Account-based marketing (ABM) has become somewhat of a cornerstone for SaaS companies looking to drive targeted, high-value engagement. Yet, even the most elaborately designed and expertly executed ABM campaigns can fall short without a strong email marketing strategy to back them up.
This is where SaaS email marketing strategies tailored to ABM efforts can make a real impact. In this guide, you’ll discover 13 actionable SaaS email marketing strategies designed to amplify your ABM efforts.
However, in case you’ve already given email marketing a shot, received lukewarm results, and then dismissed it as outdated, let’s restore your faith in this veteran marketing tactic. So, let’s begin by exploring: Is email marketing a good strategy for your SaaS company?
Is email marketing a sound strategy for SaaS?
Yes. SaaS marketing is unique. Here’s what an effective email marketing strategy can do for your SaaS company:
Cover every step in the buyer’s journey
SaaS sales cycles are notoriously long, intricate, and far from linear. As much as marketers would like to keep it straightforward, your prospects will move back and forth between several stages before making a purchase.
It’s the nature of the product and the industry. Your customer needs to evaluate options, revisit decisions, intricately compare your product to multiple others, be influenced by SaaS influencers, consult various stakeholders, and sign up for a free trial. And your sales cycle is still not finished.
This is where email marketing comes in. An effective email marketing strategy addresses the prospect’s evolving needs at every touchpoint. It meets and greets them wherever they are in their journey and nurtures them till they’re ready to buy your SaaS offering.
Educate and retain your users
In the SaaS industry, the competitive edge lies in unique, feature-rich products that address specific user needs. However, these intricate features can make your SaaS product complex, especially for new users.
Customers who face onboarding challenges or feel overwhelmed may stop using your product altogether, resulting in churn. This is where email marketing turns into an educational tool.
Targeted email campaigns can guide users through onboarding with step-by-step tutorials, feature spotlights, and use-case demonstrations. This is valuable because educated users make more satisfied users and satisfied users drive retention and opportunities for upselling or cross-selling.
Scale with your product with a solid ROI
Your SaaS product may be in a nascent stage at the moment, but it will evolve and grow, and so will your users and your competitive landscape. Email marketing excels as a dynamic tool to consistently engage with your audience.
Introducing new features? Entering a new market? Expanding your service offerings? An email campaign is all it takes to keep your users informed and excited. Email marketing also supports growth by upselling existing customers to higher-tiers.
Lastly, scaling with email marketing is significantly more cost-effective than relying on any other marketing channel. Once you’ve built a solid email list, the cost of reaching your audience remains relatively stable, even as your subscriber base grows. No wonder email marketing can drive an average ROI of up to 40 times!
13 email marketing strategies for SaaS companies
Email marketing can transform how you connect with your audience, nurture leads, and retain customers. So, here are 13 strategies explicitly designed for SaaS companies:
Segment your audience
Hyper-relevant content is the key component that makes ABM work. Email marketing excels at delivering relevant content, and if you segment your audience, your content can become hyper-relevant.
How you segment your audience is what sets your campaign apart, though. The criteria could be company size, industry, user behavior, awareness, or subscription stage. This is where you need to evaluate your unique SaaS product.
Personalize your emails
Do you want your reader’s undivided attention? Use their name in your emails. Reading one’s name engages the brain and can precipitate the cocktail party effect, where every other stimulus dies, and the user gets focused on your message.
You can personalize your emails in several ways. Greet the user by their name, drop their name in the subject line, or even sign off with it. For longer emails, use the user’s name before your most important message to perk up their attention. The only rule is quality over quantity.
Focus on value-driven content
Focus on value-driven content if you want to tap into the psychology of reciprocity. When you provide something that your audience values, they are more likely to engage with your message and take action.
This is even more important in ABM as there are a handful of prospects, so everything has to be tailored to their experience and pain points. When your emails consistently provide real value, your audience will look forward to your communications and reciprocate by engaging with your content or even signing up for a free trial by the end.
Optimize for mobile
SaaS is a competitive industry. When nearly 60% of all email opens occur on mobile devices. If your emails aren’t mobile-friendly, you risk losing potential leads and customers due to poor readability or functionality.
Mobile optimization means your emails display correctly on mobile devices, with easy-to-read text, clickable buttons, and fast load times. A great user experience increases the chances of engagement, conversions, and, ultimately, stronger ABM results for your SaaS company.
Use clear CTAs
Never confuse delivering value with withholding CTAs. If you’ve provided enough value, your audience will naturally gravitate towards wanting to do something in return. Whether scheduling a demo, starting a free trial, or downloading a resource, show them what to do next through a simple, direct, and clear CTA. Here’s what else you can do:
- Make your CTA stand out from the text
- Using concise language and contrasting colors
- Positioning it prominently in the email
Also, no matter what you do, only have a single CTA per email. Single CTAs can increase clicks by 371%.
Leverage automation in your ABM
Leveraging automation with email marketing can boost your ABM. When multiple decision-makers are involved, automation tools can help deliver relevant content, track engagement, and adjust outreach in real-time.
You can nurture leads and engage customers at scale by setting up automated workflows based on user behavior, such as welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, or product usage tips.
Track and analyze metrics
No matter where you start your ABM, you have to keep refining it. To refine it, you need to start tracking metrics. Open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and engagement levels all provide some form of insight into your marketing strategy.
Email analytics tools are critical. Every time you implement a new strategy, analytics help you monitor its performance and make data-driven tweaks to optimize it. Tracking metrics is a strategic step that’s also going to help you get the most out of all the other strategies that follow.
Write compelling subject lines
Subject lines have always been important, but they take another level of importance In ABM because they cater to highly targeted, high-value accounts. A personalized, hard-to-ignore subject line grabs the attention of whoever you’re trying to get in front of: decision-makers or decision influencers. Also, try these:
- Keep it short and clear: If a subject line is more than 50 characters, it won’t be fully visible.
- Name drop: Incorporate the recipient’s name, company, or specific interests to make them feel like the email is meant just for them.
- Evoke curiosity or urgency: Create a sense of excitement or urgency to encourage opens.
Try shorter emails
If you’ve been trying to convey your message through long emails, try writing shorter ones. Shorter emails can be particularly effective for ABM in SaaS because they respect the time of busy decision-makers while delivering targeted, high-value messages.
For ABM, where relevance is the most critical factor, a short, crisp but well-crafted message specifically tailored to the account’s needs can have a significant impact. Pair your shorter content with a strong CTA and track your ABM email marketing campaign’s performance.
A/B test
While metrics will give you a broad perspective of a campaign’s performance, A/B testing can pinpoint differences in performance for specific elements, such as subject lines, CTAs, or even design elements.
There’s simply no need or room for guesswork in an ABM’s precision-focused campaign. You simply have to test different versions of the elements and use data to drive your decisions. A/B testing can create ROI-generating campaigns as they closely meet the unique needs of each account.
Ensure GDPR and CAN-SPAM compliance
The high-value accounts you’re targeting may span multiple regions, so your email campaigns must be GDPR and CAN-SPAM-compliant. These regulations protect recipient privacy and govern practices like data collection, consent, and opt-out options.
This can be considered a defensive strategy as it protects your SaaS company from legal and reputational risks. Non-compliance can lead to hefty fines, loss of customer trust, and damage to your brand’s credibility. It’s a proactive way to safeguard your operations and reputation that pays off in the long term.
Highlight social proof
SaaS products are complicated. Decision-makers often rely on reviews, testimonials, and case studies to validate their choices. This is why highlighting social proof in email marketing for SaaS works so well. You can include client success stories, industry accolades, user statistics, or anything that demonstrates your product’s real-world value.
In ABM, you can go a step further and narrow down the social proof to the specific pain points or industries of each account. This makes your campaign even more impactful.
Regularly clean your email list
Over time, inactive or incorrect email addresses can harm deliverability and skew engagement metrics. For ABM, which focuses on a few important accounts, maintaining a clean list ensures that you’re only targeting genuinely interested decision-makers.
Removing unengaged contacts also means you can focus your resources on prospects most likely to convert. That’s the essence of ABM efforts anyway – go narrow but make it count.
Why stop at SaaS email marketing? Work with Ranq to upgrade your online presence
With those strategies, your ABM efforts are bound to make an impact. When you start getting your target’s attention, it’s time to start working on conversion. You’ll need an online presence as effective as your ABM email marketing campaign to impress your prospects.
We’re Ranq, an end-to-end SEO and marketing agency specializing in working with SaaS companies that want to maximize their results. Look at the SaaS companies we’ve helped grow or simply get in touch to get your own customized SaaS marketing strategy.