss them further.

We’ve selected top email marketing tools for every company size and goal. You’ll discover tools that are good for small startups, tools with customizable automation, an effective transactional email service provider, great for customer support, and many others. Check out our list and find the tool that will work best for you.

1. Customerly — SaaS companies looking for smooth email automation with a wide range of customizable templates will enjoy this service. With an intuitive email template builder for SaaS, one can create various types of emails quickly and with no sweat, including onboarding emails, your trial is ending, the free trial has expired, review and feedback emails, and many others.
2. Mailtrap — a robust solution for companies looking for separate streams to improve deliverability. This is a bulk email delivery service that has two streams: one for bulk emails and the other one for transactional emails. It’s a great choice for developer teams as well as marketing ones, as there is a wide range of easy-to-implement code snippets. This way one can quickly integrate the code and send an email. In addition to this, Mailtrap offers an intuitive email builder with lots of customizable and ready-made templates.
3. FluentCRM — a powerful email marketing automation tool for WordPress. Basically, it enables you to automate your email marketing campaign within the WordPress dashboard. Email builder, email sequencing, campaign management, analytics, and more — this CRM plugin simplifies email automation. You can create multiple sales funnels, run tests, and discover behavioral patterns all in one platform. Plus, it’s worth mentioning that this tool has an unlimited number of contacts you can add and an unlimited number of emails you can send.
4. Benchmarkemail — an easy-to-use tool with a plethora of email templates you can use with no coding experience. There are also many beneficial integrations like Canva Designs, Pexels, and Giphy. With their help, you can seamlessly use your Canva designs or search for the needed picture for your email without leaving the email builder. This tool can also boast of integrations like Shopify, Zapier, PipelineDeals, and LinkedIn. There are also in-built analytics enabling one to monitor common metrics including open and bounce rates, unsubscribes, links clicked, and others. 
5. Encharge – an email marketing automation tool designed for SaaS products. With Encharge you can send behavior emails based on what people do (or don’t do) in your product.  You can also integrate your CRM and subscription billing provider data to build precise segments and send targeted emails. 
6. Brevo — a great choice for small SaaS businesses trying to improve their email marketing strategy. From audience segmentation to customizable email templates, from personalization features to AI solutions — you can check out core features for free. Brevo also has two separate streams for bulk and transactional emails. A free plan includes 300 emails per day which is enough for a small brand at the beginning. 
7. HubSpot — a good tool for B2B SaaS content marketing. It enables you to create complex email campaigns with robust segmentation. You can use pre-built templates, benefit from AI solutions, enjoy in-depth analytics, and enhance your email marketing strategy.

SaaS email marketing is quite challenging. But does it mean that you can’t handle it? Just the opposite. With the right tools up your sleeve, you can craft an effective email marketing strategy to grow your SaaS business. You’ve read about practical guides, tips, and examples of successful SaaS email marketing. So have no doubts and turn your inspiration into action.