Email Marketing for SaaS: From Clicks to Conversions

Why is email marketing for SaaS so important?

The SaaS market is where many want to be: it seems to be booming and is projected to reach 1.2 trillion by 2032. And email marketing for SaaS is one of those tools that can help you secure a piece of that pie and turn your casual website visitors into paying customers who will keep coming back for more. 

But just as with everything in life the SaaS landscape is changing and so do the strategies you will have to use to promote your product. Big change on the market: according to Gartner’s 2024 State of Software Investment Report, 20% of buyers plan to downgrade the software they are using, cancel it, or switch vendors. That’s where smart email marketing comes in. It’s your chance to prove your worth and keep customers hooked, sending them the right message at the right time.

Another curious number: 68% of SaaS apps are now IT-sanctioned (up from 35% last year), so not only budgets for SaaS spending are being cut, but it is also getting harder to become that app that companies are willing (and allowed) to spend money on. So your email strategy should not only plan to reach end-users. It also has to be about landing in the inboxes of decision-makers who control the purchasing power and ultimately allow your app to be used in the organization. And email is the easiest way to reach those people too. So, whether you’re a scrappy startup or a SaaS giant, email marketing is your one-way ticket to growth.

Types of email newsletters for SaaS

SaaS companies have many email types to choose from for the promotion of their product. Each serves a unique goal: from demonstrating your product’s latest features to sharing industry insights in an attempt to establish your company as a thought leader. Email marketing affects 24% of revenue in B2B so selecting the right content for your email strategy is important. Let’s break down the main types you might want to consider. 

Product highlights

Product highlights allow us to talk about marketers’ favorite subject: the product itself. And every time you talk about your product there’s a chance that yet another new feature will be the one triggering the customer’s desire to hit that “subscribe” / “buy” button. 

Figma’s newsletter nails this format. They showcase multiple new features like AI integration and UI updates but keep it snappy. Each highlight has a clear “Learn more” call-to-action, driving clicks and engagement. 

The layout is colorful and visually appealing, fun to look at. Figma understands its users: what they like from the visual perspective and what they want for their work. By featuring Dev Mode and prototyping improvements, they’re speaking directly to their core audience’s needs.

This email works because it:

• Demonstrates continuous product evolution.
• Provides clear value propositions for each feature.
• Encourages feature adoption through targeted CTAs.
• Reinforces the subscription’s ongoing worth.

For a SaaS company, this type of email keeps users excited and engaged, potentially reducing churn. It also gives users rock-solid reasons to log in and explore, boosting overall platform engagement. Give it a try. 

Customer spotlight

Customer spotlight emails focus on users and their success stories with the product. 

Rocket Money’s newsletter is a clever spin on this concept. They could have focused on any particular customer’s story, but instead, they spotlight the individual user’s financial data.

This personalized approach proves the product’s value for any given user in a way that’s impossible to ignore: a 64% decrease in spending is hard to miss. The clean design and easy-to-digest numbers make the complex topic of personal finance feel manageable. 

This email works because it:

• Makes the user the hero of their own financial story.
• Provides personalized insights.
• Simplifies complicated financial data.
• Creates a regular touchpoint that users actually want to open to see their progress.

For a financial SaaS, this kind of email builds trust, proves value way louder than words, and likely reduces churn. After all, who doesn’t want to open an email that’s all about their money? 

Industry news and trends

These types of emails keep your users in the loop about what’s going on in their field and also (if you are doing it right) establish you as a go-to source of information, an authority and a thought leader. Which can be very powerful across many industries: finance, legal, etc. 

Keyword Chef’s monthly newsletter is a good example of this approach. They keep you in the loop on the main SEO developments and also share some good niches that might be a good choice to work on in the coming months.

This email works because it:

• It positions Keyword Chef as a thought leader and experts on what they do. By sharing  new potentially profitable niches every month, they’re saying “We know what’s going on  and we have a tool to figure it out that you can use too.”
• All the news and niches are listed in a well formatted easy to digest way that immediately fills you in on monthly SEO dramas and inspires you to take actions to pursue your new niche project.

Keyword Chef’s approach is great for building a strong reputation as an expert in the field, strengthening  relationships with their audience and reminding them of the product’s benefits (niche finding) in a very subtle, non-invasive way. 

Exclusive offers

Those can be SaaS marketers’ secret tools for driving up conversions faster. Wix’s email offering  50% off is a textbook-worthy example of how to do it right.

The countdown timer creates instant urgency. Bold “50% OFF SALE” grabs attention immediately. And it seems like Wix knows their audience well. Small business owners and entrepreneurs — they don’t just want a discount, they dream of looking “more professional online” with minimum effort. The sample website image seals the deal. So to recap: 

This email works because it:

• Creates urgency with a time limit.
• Offers significant value (50% off is a good deal).
• Clearly shows benefits of upgrading (sample website).
• Makes the next step obvious and easy.

For a SaaS company, this kind of offer can turn fence-sitters into paying customers overnight.

Email marketing strategy for SaaS

From understanding your audience to writing emails so personalized they always cover exactly what the recipient wants to read about, let’s touch on all the basics and see how each of the strategies can work to boost SaaS marketing efforts.

Understanding audience

SaaS companies need to truly know their audience. It’s common sense really, when you offer your prospects exactly what they want when they want it, why wouldn’t they buy it? 

Take Blaze’s approach in the example. In this email, they focused on one of their customers’ pain points: time constraints in content creation.

Blaze asks, “What if you could get all your marketing done for the week in just one hour?” This shows they understand their users’ struggles. By mentioning audience-specific deliverables like “5 blog posts written and scheduled,” they’re speaking directly to their users’ needs.

When you understand your audience and all their pain points like Blaze does, you can create compelling, personalized email content with higher conversion rates.  

Personalization

Back in the day, it was enough to address the recipient by their name to impress, but today personalization goes way beyond that. It’s knowing a lot about your customer’s preferences and behaviors when it comes to your product and using that data in your email campaigns. The Linktree example perfectly illustrates this strategy.

It provides users with their specific profile views, clicks, and click rates, data that matters to each user. By showing the week-over-week change (like the 200% increase in views), Linktree makes the personal data even more engaging and relevant, not only reminding about the great wealth of data available in the app’s dashboard, but also providing value. The “See all analytics” button calls for clicking, potentially increasing time spent on the platform.

Effective marketing in SaaS is about creating custom experiences that make each user feel seen, feel special. Whether it’s through personalized analytics, targeted feature recommendations, or custom content, the goal is to make each user feel like the product is a perfect match for their needs.

User segmentation

Another powerful strategy loved by email marketing agencies, but also B2B and SaaS companies in particular. By segmenting users based on their motivations and needs, companies can create more engaging email experiences. And even create various features of their product, create custom subscription plans, etc. 

The Descript email showcases one way of doing user segmentation through email marketing brilliantly. Instead of sending a generic message to all users, they’re using a survey to segment their audience based on specific needs and motivations. 

Look at the options Descript provides: “Studio Sound with less restrictions”, “AI-Green Screen with less restrictions”, “Needing additional transcription minutes”. Each of these represents a distinct user segment with unique needs. And depending on the responses their user base will be tagged and saved into categorized sublists so the company can deliver content tailored to the audience’s most burning interests. For instance, users who selected “Expanded stock media library” might receive future emails showcasing new additions to the library, while those who chose “Higher resolution for video export” could get tips on optimizing video quality.

For SaaS companies, this kind of segmentation can be particularly powerful. It allows for personalized onboarding experiences, targeted feature announcements, and more relevant upsell opportunities. And don’t even get me started on improved email deliverability.

Customer retention

Do you recall times when you would register for a trial for a new cool SaaS on the block and then never come back to use it? I surely do, it happens to me several times per week. And that’s when a decent and engaging customer retention campaign can save the day. It can be something simple to digest, highly practical, reminding of the solution offered by the product, the list goes on. 

Let’s look at Bitly’s email is a perfect example of how to do this right.

By highlighting that the user has hit 50% of their onboarding goals, Bitly creates a sense of achievement and momentum. They provide a clear roadmap of the next steps, showing users what they’ve accomplished and what’s left to do. This kind of gamification definitely prompts some users to come back for more. The steps look easy enough to finish. So why not do it?

The stats back up this strategy. Sending more than 8 emails between deal creation and closure increases close rates by 47%. Even sending 4-8 emails bumps close rates by 29%. More importantly for retention, sending more than 5 emails after deal creation leads to 13% faster sales cycles on average.

These numbers show that consistent, valuable communication is key to customer retention. So don’t be afraid to come across as too spammy. As long as the messages you are sending are valuable and match the needs of your customers, they should do the trick. 

Creating effective email content

This strategy is plain simple. But it’s definitely easier said than done. 

So let’s just take a moment to get inspired by mmhmm’s newsletter. 

I don’t know about you but the header “Don’t have meetings that suck” immediately grabs my attention (because most of the meetings I attended during my corporate times sucked). It speaks to a common pain point. It’s followed by a teaser about survey results, offering valuable insights and also prompting you to pat yourself on the back (“I was right, meetings suck, even surveys confirm that.”) The newsletter then seamlessly transitions into showcasing various features and use cases with smart and punchy subheadlines. These little tricks are how you make your content stand out in a crowded inbox.

Now, you might be thinking, “Does all this effort really pay off?” Well, email marketing contributes 1.3% of total MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) in B2B SaaS. 

And while that might seem small, in the world of SaaS, where every lead counts, especially given that email marketing is probably the cheapest form of marketing compared to running or PPC ad campaigns. Plus, in most cases, email recipients are qualified leads — people who are already interested in what you’re offering.

The key to creating effective email content like mmhmm’s is to focus on value. Every section of their email either entertains, educates, inspires, or solves a problem for the user. And what’s a good approach to master this strategy? Just look around and keep a swipe file of the most interesting emails that strike as fun, helpful, valuable, share-worthy, etc. Your email writing and knowing what your customer wants will get better with time.

Email marketing for SaaS examples and success stories

Let’s look at how some SaaS companies have used email marketing for growth. These examples show creative strategies that have delivered measurable results. And at the very least you can get inspired and maybe think of how you can implement similar ideas to promote your product. 

Selzy

Being a SaaS company too, first, we’d like to share with you an example of some of our own campaigns.

On our homepage, we claim ourselves to be “the easiest way to start selling with emails”, and we made another step in that direction back in February 2024, when we introduced the newer and easier email builder. BTW, if you haven’t tried it yet, there’s no better time than now to do so — just log in or sign up and you’re free to go.

Because of a bunch of new features like an AI assistant (and basically just being a totally different product in general), it was a big occasion for us and we wanted to make a proper user announcement.

So, the key elements of this email strategy by Selzy included:

• Making sure that it does its job of telling our clients about the big changes and helping them adapt.
• Providing clear but brief descriptions, screenshots and direct links to how-to pages in the Help Center or straightaway to users’ personal spaces since the main action was supposed to happen there and the email acted more like an entry point.
• Simply making this campaign one of the first ones made fully in our current design and style.

HubSpot

HubSpot’s explosive growth and marketing tactics the company used was described in one of my favorite books ”Disrupted” by Dan Lyons. Regardless of Dan’s feelings toward some of the company’s practices it clearly worked. And I saw similar techniques being implemented time and time again in other SaaS startups: demand generation, lead nurturing, extensive segmentation and educational content for all stages of your funnel. Like it or not, it works. 

Speaking of email marketing in particular and to be more descriptive, HubSpot uses marketing automation to send targeted emails to different marketing personas, identified based on user demographics, behavior and interactions. For example, after someone downloads an ebook, HubSpot triggers an email workflow with related content, case studies, and invitations to webinars. This approach consequently warms up the leads and guides them towards becoming customers.

Key elements of HubSpot’s email strategy included:

• Educational content emails to nurture leads and build trust.
• Personalized emails tailored to clients’ interests and behaviors.
• Segmented campaigns targeting specific customer groups.
• Automated email workflows triggered by user actions.
• Lead nurturing sequences guiding prospects through the buyer’s journey.

Let’s look at the example of one of their welcome email series. It introduces new users to the main features of a product in a simple-to-understand manner:

Ultimately, this approach has contributed to HubSpot’s strong conversion rates and customer retention and forced investors to shower the company with love. Over the course of a couple of years in 2011 and 2012 they raised $66 million in two rounds of funding (D and E) and ultimately it seemed to pay off. The company is still around, they never raised more and its current annual revenue is estimated between $1 and $10 billion according to CrunchBase. 

By providing timely, relevant information, it increases the likelihood of leads becoming long-term customers. And you can give it a try too.

Dropbox

Dropbox is famous for the explosive growth it managed to achieve through its ingeniously simple referral program that heavily relied on email. The program rewarded both the referrer and new user with extra storage space and it was very effective.

Dropbox saw 3,900% growth in 15 months, doubling its user base every 3 months. They went from 100,000 users in September 2008 to 4 million by December 2009.

Key elements of Dropbox’s email strategy included:

• Option to sync email contacts during signup.
• Invitation emails sent to referred friends.  
• Welcome emails highlighting space gained from accepting an invite.
• Follow-up emails encouraging more referrals.

Here’s an example of Dropbox’s simple but effective sharing invitation email:

The clear call to action and explanation make it easy for recipients to join and start using Dropbox. This method still can work as long as you offer your client to solve a really important problem. We are talking about your solution as a painkiller, not a vitamin. 

Canva

During COVID-19, Canva used email to support its design community with relevant, localized content. And that fueled even more growth for an already successful startup. They increased the volume of weekly sent emails from 30 million to 50 million, increased open rates by 33%, and got a 2.5% boost in the platform.

Key elements of Canva’s email strategy included:

• Using the trends to shape content.
• Scaling sends volume while maintaining deliverability. 
• Localizing content for 20+ languages to keep up with expanding audiences.
• Providing even more valuable design resources relevant to the trends.

Here’s an example of one of Canva’s COVID-19 related emails, offering health awareness design templates:

Canva’s case study shows how adapting email strategies to user needs and current events can drive major improvements in key metrics.

Final thoughts

Email marketing for SaaS isn’t just about sending as many emails talking about your product. It’s about building relationships with the list. From personalized onboarding to fun retention campaigns: every email can be an opportunity to show that your product is great in a smart way and seal the deal. 

What are the most important tips to take away from this article if you are a SaaS marketer looking for some pointers to get started with email marketing? My short list: 

• Make it personal. Forget generic emails, send hyper-targeted messages that speak directly to your users’ needs and keep them wanting more.
• Segment away. Stop sending emails to everyone. Break down your list and deliver laser-focused content that addresses particular groups’ questions.
• Show, don’t tell. Demo your product’s latest features to keep your users aware that your product is alive and well and reduce churn. 
• Turn customers into heroes. Spotlight your users’ success stories. It will build trust and inspire others to stick around (maybe you will feature them in the next email?)
• Try flash sales. Use exclusive, time-limited offers to push fence-sitters into action — urgency drives conversions.