There are 6 main email sequences you’ll need to build a successful SaaS email program.
Email Program Lifecycle
These are the key steps and milestones each user goes through. The goal is linear from left to right but some won’t activate, buy, or will flat out churn. This flow chart accommodates those scenarios.
Let’s look at these different sequences and how to handle them specifically.
1) Lead ⇒ Signup
The goal of your first sequence will be to convince these subscribers of the unique value of your product. For this sequence, you have to balance the value of what the prospects actually signed up for (content updates for example) against pushiness. The tone of this sequence will be more laid back. Key emails will be the welcome email for your series, and your ask to sign up.
2) Signup ⇒ Activation (a.k.a. Onboarding)
For this phase, your goals are to help establish product value and to ensure users achieve their desired outcome with your product. The tone should be informational and straight to the point. These emails are about discovery, overcoming objections, and getting users back into your product. Key emails will be your welcome email, and your first onboarding emails. Not only will these emails get opened more than any others (novelty), they will help you capitalize on the initial signup momentum (excitement). Chances are that, if users delay in getting started, they won’t ever get around to using the product.
3) Activation ⇒ Conversion (a.k.a. Upgrade)
The key email for this phase is the upgrade email. This one can be a bit pushy, or more salesy to drive conversions. Here your goals are to confirm the product value, to remind the user how valuable the product is, and to capitalize on activation momentum if they did activate. This sequence doesn’t have to end at the upgrade. If your users don’t convert and decide to stay on the free plan or give up on their trial, you can give them more reasons to upgrade with value expansion emails: ‘Hey, our product also allows you to do X’. It’s always a good idea to eventually try to close them again, approaching it from a different angle.
4) Conversion ⇒ Retention
Your retention email sequence technically can last forever. Because of that, and because you are dealing with your VIPs, this often needs a different tone and a different strategy. Although goals can vary depending on your business objectives (pure retention, expansion revenue, feature discovery, etc), the key objective is always retention and re-purchase. The best way to do this is to remind your users of the tremendous value that they are getting from your product. You can do this with feature expansion, transactional emails, and launch emails which showcase more or different value in your product, or remind them of the value they are personally getting from the product with, for example, a summary email.
5) Retention ⇒ Expansion
Alternatively, you can also work on moving monthly subscribers to yearly subscriptions. This can be really effective when users are already engaged with your product. You can simply tell them how much money they will save by moving to an annual subscription, make a one-time offer, and watch the money roll in. You might not even need a discount to get upgrades. This approach will both improve your cashflow, and reduce your churn rate.
Depending on your goal, you can also focus on expansion revenue: Do you want to grow user seats? Feature usage? Look at consumption, and when an account is within 20% of maxing out a key value metric—what and how you’re charging—send an email with an offer to upgrade their account to a more expensive plan. Experiment with discounting, and see how it goes. This technique works great, and it’s fairly easy to implement.
6) Retention ⇒ Referral
You can have different asks for referrals from both paying subscribers and free users if your business has a freemium model. Any referral email sequence will probably be sent out in parallel with other sequences. To successfully get referrals, it’s often a good idea to run Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, standardized surveys assessing how likely users are to recommend your product. Based on scores 0 to 10, you can figure out which of your users are Passives, Promoters, and Detractors. Asking your Promoters (scores of 9 or 10) to help is a great way to get reviews or referrals, or to get them to invite more users. Since you are working with your fans, the tone should be more casual and appreciative. Key emails for this sequence will be your NPS Survey, and your specific ask. We will look at the referral sequence in depth in the Referral deep dive at the end of the book.
Key Goals and Emails
Sources:
https://www.amazon.com/SaaS-Email-Marketing-Playbook-Retention-ebook/dp/B087BCNR7D