Is email marketing dead?
Some experts may think so, but the statistics say otherwise. According to Hubspot’s 2020 report, email marketing seems to be alive and thriving:
- 81% of B2B marketers say their preferred form of content marketing is email newsletters
- 31% of B2B marketers name email marketing as the best strategy to nurture leads
- 87% of B2B marketers choose email because it’s one of the top free organic distribution channels
On top of that, the report says that the overwhelming majority of business professionals (80%) believe that email marketing is the most effective strategy for customer retention. So, as a B2B business owner, you can use email marketing throughout the entire sales funnel, from building awareness to inspiring action.
However, email marketing is quite competitive, especially among SaaS companies, for many of which email is the main marketing channel. So, of course, there is a possibility that your email marketing efforts don’t pay off.
To make sure they do, let’s take a look at a few awesome examples of SaaS email copywriting, which you can use to inspire your next B2B email marketing campaign.
1. Making the right impression with a welcome email
Imagine that you’re meeting a person for the first time. What do you do? Of course, you introduce yourself, briefly tell them who you are and touch upon a few necessary details about you.
Welcome emails work the same way, helping you introduce your SaaS business and your product to your new subscribers. From the point of marketing and sales, welcome emails are also a great strategy to nurture your potential customers. People who receive welcome emails show 33% more engagement with a brand and are more likely to positively react to all your future emails.
In general, you can use two ways to introduce yourself through a welcome email: a longer one and a shorter one. And both can be equally effective.
Moosend, the provider of email marketing software, has a great example of a quite long welcome email:
There are quite a few good practices that Moosend uses in its welcome email, which you can also add to your email marketing toolkit:
- The official invitation to the ‘family’. As you can see, the copy of the email starts with an official invitation to the Moosend family. This is a great way to personalise the welcome email and to boost engagement.
- Expectations are set right away. The company notifies the subscriber about the upcoming emails and the exclusive content that they will receive because they are now a part of the Moosend club.
- The proper CTA button. To help a new customer navigate the product, the CTA button takes them right to their Moosend account with a quick reminder of what they can use this account for in the GIF image below the button.
- Additional support. In case a new customer is not sure how to use their new account, Moosend provides a couple of additional links where they can find all the necessary information on how to use the product.
Looking at Moosend’s welcome email, one can confidently say that this is what the complete version of such an email should look like. However, you can do the same, utilising far less space and fewer words. Slack is a great example of that.
Slack’s welcome email only contains basic information to help a user access their account and also some helpful links to learn more about how the product works:
Is it a good welcome email?
Yes, without a doubt. It has everything a new customer needs: the necessary account details and additional customer support information.
Sometimes, keeping your emails simple and brief is the best strategy to introduce people to your product or service. They can keep learning as they go, and such a short welcome email can just be used to greet them and welcome them as your new customers.
Choose the length of the email copy according to your goals. If you have a more complicated onboarding process, like Moosend, it is better to make a copy of your welcome email a bit longer. But if your onboarding process is quick and straightforward, a shorter copy of the welcome email is enough.
2. Nurturing leads with an onboarding email
Speaking of onboarding, email marketing can be a very helpful tool to boost the engagement of new customers as well as wake up dormant subscribers. Onboarding emails can help your customers extract greater value and more benefits from your SaaS product. One of the ways you can do this is by providing your customers with free product-oriented education opportunities.
Customers want companies to give them something of exceptional educational value. Jeffrey McKinley, an editor and researcher at TrustMyPaper writing service, shares: “Our recent research has shown that B2B customers expect brands to give them knowledge rather than entertainment when it comes to marketing.”
Tidio, a chatbot building software company, is a great example of living up to the expectations of its customers. The company frequently provides webinar opportunities to educate their clients and potential customers about the features of their product, using email to send out the notifications:
On top of providing a free educational opportunity, the company also increases email conversions by offering exclusive access to free chatbot consultation with one of Tidio’s experts.
What’s the lesson here?
Incorporating onboarding emails into your email marketing strategy can give a significant boost to your engagement rates, as you provide educational opportunities to your customers and show them the value that they can get from your product.
3. Weekly Follow-Ups and Progress Notifications
Another example of great emails used for onboarding is a weekly product use update. When the customer has already been using your product for some time, it is a good idea to show them what value your product gives them.
Grammarly, an online editing and proofreading tool, is a great example of this strategy in action. The company sends weekly progress notifications, like the one below, to show how its product helps the customers improve their writing skills:
This newsletter breaks down the weekly product use progress showing the user’s achievements. The email copy shows the user the value that they are already getting from Grammarly’s product and also provides ideas, what the user should work on, and how Grammarly can help with that.
4. Exclusive Product Updates
One of the great benefits of email marketing is that it helps notify your clients and subscribers about the upcoming product updates before the entire world gets a chance to learn about them.
In the example below, you can see how Canva, an online design platform, uses email marketing to notify its customers about the new Canva Desktop feature:
Canva’s email copy is short and concise, consisting only of some information about the new feature and the CTA button. Such emails don’t have to be too long, as they are merely notifications, and should only be focused on the benefits of the new product feature.
Some SaaS companies also use such product update emails to give their subscribers exclusive access to the new features as well as provide discounts. This is also a great way to boost engagement and sales because, with such email copy, you build a stronger community, treating it with exclusive offers.
Implement these email copy examples in your strategy
Boosting engagement, increasing conversion rates, and building a community are only a few of the benefits of email marketing for SaaS companies. But, as with any other marketing strategy, you need to approach email copywriting with a lot of attention to achieve the results you expect.
Hopefully, the examples that we have discussed in this article will get you inspired to create your own emails that engage, convert, and create a strong community of loyal customers.
This is a guest blog by Diana Adjadj, who writes for 3to5marketing.com.