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Tag: drip email

  • SaaS Marketing: Why SaaS Businesses should Build an Email List and How to do Build one?

    Being a SaaS business brings you various channels for marketing your product and services digitally. Around the Internet, there are numerous tips or guidance on how to make your business globally popular and for that, everyone has only one answer- Digital Marketing. Now, talking about digital marketing, various channels help you take your SaaS businesses to the next level, like through social media, SEO, Email Marketing and many others.

    With global users of over 4.03 million, email marketing helps the SaaS businesses to reach the maximum target. With these statistics, email marketing is known to have the highest number of users of any other digital marketing channel. In this article, we will be discussing why building an email list is so important and effective for SaaS businesses and most of all, how to build it. So, let’s get started!

    Why is building an Email List Important for SaaS Businesses?
    How to build an Email list?
    FAQ

    Why is building an Email List Important for SaaS Businesses?

    Being a SaaS marketer, it’s important for you to have an organized special list of names and email addresses of your target audience and existing customers.

    We are well familiar with the functionality of email marketing and with that, several reports are made which clearly states that around 43,000 percent return is guaranteed on investment (ROI) for businesses.

    With an email list, subscribers can easily join it from the official website of your businesses and verify their identity. With your best of offerings, audiences get attracted to your business and turn into your paying customers. And when it comes to SaaS Businesses, the email list gets around 10 times higher modifications than any other social media campaign.

    In SaaS Businesses, an email list helps in sending numerous emails to everyone from the list regarding online store, blog updates and many others. You can also keep them updated about new offers and discounts by making them subscribe to your newsletter.

    7 Amazing Ways To Monetize your Email List
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    How to build an Email list?

    We have broadly discussed what an email list is and how important it is for SaaS business. Now, it’s time to understand how to build a solid email list.

    In order to thrive in your SaaS businesses, certain steps can help you in building the perfect email list, these steps are:

    Understand your audience

    For any business or marketing strategy, it’s very important to understand what their audience needs and looks for. It’s important you distinguish your target audience as understanding them before functioning helps you in getting better responses.

    For this, you need to create a marketing persona that will represent your ideal customers. Marketing persona helps you find your target audience and strike them right where it hits! The best place for this is social media, now as you find your audience, ask them to provide their email addresses. When you charm your audience in the right manner, they automatically give you their email addresses. And that is a win!

    Create a Website

    As you gathered your audience, you’d need a place where can be assembled, which is a website. Now, creating a website is pretty tough and must be created with great innovative ideas to charm your audience.

    But the plus point with the email list for SaaS business is that you don’t need a huge website to get started. You can just create a landing page that carries your email opt-in form. The audience enters their email addresses in the opt-in form, available on your website.

    Email Marketing Service

    For better communication with your email list, you need to have an email marketing platform. Email Marketing platform helps you to organise your email list and send emails to the target audience.

    On a broader note, the email list will also serve the purpose of drip campaigns, sequencing and many more. Your main focus through the email marketing service is to collect all the email addresses in a very safe and valid manner.

    Charm the audience through your Offer

    Now, the major goal is to charm the audience with your amazing offers that won’t hold anyone from joining your email list.

    Think from the perspective of a customer like how you can be so impressed by a website and its offers that you’ll immediately give your email address. The customer won’t provide their email information unless they are offering a generous exchange.

    Make sure you provide what your target audience needs and won’t find elsewhere, and also, free!

    Maybe you can provide the customer with access to your report, software or any other valuable thing. This way, your audience will automatically get attached to your website.

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    Conclusion

    It often becomes pretty tough to build up a strong and legitimate email list for your SaaS business. But as you get on with it, it becomes very simple and you get more ideas to promote your business among the audience.

    The major thing that you need to focus on with the email list is to opt for a single and strong strategy and function it smoothly. If you stick by your marketing strategy, you’ll automatically see the results by the enhanced number of the email address joining your list.

    With this article, we attempted to describe to you all the major steps and requirements for a strong email list. If you follow these steps and understand the importance of an email list for your SaaS business, you’ll collect a great number of email addresses for your list.

    FAQ

    Why building an email list is important?

    Building an email list is the best way to build a relationship with your potential customers.

    How to build an email list?

    Understand you audience, Create a Website, and Automate your emails.

    Why should a SaaS company have a mailing list?

    In SaaS Businesses, an email list helps in sending numerous emails to everyone from the list regarding online store, blog updates and many others.s

  • What is Drip Email Campaign?

    Whether you’ve been using email marketing automation for years, or have just started to dip your toes in, you’ve probably come across the concept of “drip campaigns”. Email drip campaigns are intimidating. They’re complicated, requiring you to create a bunch of content, write a bunch of emails, and then stitch it all together somehow.

    What is an Email Drip Campaign?

    An email drip campaign is a series of messages that are sent, or “dripped,” in a predefined order at a predefined interval. So, for example, if someone joins your email list, they receive Email #1 upon signup, Email #2 three days later, Email #3 five days after they join, and so on.

    Must read: How to validate your SaaS idea before building an MVP?
    Relevant read: How to Track Customer Acquisition in SaaS?

    The primary goal of an email drip marketing campaign is to attract the right subscribers. And send subscribers highly relevant emails that encourage them to commit to your call to action. Even though these are automated emails, they can be personalized with your contacts’ name, company info, customer behavior, and more.
    Automated email drip campaigns have been proven to perform better toward reaching your business objectives, for example:

    1. To effectively nurture your leads,
    2. Communicate regularly with your customers,
    3. Increase sales or
    4. Re-engage lost customers in a scalable way.

    Drip campaigns are commonly used to communicate to new subscribers or someone who made a purchase but didn’t join your email list yet, but you can use them at any time.

    What makes a drip campaign successful?

    To create an effective email drip campaign, first, you need to pinpoint your pain:

    • Do you need more checkouts?
    • Drive back to your website your one-off website visitors?
    • Do you need to increase engagement among your existing subscribers?
    • Or onboard users smoothly so that they set up their accounts and start using your service?

    All of these can be automated via the right drip campaign!
    The secret to creating the perfect drip is to revisit it along the way; feed your insights and results into your existing drips and customize them accordingly.

    Relevant read: Essential Tips for Marketing Your Business to Boost Profitability
    Important read: Challenges Faced by SaaS startups

    Common Types of Drip Campaigns

    A drip email campaign is a primary nurturing/communication channel with your prospects and customers. Let’s look into how most common drip email campaigns are structured.

    Welcoming

    You did a great job at marketing your product, and you’ve gotten a lot of users to subscribe to your newsletters or sign-up to learn more about it. But how do you turn these new users into actual customers? How do you get them to try your product? Why should they be interested on what you have to offer?
    That’s where welcome emails shine — they introduce users to your products and highlight what you have to offer.

    Welcome campaign
    Welcome campaign

    Since the goal of a welcome email campaign is to deliver the first unit of value (aka the ‘Aha’ moment), you can stop this series of emails at any time when user becomes an ‘active user’. At this point, prospects understand your product value proposition and the next step is to teach them how to get maximum value from your product

    GETU's Welcome Email
    GETU’s Welcome Email

    GE Learning Technology (GETU)’s welcome email begins with a clear introduction of its business and benefits outlined in bold, followed by a video that provides a more in-depth explanation of its services.

    User Onboarding

    If welcome drip campaigns introduce your customers to your business, then onboarding campaigns are here to make them stay. They’re useful to software companies who encourage users to try their free trial first.

    User Onboarding
    User Onboarding

    For example, if a user submits a registration form to create an account on LinkedIn, he/she will receive a welcome email. If the user never comes back, he/she will receive a series of welcome emails to encourage them to come back. On the other hand, if a prospect has registered to LinkedIn and started using it but hasn’t completed their profile details, then LinkedIn’s user onboarding emails will be sent. These explain why and how providing more profile information can enrich a user’s LinkedIn experience.

    box's user onboarding email
    box’s user onboarding email

    Cloud storage app Box employs drip campaigns to teach people how to use their product.

    Also read: Bootstrapping SaaS Startups
    Relevant read: Email writing for Engagement stage

    Nurturing Leads

    Some users need a little push, or nurturing — engaging promotions until they’re ready to buy your product. As a result, most businesses nurture their leads by offering emails with links to relevant content such as newsletters and webinars.

    Nurturing Leads
    Nurturing Leads

    Prospects don’t always come through your free trial gate. Downloading a marketing asset, such as a whitepaper, industry research, case study or signing up to a webinar is another way to start a communication process with a prospect.

    Zapier's email
    Zapier’s email

    Zapier sends new users a nurturing drip email to help them brainstorm automation ideas.

    Product Engagement

    Product engagement campaigns are essential to a SaaS company with a freemium business model. Companies that use freemium models need to ensure that customers who aren’t paying for the product right now are engaged and increasingly use the product.

    Product Engagement
    Product Engagement

    The math here is pretty simple: the more often someone engages with your site, the more likely they are to convert into a paying customer. Engagement emails are a type of drip campaign that invite the recipient to return to your site and look around, triggered either by some on-site activity or a general lack of activity.
    Social sites are a great example of how to use activity-based triggers. If someone on Twitter mentions you in a tweet, Twitter can send you an alert-style email, encouraging you to visit Twitter and respond.
    But it doesn’t have to be just happy feelings; guilt can work as well. If you don’t log an activity in fitness app RunKeeper for a while, they’ll send an automated “We miss you!” email. It’s a subtle way to remind you that you should work out, combined with a touch of nostalgia for the app they hope you’ll use while exercising.

    RunKeeper's email
    RunKeeper’s email

    RunKeeper sends users who have not logged a workout in a while a re-engagement drip email.

    Promotional Drip Campaigns

    Promotional emails are used to upsell, promote and inform customers about limited-time promotions, special offers, new products and discounts.
    “You might also like” isn’t just for Netflix bingeing—recommendation engines are a cornerstone of nearly every giant online retailer. The more a company knows about you and your buying habits, the better they can predict what you will and won’t like. With that info, they can send you targeted drip emails that contain products or coupons specific to your purchasing tendencies.

    Jaybird's Promotional Email
    Jaybird’s Promotional Email

    Jaybird’s email which introduces its wireless headphones is one good example.

    Relevant read: How to Set Pricing for Your SaaS Product?
      8 Ways to Toggle SaaS Customer Retention

    Confirmations

    You’ve closed the sale, or better yet, convinced a user to stick with your product for another year with a renewed subscription. But your drip email work isn’t done. You can also use a drip campaign to confirm your user’s purchase renewal—just set up a “thank you” auto-responder that goes out right after they hit the “purchase” button. In that confirmation drip, you could include some links to your product’s newest features to re-engage them with your brand.

    Confirmation email
    Confirmation email

    Fairfield uses drip campaigns to confirm user reservations, and show off some of the hotel amenities.

    It should be a no-brainer to send your users an email receipt after they make a purchase, but you can also leverage that communication with related products and upsells. And with confirmations for things like plane tickets and hotel rooms, send a quick email a day before the event to put any important confirmation codes at the top of the user’s inbox. Then, perhaps, that same drip can send another email a few days later, asking them to review your product or service and offer a coupon for future purchases.

    Conclusion

    In this article, we have seen what is drip email campaign and learnt about different types of drip email campaigns. If used correctly, drip email campaign strategy can be of great value to the marketing and growth of your company. With drip email campaigns, you will be able to get the right subscribers, nurture your leads, increase sales and/or re-engage lost customers.
    So, apply the suitable drip email campaign strategy right now, and get started. Let us know your views in the comment section.

    Also read: How to Design Drip Email Campaign?