The SaaS Email Marketing Playbook Quotes

“Does It “Really” Need to Be an Email? By this point, you’ve probably figured out that I love email. Well, in spite of my love for email marketing, not every communication needs to be an email. In fact, there are times when emails really aren’t the best solution. So, if not email, what else? Other solutions include: In-App messages like popups, sidebars, site notifications, chat messages, browser or push notifications, desktop notifications, text messages, and even product tours and onboarding flows. Email is great when the user isn’t currently using your product. It’s great to drive them back in, but when they are right there using your product, you can’t expect them to be checking their emails at the same time. Before setting up a new email campaign, ask yourself if email is the best way to achieve your objective and drive the user behavior you seek. Maybe a popup or site notification would be more effective. Users can’t typically unsubscribe from popups, sidebars, site notifications, chat messages, or onboarding flows. They are usually better embedded into your app and more contextual. Because of this, they tend to reach users more directly than email can. That means that they can often be more effective to influence user behaviors. Push notifications, desktop notifications, and text messages still have some novelty to them. They can also reach users in different contexts from email. Although sometimes it’s better to use a different communication type, sometimes combining email with other options is the best way to go. For this reason, it’s important to consider the mix. For example, an email followed on-site by an In-App message, or an onboarding flow followed by an email summing up the process may be more effective than a single email. It will allow you to follow up on user actions, and make it really clear what needs to get done. By breaking down the steps one at a time, there’s more chances for users to learn. At LANDR, we often followed feature launch emails on-site with In-App messages. This helped to keep communications simple and goal-focused (one goal per message). The email was about getting people in the product, while the In-App message was about getting them to engage with the product. This approach allows you to evaluate and optimize each step of the process independently. Automation platforms like Intercom, ActiveCampaign and HubSpot generally allow you to combine messaging types. If your platform doesn’t currently have site messaging or onboarding functionalities, you may have to use multiple tools in conjunction in order to maximize results. This will make it trickier to track pacing, sequencing, and goals but it isn’t impossible. You also need to consider tracking effort when adding new communication types to your mix. As your program becomes more complex, it can be easy to lose track of the overall user experience: Are your users getting spammed? Are you creating a disjointed customer experience? Test things from your users’ perspective. Keep an eye out for social media messages and support requests as you do. In the next chapter we will look at setting up automations to minimize issues and maximize outcomes.”
― Étienne Garbugli, The SaaS Email Marketing Playbook: Convert Leads, Increase Customer Retention, and Close More Recurring Revenue With Email

“1. Create intimacy: You’ll get more trust—and capture the attention of your prospects—by establishing a personal connection. Your emails should read as if one person has written it to another: one to one. This can be achieved by: using a personal, or plain-text template; using “you” instead of “we”, or “I”; telling stories; and making good use of personalization. For an even greater effect, you can add subtle personalization throughout your copy. For example: “…this is what we’ve heard from other people in [ Tampa ]”. 2. Make users feel special: On top of personalization, you can create exclusivity: “This offer is only for our most engaged users” “…it’s for early adopters” Or appeal to vanity: “Our most successful users want to feel this way…” 3. Demonstrate that you understand their reality: You can create obvious qualifications everyone wants to have assigned to themselves, for example “…people who care about maximizing their return on investment”; or “…savvy marketers”. Illustrate product benefits and value with clear examples that relate to the unique situation of your users. 4. Create urgency: As Zapier did, you can also get creative with deadlines. Use coupons with limited-time offers to accentuate the fear of missing out (FOMO)17: “Offer only available until June 4th…” “Only a few people get this plan…” 5. Use clear actions: Use a CTA that clearly establishes the next steps. Repeat it throughout the email, coming at it from different angles. Use the P.S. to attract the eye and to reinforce the action you want users to take (when appropriate). Keep your emails simple and your messaging scannable. It’s important for users to be able to get the email at a glance. Short and sweet often outperforms long and complex emails. You want a near-instant reaction from your readers. Your email has to build up to the desired action. Use copy to overcome objections, and accentuate the desire to buy or engage. A good email has to: capture attention through the subject line, personalization, or a story; build reader interest by demonstrating either the benefit or the problem; build desire to act by creating information gaps, time constraints, or the fear of missing out; and drive action through a well-timed CTA, telling users exactly what you want them to do. These are really just the four steps of the AIDA model18 (Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action) applied to email copywriting. Don’t get intimidated by copywriting. Emails that are too polished often don’t work as well. Get started crafting your own email offers. We’ll get started working on subject lines in the next chapter.”
― Étienne Garbugli, The SaaS Email Marketing Playbook: Convert Leads, Increase Customer Retention, and Close More Recurring Revenue With Email

“Here’s the trick to significantly improving your SaaS email marketing skills—you have to become a student of it. This means you should: Start collecting great email copy, CTAs, and designs. Understand the objective behind each and every email that businesses send. Try to understand the rationale behind copy, link, and design decisions. There are great websites like Really Good Emails11, Good Email Copy12, and Good Sales Emails.com13 that you can use for your research. These sites categorize email copy and designs by types. As well as this, you should sign up to receive emails from some of the leading SaaS brands. Those include, among others: Drift MailChimp Pipedrive Shopify SurveyMonkey Trello Wistia Zapier You should also sign up to competing products and mailing lists from companies in your sector. I personally signed up to thousands of products and newsletters. It’s great for benchmarking and research. At the time of writing, I’ve already passively collected more than 60,000 emails. Obviously, don’t sign up to your competitors’ products with a business email address! I have a special email address I use for this. This account allows me to get data, understand what other organizations are doing, and find good copy ideas. For example, here’s what a search for ‘Typeform’ gives me: Figure 18.1 – Inbox Inspiration It’s not uncommon for me to sign up several times to the same product or newsletter. This allows me to see what they have learned and to track the evolution of their email marketing program. At LANDR, we created a shared document to keep track of subject lines, offers, and copy we wanted to test. Our copywriter was even going through his junk mail folder to find ideas and inspiration. There are tests we ran that were inspired by copy found in his spam folder. Some of them turned out to be really successful too—so keep your eyes open for inspiration. You can use Evernote, Paper, or any other platform to collaborate on idea generation. Alternatively, you can subscribe to paid services like Mailcharts14 or Mailody15. These services will help you track and understand your competitors’ email programs. Build processes to find and access copy and design ideas. It will help you create better emails, faster. In the next chapter we’ll get started creating our first email sequences.”
― Étienne Garbugli, The SaaS Email Marketing Playbook: Convert Leads, Increase Customer Retention, and Close More Recurring Revenue With Email

“Prioritizing Your Email Roadmap Chances are you’ll need a Hail Mary. And a Net Promoter Score survey email. And a newsletter. And… And… And… If you are getting started with your email program, the list of emails you’ll need will probably be very long. Do you need to do everything at once? Definitely not. In fact, it’s best to start your program by aligning with business priorities and getting results before thinking about expanding. What areas are most troublesome in your business right now? What metric are you expected to move with email? Is it: Engagement? Retention? Conversion? Revenue? Signups? If none of those stick out above the rest, start from the top. Welcome and onboarding emails set the tone for product usage. Better onboarding and value communication lead to reductions in churn and disengagement down the road. Welcome and onboarding emails are also sent to most, if not all, of your users, thus they have a greater potential to influence user behaviors. At Highlights, for example, we set up a welcome email, five onboarding emails, and an upsell email the week before we launched the product. The goal was to maximize the number of people in a position to convert. It also allowed us to start getting some data to optimize performance. In general, you’ll want to prioritize emails that: send a lot (large volume of sends); send consistently (every day, or every week at least); and have the potential to have a big impact on a key business goal. In the beginning especially, you want to make sure that you have a clear goal or metric to monitor with the aim of evaluating performance with user data. Start implementing a first sequence, test, gather data, and move on to the next sequence.”
― Étienne Garbugli, The SaaS Email Marketing Playbook: Convert Leads, Increase Customer Retention, and Close More Recurring Revenue With Email

“Creating Key User Segments The beauty with segmentation is that it can be used for more than email targeting. You can use your segmentation for tracking and reporting, to recruit candidates for interviews, and for quality assurance. If your segmentation doesn’t get you the right users, you want to find out as quickly as possible. Before starting to write emails, you’ll want to create key user segments. Those could be: people who haven’t signed up for your product (if the required data is available); people who signed up today; people who signed up in the last seven days; people who signed up in the last seven days, but didn’t engage, or didn’t activate; people who signed up in the last 30, 60 or 90 days and activated; inactive users; users whose trial is about to end or just ended and that you would eventually like to convert; paid subscribers in their first month; paid subscribers retained for two months or more; subscribers on annual plans; users who you think would be willing to refer your product to others; subscribers who cancelled; subscribers who cancelled more than once; or signups per specific acquisition channel. Don’t go too far, but do try to test real segments with real data. Let them run a few weeks. Do users flow through the way you’d expect them to? Go through random profiles in each of these segments and compare with the data from your database. Are those the users you’d expect to find in each of these segments? Any issues? You want to uncover issues with the implementation or your segmentation as early as possible. It’s easier if you do this—and much less costly in terms of mistakes—before you start sending emails than after. Make sure you can track users across different segments and that your segments truly are mutually exclusive when they need to be. Identify issues, adjust, and refine. This step will save your team a lot of headaches later on. As you test your segments, make them available to the rest of your team. Your colleagues can also help point out issues. At this point, if there aren’t any major issues, your setup is complete. Let’s get started sending some emails!”
― Étienne Garbugli, The SaaS Email Marketing Playbook: Convert Leads, Increase Customer Retention, and Close More Recurring Revenue With Email