Email Automation for SaaS Companies: How To Utilize Automation
Mayank Wadhwa
A staggering 64% of businesses use email automation to reach their customers. If you are not one of these marketers, you could be missing out on a lot of benefits. How?
Email marketing automation helps you automate everything from capturing leads to sending emails, regardless of how large your customer base is. This saves you a lot of time that you can invest in growing your business.
In addition to helping you save time, email marketing can boost your sales potential.
Wondering how email marketing automation helps you achieve the above benefits? In this article, we will take a look at email marketing automation, the benefits it brings, and how you can automate emails for your SaaS company. In addition, we have listed the top 3 email marketing automation tools for you to choose from.
What is Email Marketing Automation?
Email marketing automation helps you send automated yet personalized messages to your prospects based on specific triggers or events. It helps deliver the message to your audience at the right time using automation.
Here’s how email marketing automation typically works:
You create multiple email copies to be sent on different occasions (customer onboarding, offers or discounts, product updates, etc). Whenever a particular event occurs, your email marketing automation tool automatically sends the emails. This way, the right email reaches the right audience at the right time without you having to lift a finger.
Wait, there’s more to it. The right email marketing automation tool can integrate with your website analytics and help you segment your prospect list based on their behavior, preferences, and more. This way, you can personalize your messaging and achieve your marketing goals more effectively.
But is email marketing automation worth the effort and money? Let’s find out.
What are the Benefits of Automated Emails?
Here’s how email automation empowers your SaaS marketing strategy:
Enhances Qualified Lead Flow
Not every lead enters your sales funnel at the same stage.
Some may enter at an early stage (awareness), looking for more information. While some may enter at a later stage (conversion) with an intent to buy. Sending the same emails to both these groups won’t help you convert leads into paying customers. According to McKinsey, 76% of customers get irritated when brand interactions are not personalized to their interests.
However, with email marketing automation, you can send customized emails at the right time based on your potential customer’s stage in the buyer’s journey. This form of personalized messaging allows you to enhance your lead flow and, thus, your sales potential.
Boost your Customer Retention Rate
Selling to your existing customer is easier and substantially more affordable than trying to convert a new customer.
And guess what? Email marketing automation can help you retain more customers. It lets you regularly stay in touch with your customers with personalized messaging. This helps build trust and loyalty and boosts customer retention.
Pro Tip: Make sure your email copy is engaging, personalized, and persuasive enough to retain your customer.
Makes your Marketing Strategy More Efficient and Scalable
Sending out a series of emails manually can be time-consuming. Also, the number of emails you send is limited by the size of your marketing team. Imagine if your customer base doubles or triples, would you be able to send emails to everyone? Probably not!
With email marketing automation, you can scale your marketing efforts. Once you automate the sequence, the tool automatically sends emails as a particular action happens. So, whenever a new customer onboarding or downloads collateral or takes action, emails are sent without human intervention. This way, you can reach out to all your leads/customers without fail.
Improves your ROI
Email automation allows you to send messages based on triggers like new user sign-up, customer birthday, trial expiry, and more. No matter how many customers or leads you have, emails are sent without the help of manual resources. This helps you save a lot of time (a crucial resource for businesses), which you can invest in growing your business.
Moreover, automated emails achieve 84% higher open rates, 341% higher click rates, and over 2200% conversion rates. And all this translates to a higher ROI.
Gives your Sales Team More Context
According to HubSpot, 22.1% of salespeople believe aligning the marketing and sales teams helps them close more deals. However, If your sales and marketing departments aren’t aligned, the sales team will hardly have any information to persuade the lead. And this can make it hard for them to close more deals.
Fortunately, automated email marketing helps align the sales and marketing departments.
When the marketing team leverages email marketing automation, everything gets logged into the tool. The sales team can see which prospects filled out a form or downloaded a collateral. This offers the sales team more context, enabling them to approach the prospect with more confidence and increasing the probability of closing a deal.
How to Automate Email for a SaaS Company?
Here’s how you can strategically automate email marketing for your SaaS business:
Segment Your Target Audience
Imagine you sell B2B accounting software with different plans for small and enterprise-level clients. Both these clients have different needs, which is why they registered for different plans. Sending the same email to all your clients, regardless of their preferences, would make no sense. In fact, you might end up confusing or even frustrating your customer.
Enter audience segmentation.
Audience segmentation or segmenting categorizes your target audience based on multiple factors, including behavior, buying patterns, preferences, and more. When you segment your audience, you can launch hyper-targeted email marketing campaigns with personalized messaging, leading to better results.
Here is an example of segmented email (based on purchase history) from a banking app:
Subject Line: 📢Flat $.10 Cashback on bill payment💰
Send Introductory Emails
An introductory email is the first conversation with your new customer. It helps set the tone of the entire customer journey. Therefore, it should welcome the user to your SaaS platform, highlight your brand, and offer clear instructions on how to get started.
Below is an introductory email from Microsoft Designer. Microsoft welcomes the user with a cool subject line (Welcome aboard, creative genius!), briefly explains some features, and offers instructions. Also, there’s a link to the tool within the email.
Personalized Email Marketing Campaigns
This goes without saying: your automated email marketing campaigns should be personalized. After all, personalized emails get a 14% higher open rate and a 29% higher click-through rate than non-personalized ones.
To personalize your emails:
Get started with the subject line. If the subject line includes the recipient’s name, recent purchase, job title, or any other type of personalization, it’s 50% more likely to be opened.
Prepare the messaging and content based on user interest or their position in the buyer’s journey. This will help the recipients connect with your messaging better.
Here’s an example of a personalized email from Simplilearn:
Simplilearn added the user’s name and reminded them of their certificate, making the email more personalized. Their subject line is also personalized (🛎️ Ding, Ding. Your certificate is ready for pickup).
Create Behavior and Response-based Triggers
Triggers are predefined events that initiate automated emails when a particular action happens. The motive here is to send the right type of content to the right audience at the right time using automation. This encourages users to take the next action.
Example: Imagine you offer a SaaS accounting tool. A customer signs up for a free trial, which eventually ends. You can set up a trigger to initiate an automated email offering a discount when the customer renews their subscription. By responding to the behavioral patterns of your email subscriber, you can increase the likelihood of converting a lead into a paying customer.
Increase Customer Retention
As stated earlier (in the benefits section), email marketing automation can help you boost customer retention. Let’s understand how.
With email marketing automation, you can regularly connect with your customers. For instance, you can send new offers, product updates, or feedback forms to understand their pain points. This will help you make the necessary improvements and rebound with full force.
Imagine a customer signed up for a month on your SaaS platform. It has been a month since their subscription expired and recharged. An automated email sequence with an instant discount on signup could help you bring the customer back.
Improve Email Automation Through Continuous Testing and Optimization
Make sure you try out different variations of subject lines, CTAs, email copy, content types, and more. Continuous testing and optimization will help you determine what works and what doesn’t, enabling you to improve the effectiveness of your campaign.
Pro Tip: Some important KPIs to track are open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, etc.
Security Compliance and Privacy
It’s crucial to follow the necessary security guidelines (GDPR) when launching email marketing campaigns. For instance, you must have consent from your email subscribers to receive emails. Also, there should be a clear opt-out option to allow your recipients to unsubscribe as they like.
Note: Not following the guidelines could put your customers’ data at risk. Also, it might lead to legal or financial repercussions.
Top Email Automation Tools
Snov.io
Snov.io is an all-in-one sales enablement tool that does a lot more than email marketing automation. From performing email address searches and verifying emails to setting up drip campaigns and tracking the performance, Snov.io does it all. It’s a comprehensive tool suited for both small businesses and large enterprises.
Primary Features:
Email Verifier
Email Warm-Up
Email Search
Sales CRM Tool
Email Drip Campaigns
Tracking and Analytics
Integrations: Integrates with tons of tools, including Mailchimp, SendGrid, Zapier, Salesforce, Pipedrive, HubSpot, and more.
Pricing: Snov.io comes with a free trial. However, aid plans range from $30/month to $3,999 a month.
Salesmate
Salesmate is a comprehensive email automation and CRM tool that helps improve sales productivity via streamlined processes. You can manage customer relations, track sales, and automate email campaigns to improve customer engagement.
Primary Features:
CRM Integration
Email Campaigns
Automation Workflows
Sales Pipeline Management
Email Tracking
Integrations
Integrations: Integrates with many tools, including HubSpot, Pipedrive, Slack, ActiveCampaign, Zapier, and more.
Pricing: While there’s a free trial, the basic plan starts from $23 per user per month.
ConvertKit
Tailor-made for bloggers, creators, and online businesses, ConvertKit is an email marketing platform. It offers multiple tools for email marketing automation, allowing you to grow your audience and nurture relationships.
Primary Features:
Automated Funnels for Email Marketing
Subscriber Management
Landing Pages
Form Builder
Broadcast Emails
Integrations
Integrations: Integrates with Shopify, WordPress, Zapier, Patreon and more.
Pricing: While there’s a free plan, you need to upgrade to the “Creator” plan to automate email sequences for $9 a month.
Examples of Email Automation
Here are some popular email automation examples:
Welcome Email
Welcome emails are often sent when new users sign up for your subscriber list or register on your platform. Here’s a welcome email from Jooble:
If you noticed, this email is not generic and was triggered after a certain action. It also includes the next steps to be taken.
Offer/Discount Email
Offers or discount emails often help with customer retention. Here’s an example from CoSchedule, where they’re offering 10% per referral and a 50% discount for leaving a review:
Newsletter Emails
These automated emails help Build community and share important updates and the latest content with your subscribers. Here’s an example from LinkedIn, where they can be seen sharing insights on the future of B2B marketers.
Wrapping Up
Email marketing automation can benefit you in more ways than you can imagine. It can help you improve your lead flow, retain your customers, scale your marketing strategy, boost your ROI, and offer more context to your sales team. And all this translates to better sales.
So, what are you waiting for? Compare the email marketing automation tools for SaaS companies mentioned above and choose the best one based on your needs. Follow the email automation strategy and start making more sales.
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Posted Oct 5, 2024
Email marketing automation helps you automate everything from capturing leads to sending emails, regardless of how large your customer base is. This saves you
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