Regardless of what others say, SaaS email marketing can be a very effective practice that you, as a business, can incorporate into your marketing strategy. Aside from that, email marketing has its own set of advantages, such as personalized content, direct contact with users, better customer segmentation, cost-effectiveness, and so on.

This blog will walk you through the top 10 best SaaS email marketing strategies that may help you with lead nurturing, customer engagement, revenue generation, and achieving various other business objectives

What Is A SaaS Email Marketing Strategy?

SaaS email marketing is a marketing practice that aims to improve, increase, or achieve desired SaaS business goals. It can range from customer retention to revenue generation, to reducing churn rate, to product marketing.

Besides that, there are multiple SaaS email marketing strategies that you can implement to educate your audience about your service or product as well as to deepen your customer relationship.

Why Is Email Marketing Crucial For SaaS?

SaaS email marketing is critical to the success or failure of any SaaS business. A well-planned and executed email marketing campaign can help your SaaS company achieve desired results, such as increased customer retention, lead conversion, and revenue growth. At the same time, a poorly planned and executed SaaS email strategy will only harm your business.

Assume you’ve recently started a SaaS business. Your primary or near-term goal might be to educate your target audience about your offerings. Later on, you might want to monetize that audience and convert them into customers. Your next objective could be to keep those customers or to persuade them to renew the package or service when it expires.

All of these objectives can be reached with the help of well-planned and well-executed SaaS email marketing strategies.

10 Best SaaS Email Marketing Strategies In 2023

The following are 10 Email marketing strategies for SaaS businesses that, if properly implemented, may benefit your company in a certain way. For your convenience and understanding, we have divided these strategies into 3 categories. Let’s take a quick look at each of them.

A. Lead Nurturing SaaS Email Marketing Strategies

The 4 best email marketing strategies for SaaS businesses that can definitely help you with lead nurturing or lead conversion are as follows.

1. User Onboarding

Email can be an excellent channel for ensuring smooth user onboarding– the process of familiarizing new users with a product, typically an application or software. You can share the onboarding process or onboarding sequence with your new users through email marketing.

For example, as soon as new users complete the registration process, you can send them an onboarding email with a step-by-step guide on how to proceed or use the product. This will not only benefit users, but it will also relieve your customer support team from a large number of onboarding process related queries.

2. Educate Prospects

The next major SaaS email marketing strategy you can use to keep users from leaving or unsubscribing from your service is to encourage education and disseminate information. Once users discover your product, they usually try to educate themselves about it.

So at this point, your job should be to move the prospect from the awareness stage to the consideration stage.

To do so, you must first get the users’ email addresses. You can certainly do this with the registration form, though it is a difficult task, especially when users are not particularly interested in the product.

However, once you have their email addresses, you can target them with personalized email campaigns that include sharing product benefit guides, product reviews, and offers, among other things.

3. Free-to-Paid Upselling

The freemium business model is effective for increasing the customer base. However, converting those visitors into paying customers is a challenging feat. Nevertheless, you can certainly achieve this goal by implementing the best lead nurturing SaaS email marketing strategies.

(Source: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content)

For example, you could send an email to each free user explaining the benefits of premium features or premium features that paid users are enjoying.

You can even share case studies on how premium features have helped paid users in meeting their business objectives. This exercise will certainly help you in converting free users into paid users.

4. Customer Retention

After successfully converting free users to paid users, your next task should be to keep those customers for as long as possible. Your email campaigns for these premium or paid users should revolve around how your product is helping them or how your product is the best software solution for their business.

Each of your SaaS email marketing strategies should aim to persuade your users to renew their subscriptions when it expires.

There are numerous ways or SaaS email marketing strategies to improve user retention rate. For example, you can inform your users about new features that will be added in the next version or discounts that will be available for the next renewal, and so on.

All of these standard steps will surely make users aware of the value that your product adds to their business and eventually entice them to renew the plan.

B. Customer Engagement SaaS Email Marketing Strategies

If SaaS companies want their customers to keep investing in their products for a long time, they must keep their users engaged. The following are some of the best SaaS email marketing strategies for growing customer engagement.

5. Engaging Content

It is true that engaged users tend to use your products for a longer period of time than non-engaged users. Keeping customers engaged also helps to significantly reduce churn. The users who will be in constant touch with you or your support team will feel that there is someone who will assist them with any product-related issues as and when they may encounter them. 

(Source: https://gleam.io/blog/content/images/)

And one way to reassure them about the product and support is to send them enough informative materials via email.

One of the most effective SaaS email marketing strategies for keeping your users engaged is to provide them with informative materials such as product guides, how-to guides, blogs, newsletters, tutorials, and so on. This will help them use the product to its full potential, besides making them able to resolve minor issues on their own.

6. Product Benefit Awareness

Another SaaS email marketing strategy for retaining users is to keep them informed of the product benefits they receive by subscribing to your product.

For example, if you are a VoIP service provider, you can continue to send them emails with statistics such as how many more calls they have attended in a given period of time or how much their call-dropped rate has decreased since subscribing to the service or feature such as call queuing system.

By illustrating the benefits that users gain from using your service, you may eliminate any doubts in their minds about the service’s effectiveness in your business.

Such email campaigns also assist users in understanding how their investment in the service is insignificant or why it is worthwhile compared to the benefits that the product provides to the business.

7. Celebration Campaigns

A celebration email campaign is an excellent SaaS email marketing strategy for engaging your customers and nurturing your relationship with them.

Celebration mails, also known as milestone mails, are emails that celebrate an important day in the life of your subscriber or the customer lifecycle. For example, it could be the user’s birthday, wedding anniversary, product subscription anniversary, etc.

(Source: https://www.litmus.com/)

Other than greetings, you can use a celebration or milestone campaign for various other purposes. For example, you can use the occasion to offer a special discount to customers and encourage them to upgrade or subscribe to the advanced plan.

This will be a win-win situation for both users and providers because one receives a discounted subscription while the other gets a premium user’s benefits!

C. Revenue Creation SaaS Email Marketing Strategies

Revenue is a critical component of any business as it decides the financial success or failure of the company. The following are some of the best SaaS email marketing strategies for increasing revenues.

8. Up-selling & Cross-selling

Upselling and cross-selling are two of the most important SaaS email marketing strategies businesses can use to increase customer value.

Upselling refers to marketing practices that encourage users to upgrade to paid or higher-tiered plans. On the other hand, Cross-selling refers to marketing practices that encourage users to purchase additional services or products in addition to those they already use.

Depending on each user’s subscription plan or product type, you can send them personalized emails encouraging them to upgrade to a higher plan for more features. Alternatively, you can even encourage them to invest in additional products or services such as add-ons, plugins, and tools that complement their primary product. 

For a better conversion rate, you should even consider offering them a discount on add-on products or services.

9. Retargeting  Campaigns

Retargeting email campaigns can be an excellent revenue-generating SaaS email marketing strategy as they target users or visitors who have not subscribed to any of the services. It is an email campaign used by businesses to contact website visitors who do not complete the desired purchase action.

You can use visitor information such as email addresses to understand their interests and send them personalized emails.

(Source: https://www.campaignmonitor.com)

For example, you may find that visitor A has repeatedly visited the product X page and its pricing page but has not purchased the plan. The reason could be that they find your pricing higher than that of other providers.

In such cases, you could send them a personalized email with a discount on that plan. This will certainly make them reconsider your product, and they may even purchase it.

10. Referral Campaigns

Referral campaigns can be one of the most effective SaaS email marketing strategies for dramatically increasing your user base. You can ask your existing users to participate in a referral campaign in exchange for a reward.

Remember that the reward does not have to be huge. You can simply give them access to a premium feature for a month, offer Cashback rewards, or something similar.

In addition to cashback and premium feature access, you can extend their free trial period in exchange for referrals. This type of email campaign will not only increase your user base but also significantly increase engagement.

So these are the 10 SaaS email marketing examples you should follow to improve a variety of business metrics ranging from customer retention to churn rate to revenue to improve customer satisfaction. Not to mention that these ten email marketing strategies for SaaS span the customer cycle and can be useful at each stage.

Bottom Line

Running a SaaS business is indeed a challenging task if you do not have an effective marketing strategy in place. The various email campaigns listed above not only help you achieve your business goals, but they may also help you save money on marketing campaigns. However, to reap the maximum benefits, you must plan and execute each of these SaaS email marketing strategies with extreme caution and diligence.

Author’s Bio:- Aditya Soni is a certified SEO trainee and is responsible for improving the site’s organic visibility. He has worked with SaaS companies and startups to enhance their web presence through content marketing. He is also a big fan of reading ahref SEO blogs.