The SaaS Email Marketing Playbook

by Étienne Garbugli

https://www.saasplaybook.co

No matter how great your product is, it’s very likely that 40 to 60% of free trials never see your product a second time. This means that you stand to lose up to 60% of your hard-earned signups. Do you just let them go?

Email marketing is one of the highest leverage activities in a SaaS business. It can help:

• increase onboarding and trial conversions;
• reduce churn; and
• grow monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

By introducing a single campaign today, you could significantly increase your conversions, and get the benefits of that increase predictably and repeatedly, week after week. That’s the beauty of automation. It’s also how we created an upsell program at LANDR that was generating up to 42% of weekly subscription conversions. When I joined LANDR, we were only sending 3 automated emails (and only 1 of those was performing). By focusing on sending the right email to the right user at the right time, performance jumped up, with increases in:

• product onboarding completion;
• engagement;
• sales; and
• upgrades to annual subscriptions.

We made a lot of mistakes along the way (including sending 85,000 emails to the wrong users). It took a lot of trial and error, long hours, and exhaustive internet searches, but the results were obvious. Email was more effective at generating revenue than:

• Investing in more ads;
• Building new features hoping they’ll drive engagement;
• Redesigning at the cost of trial and error.

You can learn SaaS email marketing the way we did (through hard work), or jump to the front of the line.

The SaaS Email Marketing Playbook includes everything I would have loved to know about email before I got started at LANDR:

• how and when to create new emails or In-App messages to influence your users’ behaviors and purchase decisions;
• how to double, triple, or quadruple the performance of every single email you send;
• how to stand out in an increasingly more crowded inbox; and
• how to create processes and structure to systematically grow the performance of an email marketing program.

The book also includes seven deep dives to help you implement your onboarding, upsell, retention, referral, and behavioral sequences, among others.

You don’t need to be a master copywriter (or have one on your team) to send effective emails. You just need the right processes and knowledge to start growing your business with email.

The SaaS Email Marketing Playbook contains everything you need to plan, build, and optimize your email marketing program.

Genres: Business, Startup

260 pages, ebook

First published April 19, 2020

About the author

Etienne works at the intersection of Technology, Product Design and Marketing. He’s a three-time Startup Founder (Highlights, Flagback and HireVoice), a five-time entrepreneur, and a recognized Usability and UX research expert.

Reviews

[Harry Harman · Rating 5 out of 5]

recommends printing out each step and every action that users need to take in your product, and asking:

1. What steps can be eliminated?
2. What steps can be delayed?
3. What steps are mission-critical?

[Jamie Bee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good for People who do Email Marketing in SaaS Companies

In case you hadn't grasped it by the title, this book is intended for people who work at an SaaS company and help with email marketing for it. You might be able to glean other tips if this isn't you, but this is the core audience for the book. I like that this book is very specific and targeted, and clearly, this author knows what he is talking about. He also expects the reader is going to have a certain level of marketing knowledge before reading the book, as he doesn't explain many of the marketing terms and concepts before just telling you how to do them or his take on them. So if words like data implementation plan, automations, retention, and optimization make you go a little weak in the knees, this may not be the book for you. What I found most fascinating were the deep dives in the back of the book. In them, the author gives specific ideas and examples of email sequences for a variety of reasons, like cold email and onboarding sequences. For some reason, the author has this after the conclusion of the book, but I think these deep dives are critical and should definitely be included in the main portion of the book. I don't think a conclusion should happen until the book actually concludes! If you are in the target market of this book, you will most likely find tips and strategies to help your email marketing be more effective and helpful for your company or the company you work for.

I received a free copy of this book, but that did not affect my review.

My book blog: https://www.readingfanaticreviews.com

[Chinye John · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best guides to email marketing that I have read so far... It gives you what you need to start your email marketing campaigns.

This is especially important for product led businesses.
As a copywriter, this helps me understand a little of the workings of saas businesses and how best to serve them

I highly recommend... It's beginner friendly.

[Kirby Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has a lot of great information for people wanted to go to the next level with the email sequences would highly recommend. Should probably be five stars but there probably could’ve been a few more examples of specific industry offerings here.

[Roxana · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good starter in email marketing for SaaS

[Jordan Akpoborie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is not only a complete guide on using Email to properly increase and impact your Customers, it also touches on the subject of better designing your Saas Brand so your users get the most out of your product. Excellently researched and written. A must Read!!

[Marian · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great introduction to email marketing that came right at the perfect time. If you want to start learning more about it, this book is a perfect guide.