Marketing SaaS is not easy. It implies many challenges to overcome, but fortunately, there are marketing techniques that help ease the task and get quick and manageable results. Email marketing is one of them.

Let’s go through the main challenges we mentioned and the most effective ways to take your SaaS email marketing to the next level and improve results.

Highly Competitive Market

With SaaS, there’s often a wide range of services that compete for the same target audience, and from year to year, the competition is becoming harder like Wix vs Squarespace.

And even if you market a brand new service where direct competitors do not exist, your customers are likely to have alternative ways to satisfy their demand you need to compete with on a regular basis.

Creating a New Demand

Often, a new SaaS means a new type of product, so another typical challenge is forming a demand and ensuring the audience in the new way of solving their problems.

Adapting to Change

Whether you are bringing a new product to market and creating new demand or offering a better solution to a well-known issue, you will face resistance to change. This implies not only finding the best audience to start from and convincing people to try, but often finding fundamentally new ways to promote or even use your solution.

Product Quality

If your product is new, it’s often an MVP, which is far from perfect. This makes SaaS marketing even more challenging because you need to promote what exists and “contaminate” the audience with the future vision.

How to Bring Your SaaS Email Marketing to a New Level

Let’s look at a few tips that can take your email marketing efforts from ordinary to extraordinary in a matter of moments!

1. Use the Lean Approach

Rather than looking at your email marketing strategy as a strict plan that you have to follow, look at it as a series of hypotheses or experiments. This is mostly known as one of the basic principles of the lean approach, where you create a cycle of learning with your minimum viable product.

In email marketing, start with the MVP. Don’t try to launch all your ideas at once and avoid spending too much time on flawless implementation. Think of the most crucial step to start from, which may bring you the biggest profit if you do in a very basic way and do it.

After, run experiments to improve the results and launch the next types of marketing campaigns.

2. Focus on Your Customer’s Results

When you email market your SaaS, don’t focus on features and technologies. There’s a great temptation to describe your great tech stack and all innovations put into the product, but for most target audiences — except for tech-minded ones and, possibly, investors — it’s not what they want to know.

Instead, describe what unique benefits your users will get and how the product will improve their lives compared to other solutions. Use technologies to explain benefits, but not vice versa.

In the welcome email series, show the most outstanding solutions and the best features to start. In the following newsletters, try not to show your company and product news, but also educate your readers and try to become a thought leader for them.

3. Start with the Right Audience

You must’ve come up with your target audience when creating your SaaS solution, but when it’s time to market it, you don’t do this all at once and from all angles. Instead, start with the most prospective customers that are easier to attract.

If it’s a new product, you need to cross the chasm and attract innovators and early adopters among those people who like trying the newest things.

If it’s an existing product, use your traction to see which target audience brings you the most profit and focus your email marketing on it in the first place.

4. Build Relationships, Not Just Sales

People do business with people, and the same goes for SaaS. Bringing a great product to the market is not enough for big success — you need to become their trusted opinion leader in the chosen segment, and email marketing may help a lot.

In addition to sending educational content to the whole list, you may go further. Segment your list based on users’ issues and requirements, buyer journey stage, and behavior inside the app. Based on that, define what info will bring the most benefit to them or their companies and create segmented email lists.

Also, don’t miss their personal and product-related anniversaries and support them in hard times as many companies did during the pandemic offering additional discounts and education.

This may seem like a waste of time because such content is not intended for direct sales, but it creates trust, builds relations, and helps sales significantly in this indirect way. Also, if you manage to build a community of your evangelists, it may give you a great boost to overall marketing and sales.

5. Combine Quick and Long-Term Marketing Tactics With Your Email Strategy

An email is a great tool itself, but in combination with other marketing techniques, it may create what is called synergy.

For example, you may integrate your email tool with PPC and send targeted emails based on users’ interaction with ads. If you go even further, you may incorporate your website analytics and display ads, and send emails based on the pages or articles they viewed. This will give you quick and measurable results.

As for long-term strategies, you may coordinate your email marketing with SEO and content marketing and support new blog posts with an additional boost. You may also compile articles on the same topic in emails to support your educational and reputation goals.

6. Maximize the LTV and Minimize the CAC

CAC stands for Customer Acquisition Cost and is the amount your business will spend to get a customer.

LTV means Lifetime Value. And it’s the amount of money an average customer may bring to the company during all the time they would use its products.

These are two primary metrics to take care of in any SaaS. And here’s how email marketing may help:

• Attract leads into your email funnels, exchanging their email for a gift (an extended trial, high-quality educational content, additional service, etc.). Even if they don’t buy right away, you’ll have a chance to nurture them with your email marketing and decrease the CAC compared with PPC or another type of direct marketing.
• Help convert leads with email series. During onboarding, educate them about the product and its best features. After, touch them from time to time with new features and offers.
• Use email to return customers who stopped using your product. Reach out to them with a question or special offer and increase their LTV in this way.

7. Improve Each Step of your Funnel

Test every step of your email marketing funnel and refine the ones you think should perform better.

This concept is well-known in growth hacking and is entirely applicable here. Refining your email step by step and finding hacks to tune up the performance may bring your efforts to a new level.

Conclusion

Email marketing is pretty much like other popular marketing techniques, and the best approaches are interchangeable. Join professional communities, apply lean growth hacking and other methods, and your SaaS email marketing will bring significantly higher results than if sticking to standard email techniques.